One year ago at Cogito: "Amnesty International and the Prostitution Debate"

In case you missed it, this post at Cogito on "Amnesty International and the Prostitution Debate" appeared just on a year ago and I never did follow up in the way I foreshadowed at the end. Perhaps I should still do so, but it's one of those topics where I hesitate. It's so emotionally explosive - with very passionate views on all sides - that civil discussion is almost impossible, any factual errors will be pounced on viciously, and disagreement is likely to be interpreted as showing a morally corrupt character. If you want to make a genuine intellectual contribution, as opposed to engaging in noisy activism for whichever policies and viewpoints you already favour, this is an issue where you need to be very careful indeed.

Sample (slightly edited for flow):

Responses by philosophers run the entire gamut from fierce hostility toward prostitution (and toward any policy of full decriminalization) to an almost rhapsodic affirmation of prostitution’s benefits.

This illustrates both the strength and the limitations of philosophy as an academic discipline. The various philosophers who responded to a request from the philosophy blog Daily Nous to discuss this topic are clearly intelligent people. All of them make useful observations for the purpose of clarifying what is at stake. Yet they come to a wide range of conclusions, with no realistic prospect that they could ever converge on agreement.

As so often with philosophical debate, we can see that the participants are all operating with deep preconceptions about values, priorities, morality, and the role of law. Generally speaking, their responses are quite logical if you accept their preconceptions, but how do we establish which of these are the right ones?

Much work in academic philosophy involves an intellectually rigorous effort to solve exactly that problem. I certainly don’t suggest that it is impossible, and perhaps we do make slow progress. In practice, however, it’s extraordinarily difficult. If philosophers - or other people - are to reach agreement, sooner or later they must identify some shared premises from which they can reason and argue. But even professional philosophers find this difficult when engaged in moral, political, and social or cultural controversies, such as what we should do about prostitution.

As for what I think about prostitution… I think it’s a difficult issue, I change my mind frequently (at least about the details of a wise policy approach), and I think there are considerations that can pull in different directions. I’ve tended in the past to support full decriminalization, in the sense discussed above, but I doubt that it can be the whole story or that prostitution deserves our rhapsodies. It’s possible, too, that we need more empirical data, and that what might work in one society (if we’re mainly seeking harm reduction) could fail in another.

Sunday supervillainy - Currently reading Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club, by Alison Goodman

I've almost finished Alison Goodman's latest novel, Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club (also known as simply The Dark Days Club).

I don't usually offer disclaimers, since it's a small world and you can assume that I know many of the people whose books I discuss. But just this once, partly because I love this book - and I strongly recommend it if it sounds like your sort of thing - I'll get out of the way that Alison and I are personal friends.

With that said, this is a Gothic novel of a kind. It blends Regency romance (and Jane Austen's sharp eye for social observation) with a dark, soul-corrupting war against a demonic horde secretly entrenched in the cities, towns, and villages of the world. So what's not to like? It's beautifully written and adroitly paced, with rounded, vividly realized characters whom I find myself caring about. Lady Helen's dilemmas, large and small, are almost painful to contemplate. And yet we must know what she'll decide at each point - which keeps us devouring paragraphs and turning pages.

The bad guys of the narrative are demonic beings of various grades that infest the earth, preying on humankind by analogy, somewhat, to vampires. (Although this is not a vampire novel, Lady Helen does rather resemble Buffy - if Buffy were a young aristocratic woman living in England during the extravagant Regency period of the early nineteenth century.) These beings are opposed by a small group of especially gifted humans who might as well be considered mutants - the expression lusus naturae, whim, or we'd say "freak", of nature, is used more than once - and possess the terrible responsibility of employing their powers for mankind's greater good.

Much science fiction and fantasy can be seen as expressing anxiety about the uses of power. As we are told by countless book, movies, comics, etc. - whether it's Spider-Man, or the X-Men, or something more respectably middlebrow - certain people might use extraordinary powers altruistically and responsibly, while others would bend theirs to destructive or selfish purposes. In fiction, as with real-life uses of power (political, economic, technological, or otherwise), it is not always so straightforward. Even when used with all responsibility and diligence, great power may tend to corrupt the user, and this is certainly an overarching dilemma that confronts poor Lady Helen. Dare she embrace her abilities, and what kind of nightmare path in life will she be starting if she does? What would the power and the struggle do to her generous heart and purity of spirit?

There are two more books to come, so I'm looking forward to the whole trilogy.

Saturday self-promotion - "Dr. Frankenstein meets Lord Devlin: Genetic engineering and the principle of intangible harm"

From March 2004 to August 2008 - when I submitted my dissertation to be examined - I undertook a Ph.D. in philosophy at Monash University under the supervision of Justin Oakley (with Dirk Baltzly filling in at one point while Justin was on sabbatical leave). My associate supervisors were Jeanette Kennett (briefly) and Rob Sparrow.

(During this time, I also did a lot of sessional lecturing and tutoring across the philosophy and bioethics curriculum at Monash; this, in fact, continued almost until I shifted house from Melbourne to Newcastle in late 2009. I still have many friends at Monash, though some have moved on to other institutions or to retirement.)

The title of my doctoral dissertation was "Human Enhancement: The Challenge to Liberal Tolerance." It was passed without revisions in November 2008, and I formally graduated in absentia at a ceremony in early 2009. Subsequently, I revised, updated, and slightly expanded it for publication as a book with MIT Press. This appeared at the beginning of 2014 under the title Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies.

In both the dissertation and the book, I argue that the nations of the world, and particularly the liberal democracies of the West, have been too hasty to enact draconian laws against a range of "genetic choices", such as human therapeutic and reproductive cloning, certain uses of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and genetic modification of human embryos. Not only that, the illiberal approach taken in this case augurs badly for the likely political responses to any future innovations that might cause widespread outrage and fear.

Throughout, I attempt to distinguish between, on one hand, moral arguments that might be made from various contestable viewpoints that should not prevail in lawmaking within liberal democracies and, on the other hand, widely accepted liberal principles such as the Millian harm principle. I consider various arguments against genetic choices that might plausibly pass muster under liberal principles - and while I find various grains of merit in some of them, I don't find enough to justify the regimes of restrictions and bans that are currently in place, many of them enacted in response to the announcement, in early 1997, of the birth of Dolly the Sheep.

I'm linking to my article "Dr. Frankenstein meets Lord Devlin: Genetic engineering and the principle of intangible harm." This was published in The Monist, a prestigious peer-reviewed philosophy journal, during my stint at Monash. It was one of several journal articles that I wrote while completing the Ph.D. I've recently uploaded a copy at Academia.edu - so you might want to check it out if you have access.

The point of the article is to consider whether technologies such as genetic engineering of human embryos could cause some kind of "intangible harm" to human societies such as described by the great British jurist Lord Patrick Devlin. I ask about the possible social effects if genetic engineering is used to produce dramatic enhancements of human capacities.

Devlin notoriously put forward the argument about intangible harm during debates in the late 1950s, and into the 1960s, about legalisation of prostitution and homosexual acts. He was replying to the Wolfenden Report, which recommended liberal reforms to the law in Britain. The overall judgment of history has been that Devlin's arguments in defence of a conservative position - and what is now called legal moralism - failed (though of course there is still much opposition to prostitution, often on independent grounds based largely on paternalism).

For all that, might Devlin have something to teach us? His suggestion that allowing some practices could cause so-called "intangible harm", by destroying social bonds in some way, is not obviously ridiculous, even if fails badly as a justification for prohibition of, in particular, homosexual acts. In "Dr. Frankenstein meets Lord Devlin", I try to sort out whether the argument does any better with more futuristic practices such as genetic engineering (something that we are now closer to being able to do effectively, with the recent development of CRISPR-Cas9 technology). In the end, I'm rather sceptical, despite trying to give the argument a good run.

To be honest, I think I do a better job with this in Humanity Enhanced, based on my dissertation written a few years after the article. My later accounts have a sharper, and more comprehensive, analysis of the jurisprudential principles involved.

But I'm fond of "Dr. Frankenstein meets Lord Devlin." Although it represents a relatively early stage of my thinking - published, as it was, about seven years before Humanity Enhanced - I still feel that I managed to lend some clarity to difficult issues. Do check it out if the policy issues surrounding genetic science interest you. As its (memetic) parent, I'm certainly biased, but I think it deserves some more readers.


Postscript: Having just re-read the article, I think the above even sells it a bit short. At any rate, if you don't have the time to read, or money to buy, Humanity Enhanced, "Dr. Frankenstein meets Lord Devlin" might be worth your while. It lays out a lot of my thinking about these issues in fairly extended form. Also, it gives an idea of where I am coming from in debates about genetic choice and much else.

Dolly the Sheep and the human cloning debate - twenty years later

(I'm now republishing this article in full. It was originally published on The Conversation. You can read the original here).

Dolly, the world’s most famous and controversial sheep, was born twenty years ago – on July 5, 1996 to be precise. She was the first mammal to enter the world following a process of reproductive cloning, making the event a spectacular scientific breakthrough.

To create Dolly, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Scotland employed a technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). With SCNT, DNA from the nucleus of an ordinary cell - obtained from anywhere in an animal’s body - is transferred into an enucleated oocyte (egg cell), typically from a different animal.

In Dolly’s case, her DNA came from one sheep’s mammary cell; it was implanted into an egg from another sheep; and the resulting tiny biological entity was implanted into the uterus of yet a third sheep, where it grew until birth.

The result of SCNT is a creature with almost the same genetic potential as the one providing the nuclear DNA. SCNT is thus a powerful, and often effective, form of animal cloning.

Dolly is born! Announcement and reaction

Subsequently, in February 1997, Ian (now Sir Ian) Wilmut and his research team at the Roslin Institute announced Dolly’s birth in the prestigious science journal Nature. This provoked political and ethical debates that have never truly stopped.

Public discussion of cloning gradually receded in prominence as new issues arose to dominate the airwaves and the headlines, notably the threat of jihadist terrorism following the attacks on September 11, 2001. But issues relating to cloning technology remain crucial to debates over biomedical research and its regulation.

The announcement – with a description of the method used to bring Dolly into existence – triggered a feverish worldwide response because of the possible implications for human cloning. It was immediately obvious that SCNT could, in principle, be used to create human babies. Across the world, many countries banned human cloning - often with significant punishments, such as lengthy jail terms, even for attempting such a thing.

The case against cloning

The actual arguments against human cloning are extremely varied, and I cannot elaborate them all here. (I go into more of them, and in far more depth, in my 2014 book, Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies).

One common claim is that bringing children into the world in this way is somehow a violation of the natural order, or of human dignity; or perhaps it would be an act of “playing God”. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to pin down precisely what any of these claims really mean in the context of bioethical debate. I am, for example, sceptical about the existence of anything that can correctly be called “human dignity”.

Some critics fear that children created via SCNT would be subjected to unfair expectations of duplicating the talents and achievements of whoever provided their nuclear DNA. Sometimes the critics speak in terms of the autonomy of the child being violated, diminished or denied, although it can be very difficult to spell out exactly what this amounts to. In Humanity Enhanced, I challenge the idea that children conceived through SCNT would have their autonomy violated – or would somehow lack or lose autonomy – in any sense inapplicable to “ordinary” children.

Some critics worry about a larger social effect, or even an effect on our species, if cloning restricted the diversity of children being born (perhaps because parents and doctors might look for donors with a narrow range of characteristics, such as possessing high intelligence and meeting certain standards of physical beauty).

Yet other arguments acknowledge that reproductive cloning in itself might not have a great social or species-wide impact; however, it’s claimed, cloning could place human societies on a slippery slope toward accepting even more radical technological interventions such as genetic engineering of human traits. On one version of the approach, this would, in turn, set us upon a path to unequivocally horrible social outcomes. Thus cloning supposedly confronts us with a slippery slope to another slippery slope … which seems like a tenuous style of argument.

Though some of these fears may have an element of truth, they are all exaggerated. In my view, which I’ve defended in Humanity Enhanced and other publications, human cloning would not be a seriously worrying action if we could carry it out safely.

To some extent, however, all of this is moot. Over the past twenty years, we have enjoyed success in cloning many mammalian species, but no one has cloned a human being. Indeed, we have been frustrated in efforts to clone other primates such as apes and monkeys.

In the upshot, human reproductive cloning is not yet feasible, and indeed there’s no current prospect that it could be carried out effectively and safely in the foreseeable future. Even if we did conceive a human embryo through SCNT, and we then managed to bring it to term, the odds are very high that the result would be a seriously deformed child.

That’s a good pragmatic reason not to make attempts until we know a lot more, and even then we’d need to have developed the technology to a point where we are about as likely as with ordinary births to end up with a healthy baby.

I don’t rule out that someone might accomplish this technological feat one day, but, once again, there is no sign of it happening. Nor is it what SCNT research is really about from the point of view of reputable medical researchers. The real action is with what is known as “therapeutic cloning”. Allow me to explain.

Reproductive and therapeutic cloning

So far I’ve focused on “reproductive cloning”, and more specifically on human reproductive cloning: the postulated use of SCNT (or any other technique that might have a similar result) to bring about the birth of a human child.

By contrast, the expression “therapeutic cloning” refers to the creation of human embryos by SCNT for some other purpose, such as for biomedical research or for harvesting cells or tissues to be used in therapies.

Although some ethical issues are raised with therapeutic cloning – including a concern that the associated research destroys human embryos – the idea has been obtaining legal acceptance in some countries, usually subject to tight government regulation. If we start to see impressive results from therapeutic cloning, with new therapies emerging from the research, I expect that it will eventually obtain the same wide acceptance that IVF – in vitro fertilization – now enjoys in Western countries. (It’s not that long ago that IVF was also widely regarded as abhorrent.)

More generally, people come to embrace new technologies, even those that initially seemed shocking and “unnatural”, once concrete benefits become clear.

Twenty years later

Two decades later, I’m not sure that the ethical arguments advanced for and against human cloning are greatly different from those we saw back 1997. However, the early debate was very one-sided. The initial response to the dramatic Nature article by Wilmut et al. was largely one of fear, mingled with disgust, with too little rational reflection. Since then, the fear-mongering has partly died down, but not before a great deal of draconian legislation was enacted across the world. Little chance was given for calmer voices - or any dissenting voices - to be heard before governments took action.

As it seems to me, calmer voices eventually won the academic debate. There is a strong sense, within the field of secular bioethics, that the early arguments against human reproductive and therapeutic cloning were flawed. However, dissenters lost the political debate almost before it began. Politicians, journalists, many academics, and the general public in our Western liberal democracies greeted the very idea of human cloning with a cascade of hostility.

The expressions of fear, disgust, and moral outrage appeared immediately; in response, highly illiberal laws were enacted without due consideration of the issues.

But more reasonable people are slowly winning back the central political ground, gradually making the public case that technologies based on SCNT may bring many benefits. That, perhaps, will be the story of the next twenty years.

New post at The Conversation: "Dolly the Sheep and the human cloning debate - twenty years later."

I've published a new post on the Cogito blog, hosted by The Conversation: "Dolly the Sheep and the human cloning debate - twenty years later." Check it out!

Journal of Evolution and Technology currently closed for submissions

The Journal of Evolution and Technology (for which I am editor-in-chief) is now closed for submissions until the beginning of 2017. This is to give us a chance to get our backlog under control.

Unlike most other open-access journals, we do not charge a publication fee. Nor are we able to make money by selling subscriptions to university libraries. We need to operate with the very limited resources that can be provided by our publishing organisation, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). And as a result, JET depends mainly on volunteer labour - in particular, I don't receive any payment for editing the journal, so I have to fit it in around other projects as best I can.

At the same time, we strive to match the editorial and scholarly standards of the best academic journals. Accomplishing this with rather thin resources is a continual challenge, and something has to give. The "something" is often our ability to keep up with submissions. There's a tendency for delays and backlogs to occur. Until such a time as the IEET receives a large infusion of funds, closing JET for submissions from time to time, in order to catch up with ourselves, seems to be the best solution.

It did work quite well this time last year, enabling us to focus on getting material through the pipeline. See JET's front page for the full issue that we have already published this year (issue 26(1)) and the material published so far toward the issue currently in progress (26(2)).

You can, of course, always donate to the IEET to help it carry out its programs!

Sunday supervillainy - Currently reading The Transhuman Antihero, by Michael Grantham

I'm currently reading Michael Grantham's book The Transhuman Antihero: Paradoxical Protagonists of Speculative Fiction from Mary Shelley to Richard Morgan (McFarland, 2016). Paradoxically, as it were, I am reading this after seeing a very unfavourable review of it published in the latest issue of Science Fiction Studies. Bad reviews are often better than no reviews at all, at least if you want to be read and cited! It became apparent to me that this was a book I needed to read, since it covers much  the same ground as some of my own research.

I can report that Grantham's book is nowhere near as bad as the SFS review suggested. On the contrary, many of the readings of individual texts are detailed and insightful. If you have an interest in this area, the book is worth broaching. It's also written fairly well, despite some overly convoluted sentences, and it's been edited well enough to be pretty free of typos and the like.

At the same time, the editing could have been better - for example, too many odd word choices slip through, as when Grantham claims that one author "is not alone in his advocation for designer evolution." Why not "advocacy"? Again, a particular novel "confronts the reader with a social reality in which advancements in genetic technologies have led to [certain outcomes]." Why not just "advances"? These are not at all the only such glitches, alas, and although all writers make a few mistakes in our fuzzier moments a reputable publishing house should never let through so many as has happened here.

As the SFS reviewer notes, the choice of texts to discuss seems very arbitrary. There is lengthy discussion of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, which is fine in itself, but I can't see much reason for choosing them beyond the author's personal interest. Many of the choices seem more like "stuff that I like" than any careful attempt to identify and examine a literary tradition. Perhaps that's not such a bad thing (as I said, the actual readings of specific texts are generally good), but it would dangerous to draw any novel conclusions from this sample of readings. It's impossible for a scholar in this field to be comprehensive, of course, at least in a relatively short book. But perhaps Grantham should have been more open about that problem and more tentative in offering conclusions (this is something for me to remember, as well!).

More worryingly, I'm not very impressed by the idea of a paradoxical "transhuman" anti-hero. Grantham's grasp of transhumanism is shaky: for a start, transhumanists don't tend to use the word "transhuman" as an adjective in the way he does, even in his title, although any rigour about this has long been lost in popular discussion. Since Grantham wants to rely on formal transhumanist theory, and is not just using words loosely, this should have been sorted out in a more scholarly way. He also shows loose scholarship in citing material from the ongoing debates in fields such as bioethics about the prospect of genetic enhancement. Arguments are put forward very quickly and uncritically, with, again, a sense that the choice of authors cited is rather arbitrary.

Getting down to the main thesis, what I find weakest is the idea that there is anything paradoxical in the idea of characters who have greater-than-human physical and/or cognitive capacities, combined with moral limitations of some sort. These characters may pursue destructive ends because they have not been morally enhanced or because of the way they are treated by societies that (to use a cliché that Grantham avoids) hate and fear them.

Well, fine. Science fiction novel after science fiction novel (and one SF movie, comic book series, graphic novel, TV show, etc., after another) shows how this might play out. Great power might be connected with great social alienation and/or destructiveness - and not so much with great exercise of responsibility for the welfare of others - but that's hardly an original point to make. Again, I'm pleased to see good readings of individual works that bring this out, and it's a theme that I often return to in various ways in my own writing, including in this series of blog posts. But there's no real paradox here. Why would great power necessarily go along with enhanced attitudes of concern for others?

In all, I'd give this book a B-minus. It's worth reading for its individual chapters, and early on it hits some of the correct high spots (though why not H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and/or Philip Wylie's Gladiator, which are perhaps the key narratives in the early tradition, along with some that Grantham does discuss such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Olaf Stapledon's Odd John?). The later chapters become increasingly arbitrary in what is selected for discussion - perhaps inevitably so, because of the explosion in science fiction since the 1970s, but that problem had to be addressed in some way, and in any event the actual choices made don't seem especially astute.

The book will increase your understanding of how science fiction, as a genre, has handled the idea of more-than-human characters, and how, as a genre, it has mused (or sometimes failed to) upon the morally acceptable uses of technoscientific power. But it does this through useful discussions of some selected texts, and not through much in the way of insight into a developing tradition.

Saturday self-promotion - "The case against radical enhancement: Assessing the central arguments"

I delivered this paper - "The case against radical enhancement: Assessing the central arguments" - at a seminar held at Yale University back in 2012. I visited the US that year mainly to speak at the Center for Inquiry's annual conference, held in Orlando, Florida, on that occasion. But I was able to find opportunities to speak at some other venues, including Yale.
The paper has not been published in written form except at (if you follow the link) Academia.edu. I have, of course, discussed similar issues elsewhere, including in my doctoral dissertation from Monash University and my 2014 book from MIT Press, Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies.

In a way, the title is misleading, since I did not actually put a case against "radical enhancement" (radical technological enhancement of human capacities). Rather, I examined the case developed by Nick Agar, in his (then) recent book Humanity's End, and mused more generally about arguments along the lines of Agar's. The paper actually scrutinises such arguments with considerable scepticism.

A large sample (from near the end):

Nor are our current lives ideal, even if all goes as well as can be. Our lives inevitably diminish in many ways as we grow older. What we most certainly do know is that renuciation of radical enhancement, and particularly of [Aubrey] de Grey’s negligible senescence project, would not give us the option, as individuals, to go into the future with undiminished lives. Though we may live to eighty or ninety years, or even longer, we function near our peak for only a couple of decades, early in adulthood, and at our very best of health and strength for even less. Beyond the middle years of life, we are faced by a constant deterioration of our organs, organ systems, and capacities, which eventually spirals down into increasingly debilitating fragility. This is a kind of routine impoverishment of life that we should acknowledge without guilt or shame, despite propaganda about “aging gracefully” and the like.

In his book Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (Norton, 2003), Carl Elliott discusses a suggestion by David Gems that the problem in growing older is “ontological diminution” meaning “a flattening of the conditions that sustain our existence.” Though Elliot is no admirer of enhancement technologies, he describes this process of diminution vividly: the dimming of senses and desires; the loss of capacities; the narrowing of perceptions and possibilities as the future grows more and more constricted.

There is something like a taboo against saying so explicitly and openly, but the aging process impoverishes our lives in very basic ways. If we are honest, halting the deterioration of our health, strength, and capacities is something that we have every reason to value, and I do mean right now, before any transformation of our values that new technologies may bring. We cannot, of course, imagine the detail of entire lives without the aging process, but it seems perverse to complain that removing the process, or drastically slowing it down to give us more time at or near our peak, would impoverish us.

Agar may well be correct, however, when he suggests that there is a limit to how much technological change we can absorb if it happens very abruptly. A series of sudden and radical changes in human capacities might well have a psychological downside. It might be shocking and alienating — like the impact of a military invasion by a technologically-superior culture. Even so, there would be gains. The overall outcome might not be a bad one when all things are balanced and considered. In any event, any radical enhancements of human capacities are more likely to take place over generations, allowing time for people and cultures to adapt.

In the end, we are confronted by a fascinating situation. First, I’ve suggested that seemingly scary new technologies such as human reproductive cloning may not be so scary after all when we think about their limited effects on individuals and societies. They may require regulation, but there is no good reason to ban them outright. Second, when we think of more futuristic and radical technologies, the position changes — but not necessarily in a way that justifies draconian legislation. We can imagine scenarios in which radical enhancement technologies change our societies deeply, perhaps undermining practices that we currently value. We can even describe in detail what some of the threatened practices might be, though we can’t be sure of the actual effects on them.

But none of this is a reason to step on the brake. Yes, the development of new technologies can threaten existing practices and attitudes, as has happened in the past with the printing press, railroads, motor vehicles, the contraceptive pill, the internet, and many other examples, but people generally adapt, and new social practices develop to incorporate the technology. These can then provide new sources of happiness and meaning.

Of course, I have not shown that all radical enhancements would be innocuous, or that they could be implemented with no social dislocation, or with no downside for people who might miss out. I have not tried to argue in a comprehensive way that all emerging technologies whatsoever should be accepted politically, subject only to minimal regulation (such as for safety). Nonetheless, it is well to beware of biases that can skew debate, making clear and rational analysis even more difficult. That is my main take-home point.

Often, it is assumed that we face a crisis in responding with sufficient urgency to the emergence of Frankensteinian technologies. I see things in a different light. If anything, the debates of the past decade or two show a crisis for liberal tolerance. We should insist, perhaps politely, perhaps more passionately, that policy makers in our modern liberal democracies require compelling reasons before they embark on programs of political coercion. We can object to distortions of public debate arising from feelings of disorientation or repugnance, undue deference to religious leaders and doctrines, fears of what might be lost from technological change, and the all-too-common impulse to reach for the crude tools of the criminal law.

Free Inquiry - August/September 2016 - incl. my review of The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism

The new issue of Free Inquiry (Volume 36, No. 5 (August/September 2016)) arrived here a few days ago. It includes interesting commentary on the meaning of "atheism", the history and influence of humanist thought in America, the struggle against Islamism and Jihadism, and other important topics.

A large chunk of the magazine, toward the back, consists of my book review of The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. Book reviews don't tend to get much attention in academia or in the blogosphere, but searching reviews of important books can themselves have some importance - especially when they draw out problems with new books that are likely to be influential. Because book reviews can usually be published more quickly than peer-reviewed articles, they can often contribute to debate in a more timely way. They can also be more publicly accessible.

In this case, I've devoted 3,500 words to The Blackwell Companion, a book that is obviously important (and certainly belongs in every academic library), but which also worries me in certain ways. In particular, there is a sense that the volume, taken overall, is almost hostile to philosophical naturalism, although sympathetic to methodological forms of naturalism. Trying to sort this out - and to get clear what various forms of naturalism even amount to - takes me into some deep discussion that I might have been better off, from a purely selfish viewpoint, trying to publish as an academic article.

Do check out my review if you subscribe to Free Inquiry. If you don't subscribe, you might consider doing so or making sure that your local library does. It publishes much interesting material, most of it not freely available online. Free Inquiry makes a sample of its articles, etc., available on its site, but this is to whet appetites: most of its content (and often the juiciest stuff) is behind a paywall. That's a perfectly legitimate publication model, but it does mean that subscriptions are required to get the magazine's full benefit.

Strict father versus nurturing parent: the Trump v. Clinton show

I've made this point once or twice on Twitter, and I'm sure I can't be the only person in the world to have done so. Yet, I've not come across it from anybody else so far. My apologies, then, to anyone in the news media or the blogosphere who has beaten me to the punch without my noticing.

With my throat now duly cleared... it seems obvious, if you study such things, that the Democratic Party in the US has wholeheartedly embraced the strict father versus nurturing parent model of politics famously developed by George Lakoff. That is, the party has been casting Hillary Clinton, and by implication any federal government that she leads, as a nurturing parent to vulnerable people of all ages. In doing so, it has certainly played up her strengths (and her image) as a literal mother, but there has also been much talk about the future for America's children and about helping vulnerable groups.

I've never before seen this dynamic play out in quite such a stark way. The fact that Clinton is the first female candidate for US President from any major party obviously feeds into what is happening. Like it or not - and I don't especially - it's easy and tempting to cast mature women as mother figures. At the same time, contrast the blustering, bullying, bragging, swaggering persona of Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, who always seems to be identifying imagined wrongdoers for punishment. Even Trump's manner of parading his adult children at the Republican National Convention feeds into the Lakoff dichotomy: according to Lakoff, the "strict father" is supposed to bring up his children to become ruggedly independent, successful adults in their own right. That's pretty much how the Trump brood are being showcased during this election.

It remains to be seen how it will all play in November. Irrespective of the intellectual plausibility of Lakoff's model, I fully expect Clinton to win the election handily... but I've been wrong before. Six months ago, say, I was confident that Trump would not end up being the Republican nominee; one way or another, I thought, he would be stopped by the GOP establishment before the train got so far. Well, I was wrong about that, and I definitely underestimated something about Trump's abilities and appeal. Mea culpa!

For the record, I'm not keen on any image of the government, or the state, as a fatherly or, more generally, parental figure. If anything, the idea strikes me as slightly creepy. Still, Lakoff seems to have a point about the state - and particular candidates for high office - taking on these sorts of public images.

Again for the record, it seems to me that a Trump presidency might be disastrous on an almost apocalyptic scale. Leaving aside all the other issues now involved in the political circus, I find it very easy to imagine Trump and the people around him making massive blunders in economic planning and foreign policy, among other crucial areas. I don't trust him, or them, to have the right kind of expertise ... or to show any epistemic modesty and due caution when they're needed. More generally, Trump's crazy salad of protectionism, isolationism, and xenophobia seems to me exactly what the US (and along with it, the rest of the world) does not need with its meat.

I don't usually blog about issues of party politics, but for whatever it's worth that's how I view it all from the relative safety of Australia. Apprehensive as I am, though, about the possibility of a President Trump, I'm also fascinated by such an extraordinary clash of political imagery and conceptual models.