The Distressed Spider and Intervention: A Thought Experiment

By Keith Tidman

To intervene, or not to intervene?

 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel set the stage for a curious thought experiment. Nagel described how, while a university professor, he noticed what he considered a puzzling scene play out. It was a spider trapped in … let us say, a sink ... in the building housing the philosophy department. The spider, despite defensively scurrying around its tightly limited terrain, seemed condemned throughout the day to becoming doused with water, incapable of altering its fate — if altering its fate was what it even wanted to do. Weeks passed.

 

As Nagel portrayed the scene, the spider’s “life seemed miserable and exhausting,” which led him to conclude he should “liberate” it, in a dash to freedom and a better life. Seemingly the morally right thing to do, despite the relative insignificance of a single spider. Nagel finally justified intervention on the presumption that the spider could readily find its way back to its spot in the sink if it “didn’t like it on the outside.”

 

That is, could Nagel’s well-intentioned rescue afford the spider a more meaningful, happier life — assuming, for the sake of argument, the spider could think in such abstract terms? Or was such interventionism haughty and presumptuous? Nagel, pondering higher-level causes and effects, humbly confessed that his emancipation of the spider was therefore done with “much uncertainty and hesitation.”

 

Regardless, Nagel went ahead and reached out with a paper towel in the spider’s direction, which the spider, intentionally or instinctively, grabbed on to with its gangly legs, to be hoisted onto the floor. Thus carefully deposited, however, the spider remained still, even while prodded gently with the paper towel. “Playing dead,” perhaps — and afraid of carelessly being stomped on by people walking around? The next day, Nagel “found it in the same place, his legs shriveled in that way characteristic of dead spiders.”

 

Nagel’s experience, and the thought experiment derived from it, tees up at least two inferences regarding the ground rules governing intervention in others’ lives. On the one hand, no matter how benevolently intended our deeds, intervention might exact unanticipated outcomes. Some ugly. On the other hand, indecisiveness and inaction might likewise result in harm — as the renowned “trolley problem” demonstrates, in which choices, including the option not to redirect the trolley, still lead to some loss of life. In short, indecision is a decision — with repercussions.

 

We therefore have to parse the circumstances and priorities as best we can, deciding to intercede or stay removed from the scene. Either choice is swayed by our conspicuous biases as to meaningfulness in life, despite the choices’ innate subjectivity. Both choices — intervene or leave alone — are entrapped in the unavoidable moral morass and practical implications of their respective consequences.

 

Nagel’s spider incident was, of course, also metaphorical of the lives of people — and whether we should judge the merits or demerits of someone’s stage-managed life circumstances, going so far as to urge change. We might perceive such advice as prudent and empowering, even morally right; but maybe in reality the advice is none of those things, and instead is tantamount to the wrong-headed extraction of the “ailing” spider. The next two paragraphs provide examples of everyday, real-world circumstances that might spur intervention. That is, let's ask this: In these and other real-world cases, of which the count is endless, does the proverbial spider warrant extrication?

 

For instance, do we regard someone’s work life as mundane, a dead-end, as beneath the person’s talents? Do we regard someone’s choices regarding nutrition and exercise and other behavioral habits as impairing the person’s health? Or what if we see someone’s level of education as too scant and misfocused relative to modern society’s fast-paced, high-tech needs? Do we fault-findingly regard someone’s choice of a partner to be unfavorable and not life enhancing? Do we consider someone’s activities as embodying calculable risks, to be evaded? Do we deem someone’s financial decisions to be imprudently impulsive?

 

Maybe those “someones,” in being judged, begrudge what they view as the superciliousness of such intercession. Who has the right (the moral authority) to arbitrate, after all, people’s definition of happiness and the meaningfulness of life, and thus choices to make, where there may be few universal truths? Where do resolute biases contaminate decision-making? One possible answer is that we ought to leave the proverbial spider to its fate — to its natural course.

 

But let’s also look at possible, real-world interventionism on a more expansive scale. Do we properly consider both the pragmatic and moral consequences of interceding in matters of the environment, biodiversity, and ecosystems, where life in general has inherent value and decisions are morally freighted? How about, in international relations, the promotion of humanitarian standards, the maintenance of security, and cultural, civilizational affairs? And what about in other nations’ domestic and foreign policy decision-making that bear ubiquitously across the interconnected, globalised planet?

 

Even the sunniest of intentions, instilled with empathy and wistful introspection, may turn out ill-informed — absent a full understanding of someone else’s situation, where the setting is key to the person’s happiness and sense of meaningfulness. Perhaps that particular someone did not need to be removed from the fabled appliance, so to speak, in order that he might scurry off toward safety.

 

Nagel assumed the spider might feel forlorn; but perhaps it didn’t. Maybe it was a case of infelicitous projection or a desire simply to assuage raw instincts. Let’s not forget, the spider died — and did so as the consequence of intervention. Lessons applicable to all frames of reference, from the globe to the community and individual, whom we might assume needs rescuing.

 

The thought experiment prods us to go beyond shallow, short-term consequentialism — beyond what happens right off the bat as the result of intervention — instead to dig into primary principles guiding the verdicts we render. Foundational moral values, personal and societal — even  universal — matter greatly in these presumptive decisions.

 

Picture Post #43 The Importance of Empathy

 

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

 

I remember reading about Nazi Germany, which is truly the only comparison that makes sense when looking at Israel's genocidal hatred of all things Palestinian. The ordinary German people used to line the streets and toss bread to Jews in the wagons as they went past on their way to concentration camps.  They did this for AMUSEMENT - they laughed at the people scrabbling for the scraps, like animals. 

The point is, ordinary Germans felt their Jewish neighbours were not "people'. Something of the same cruel indifference governs the behaviour of Israelis to their Palestinian neighbours today. The picture is powerful because it reveals what happens where common humanity has disappeared.

AP photographer Tsafrir Abayov, who has been covering the border between Israel and Gaza for almost 20 years commented in the Independent:

“I grew up in Ashkelon about 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of Gaza, and I’ve been covering the Israel-Gaza border for almost 20 years, so I know this border from end to end. I have a lot of spots where I know I can get a good shot. On this day, I was driving by and I saw a group of female soldiers who had gone up to a tank position on the Israeli side, about 50 meters (164 feet) from the border. I don’t think these soldiers are normally stationed there. They just went up to take a look. From this position you can see right into Gaza — and all the destruction.”

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Why Don't People Seem to Care about Palestinian Lives?

Palestine is being ‘ethnically clensed’ in plain sight - yet the West seems indifferent

By Martin Cohen

Palestine is being ‘ethnically cleansed’ in plain sight - yet the West seems indifferent. Why is this? Wherever you start, the trail soon leads back to US politics.

How close is the current U.S. President, Joe Biden to Israel and how much influence does the US have over Israeli policy? The answer is “very” and “not much”. In 2010, in the middle of the then-vice president’s trip to Israel, the ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu government embarrassed Biden by announcing 1,600 new homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the future capital of a future Palestinian rump state. Biden is notoriously aggressive and won’t normally tolerate any disagreement. Thus, in a 2022 article for Axios, entitled ‘Old Yeller: Biden's Private Fury’, Alex Thompon notes how:

“Being yelled at by the president has become an internal initiation ceremony in this White House, aides say — if Biden doesn't yell at you, it could be a sign he doesn't respect you.’

But with Israel, it seems the situation is rather different.

One of Netanyahu’s advisors, Uzi Arad, later revealed that when Prime Minister Netanyahu met with Biden soon after publicly humiliating him, Biden threw his arm around “Bibi” and said with a smile, “Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.” Likewise, in 2012, Biden publicly said to Netanyahu: 

“Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you.”

In vain, it seems, do advisors try to educate Biden about the complex politics of the region. About memories like that of the Nakba, at the heart of this ignored history. This is a term which means “catastrophe” in Arabic. It refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Prior to this, contrary to claims that Arabs and Jews cannot live together, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. It is always unpopular to state it, but in fact Hitler supported the idea which surely tells you want a terrible one it always was.

Today, the politics of Americans – and many other countries too, including the U.K –  with respect to Israel is characterised by three things. Prejudice against Arabs - who are seen as various kinds of “terrorist”; ignorance and indifference to the history of the region. However, American politics add in one other ingredient, and a most dangerous one too,  which is an irrational conviction that the Bible predicts the Second Coming of the Messiah – but only once the Holy Land is reunited under Israeli control. It has even been suggested that Joe Biden is part of this evangelical cult, though I have no way of knowing if this rumour is true. What I do know is that this ridiculous and irrational view has considerable influence on both Democrat and Republican parties. It feeds into a political consensus that, one way or bloody another, Palestine needs to become “Israel”.

Nonetheless, in November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab (with Jerusalem under UN administration). When, understandably, the Arab world rejected the plan, Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian towns and villages, forcing tens of thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948. The result of this war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population.

Today, most of the inhabitants of Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees from the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 war, and more than half are under the age of 18. Apart from the tragedy of forcibly displacing children, attempts to blame the inhabitants of Gaza for either “voting for” Hamas or not resisting them are hollow given this age distribution.

Today too, due to Israel’s siege of Gaza, the majority of Palestinians there no longer have access to basic needs such as healthcare, water, sanitation services, and electricity. Prior to the siege, their situation was already pretty desperate: according to the UN, 63 percent of the population was dependent on international aid; 80 percent lived in poverty and 95 percent did not have access to clean water.

Alas, many American voters have been encouraged to feel indifference to Palestinian suffering for decades, and instead have passively accepted an alternative reality in which the Jewish people not only there - but worldwide - are a persecuted but courageous minority. Never mind that nearly six million Americans are Jewish and live pretty safely there…

The bottom line then is that, in the normal way, there is NO political price to be paid by the Democrats for supporting the Israeli government in its latest, murderous expansion of “Jewish areas”. However, this time, I actually think is NOT normal.

The catch is, despite Biden's "unconditional" support, Israel knows the Palestinians won't conveniently flee abroad (despite so many being killed at the moment, with highly publicise strategies of cutting off water and bombing hospitals) so its strategy becomes one of just killing. But Gaza alone contains some 600 000 people - mostly children. If they won’t flee, then they need to be killed. After all, Gaza was already a kind of prison. It will be hard to square that circle.

When I was younger, I remember meeting some of the "IDF heroes" of the last war - certainly they fought at a significant disadvantage against well-armed foes. Could it be today that the 360 000 reservists now begin to doubt their commanders? I think it is possible. However, If not, they will soon find themselves wading through civilian bodies in the rubble of Palestinian homes.

But back to a question posed recently on Quora will Biden pay a price for his indifference to the plight of millions of Palestinians? No, in the short term,  I don’t see Biden or anyone else paying a price for this. However, in the longer term – indeed maybe as soon as within a few months – I think things will look very different At which point, either Israel corrects itself (as Netanyahu represents only a small minority) – or history will do it for them.

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Further reading on Palestine

https://visualizingpalestine.org/visuals/http-visualizingpalestine-org-visuals-shrinking-palestine-static

https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rpal20/collections/GazaTwoDecades

The Dubious Ethics of the Great Food Reset

Picture “for a school project”

By Martin Cohen 

There’s a plan afoot to change the way you eat. Meat is destroying the land, fish and chips destroys the sea and dairy is  just immoral. Open the paper and you'll see a piece on how new biotechnologies are coming to the rescue. It's all presented as a fait accompli with the result that today, we are sleepwalking to not only a "meat-free" future, but one in which there are no farm animals, no milk, no cheese, no butter - no real food in short. And that's not in our interests, nor (less obviously) in the interest of biodiversity and the environment. There's just the rhetoric that it is "for the planet" 

According to researchers at the US think-tank, RethinkX, “we are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption” of agriculture in history. And it's happening fast. They say that by 2030, the entire US dairy and cattle industry will have collapsed, as “precision fermentation” – producing animal proteins more efficiently via microbes – “disrupts food production as we know it”.
There’s trillions of dollars at stake and very little public debate about it. Instead, there’s a sophisticated campaign to persuade people that this revolution is both inevitable and beyond criticism.

No wonder Marx declared that food lay at the heart of all political structures and warned of an alliance of industry and capital intent on both controlling and distorting food production.

The Great Food Reset a social and political upheaval that affects everyone, yet at the moment the debate is largely controlled by the forces promoting the changes: powerful networks of politicians and business leaders, such as the United Nations Environment Program, the so-called EAT-Lancet "Commission" (it's not really a commission, how words mislead!) - and the World Economic Forum, all sharing a rationale of 'sustainable development', market expansion, societal design, and resource control. Vocal supporters are the liberal media and academics who, perversely, present the movement as though part of a grassroots revolution.

There have been plenty of political programmes designed to push people into ‘the future’. Often, they flirt with increasingly intolerant compulsion. So too, with The Great Food Reset. Governments are already imposing heavy burdens on traditional farming and attempting to penalise the sale of animal products in the marketplace - either on the grounds that they are ‘unhealthy’ or, even more sweepingly, that they are bad for the environment.

In recent months, the steam has gone out of the “vegan food revolution”, mainly because people like their traditional foods more than the new ones, which typically are made from the four most lucrative cash crops: wheat, rice, maize and soybean. Incredibly, and dangerously, from over half a million plant species on the planet, we currently rely on just these four crops for more than three-quarters of our food supply. Animal sourced foods are our link to food variety.

But there's another reason to defend animal farming, which is that for much of the world, small farms are humane farms, with the animals enjoying several years of high quality life in the open fields and air. The new factory foods have no needs for animals and the argument that, well, better dead than farmed, just doesn't hold water – at least for traditional farms. It's the fundamental ethical dilemma: yes, death is terrible – but is it worse to have never lived?

In recent decades, we’ve seen many areas of life remodelled, whether we wanted them to be or not.. But to dictate how we grow food, how we cook food, and how we eat it, may just be a step too far.

The Euthyphro Dilemma: What Makes Something Moral?

The sixteenth-century nun and mystic, Saint Teresa. In her autobiography, she wrote that she ‘was very fond of St. Augustine … for he was a sinner too

By Keith Tidman  

‘Consider this: Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?’ — Plato, Euthyphro

Plato has Socrates asking just this of the Athenian prophet Euthyphro in one of his most famous dialogues. The characteristically riddlesome inquiry became known as the Euthyphro dilemma. Another way to frame the issue is to flip the question around: Is an action wrong because the gods forbid it, or do the gods forbid it because it is wrong? This version presents what is often referred to as the ‘two horns’ of the dilemma.

 

Put another way, if what’s morally good or bad is only what the gods arbitrarily make something, called the divine command theory (or divine fiat) — which Euthyphro subscribed to — then the gods may be presumed to have agency and omnipotence over these and other matters. However, if, instead, the gods simply point to what’s already, independently good or bad, then there must be a source of moral judgment that transcends the gods, leaving that other, higher source of moral absolutism yet to be explained millennia later. 

 

In the ancient world the gods notoriously quarreled with one another, engaging in scrappy tiffs over concerns about power, authority, ambition, influence, and jealousy, on occasion fueled by unabashed hubris. Disunity and disputation were the order of the day. Sometimes making for scandalous recounting, these quarrels comprised the stuff of modern students’ soap-opera-styled mythological entertainment. Yet, even when there is only one god, disagreements over orthodoxy and morality occur aplenty. The challenge mounted by the dilemma is as important to today’s world of a generally monotheistic god as it was to the polytheistic predispositions of ancient Athens. The medieval theologians’ explanations are not enough to persuade:

‘Since good as perceived by the intellect is the object of the will, it is impossible for God to will anything but what His wisdom approves. This is as it were, His law of justice, in accordance with which His will is right and just. Hence, what He does according to His will He does justly: as we do justly when we do according to the law. But whereas law comes to us from some higher power, God is a law unto Himself’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 21, first article reply to Obj. 2).

In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Leibniz offered a firm challenge to ‘divine command theory’, in asking the following question about whether right and wrong can be known only by divine revelation. He suggested, rather, there ought to be reasons, apart from religious tradition only, why particular behaviour is moral or immoral:

 

‘In saying that things are not good by any rule of goodness, but sheerly by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realising it, all the love of God and all his glory. For why praise him for he has done if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing exactly the contrary?’ (Discourse on Metaphysics, 1686). 

 

Meantime, today’s monotheistic world religions offer, among other holy texts, the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah, bearing the moral and legal decrees professed to be handed down by God. But even in the situations’ dissimilarity — the ancient world of Greek deities and modern monotheism (as well as some of today’s polytheistic practices) — both serve as examples of the ‘divine command theory’. That is, what’s deemed pious is presumed to be the case precisely because God chooses to love it, in line with the theory. That pious something or other is not independently sitting adrift, noncontingently virtuous in its own right, with nothing transcendentally making it so.

 

This presupposes that God commands only what is good. It also presupposes that, for example, things like the giving of charity, the avoidance of adultery, and the refrain from stealing, murdering, and ‘graven images’ have their truth value from being morally good if, and only if, God loves these and other commandments. The complete taxonomy (or classification scheme) of edicts being aimed at placing guardrails on human behaviour in the expectation of a nobler, more sanctified world. But God loving what’s morally good for its own sake — that is, apart from God making it so — clearly denies ‘divine command theory’.

 

For, if the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, which is one of the interpretations offered by Plato (through the mouth of Socrates) in challenging Euthyphro’s thinking, then it opens the door to an authority higher than God. Where matters of morality may exist outside of God’s reach, suggesting something other than God being all-powerful. Such a scenario pushes back against traditionally Abrahamic (monotheist) conceptualisations.

 

Yet, whether the situation calls for a single almighty God or a yet greater power of some indescribable sort, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who like St. Thomas Aquinas and Averroës believed that God commands only what is good, argued that God’s laws must conform to ‘natural reason’. Hobbes’s point makes for an essential truism, especially if the universe is to have rhyme and reason. This being true even if the governing forces of natural law and of objective morality are not entirely understood or, for that matter, not compressible into a singularly encompassing ‘theory of all’. 

 

Because of the principles of ‘divine command theory’, some people contend the necessary takeaway is that there can be no ethics in the absence of God to judge something as pious. In fact, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, presumptuously declared that ‘if God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Surely not so; you don’t have to be a theist of faith to spot the shortsighted dismissiveness of his assertion. After all, an atheist or agnostic might recognise the benevolence, even the categorical need, for adherence to manmade principles of morality, to foster the welfare of humanity at large for its own sufficient sake. Secular humanism, in other words — which greatly appeals to many people.

 

Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative supports these human-centered, do-unto-others notions: ‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. An ethic of respect toward all, as we mortals delineate between right and wrong. Even with ‘divine command theory’, it seems reasonable to suppose that a god would have reasons for preferring that moral principles not be arrived at willy-nilly.

  

Determinism and Accountability

By Keith Tidman

People assume that free will and moral responsibility are mutually and inextricably interwoven. That is, the default belief tends to be that people make decisions and act on them freely. On the grounds of that conviction, society condemns and punishes, or lauds and rewards, people on the basis of their actions’ supposed morality. It’s how accountability for behaviour intersects with matters like retributive and distributive justice. 

 

But what if decisions and actions are already decided – predetermined? Such that if an event has transpired, it is impossible it could not have happened. Might society still need to parse people’s deeds on the basis of some arbitrary construct — a community’s self-prescribed code of right and wrong — in order for society to function in an orderly fashion?

 

With the objective, then, of preserving social orderliness, all the while holding people responsible, doesn’t society have no option but to submit to at least the pretense of free will? Where even that pretense is itself predetermined. That is, to make-believe — for the sake of convenience, pragmatic expediency, and the evasion of disorder — that people enjoy unfettered decisions, choices, and deeds.

 

Okay, so far I’ve summarised what free will means by way of libertarian agency in choosing and behaving in particular ways, with the presumption, however faulty, that people could have acted otherwise. But what about its counterpoint, determinism: especially what in academic circles is often referred to as ‘hard determinism’, where determinism and freedom unreservedly conflict (called incompatibilism)?

 

According to determinism, for example, acting benevolently rather than selfishly (or the reverse) may be no more the exercise of unconstrained free agency than naturally having brunette hair or 20/20 vision. We may not really be ‘free’ to decide which job candidate to hire, which book to read, which model car to buy, which investment to make, which country to visit — or which political candidate to vote for.

 

Rather, the argument states that all decisions and deeds are predicated on the laws of nature, which inform, describe, and animate the stuff of our universe. The proposition is that people’s choices and actions are shaped (are predetermined) by all that has happened over the course of the cosmos’s entire lifespan. The basis is an unremitting regress of successive causes and outcomes recursively branching and branching in incalculable directions, nonstop. A causal determinism, sourced all the way back to the beginning of the universe.

 

That is, decisions and deeds inescapably result from a timeless accretion of precedents. The tumbling buildup, over far-ranging generations, of influences: like culture, genetic makeup, experiences, parenting, evolution, intelligence, identity, emotions, disposition, surroundings. As well as, every bit crucially, what naturally occurred throughout the entirety of history and prehistory.

 

Such factors, among others, have powerful, compelling influences, canceling out moral agency — our ability to make choices based on our sense of right and wrong. After all, in the deterministic model, the events that occurred as antecedents of current and future events did so necessarily. Indeed, we might imagine that if fissures were ever to show up in determinism’s cause-and-effect procession of happenings, the laws of nature and of human behaviour would pitch toward systemic failure — the undoing of events’ inevitability. We thus justify judging and punishing people who behave antisocially, on grounds induced by predetermination, where there is only one possible course of events.

 

If, however, because of the absence of free agency and volitional intent, people cannot be regarded as morally accountable, ought they be held responsible anyway, subject to legal or other kinds of sanction? To go through the motions — despite determinism dangling menacingly over systems of criminal justice everywhere. And similarly, ought people be lauded and rewarded for things deemed to have been done right? With implications for assigned guilt, sin, and evil, and other verdicts pertinent to actions freely chosen.

 

One answer to the two preceding questions about responsibility has been ‘yes’, on the basis of a belief system referred to as compatibilism. This asserts that free will and determinism can compatibly coexist. But this is a challenging — arguably impossible — needle to thread, short of arbitrarily warping definitions, assumptions, and preconceived conditions.

 

My position goes in a different, even simpler, direction from compatibilism. It is that accountability is necessitated by society having to prescribe ethical norms, no matter how contrived — and attempt to force human behaviour to fit those engineered norms — in order to avoid society alternatively sinking into chaos. In this manner, society learns, perhaps kicking and screaming, to cope with a deterministic world — a world where people cannot act otherwise than they do, and events are inevitable.

 

It’s difficult for us to shake intuitively favouring free will, despite its illusory nature. People feel as if in control; they zealously covet being in control; they recoil unsettlingly at the prospect of not being in control. Fundamentally, they sense that personal agency and volitional intent define humanity. They can’t easily discard the pretense that only freely willed actions meet the criterion of warranting tribute, on the one hand, or fault, on the other. 

 

But even if they’re not in control, and determinism routed free will from the start, society must behave otherwise: it must hold people responsible, both to deter and punish — censure — and to reward — validate — decisions and actions as if free choice had indeed sparked them. 

 

Europe’s Deadly Ethical Dilemma: Energy or Ethics?

A political cartoon depicting Putin's relentless desire to crush democracy by any means, including using Russia's extensive oil profits to do so. Via https://usrussiaukraineconflict.weebly.com

By Martin Cohen

Energy or ethics? On the morning of February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine after months of rising tensions and failing diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine. In the days that followed, Russia attacked from the air, land, and sea — killing thousands of people, mostly civilians, and devastating the lives of more than 44 million people.

Outside Russia and a handful of satellite countries, most people think that's plain wrong. But here’s the more tricky ethical dilemma: European countries pay about $850 million per day - repeat, per day! - for Russian oil and natural gas. Since February, this money has financed Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for Ecological Transition, was reported earlier this month saying that

‘It is very difficult to explain to European public opinion and Ukrainian society that we are still importing Russian energy that finances this war,’ and that such energy imports create ‘obvious moral tension’.

Indeed it does. And to reduce the ‘moral tension’, political leaders and an uncritical Western media have insisted that cutting the energy imports would be difficult, and would dramatically put up prices for consumers.

Take gas. The universal mantra about Europe needing Russian gas is misleading. Europe (like the US) has plenty of its own gas IF it stops burning it – to make electricity. Burning gas to make electricity is in any case a wasteful and short-term practice. 

Another argument offered for continuing to buy Russian energy is that Russia is a major supplier of diesel fuel and that if that supply were lost, operating diesel-powered trucks and farm equipment would become much more expensive. Journalists happily repeat such things. Yet typically, in Europe, the price of diesel is more than half made up of tax. 

Put another way, the choice is between continuing to fund atrocities like that in Bucha last week, in which the world saw "lifeless bodies, bloodied by bullets, and some with hands bound, had been left strewn about or shoveled into makeshift mass graves"  and a temporary interruption of government tax receipts. 

Diesel is only a small part of European energy from Russia though. The bigger questions are about coal, oil and above all gas.

Take coal. Today there is a a whopping carbon tax on coal: 42.33 Euro/t-CO₂ leading EU countries to drastically cut down their production and (to a lesser extent) their consumption of coal over the past two decades to meet climate change targets. However, rather hypocritically their reliance on imported coal, especially from Russia, has shot up. (The explanatory factor here is that European coal industries used to be unionised and expensive. Climate Change policy enabled governments to outmaneuver the powerful unions.) 

Nonetheless, the point is that today, as Alexander Bethe, chairman  of the German association of coal importers, has said, hard coal imports from Russia to Germany can easily be substituted. In a matter of months at most. Bethe named the US, Colombia, South Africa and Australia among the countries most likely to fill the gap.

‘There is a well-functioning world market. There are sufficient quantities available. Germany imported about 18 million tons of hard coal from Russia last year. That is only about 2% of the total world trade.’

Ethics is linked to what is possible. Cutting the flow of money to the Russians is seen in current circumstances as deeply troubling - and thus we are assured repeatedly that alternatives do not exist. Yet in fact they do. 

But what about Russian gas? As far as generating electricity goes, Europe has an internal market into which renewables, nuclear and coal could all - immediately - replace gas. The failure to do this is again a political decision.

Politicians seeking advice on what is possible in the energy sphere are being bamboozled by two powerful lobbies who are now blocking what on the face of it is the moral imperative to stop buying Russian energy. One lobby is the nuclear industry who have explicitly linked the ‘inability’ to stop buying Russian energy to their programme of new nuclear power stations: a message that the UK, for example, has eagerly adopted.

But the other lobby, particularly important in leading the otherwise liberal media away from campaigning to stop the energy imports from Russia… is the green one. It is the climate change lobby that insists that even now, power stations must run on imported Russian gas rather than European or American coal. The strength of the green lobby is so great that in the UK for example, the coal units of the country's largest power station, Drax, are idling now just when they could be operating and reducing the need for Russian gas. That said, during Boris Johnson's surprise visit with President Zelensky in Kyiv on April 9, the United Kingdom set an example for EU leaders of what can in fact be accomplished in sympathy with Ukraine, with the prime minister declaring an embargo on Russian energy.

More generally though in  Europe, the ‘virtuous’ carbon taxes have led electricity companies to burn (Russian) gas and coal rather than their own (as well as, of course, to use expensive renewable energies). 

The result is a strange kind of alliance that sociologists call a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. The term describes the shared interests of the baptists who believe alcohol is evil, and the bootleggers who want scarcity to lead to higher profits. Bizarrely, at the moment, people who are convinced that they have to stop the world overheating have - whatever their intentions! - ended up on same side as a Russian army conducting a horrific ‘special operation’ on its neighbour. It’s a bitter irony indeed.

The Ethics of ‘Opt-out, Presumed-Consent’ Organ Donation

By Keith Tidman

According to current data, in the United States alone, some 107,000 people are now awaiting a life-saving organ transplant. Many times that number are of course in similar dire need worldwide, a situation found exasperating by many physicians, organ-donation activists, and patients and their families.

The trouble is that there’s a yawning lag between the number of organs donated in the United States and the number needed. The result is that by some estimates 22 Americans die every day, totaling 8,000 a year, while they desperately wait for a transplant that isn’t available in time.

 

It’s both a national and global challenge to balance the parallel exigencies — medical, social, and ethical — of recycling cadaveric kidneys, lungs, livers, pancreas, hearts, and other tissues in order to extend the lives of those with poorly functioning organs of their own, and more calamitously with end-stage organ failure.

 

The situation is made worse by the following discrepancy: Whereas 95% of adult Americans say they support organ donation upon a donor’s brain death, only slightly more than half actually register. Deeds don’t match bold proclamations. The resulting bottom line is there were only 14,000 donors in 2021, well shy of need. Again, the same worldwide, but in many cases much worse and fraught.

 

Yet, at the same time, there’s the following encouraging ratio, which points to the benefits of deceased-donor programs and should spur action: The organs garnered from one donor can astoundingly save eight lives.

 

Might the remedy for the gaping lag between need and availability therefore be to switch the model of cadaveric organ donation: from the opt-in, or expressed-consent, program to an op-out, or presumed-consent, program? There are several ways that America, and other opt-in countries, would benefit from this shift in organ-donation models.

 

One is that among the many nations having experienced an opt-out program — from Spain, Belgium, Japan, and Croatia to Columbia, Norway, Chile, and Singapore, among many others — presumed-consent rates in some cases reach over 90%.

 

Here’s just one instance of such extraordinary success: Whereas Germany, with an opt-in system, hovers around a low 12% consent rate, its neighbour, Austria, with an opt-out system, boasts a 99% presumed-consent rate.

 

An alternative approach that, however, raises new ethical issues might be for more countries to incentivise their citizens to register as organ donors, and stay on national registers for a minimum number of years. The incentive would be to move them up the queue as organ recipients, should they need a transplant in the future. Registered donors might spike, while patients’ needs have a better hope of getting met.

 

Some ethical, medical, and legal circles acknowledge there’s conceivably a strong version and a weak version of presumed-consent (opt-out) organ recovery. The strong variant excludes the donor’s family from hampering the donation process. The weak variant of presumed consent, meanwhile, requires the go-ahead of the donor’s family, if the family can be found, before organs may be recovered. How well all that works in practice is unclear.

 

Meanwhile, whereas people might believe that donating cadaveric organs to ailing people is an ethically admissible act, indeed of great benefit to communities, they might well draw the ethical line at donation somehow being mandated by society.

Another issue raised by some bioethicists concerns whether the organs of a brain-dead person are kept artificially functional, this to maximize the odds of successful recovery and donation. Doing so affects both the expressed-consent and presumed-consent models of donation, sometimes requiring to keep organs animate.

 

An ethical benefit of the opt-out model is that it still honours the principles of agency and self-determination, as core values, while protecting the rights of objectors to donation. That is, if some people wish to decline donating their cadaveric organs — perhaps because of religion (albeit many religions approve organ donation), personal philosophy, notions of what makes a ‘whole person’ even in death, or simple qualms — those individuals can freely choose not to donate organs.

 

In line with these principles, it’s imperative that each person be allowed to retain autonomy over his or her organs and body, balancing perceived goals around saving lives and the actions required to reach those goals. Decision-making authority continues to rest primarily in the hands of the individual.

 

From a utilitarian standpoint, an opt-out organ-donation program entailing presumed consent provides society with the greatest good for the greatest number of people — the classic utilitarian formula. Yet, the formula needs to account for the expectation that some people, who never wished for their cadeveric organs to be donated, simply never got around to opting out — which may be the entry point for family intervention in the case of the weak version of presumed consent.

 

From a consequentialist standpoint, there are many patients, with lives hanging by a precariously thinning thread, whose wellbeing is greatly improved (life giving) by repurposing valuable, essential organs through cadaveric organ transplantation. This consequentialist calculation points to the care needed to reassure the community that every medical effort is of course still made to save prospective, dying donors.

 

From the standpoint of altruism, the calculus is generally the same whether a person, in an opt-in country, in fact does register to donate their organs; or whether a person, in an opt-out country, chooses to leave intact their status of presumed consent. In either scenario, informed permission — expressed or presumed — to recover organs is granted and many more lives saved.

 

For reasons such as those laid out here, in my assessment the balance of the life-saving medical, pragmatic (supply-side efficiency), and ethical imperatives means that countries like the United States ought to switch from the opt-in, expressed-consent standard of cadaveric organ donation to the opt-out, presumed-consent standard.

 

Can Thought Experiments Solve Ethical Dilemmas?

In ethics, the appeal to expand the “moral circle” typically requires moving from consideration of yourself to that of all of nature.

By Keith Tidman

What, in ethical terms, do we owe others, especially when lives are at stake? This is the crux of the ‘Drowning Child’ thought experiment posed by the contemporary philosopher, Peter Singer.

Singer illustrates the question to his students in this way:

You are walking to class when you spot a child drowning in a campus pond. You know nothing of the child’s life; and there is no personal affiliation. The pond is shallow, so it would be easy to wade in and rescue her. You would not endanger yourself, or anyone else, by going into the water and pulling the child out.

But, he adds, there are two catches. One is that your clothes will become saturated, caked in mud, and possibly ruined. The other is that taking the time to go back to your dorm to dry off and change clothes will mean missing the class you were crossing the campus for.

Singer then asks his students, ‘Do you have an obligation to rescue the child?’

The students, without exception and as one might expect, think that they do. The circumstances seem simple. Including that events are just yards away. The students, unprompted, recognise their direct responsibility to save the flailing child. The students’ moral, and even pragmatic, calculus is that the life of the child outweighs the possibility of ruined clothes and a missed class. And, for that matter, possibly the sheer ‘nuisance’ of it all. To the students, there is no ambiguity; the moral obligation is obvious; the costs, even to the cash-strapped students, are trivial.

The students’ answer to the hypothetical about saving a drowning child, as framed above, is straightforward — a one-off situation, perhaps, whose altruistic consequences end upon saving the drowning child who is then safe with family. But ought the situation be so narrowly prescribed? After all, as the stakes are raised, the moral issues, including the range of consequences, arguably become more ambiguous, nuanced, and soul-searching.

At this point, let’s pivot away from Singer’s students and toward the rest of us more generally. In pivoting, let’s also switch situations.

Suppose you are walking on the grounds of a ritzy hotel, to celebrate your fiftieth anniversary in a lavish rented ballroom, where many guests gleefully await you. Because of the once-in-a-lifetime situation, you’re wearing an expensive suit, have a wallet filled with several one-hundred-dollar bills, and are wearing a family legacy watch that you rarely wear.

Plainly, the stakes, at least in terms of potential material sacrifices, are much higher than in the first scenario.

If, then, you spot a child drowning in the hotel’s shallow pond nearby, would you wade in and save the child? Even if the expensive suit will be ruined, the paper money will fall apart from saturation, the family antique watch will not be repairable, and the long-planned event will have to be canceled, disappointing the many guests who expectantly flew in at significant expense?

 

The answer to ‘Do you have an obligation to rescue the child?’ is probably still a resounding yes — at least, let’s hope, for most of us. The moral calculus arguably doesn’t change, even if what materially is at risk for you and others does intensify. Sure, there may be momentary hesitation because of the costlier circumstances. Self-interests may marginally intrude, perhaps causing a pause to see if someone else might jump in instead. But hesitation is likely quickly set aside as altruistic and humanitarian instincts kick in.

To ratchet up the circumstances further, Singer turns to a child starving in an impoverished village, in a faraway country whose resources are insufficient to sustain its population, many of whom live in wretched conditions. Taking moral action to give that child a chance to survive, through a donation, would still be within most people’s finances in the developed world, including the person about to celebrate his anniversary. However, there are two obvious catches: one is that the child is far off, in an unfamiliar land; the other is that remoteness makes it easier to avert eyes and ears, in an effort at psychological detachment.

We might further equivocate based on other grounds, as we search for differentiators that may morally justify not donating to save the starving child abroad, after all. Platitudinous rationales might enter our thinking, such as the presence of local government corruption, the excessive administrative costs of charities, or the bigger, systemic problem of over-population needing to be solved first. Intended to trick and assuage our consciences, and repress urges to help.

Strapped for money and consumed by tuition debt, Singer’s students likely won’t be able to afford donating much, if anything, toward the welfare of the faraway starving child. Circumstances matter, like the inaccessibility; there’s therefore seemingly less of a moral imperative. However, the wealthier individual celebrating his anniversary arguably has a commensurately higher moral obligation to donate, despite the remoteness. A donation equal, let’s say, to the expense of the suit, money, and watch that would be ruined in saving the child in the hotel pond.

So, ought we donate? Would we donate? Even if there might appear to be a gnawing conflict between the morality of altruism and the hard-to-ignore sense of ostensible pointlessness in light of the systemic conditions in the country that perpetuate widespread childhood starvation? Under those circumstances, how might we calculate ‘effective altruism’, combining the empathy felt and the odds of meaningful utilitarian outcomes?

After all, what we ought to do and how we act based on what’s morally right not infrequently diverge. Even when we are confronted with stark images on television, social media, and newspapers of the distended stomachs of toddlers, with flies hovering around their eyes.

For most people, the cost of a donation to save the starving child far away is reasonable and socially just. But the concept of social justice might seem nebulous as we hurry on in the clamour of our daily lives. We don’t necessarily equate, in our minds, saving the drowning child with saving the starving child; moral dissonance might influence choices.

To summarise, Singer presented the ethical calculus in all these situations this way: ‘If it is within our power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it’. Including saving the life of a stranger to avoid a child’s preventable death.

For someone like the financially comfortable anniversary celebrator — if not for the financially struggling college students, who would nevertheless feel morally responsible for saving the child drowning on campus — there’s an equally direct line of responsibility in donating to support the starving child far away. Both situations entail moral imperatives in their own fashion, though again circumstances matter.

The important core of these ethical expectations is the idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’: simply, to value everyone equally, as citizens of the world. Idealistic, yes; but in the context of personal moral responsibility, there’s an obligation to the welfare of others, even strangers, and to treat human life reverentially. Humanitarianism and the ‘common good’ writ large, we suppose.

To this critical point, Singer directs us to the political theorist William Lecky, who wrote of an ‘expanding circle of concern’. It is a circle that starts with the individual and family, and then widens to encompass ‘a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity’. A circle that is a reflection of our rapid globalisation.

Perhaps, the ‘Drowning Child’ thought experiment exposes divides between how we hypothesize about doing right and actually doing right, and the ambiguity surrounding the consistency of moral decision-making.

The Problem of Inauthenticity

Harry, Meghan and Oprah having a chat (Photocredit-HarpoProductions-JoePugliese)

What was the ‘intention’ of  Mister and Missus Harry Mountbatten–Windsor with THAT  interview? You know, the one with Oprah Winfrey in which they spilled the beans on life in the British Royal Family.

As one gushing website put it:

“The dust is still settling from Oprah Winfrey’s explosive two-hour interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on Sunday, and the revelations are devastating. Markle, pregnant with the couple’s second child, described the racist treatment she endured from social media, the British press and the royal family itself.”

Was the intention then to lift the lid on racism in the Royal Family? Certainly it seemed so when Harry revealed about their baby: 

“There were ‘concerns and conversations’ about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”

The British Royals are a venerable institution, and the Queen’s husband in particular, aka Harry’s grandfather, had a well-grounded reputation for off-colour remarks, including references to “slitty eyes” while visiting China and saying of a messy fuse box in a factory that it looked like it had been put together “by an Indian”.

Was the intention of the interview then to give Harry’s grandad (who would die only a few weeks later) a really bad day? Apparently not, although, of course, neither Meghan nor Harry would actually stoop to naming names. However, Oprah herself did clarify on CBS the next morning that Harry wanted it be known that “it was not his grandmother, nor his grandfather that were part of those conversations.”

Looking at the allegation and subsequent clumsy refinement, it looks to me like the intention was not so much to throw mud at the Royal Family, which after all, for Harry would be rather like throwing mud at yourself, as at some particular individual within it with whom there had been a disagreement. Also called settling scores in public. Is that, however, a worthwhile thing to be doing on Oprah’s highly moral show? I ask because Ms Winfrey has publicly set a very high standard for her interviews. Ever since the occasion in 1988, when she interviewed white supremacists in order to “gain insight into the source of their hatred”. 

To be honest, so venomous was the interview with Harry and Meghan, Oprah could almost have offered a similar motivation here. Alas though, truth is more prosaic, and it seems only that the two wealthy celebrities were being interviewed by the third wealthy celebrity merely as a way to promote themselves. Is self-promotion a worthy, moral endeavour? I suppose we should be careful not to be too puritanical about such things. After all, a celebrity is someone who gives the public some kind of pleasure. But there's a point where celebrities celebrating themselves, and attacking lesser figures, becomes rather dodgy. 

After Winfrey interviewed the racists on that long-ago show, she publicly regretted it and vowed that from then on the watchword would be “intention”. What’s that all about then? Well, the term, signifying the search for spiritual values, is central to the new age philosophy of Gary Zukav set out in his book, The Seat of the Soul. In the book, Zukav, who was already famous for his new-age investigations of personal psychology and quantum physics (including one of my own favourite reads, The Dancing Wu Li Masters), offers a grand cosmological theory: 

“Each soul enters into a sacred agreement with the Universe to accomplish specific goals, or take on a particular task. All of your experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it.” 

For individuals this means one thing. Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and “that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.”

This is part of a broader theory set out in the book that humanity is evolving from a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues spiritual values. Zukav argues (rather predictably) that the pursuit of external power generates conflict—between individuals and lovers, within communities, and between nations – while “authentic power” infuses the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust. 

“Reach for your soul. Reach even further, the impulse of creation and power authentic, the hourglass point between energy and matter, that is the seat of the soul.” 

Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, praised the book as “remarkable” and complimented Zukav, calling him “one of our finest interpreters of frontier science”, able to explain and understand the human spirit.  

Anyway, the principle became a guiding light for Winfrey. “The number one principle that rules my life is intention,” Winfrey has said adding that  after reading Zukav’s book, she called a meeting with the TV show’s producers and announced a new strategy: “We are going to be a force for good, and that is going to be our intention.” 

Winfrey has also revealed that there had been plenty of times where she’d heard ideas for the show that had no positive intention, and so from now on she would turn these down. Nor, she said, would she accept ideas where she felt people were manufacturing an intention that they themselves didn’t believe in. She’d no longer accept this sort of inauthenticity.

But looking at the sight of a wealthy princeling, who once dressed up as a Nazi at a rave, and a model who in her brief visit to England was accused of bullying and humiliating staff, using her show as a vehicle to cast aspersions against friends and family alike, I can’t help but feel that either Zukav’s philosophy is worthless, or Winfrey’s adoption of it is, well, inauthentic. Or maybe both, of course!

POETRY: A Greater Question (concerning the new coronavirus)

Posted by Chengde Chen * and Yingfang Zhang

Part II 

“Genetic engineering technology is designed to enable genes to cross species 
barriers.” – Martin Khor, New diseases as viruses break species barriers… 



The people in the Doomsday horror are speculating:
Is the virus destroying mankind man-made?
If so, by whom?
Some suspect China, while others, America

But a greater question is if science can do it
If it can, won’t the disaster happen sooner or later?
Hiroshima/Nagasaki was a continuation of atomic physics
Chernobyl was what nuclear technology had entailed

When scientists said they didn’t do it this time
It meant they had been able to
So, whether it was man-made this time, or by whom,
Has been a relatively–secondary question!

If it has been possible, then it is inevitable –
A fatal car-crash for the driver is a matter of time
If we still can’t see science is such a car for mankind
What does it matter if it happens this time or the next?

---

* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

Poetry: Critique of Genetic Engineering

Posted by Chengde Chen *

“Genetic engineering technology is designed to enable genes to cross species 
barriers.” – Martin Khor, New diseases as viruses break species barriers 


Genetic engineering has a million benefits,

While I have only one reason against it.

But, any number multiplying a zero becomes a zero.

Science is supposed to support human existence;

If genes are written by all historical conditions of nature,

Isn’t quoting them out of context man outlawing himself?
 


The temperature on the Earth’s surface is within ±50ºC

A very small range in the grand thermometer of the universe,

But just the home for us – the creature of 37ºC – to survive.

Believers marvel at God’s arrangement, yet it’s only nature.

All existing species are adapters to this condition;

Those not, either never had a chance, or have been eliminated.

 

Should God, seized by a whim, play at “planet engineering”

Rearranging the order of the solar system, what would happen?

If Earth moved one step inwards to the position of Venus,

The mighty 480ºC would evaporate us into clouds.

If Earth moved one step outwards to the position of Mars,

The minus 140ºC would cast us into super-ice.



Earth is in our genes.

Genes are nature’s vertical memory and horizontal logic.

The process of adapting and eliminating carves all specifications.

The billions of codes are billions of doors and locks without keys,

Shutting out foreign viruses with DNA incompatibility

So we don’t catch cats’ flu, nor do dogs get our hepatitis.
 


Yet, manufactured genes come suddenly

Sharing no responsibility of history but short-circuiting species.

When transgenic pig organs are implanted into humans, 

Pig viruses also leap over millions of years to join us.

To gain medical benefits by dismantling the species barriers, 

It’s self-disarming to the bone or tying oneself up to WMD?
 


The biological world is a self-contained all-dimensional computer;

Messing up one sequence could throw the whole system into chaos,

Which is asking God to restart His creation all over!

So He’d rather we mess about with the planets than modify genes.

“If you must,” He may say, “modify Mine first to have a GM god 

To recreate the world, I’d need enhanced energy and perseverance.” 


---

* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde.chen@hotmail.com