Short and Sharp - Limitiation of Liberty

I know I’ve been on a kind of ‘ethical bender’ of late, so I promise this will be my last post on ethics for a while (isn’t that what all addicts say?). However, I wish to have a final quick exploration of the topic of limiting the liberty of individuals in a society. I think that by being a member of society, we  agree (explicitly in some cases, implicitly in most) to give up certain rights, such as the right to murder each other, for the safety and benefits that living in a society offers (yes, I am a fan Hobbes, if you can’t tell; at least in regard to social contract theory). The point of this post is to explore what constitutes the line between what can and cannot be limited by society.

While this is related to my last post on bone marrow donation, I’m going to use the example of vaccination to draw out the potential points of disagreement. We all (well, the significant majority) accept the limit that we cannot kill (either intentionally or through recklessness on our part). The same is true for causing harm to others that falls short of killing them (again, both intentionally and through recklessness). So, given these two fair uncontroversial points, why do we allow people, be they adults or children by the choice of their parents, to opt out of vaccination?

For those of you not familiar with herd immunity, this is the phenomenon where when a certain portion of the population is immune to a certain disease, their immunity acts to protect those who are not immune. The percentage of immunity required to reach this threshold varies for every contagion and is based on factors like the route of infection (airborne, food etc.) and the virulence of the pathogen. Within any given population, there are a certain proportion of individuals that, for medical reasons, cannot be given vaccinations (effectively, anyone with impaired immune functions, often due to age, genetic conditions or other factors). So, with an already reduced population to work with, allowing others to opt out of vaccinations further reduces the amount that are immunised, putting everyone at an increased risk of infection.

My point is not that vaccination should be mandatory (I do think that, but that is not the case I am making here), but what reasons are there that we don’t make them mandatory? I’ve heard people suggest that it is to do with liberty, but as I’ve already said, we given up liberties all the time to benefit from living in a society. Does doing something to people rather than asking them not to do something change the issue (positive vs. negative liberty)? Does removing the option to opt out change anything for people who would have chosen to be vaccinated regardless? What is the threshold for what constitutes a significant harm of an action to the public as to reduce the liberty of individuals to undertake said action?

Is Donating Bone Marrow A Charitable Act?

A few weeks ago, the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry contacted and informed me that I have matched with a person who may require a bone marrow transplantation. I told them that I was interested and went in last week for some confirmatory testing. An interesting thing that I have noticed is that a significant number of people who I have told about this have responded with “that is so generous; I could never do that”. This is the idea that I wish to explore. I’d like to begin with an apparently unrelated hypothetical:

A man is out for a late night walk down a country road and he notices a car stopped on the side of the road with its hazard lights on. Upon investigation, he finds a woman breathing heavily and clutching her chest. She tells him she believes she is having a heart attack. Unfortunately, neither of them have a mobile phone on them. She asks him to use her car to drive her to the hospital, as she is in too much pain to do so. The man does have a license. After a few seconds, the man says that he rather not, as the potential risk of crashing the car is too high.

While I cannot say for certain, I think most people would find the justification for not offering help to be quite weak; no one sees driving a car as being too risky as to not offer help to someone who may die without it. To get an idea of the risk associated with driving a car, the world death rate for motor vehicle accidents is 20.8 per 100,000 people (from the Wikipedia page, which quotes WHO statistics).

The point of this hypothetical is to highlight a contradiction in with the way that the people who I spoke of at the beginning think about bone marrow donation. Statistically speaking, donating bone marrow is safer than driving a car. For clarification, there are two procedures used to harvest bone marrow. The first and most common is a peripheral bone marrow harvest’; this is where the donor is given a drug to stimulate their blood marrow to grow and then they give blood and the bone marrow cells are harvested (in the same way as white blood cells are harvested for donation). As such, the risk associated with donating bone marrow by this method has the similar risk to donating blood; that is, a negligible risk. When most people think of a bone marrow donation, they think of extraction from the hip bone. This requires a general anaesthetic in most cases and it is this that presents the only risk of death (in that, no deaths have ever been recorded due to the actual extraction process). However, using even the most conservative figures (i.e. the ones that show the highest mortality rate), the death rate for general anaesthesia is around 14 per 100,000 people (from this study).

So, statistically speaking, it would be safer to give bone marrow to someone that to drive them to the hospital. However, I do not think that the people that I spoke of would change their view of not wanting to donate bone marrow because of this (I specifically did express this point to one of them and they did indeed not change their view). I am not entirely sure why. I see only minor differences in the scenarios and nothing to make them categorically different (well, as far as I can tell). So I throw it open to my highly intelligent audience; is there anything that would make not donating bone marrow more justifiable than not driving someone to a hospital?

[One potential criticism I could see is that I have used the world data motor vehicle accident death rates and, as such, will be much higher than any given country (for example,  the death rate in Australia is around 5 per 100,000; much lower than the world figure). However, the same is true of general anaesthesia figure; the study used data from any published study (excluding only those that were not in English). As such, it would probably be much lower in any given first world country (as is the case with the death rate from motor vehicle accidents).]

Short and Sharp: What if you're wrong?

If you are familiar with the evangelical style of Ray Comfort and Kurt Cameron, then you will be familiar with the question “what if you’re wrong?”. For those of you who are not, it is a tactic that attempts to highlight in the minds of atheists the repercussions if they are wrong about the existence of the god that Comfort and Cameron believe in (i.e. that the atheist will go to Hell). I have seen many refutations of this argument (which is essentially Pascal’s Wager), however, I am going to actually do the opposite; I think it is a valid question in certain contexts and should be answerable by any person about any belief that they hold.

To demonstrate why I think this is the case, I would like to modify a scenario used by Richard Carrier in his book, Sense and Goodness Without God;  

Suppose a friend told you they had purchased a new car, would you believe them? As this is a fairly unremarkable claim (many people own cars), it would require very little evidence for you to believe them, perhaps even just their word alone. However, suppose now that you were relying on this friend to drive you to a very important meeting. Would you be willing to rely on just their word or would you require more evidence now that the claim has the potential to impact upon your life? If you believe them, and they are wrong (either by lying or just being misinformed; say they thought the car would be ready for their use on that day, but it was delayed), you are now stuck without a way to get your meeting.

The point that I am trying to drive at is that the amount of evidence needed to support a claim is not simply just how ordinary or extraordinary the claim is, but also how much of an impact the claim’s truth or falseness will have. Claims that will have very little effects require less evidence than claims that will have profound effect, all other things being equal. The way in which Comfort and Cameron use this question is still wrong; in that, they are essentially throwing in a possibility, Hell, which has such a low probability of actually existing that it isn’t worth considering. As such, the question is only valid when used in the context of known negative outcomes. However, when used in this way, it is very useful at highlighting how effects can impact upon our evidential standards.

'Ethical' Egoists

While watching the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy recently, I was reminded of my general distain for ‘ethical’ egoists. These are people who believe it is okay to do what is in the best interests for themselves and their in-group (family, friends, lovers etc.), even if it leads to the otherwise preventable harm of others. As such, it is kind of a very shallow version of ethical egoism; the branch of moral philosophy that says that moral agents should act in their own self-interest. While the actual theory is a lot more detailed than my one sentence summary indicates, I still believe it has problems.

To demonstrate my problem with ‘ethical’ egoists, I’ll explain the scenario that occurred in the episode. Earlier in the season, Meredith had switched a placebo for an active drug in an Alzheimer’s clinical trial she was a part of. This was due to the fact that the patient who was to get the placebo was close to her. In the finale, her deception is revealed and the shit hits the fan. This is because it is a randomised clinical trial; the doctors do not get to assign who gets the active therapy and who gets the placebo. This prevents them from, either intentionally or unintentionally, giving the active treatment to patients they believe are more likely to recover anyway and skewing the results (i.e. making the treatment look better than it really is). So Meredith tampering with who gets the treatment invalidates the whole trial. Now, even after she is informed of this and how now no one will get access to the new drug (due to the trial not being able to go ahead, so it can’t be demonstrated to be effective) she still says she would do it again because it was a person who meant so much to her.

This sort of attitude (which is not at all uncommon) really drives me up the wall; effectively Meredith, and others in similar situations, are giving a big middle finger to everyone else just to help someone they care about. It really shows how self-centred someone is that they can’t step back and realise that while they are trying to help someone they love, so is everyone else. In the case of Meredith, she wanted to help someone she loved, but at the same time prevented hundreds of others from helping their loved ones.

I also ran into a similar phenomenon during an ethics class in my undergrad course; we were given the following scenario and asked whether we thought the decision in it was moral (paraphrased from memory);

An earthquake occurs in China and buries a man’s family in rumble. In the process of digging them out, he discovers that across the road an important official and his family are buried. The man decides to stop trying to rescue his family and rescue the official and his family instead. He successfully rescues them, but his own family die in the process. When asked why he made the choice that he did, he said that by rescuing the official, he could go on to coordinate the rescue effort (by virtue of having extensive knowledge of the local area) and end up saving more people.

Now, as a utilitarian, I said that the action was moral because it could effectively save more lives (increasing the overall well-being). Now while the majority did say they while they would have saved their family had they been in the situation but respected the man for thinking of others (a position I don’t find unacceptable), a small minority believed that he had acted immorally and should have saved his family (invoking duty to family primarily). After some discussion back and forth, I presented them with a new hypothetical to try to demonstrate the point I was trying to make;

A serial killer has you locked in a chair. In front of you is your family in a cage, ten families you do not know in another. You are given the choice of who dies; either your family or the ten families. Which would you choose?

I thought that this scenario was entirely black and white; that only a monster would say that it was moral to choose their family. However, I was wrong. Not only did these individuals say they would choose their families, they were defending it as the moral choice. I mean, I could understand someone saying that they aren’t strong enough to do the right thing, but to actually believe that ten other families dying so yours can survive is moral is downright insane. Could these people not understand that each of those families had people who loved them just as much as they loved their families? What makes them think that their love for their family trumps everyone else’s?

A bit more of a rant than usual, but there it is.

Short and Sharp - Reformation of Child Molesters

This post is prompted by this story (and the comment section found within). For those of you who are too lazy to click on the link, the article basically tells of a man who was convicted of indecently assaulting a 16 year old boy in 2005, and now has won through VCAT a working with children certificate because VCAT believe he no longer poses a danger to children.

The thing that most interests me is the response to this situation; at the time of writing this, not a single one of the 32 comments on the article was even willing to accept the possibility that this man has rehabilitated and is not a threat; every comment either explicitly or implicitly says that a person who molests a child is incapable of rehabilitating.

Whether or not this case is an example of reformation of a child molester (I personally think it is off the limited information available), it seems clear that the majority of individuals believe that it is impossible for a person who has sexually assaulted a child to be rehabilitated. I’m not quite sure whether it is that they think rehabilitation is actually impossible or that the cost of wrongly assessing a person as rehabilitated is too high to ever bother attempting it (a kind of ‘think of the children’ argument).

What do my intelligent audience think? Is it possible for a child molester to ever be rehabilitated? If so, why? If not, why not?

Common Questions to Atheists

I found this list of questions on Lady Atheist's blog that atheists are often asked. While I don’t particularly have anything original to add, I think that it is worth answering as it will demonstrate my views on a wide variety of issues. 

Q:  Where do you go when you die?

A:  While I wouldn’t claim to know with certainty, my view is that, upon death, we will cease to exist. From the evidence I have come across, it appears the mind is a function of the brain; so without a working brain, you will have no mind and therefore cease to exist. 

Q:  Aren't you worried that you might be wrong and you might go to hell?

A:  Not at all. Hell was never something I believed in (even when I was a half-assed Christian). Do I think it is possible that I am wrong? Of course. I just don’t think the probability of me being wrong about the existence hell is high enough to worry about. Take for example the chance that I will be hit by a car tomorrow; this is a scenario which I view as quite likely to happen in comparison with Hell being real, yet I’m not worried about being hit by a car. 

Q:  How can you be moral without God?

A:  How can you be moral with God? That isn’t a snide reply, but a serious question. Are you moral with God because God has defined what is good or because God is intelligent and powerful enough to determine what is good? If it is the first one, I would argue that you aren’t moral in any meaningful sense of the word. If it is the second, then you have just answered the question yourself; we can also determine what is good. We may not be able to do it as well as God could (assuming he exists), but being he isn’t putting his two-cents in on relevant issues, we are left to do it ourselves. 

Q:  You're really just angry with God.

A:  Sometimes, but this is irrelevant to why I am an atheist. To be clear, it is possible to be angry at a being regardless of whether it exists or not. For example, I am often infuriated by the character of Nikki on Big Love, yet that doesn’t mean I think she really exists. I am angry at the portrayed actions of her character. This is similar to when I find aspect of God’s personality (as depicted by the Bible) to be immoral/anger-inducing. Again, this doesn’t mean I think God exists; just that I find the actions that are portrayed by his character to be immoral.

Q:  You're really just angry at the abuses of the Church.

A:  Again, while I may sometimes be angry at the actions of Christians, this is irrelevant to my atheism. It may inform the actions I choose to take (e.g. opposing the homophobia of Christians directly), but it isn’t why I don’t believe in god. 

Q:  The church has been responsible for great works of art.

A:  So? There is much art in other religions, so either their gods also exist or inspiration can come from any source, real or imaginary. 

Q:  How do you know the Bible isn't true?

A:  In the same way you know that the Koran, the Tao Te Ching or any other religious text isn’t true; lack of supporting evidence and logical inconsistencies. 

Q:  Isn't it arrogant to presume you're right and all those Christians are wrong?

A:  Why is it arrogant for me to presume I am right, yet it isn’t arrogant for Christians to presume they are right? But I fully admit I may be wrong, but I will only change my position when given a good argument and evidence that my position is wrong. 

Q:  You think you know everything, don't you?  (Also: You think you have all the answers!)

A:  No. Just no. 

Q:  Science can't answer everything.  What about love?

A:  I’m not advocating that it can. Though I do think science can explain love; interactions between memories, emotions and social situations that are governed by neurons and chemicals in our brains. 

Q:  How do you explain the human need to believe in God?  God made humans different from the animals.

A:  I think the ‘need’ (I use quotation marks because I don't think it is really a need) can be explained by a number of facts known about human psychology. Firstly, humans are pattern and agent seeking creatures; our minds are built for detecting patterns and, often, attributing those patterns to an animate agent. An example of this is the thought some people get that their computer intentionally crashes when they haven’t saved; they are detecting a pattern (computer crashing when they haven’t saved) and blaming their computer for it. Now, most of us would agree that this is both not a meaningful pattern (i.e. there isn’t actually a causative effect between the chance of your computer crashing and whether you have saved your work or not) or an intentional act on behalf of the computer. I think this is a similar phenomenon to how humans came to believe in god (mistakenly identifying patterns in nature and attributing them to an agent).

The second point I would bring up would be that this pattern seeking behaviour increases when we find ourselves in situations that are out of our control. There is a good, evolutionary reason for this; our ancestors found themselves frequently in situations that were out of their control such as attacks from predators. Now, increased pattern detection in such situations would aid in survival as these individuals could determine any activity they are engaged in that is affecting the attack rates of predators. For example, it could be noticed that if meat is left uncovered for too long, predators are more likely to attack. Thusly, this would lead to the covering of meat and decreased predator attacks as a consequence. This fact could also be used to explain another fact about our current world; the countries with the highest societal health (which is a good proxy for control over our situation) have the lowest levels of religious belief and vice versa. 

Q: What about the miracles of the Bible?

A: What about the miracles of the Koran? The Baghavada Gita? 

Q:  [insert seemingly miraculous prayer story here]. How do you explain that?

A:  I normal take a two pronged approach to such questions; firstly, unless it is an event that personally happened to individual telling me this story, the question of authenticity is one that is hard to answer. Secondly, I ask why there is the need to explain some fortunate event with references to the supernatural. An example I have had presented to me is one of a family had their unborn child diagnosed with a serious condition (unspecified as to which), the prayed and when the child was born, they had no problems whatsoever. The issue here is when you realise that most, if not all, medical tests have an error rate; that is, a percentage of test results are either false positives or false negatives. This is often quite small, but when applied to a large population size, is not an insignificant number. To demonstrate this, let’s say that the test in question had a .1% false positive rate; .1% of the time, the result indicated they had the condition tested for when they really didn’t. If this test is administered to all pregnant mothers (roughly 300,000 in 2010), then we can expect 300 false positives for 2010 alone. That is, 300 mothers will be told that their child has that condition, only to find at birth that they don’t. Not really miraculous at all. 

Q:  Christianity has been around for 2,000 years.  How could it survive if it were false?

A:  How has Hinduism survived for 4,000 years if it was false? 

Q:  There are millions of Christians.  They can't all be wrong.

A:  Yes, they can, just as the billions of Muslims and Hindus can be wrong.

Q:  Nothing can exist without a creator, so the fact that things exist proves there's a God.

A:  If nothing can exist without a creator, then neither can God. If things can exist without a creator, who is to say that the cosmos isn’t one of those things? 

Q:  You can't prove that God doesn't exist.

A:  And you can’t prove Santa Claus doesn’t exist too. I am not an atheist because I think God has been proven not to exist, but because there is no evidence to prove that he does. 

Q:  If you're an atheist doesn't that mean that you don't believe in anything?

A:  I believe in things that have evidence that prove that they exist. 

 Q:  If you don't believe in God, that means you want to be God.

A:  Depends what you mean by that statement; if you mean I want humans to fulfil all the functions that have normally been attributed to God (morality, purpose etc.), then yes. If you mean I want to be a dictator in the sky, then no. 

Q:  You just left the Church because you want to sin.

A:  I was never really in any church. 

Q:  So then your life has no meaning?

A:  Yes and no. I do not believe life has any inherit meaning. But that is different from saying it has no meaning. Life has the meaning that I (and all of us) choose to give it.

Short and Sharp - Conformity

A thing that really bugs me is when people get all snooty when it comes to conformity; that if anyone does what the mainstream does, they are just a mindless sheep. Now, I won’t dispute that there are people who legitimately participate in activities they hate just because the majority it. But I believe these individuals to be a minority; most people who make are the mainstream are simply prioritizing their desires.

Let me explain further; in life, we have to prioritize our desires because it is impossible for us to undertake them all concurrent. Desires can mutually exclusive (i.e. wanting the security of a stable partner and wanting to experience the thrill of getting to know someone new) where as others are just temporally exclusive (i.e. they can’t be undertaken at the concurrently because they take up too much time and resources). We have to order our desires and select which are most likely to make us happy and which are most practical.

Conformity comes into this when you realise it too is a desire; the desire to be a part of the group. Take the following example:

Person A’s desires (ranked by preference):

1. Person A wants to be a porn-star.
2. Person A wants to be a nurse.
3. Person A wants to conform to a group.

Now a lot of people would say that they should just go with their most powerful desire to become a porn-star and, if they chose nursing instead, would criticize them for conforming to what society wants. But what they fail to realise is that, by becoming a nurse, they are fulfilling two lesser desires, which may be greater than their first one.

My point is simply this; don’t criticize the choice a person makes just because it happens to align with what mainstream society does. The desire to conform is no more rational than any other emotional desire (to be loved, to feel happy etc.).