Utilitarianism, "total-view" thinking, and human life extension

Classical utilitarians want to maximise the happiness in the world, conceiving of happiness as subjective feelings of pleasure. Really, they want to maximise the balance of pleasure over pain. Preference utilitarians want to maximise the sum of preference satisfaction.

These ideas, however, quickly lead us to apparent paradoxes, or at least disturbing thoughts. If we are morally required to maximimse utility (whether it is pleasure or preference satisfaction), then we'd better produce as much of it as possible. The more pleasure there is in the world, or the more satisfied preferences, the better. If this is our responsibility, we seem to be committed to what Peter Singer calls the total view, i.e. we are concerned with the overall total of utility in the world, and it does not matter how this is achieved. But here are some (not very original) thoughts about why the idea is so disturbing.

Think of the kind of case where a couple decide not to have any more children, or decide not to have children at all, even though the children would probably be happy. It seems as if this couple has done something morally wrong. I know that childless-by-choice couples are often thought of as morally suspect, though I strongly disagree, but for those who might be persuaded by this idea imagine a couple who already have four kids. They could have a fifth - perhaps this will be at some cost to their own happiness, but they are likely to raise the total sum of utility in the world. If they decide to have no more kids, should we say they have done a morally wrong thing? That seems to be a repugnant conclusion (to borrow a phrase from Derek Parfit).

The total view also seems to work badly in cases where the use of contraception is compared with infanticide. If one couple decide not to have children, so they use contraceptives, they are declining to add to the amount of happiness in the world. But even more paradoxically, the immorality of their action seems to be no greater than that of a couple who have a kid, then kill it in some painless way. Once again, they have declined to add to the sum of happiness in the world. Yet, surely there is a moral difference between the two cases!

More generally, the total view would seem to require that we have as many babies as we can afford to raise with a tolerably decent standard of living and prospect of being happy. It requires us not just to improve the lives of existing people, but to create new people. But surely this conflicts with most people's intuitions. Most of us probably think that if you do have a baby you (morally) should look after it, but we don't think you are morally obliged to have children — and certainly not to have as many as you can.

Philosophers sometimes try to avoid the problems of the total view by introducing a prior-existence restriction: leave out of your utility calculations those individuals who would come into existence only as a result of the very actions you are contemplating. Putting it another way, consider only those individuals who already exist (this can be expanded to a prior-existence + "existence anyway" restriction, enabling us to count those who will exist irrespective of your own actions, e.g. the future general public).

However, this way of rejecting the total view also has problems.

Consider this thought experiment (adapted from Parfit). Imagine a government-funded medical program which tests thousands of women before they become pregnant. If they are found to have a particular illness, they can delay pregnancy until they are cured. If they get pregnant while they have the disease, the resulting children will suffer congenital impairment (but will still lead lives with a positive sum of utility).

In this thought experiment, there are no relevant individuals - i.e. the babies we're thinking about - already in existence when the government decides whether to fund the program. Nor are we talking about individuals who will come into existence anyway, if that matters. Which children will, or will not, be born is actually contingent on whether the program goes ahead.

Also, think of a specific woman who has been diagnosed as having the disease. When she decides whether to try to get pregnant now, or to postpone it until she is cured, there are no actual, already-existing, children involved. Which of her ova will get fertilised by which sperm cell, and which child will end up coming into existence will depend on what decision she makes. Yet, we probably want her to delay her pregnancy and have a healthy child. We take a moral view on the issue, but the prior-existence restriction seems to say we can't.

The prior-existence restriction, then, operates on the fact that there is no already-existing child (or fetus or embryo) whose interests the government, or the woman who is contemplating having a kid, can take into account. But surely we want governments to sponsor such programs if the funds are available, and we want women to take opportunities to bring healthy babies into the world rather than unhealthy ones, where there is a choice. The prior-existence restriction would seem to prevent us from making moral claims that a government, or an individual woman, is doing the morally right thing in such cases. There is no relevant baby, or even an embryo, in existence when the decisions are made.

But allow me to harp on the point: all other things being equal, funding a program like this seems to be a morally good thing to do. Or if a woman has actually been diagnosed with the hypothetical disease, it seems that it would be a morally good thing for her to postpone getting pregnant until she is treated for the disease.

Such examples convince some philosophers that we cannot use the prior-existence restriction, at least not always; some kind of total-view thinking does have a role in morality. Or so they think.

In his article, "Research into Aging: Should it be Guided by the Interests of Present Individuals, Future Individuals, or the Species?", in the anthology Life Span Extension (ed. Frederick C. Ludwig), Singer ultimately relies on total-view thinking.

The way he sets up the thought experiment, the individuals in a society with life extension will have longer lives and more total utility than comparable individuals in a society without life extension. However, there will have to be less of them to avoid Malthusian type problems. The population at a point in time will be the same, but the number of people (think of each individual person as a four-dimensional space-time worm) in future space-time will be fewer. Also, their individual average utility will be less over their long lives than those of shorter-lived people (shorter space-time worms) over their shorter lives.

Thus, we needn't worry too much about the longer-lived people as individuals (they will be happy throughout their longer lives, though less happy as they get older, and they will think of their longer lives as a benefit). Yet the total amount of utility existing in space-time will be less if the future society has, rather than if it does not have, life extension technology.

If we accept something like the total view, we should (on the scenario developed by Singer) relinquish life extension technology. Singer wants us to adopt total-view thinking, so he comes out against life extension technology (at least if it has the kind of social impact he imagines it will have) (see page 144 of the book).

He offers a thought experiment of his own to support total-view thinking. Suppose we are confronted with the prospect of either all agreeing not to have children, thus ending the human species, or drastically cutting back on consumption of resources (at some cost to the utility of people who already exist). What should we do? Singer thinks it is obvious that we should cut back on consumption of resources and continue having children.

For utiltarians, it might be impossible, in the end, to avoid total-view thinking, despite its unpalatable aspects. However, that gives me no problem because I am not a utilitarian. I think that the justification for our moral norms is, roughly, that they help protect us from things that we fear and to preserve things that we value. Among the things that we value are having healthy children, laying the foundations for the continued existence of our society, reducing the misery in the world, but also having long, healthy lives for ourselves. There is no objectively right answer to what weight these things should be given - as individuals we give them different somewhat different weights, and to the extent that policy and law support these various values the weighting involves an element of social compromise. Reality leaves morality somewhat underdetermined.

Nonetheless, most of us do value the things I mentioned. We have perfectly good reasons to support moral norms that enshrine them as values, and to campaign for laws that will protect these values (among others).

This analysis accepts that there is no inescapably and categorically "right" answer to questions of morality and policy, a thought which may go against what we are socialised to believe and against much traditional common sense about morality. But is it really very surprising to us? I think that the mild kind of moral scepticism implicit in what I am saying should become the new common sense.

On that basis, we can worry about relieving suffering in the world, rather than maximising the sum total of utility. This needn't drive us to the crazy idea of killing all living things that can suffer (the reductio ad absurdum of negative utilitarianism) because the relief of suffering is not the only thing we actually value - e.g. we actually value the existence of complex, creative, flourishing human societies. We also value wilderness, health, freedom, our own continuing lives, and many other things.

When we look at what we actually value, there is no need to adopt any paradoxical theory such as the total view. Think of it like this. The future society with life extension technology, as depicted in Singer's scenario, will not contain people whom we should feel sorry for. Nor need it be a society that lacks complexity or creativity, even it is smaller in its space-time population than the alternative society without life extension technology. The people who live in this society will be glad to do so, and glad of the enhanced lives that life extension technology will enable them to have.

In short, no important value should lead us to try to avert such a society - all we need to do is abandon total-view utilitarianism, which gives a crude and unhelpful picture of what actually underlies our moral thinking.

Journalistic accuracy - an oxymoron?

I'm sometimes nasty about news reporters. Perhaps it's easy for me - whatever the pressures I've experienced writing articles, essays, reviews, works of fiction, and indeed blog entries, it must be tough reporting news stories under time pressure. It's a form of writing that I have no experience in, and I can see that it takes a special kind of skill and makes great demands on people's judgment and emotional energy.

That said, it's important to keep news reporters to high standards - their work contributes much to our picture of the world. If news articles are pervasively inaccurate - as they are in my experience - our understanding of the world is incrementally undermined.

Take the currently topical Essjay incident. Among the real facts are that Essjay made about 20,000 edits in his time at Wikipedia.

Of course the number of actual articles he edited was much lower. Blake Stacey gives a figure of about 6000 in his response to my previous post - but even this figure is much too high. As Blake points out in his follow-up post, it includes not just articles but other pages of various kinds. Without checking the figures myself, I know that the number of "entries" in the encyclopedia (which suggests actual articles on topics covered by the encyclopedia) that he worked on is much less than 20,000. Why?

First, no Wikipedia editor works by making only one edit per article. Once you start working on an article you are likely to make a number of edits - sometimes hundreds, though as it happens Essjay did not make a lot of edits per article that he worked on. But even if he'd averaged only two edits per article that alone would reduce the figure to 10,000. Second, many edits are not made to articles but to the talk pages of articles where the content of articles is discussed. Third, much else goes on at Wikipedia, such as exchanges on the talk pages of users who discuss issues one on one. Then there are discussions of policies, discussions of what articles to delete, etc. We also know that Essjay was not just any old editor but a busy Wiki-functionary, who would have been involved in a lot of background administrative tasks requiring edits to the encyclopedia to be made.

Moreover, one news report said that he worked on 20,000 "controversial" articles, but many Wikipedia articles are not really controversial, and there is no reason to think that Essjay worked mainly on the controversial ones.

In other words, from the fact that Essjay had about 20,000 edits, news reporters have basically made stuff up. They had no reason at all to conclude that he had edited anything like 20,000 "entries" or articles, let alone 20,000 "controversial" ones.

I've seen numerous other inaccuracies in news reports on this issue from reputable media organisations.

The thing is, I'm not surprised. In my own past dealings with the press, I've found that there are almost always inaccuracies in news stories, even when the material actually provided to reporters is accurate.

How does this happen? In the Essjay case, time pressure can't have been the reason - it would have been simple for reporters just to report the facts that they had, rather than making up facts - making up enough to give Joe Public an overall distorted impression of what the incident was really about.

If there are any working news journalists out there, perhaps you can respond, illuminating how and why this kind of thing happens. One guess is that the actual facts are often too dry-sounding, so journalists try to reword them in a way that will read better, but in doing so they make unwarranted assumptions, and so draw inferences that are not logically justified from the material they have in front of them. Perhaps jumping to conclusions in this way is just human nature, but it is very dangerous when news reporters do it, because the background facts may often be complex, even somewhat technical, and may not match the assumptions made by the reporter at all.

The Essjay thing is a case in point - you need a bit of semi-technical knowledge about how Wikipedia actually works to be able to see immediately that many of the claims made in news reports cannot be correct. But shouldn't reporters be aware of the risk that they are drawing unwarranted inferences in such cases?

I don't know enough about what goes on to be able to formulate a plausible theory as to how and why it happens; I just know it happens - and this has been a good case study. We'd be better off with more journalistic accuracy in news reporting - if journalistic accuracy in that context were not an oxymoron. Why are things as bad and they are, and what can be done to change it?

Busy week - this and that

I've been slack about blogging here over the past week or so. It's been quite busy, even apart from the fact that I'm still under a bit of (largely self-imposed) pressure to finish the thesis, and I am mopping up stray things that I've identified I need to read and consider, now I've thought most of the issues through. I also put aside a bit of time this week to review Rudy Rucker's new novel, Mathematicians in Love, for The New York Review of Science Fiction.

On Monday night I joined a small group for drinks with Garry Kilworth and his wife Annette, who've been in town for some months but are just catching up with the sf people. Garry and Annette were lovely, relaxed people who seemed to be enjoying their time in Australia.

And then there's been classes to prepare and teach, with the new semester.

In my spare time, around the edges, I got caught up in the intense discussions going on over at Wikipedia in the aftermath of what now seems to be known as "the Essjay scandal" or "the Essjay controversy".

I'll save any thoughts that I have about that until another time. Suffice to say that a very good contributor to Wikipedia, known as "Essjay" had risen to hold a lot of power and responsibility within Wikipedia and related entities, perhaps helped to some extent by his fabricated identity as a highly-qualified academic with expertise in (of all things) theology. He turns out to be a much younger person with no such qualifications. This sort of identity fabrication happens all the time on the internet, of course, and people are rightly suspicious in many cases, but the thing is that Essjay actually did terrific work and never seemed to act to undermine the encyclopedia; he played the role of enthusiastic, intelligent, academic expert helping out the project ... played it so well that his work actually was of great benefit.

However, he came unstuck because he maintained the whole charade to The New Yorker in an extensive interview last year. When he recently took up a real-life job with the Wikipedia-related organisation Wikia, he came clean about his background (or at least gave a more plausible story for someone of his age). Thereafter, more and more came out about how he had gained advantages from, and otherwise misused, his made-up identity (though, again, while doing a more than competent job as a contributor to Wikipedia, as an administrator, and just about everything else). There's now been a lot of coverage of this in the mainstream press as well as all over the net.

Interesting times. I feel sorry for Essjay - who now seems to have left both Wikipedia and his job at Wikia - while wondering how people get themselves in these situations. The events do tend to cast Wikipedia into disrepute, so there is now a huge debate going on about what to do to try to minimise the possibility of anything on this scale of deception ever happening again.

Dawkins, religion, and public policy

The February-March issue of Cosmos contains my long-awaited review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, a book that has been the subject of massive international controversy.

(This issue also has Jenny Blackford's excellent article on recent books about the mind, plus other reviews by one or other of us, but I'll put that to one side.)

Actually, my review of The God Delusion is not all that long-awaited: I wrote the review in early November, so the lag between writing and publication was three months. For a bimonthly magazine, Cosmos has published it quickly.

But in the three months between when the review was written and when it appeared in print there has been an extraordinary debate going on about Dawkins' book. I read and reviewed The God Delusion before any of this appeared, so I couldn't take the controversy into account - what you'll see in Cosmos when you pick up your copy is just a straight review of what I think is a very good, but certainly not perfect, book in which Dawkins argues his case that traditional, literal theism is a false and dangerous belief.

One thing that has since astonished me is how many secular or otherwise moderate thinkers appear to resent Dawkins speaking up in criticising religion. I was well aware of the unspoken pact among intellectuals to show a sort of paternalistic solicitude toward religion - something that has developed gradually since my youth back in the 1970s, when anti-religious feeling was more socially acceptable. But I hadn't realised just how strong this pact had become. If you write a book like that of Dawkins, arguing with wit and passion against religious belief, it now seems that most people who are in the position to review your work will question the propriety of what you're doing. It's as if any criticism of religion is seen, these days, as some kind of affront, or threat, to social stability.

As religious leaders and intellectuals have become bolder, in recent years, about attempting to shape public policy on explicitly religious or crypto-religious grounds, it has become important that those grounds be subjected to close sceptical scrutiny. If the exponents of religious and crypto-religious viewpoints wish to have a say in the formulation of public policy, then we need to scrutinise whether or not their arguments are based on any intellectually credible foundation.

Those of us who live in Western societies are no longer in a luxurious position where the proponents of religious and crypto-religious worldviews are prepared to keep out of policy debates, in the expectation that their beliefs, in turn, will be treated gently in the public arena. In particular, the Vatican is aggressive in demanding that public policy reflect its specifically religious morality. In the US, there has been a determined push to challenge the teaching of biological evolution in schools, while the President's Commission on Bioethics is dominated by religious and crypto-religious thinking. All of this is supported by levels of funding that most of us can only dream of gaining access to.

We can't pretend this is not happening around us, and go on blithely assuming that policy will be set on purely secular grounds, with religion agreeing to be sidelined.

I expect to see a lot more public questioning of religion in books and other media. The position has been reached where there will be more poking at the sore point, more intense probing at whether religious worldviews are even tenable - with more and stronger challenges to the role they play in the formulation of public policy. Contrary to so many critics of Dawkins, who obviously feel uncomfortable, I think that that's a necessary and healthy development.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel

I've recently read Infidel, the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's life to date. I say "to date", because she's still in her thirties and has many years ahead - unless, of course, an Islamist fanatic gets to her first.

Infidel was published in Dutch a few months ago, and the English translation has just been released. The narrative takes us from Hirsi Ali's birth in Somalia in 1969, through her childhood and young adult life in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopa, and Kenya, her escape to freedom in the Netherlands (via Germany), and her tumultuous career as a critic of Islam, including her involvement in the short film Submission, whose director, Theo van Gogh, was subsequently assassinated - then left with a five-page letter stuck to his chest by the blade of a butcher's knife. The letter was addressed to Hirsi Ali, and its gist was a warning that she would be the next to die.

The book takes us up to Hirsi Ali's most recent relocation, to the United States, in 2006.

Though its author's story is often harrowing - as in the account of her cruel "excision", or genital mutilation, as a little girl - it is still joyous overall. The joy lies in Hirsi Ali's totally unashamed denuciation of the economic, social, and sexual suppression of women in the name of religion and traditional culture, and in her passionate, wholehearted embrace of Enlightenment liberalism and universalism. Many Western intellectuals equivocate about the values of liberty, reason and science. Indeed, they sometimes appear to form a little Taliban in our midst. We would all be better off if they, and the world, would take Infidel's message to heart.

Why we don't need a genetic bill of rights

The point of a bill of rights is to take some issues off the table of everyday law-making, unless the position can be changed by gathering some kind of constitutionally-required super-majority.

For example, Latveria might have a provision in its bill of rights prohibiting the legislature from infringing freedom of speech. If so, this will prevent its legislature from banning, say, speech that criticises religious practices or the monarch's favourite political philosophy. Since legislation to achieve that effect is beyond the power of the legislature to enact, the issue is not a matter for ordinary, day-to-day political deliberation. This has the effect of creating areas of relative safety from the intrusion of government power into Latverians' lives.

Thus, a Latverian statute banning criticism of priestly celibacy could become law only after a referendum, or whatever other mechanism was provided for in the Latverian constitution.

Of course, legislatures are notorious for testing any restrictions placed on them by bills of rights, so the political process does not come to an end in practice. We can be sure that the legislature of Latveria will make attempts, from time to time, to push the constitutional boundaries. These are then likely to be adjudicated in the country's courts, or by its constitutional commission or whatever other body has power to determine the legal issue. However, at the least, a large range of laws - those most clearly offending the relevant "right" - are unlikely to be pursued as part of ordinary politics.

None of the above is meant to deny that a bill of rights can also provide for positive rights. Just as a constitutional provision can protect us from government power, by stipulating that certain things cannot be done by the legislature (hence, a negative right), a constitutional provision can also guarantee citizens certain specific resources. For example, such a provision might require the legislature (and other branches of government if necessary) to take positive steps to ensure that everyone has access to adequate nutrition and basic healthcare.

In practice, some countries' constitutions do provide for positive rights of this kind, but those sorts of provisions are obviously open to interpretation: just what steps must be taken, and how much money spent, before it can be said that such a positive right has been satisfied? What if money is not available? For these sorts of reasons, writing in positive rights is less attractive than creating protections from government action in the form of negative rights. Traditionally, bills of rights are usually confined to negative rights - entrenched restrictions on the ability of the government to interfere with our personal choices.

It is not obvious that any of our rights should be entrenched constitutionally in such a document as a bill of rights - why not leave the resolution of our legal rights to the dynamics of the democratic political process? Many critics of constitutionally entrenched rights see them as anti-democratic.

However, one can believe that it is best for government power to be wielded by democratically-elected representatives of the people while also believing, perhaps even on the same grounds, that its scope should have some limits. If this is "anti-democratic", it is so only in some technical sense. In any event, it is widely believed that there are some things which should not be done by governments - even governments that command majority electoral support - and that it is important to provide citizens with at least some protections from government action and the possible tyranny of the majority. Just what those off-limits things might be is, of course, a matter for debate, and the actual protections can be changed from time to time by constitutional amendment.

Constitutional amendment is a more difficult process than the ordinary process for enacting legislation - sufficiently difficult, in fact, for governments not to embark lightly on the task - but that is the whole point. In practice, a legislature will have to think long and hard before it interferes with a contitutionally-protected negative right, and any attempt to do so will probably be futile.

All of which leads to the question of what a "genetic bill of rights" might contain. Its obvious content would be a set of restrictions on legislative power, designed to protect areas of important and deeply personal choices from government interference. For example, the genetic bill of rights enshrined in the constitution of Genosha might require that the legislature enact no statutes interfering with the morphological freedom of competent adults: their ability to alter themselves genetically (or in other ways) in accordance with their own decisions. I see a good deal of merit in such a proposal, but at the end of the day there are likely to be just too many complications for any jurisdiction that adopts a sweeping provision that curtails the power of its legislature in this area. Are no self-morphing actions by its citizens ever going to be socially dangerous enough to warrant prohibition or regulation?

Never?

One way to handle the issue is by having a right that is subject to some kind of override if the government can demonstrate a compelling necessity (the nature of which would have to emerge in the jurisprudence of the courts). However, I suspect that it's better to leave the matter to the normal process of policy formulation, with the legislature enacting appropriate statutes from time to time in the normal way.

That, of course, does not mean that we should simply acquiesce in any abridgment of our morphological freedom, merely because it falls within the legislature's power. It is always open to us to oppose legislative proposals that are within the law-makers' constitutional powers, and one of the grounds might well be that a particular proposal interferes unnecessarily in what competent adults plan to do with their own bodies.

While I see some merit in a constitutionally-entrenched protection of morphological freedom, even if I am slightly sceptical about it, I see no merit at all in the creation of most other kinds of constitutionally-entrenched "rights". That's especially so if the so-called rights have little to do with protecting us from government interference with our personal and important decisions.

In modern democracies, many issues - indeed, the vast majority - are best handled through the ordinary political process. For example, the Latverian legislature can enact laws forbidding human reproductive cloning, just as it can enact laws banning certain drugs, or acts of violence, or theft, or impersonating the monarch, or anything else for which there is some policy justification. Note that, whatever the situation might be in Latveria, most jurisidictions do not need a constitutional requirement that there must be a law enacted against murder. In countries like Australia and the US, we simply rely on the common law and/or the state penal code. Similarly, if there is good policy justification (which I doubt) for a law against human cloning, it can be used to support the case for ordinary laws that are enacted in the ordinary way by the legislature of the relevant jurisdiction.

Yet, we currently see bioconservatives running around talking about a genetic "bill of rights". This is misleading, for most of what they are requesting has nothing to do with establishing protections of citizens' personal choices from intrusive acts of government.

What they really want, presumably, are just ordinary laws against such things as reproductive cloning, genetic engineering, and whatever else is currently registering strongly on their yuck-meters. They are entitled to argue for that, of course, as I am entitled to oppose them, or to argue for something much more nuanced and flexible. However, talk of a genetic bill of rights creates unnecessary confusion.

With the possible exception of a broad protection from government interference in our choices about how we change our own bodies - i.e., a guarantee of morphological freedom - most issues raised in the current debates about biotechnology are totally unsuitable for anything like a genetic bill of rights.

Perhaps some new issues will arise, defining areas where we want to rein in the power of government to abuse genetic technology - taking the issue off the table for ordinary politicking. But for now, there is a fundamental problem with trying to frame policy debates about genetics in terms of the content of a new bill of rights.

Chatting with God

For those who haven't already seen this at Pharyngula or elsewhere, try chatting with God. He's rather evasive, I'm afraid. I asked him about some of you - you can guess who you are - but got no sensible reply.

Extended

I just received advice that my graduate scholarship has been extended for six months, until 19 September 2007. That's a relief. Now to take all this work I've been doing (much of which I've been posting in raw draft form right here on this blog), and carve it into something that can actually be submitted in that time.

It's reached the point where I have to draw a line under my reading soon - I see that Michael Sandel has a new book on human enhancement, evidently based on his famous article "The Case Against Perfection", and using the same title. As this won't be published until May, I may not be able to get a copy before I'm finished, and it will certainly be too late for me to give it much consideration.

First semester upon us

The first semester of the academic year starts next week - my main commitment is to teach a few tutorials in the second-year undergraduate Ethics subject, which should be do-able.

I'm now itching to finish the Ph.D and to turn it into a book to submit to an appropriate publisher, but it's obviously not going to happen in the next few weeks. So, I currently have an application in for a six-month scholarship extension, which looks a lot more realistic right now. Whether I get the extension or not, I plan to submit in August/September, which means I'll soon be looking around and considering the next phase of my career. I have a lot more philosophy in me, and I'm hoping to find a research position - or even a teaching position with a fair emphasis on research - at an institution that's well placed to support my work (with colleagues whose work can create synergies and so on).

What's so dystopian about the Biotech Age?

The bioconservative handbook, Rights and Liberties in the Biotech Age: Why We Need a Genetic Bill of Rights, is an uneven read. Some of the short articles collected here make good points - about the importance of universal health care, for one example, and, for another, the policy justification for a limited exception to the finality of criminal justice if there is a prospect that DNA testing could provide belated exculpatory evidence. However, many pieces contained here rely on irrational assumptions, such as the idea that it is meaningful to talk about the "rights" of zygotes and embryos (Stuart Newman tries to avoid this, while getting the same conclusions, but the attempt is unconvincing).

One article strikes me as so lacking in any intellectual substance that I hesitate to comment on it, but it is worth notice just to illustrate the mentality and rhetoric that so often accompany opposition to genetic technology. This is the piece by Marcy Darnovsky, entitled "Human Rights in a Post-Human Future".

Darnovsky begins with the usual pathetic attempt to suggest guilt by association, by referring to the evils committed by the Nazis. Having made that smear, she makes a reference to the bioconservatives' proposed "Genetic Bill of Rights", then moves to this remarkable paragraph:

Even twenty-five years ago - before the development of genetic manipulation at the molecular level, legal doctrines that allow governments to grant patents on life, and DNA databases; before the advent and commercialization of in vitro fertilization and the screening of in vitro embryos; before the appearance of advertisements for social sex selection in mainstream U.S. publications - the document [i.e. the Genetic Bill of Rights] would have been widely considered an unwarranted over-reaction based on a dystopian fantasy.

Now there are probably more and less charitable ways to read this. Darnovksy does not literally say that we currently live in a world that resembles a dystopian fantasy. Perhaps the paragraph could be interpreted as merely pointing out some of the powerful (but not necessarily bad) changes arising from genetic technology, all of which make it plausible that other, more dystopian, applications could arise in the future. I doubt, however, that that is how it is meant. In context, the implication seems to be that it would take a dystopian setting to make the Genetic Bill of Rights a realistic proposal ... which it now is. So I can only take it, on consideration, that the picture she is attempting to paint of present-day reality is a dystopian one, not merely one that involves powerful technologies that might have some other, unidentified, applications which we ought to fear.

A careful reading suggests that the para would have been worded differently if its author had wanted to make a more moderate point, but perhaps Darnovsky will clarify her subjective intention some time.

Meanwhile, the paragraph is sitting there, on the first page of her article, with the implication (at least on one obvious reading) that it is sketching a dystopian situation. However she actually meant it, it's worth considering whether what she describes really is so dystopian. Let's take the points one by one:

* "genetic manipulation at the molecular level" - nothing dystopian about that that I can see. This is a new power that we have gained, which could doubtless be used for evil. Like any other power, it has been sought in order to advance what we are capable of doing. On the face of it, this is a gain. However, I'll not score it either way.

* "patents on life" - this one is a mixed bag. I don't see why patents on novel and useful life forms are, in principle, any different from patents on anything else. That said, there really are problems with allowing contrived patents on DNA sequences or on scarcely-modified organisms. The situation is not obviously dystopian, but I would support some reform of patent legislation to restrict the excessive range of DNA patents. Score one to Darnovsky.

* "DNA databases" - hardly dystopian, these have great potential for medical research and many other useful applications. That's not to say that no abuses are possible; of course they are. This makes it necessary to respond with strong privacy protections, but there's nothing necessarily dystopian about it. Score half a point to Darnovsky. Then again, think of all the good that DNA databases can do. Score a point against her as well. That's a net half point against her on this one.

* "advent and commercialization of in vitro fertilization" - I don't see the problem here. There is an argument for providing for IVF entirely from public funds, but until all forms of health care, however expensive, are provided for in that way a degree of commercialization is inevitable and necessary. IVF itself gives new options to infertile couples, which is a welcome development. It gives some people something that they, quite rationally, value. Score a point against Darnovsky.

* "screening of in vitro embryos" - this is a way to help people have healthy children, something that many people want, again quite rationally. Another point against Darnovsky.

* Advertisements for "social sex selection" - the ability of some would-be parents to decide not just "I want a baby" but "I want a boy" or "I want a girl" is another example of people being able to get something they desire, and may desire quite rationally (someone may have two boys already and wish she could now have a girl, or she may simply think that she would be able to be a better mother to a boy than to a girl, for whatever reason). If we are able to use technology to help people satisfy their rational desires, surely that is a good thing. Score yet another point against Darnovsky.

In conclusion, it's true that genetic technology has become more powerful, and will continue to do so. It will bring benefits - a greater ability of people to have healthy children, more certainty in the system of criminal justice (exculpating innocent people and blocking off the defences of guilty ones), new therapies, more individually-tailored drugs, and the prospect of expanding our capacities in ways that meet our rational desires.

That's not to deny that there are, and will be, problems to be addressed, e.g. problems relating to safety, privacy, and our ability to run an economically beneficial patents scheme. But we are by no means living in a dystopian reality or on the path to one. On balance, genetic technology still appears to be a source of benefits, and we should pay no regard to people who want to link it to dystopian visions in pursuit of a conservative agenda to rein in the technology's legitimate uses.

Let's have rational legislative initiatives to ensure such things as safety, privacy, and access - but stop all the irrational fearmongering.