Biotechnology and Ethics

The Claremont Institute has an interesting discussion about the National Association of Science’s report on embryonic stem cell research, and the mindset behind it.

In short, the NAS thinks that human affairs should be as “value neutral” as the physical sciences. Gee, I thought Robert Openheimer showed us why that’s a nonstarter, but I guess the “scientists” never really learn the limitations of their knowledge.

In the meantime, check out Wesley J. Smith’s blog on bioethics. Smith is the author of A Consumer’s Guide to a Brave New World. Travis D. Smith (no relation) writes a splendid review of this book.

Essential reading for those wanting to learn more about the state of bioethics.

Traditional Definition of Marriage Constitutional: Legal Expert

Today’s National Post (subscription required) reports that Eugene Meehan, a former national president of the Canadian Bar Association and well-published legal scholar, has argued that restricting marriage to a union of man and woman would be constitutional.

According to Meehan, C-38 undermines religious freedoms as well as federal-provincial boundaries because it’s up to the provinces to sacralize marriage and the bill does not protect individuals and religious groups from provincial laws:

Mr. Meehan also casts serious doubt on the federal government’s assurances those who do not support same-sex marriage because of their religious beliefs will be protected.

“A same-sex couple denied the right to hold their wedding ceremony in a particular hall could lodge a complaint before the relevant provincial human rights commission, alleging discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, even though the refusal was based on religious grounds,” Mr. Meehan stated in his opinion.

He also noted that Manitoba recently informed marriage commissioners their licenses would be revoked if they did not perform same-sex marriages.

This decision suggests that Lorne Gunter was correct to suggest that while C-38 only (weakly) protects religious officials, but no one else.

Lawyer Gerry Chipeur, representing a gropu of lawyers, is distributing a summary of the legal opinion to every MP and Senator.

Harper set to topple government

The Associated Press reports that Stephen Harper has vowed to bring down the Liberal government at the next opportunity. He condemned the deal concluded by the Liberals and the NDP to prop up the government, and he was right to do so. The Liberals vowed to match $4.6b in corporate tax cuts with the same amount of social spending. This was never a part of the Liberal platform, and they have kowtowed to NDP requests so that they may prolong their power.

In Adscam, they stole $100m of our money so that they could hang on to power. Now, they have stolen 46 times that amount to buy however much time they think Jack Layton can get them. If a year, we’ve bought a corrupt government for the rate of $525,000 per hour – plus the cost of whatever this $4.6b of social spending is going to exact on our economy. In the US, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress estimates that every dollar our American neighbours pay in taxes actually costs them between $1.40 and $3 in lost opportunities, misallocated resources and so on. I don’t see any reason to believe that Canada is any different (in fact, it is almost certainly worse) so taking the midpoint, we are in fact buying Paul Martin’s government for over $1.1m per hour. And whatever the results of this $4.6b in social spending are, doubtless we’ll have to repair the damage it does in the future, so we can add that to the bill as well. It’s been proven many times that government spending of this kind just makes things worse (Adobe Acrobat required).

Before or After, Don Cordonnola?

Alfonso Gagliano, the disgraced former Liberal Minister of Public Works, claims that the Quebec separatists were conducting much worse business than his own government’s unethical and illegal plan to subsidise his party’s finances. Gagliano has gone as far as to suggest that “Quebec’s then-separatist provincial government spent five times more” than the Liberals did. It is not clear what he means by spend, but he seems to be saying that the Parti Quebecois defrauded tax payers by amounts five times greater than the Liberals did?

We’re showing to Quebeckers the bad things that happened during this sponsorship program… but there’s no inquiry in the other side.

Right now, we’re just looking on one side and that is helping the separatist movement to gain momentum

If Quebeckers would know what the separatist government in Quebec did in those same years, on the same files, they would be more outrageous.

This statement begs the Watergate questions, what does he know and when did he know it?

By the sounds of it, Gagliano seems to be saying that the Chretien Liberal government set up its scamming programme to counter the separatist one. That would mean that as a Minister of the Crown, he and his boss had knowledge that crimes were being committed by the PQ and failed to report them. That is an abandonment of responsibility as officers of the Crown, and an abdication of their fiduciary duty. Instead, they chose to engage in similar unethical and illegal activity. That makes them silent accomplices. It also begs the question about what Paul Martin knew.

If, on the other hand, the allegations of separatist wrong-doing began after Adscam was up and running, then Chretien, Gagliano, Martin and the rest of the Liberal cabinet could hardly point fingers at the separatists –maybe the most likely scenario. And then we would have to conclude that the Chretien government established the template for the separatists to follow.

In short, if the separatist are reaping a political boost from the sponsorship racket, his party bears the blame on two counts: showing them how to use and improve the federal scheme to defraud tax payers, and for abdicating their duty to prosecute the wrong doing.

Either way, the Liberal government surrendered its responsibility to fight for this country –in that is in fact what they were doing– while remaining within the bounds of the rule of law and in dutiful performance of its responsibility. The RCMP shroud be taking notes.

Lastly, Gagliano’s account is very similar to his boss’, Jean Chretien. There is no contrition or admission or wrong doing. He has in fact said that there was nothing wrong with the defrauding programme. Instead, he is trying to shift the blame on to the Gomery Commission. IT will be responsible for the destruction of the country that Gagliano has forseen. My four year old boy is more responsible than that.

Cross posted from Civitatensis

The contradictions of protectionism

T. Norman Van Cott has penned an article on trade protectionism. The whole is well worth reading, but there is one particular paradox that I cannot help but love. The goal of protectionism is to prevent foreign goods, be they “too cheap” like steel or “too expensive” like oil, from coming into the country, ostensibly to protect our interests and make us richer. In effect, we throttle the flow of goods into the country in the name of prosperity, and try to restrict our trade and production to that which can be done within our own borders.

Yet the blockade is a very old trick in war. Lincoln blockaded Confederate ports, the Royal Navy cut Hohenzollern Germany off from her foreign trading partners, the German U-boat fleet tried to cut Britain off from her colonies and the USA, and the UN shut off trade with Iraq to punish her for transgressions against international peace. Even the ancient Athenians would use their navy to cut off enemy city-states from external trade and commerce.

Lincoln, George V, Hitler, Boutros-Ghali and Annan all tried to shut off foreign trade with their enemies so that they would be impoverished and more likely to acquiesce to their demands. Why, in peacetime, do Bush, Martin, Blair, Schroeder and others believe that effectively blockading their own countries would not impoverish them? If protectionism is correct, surely the actions of the U-boat fleet, the Yankee navy et al would have made their targets richer and better-off? Why the left-wing hue-and-cry about how sanctions have impoverished the Iraqi people, when they lobby for sanctions against their own country?

US Not Becoming a Theocracy

There’s a lot of debate these days in the US and abroad about the course American society is taking, and the role religion plays in shaping its politics. Despite the expectations and hopes of secularists, the religious life in the US is vigorous, and its electoral politics frequently reflects the demographics.

Despite the expectations and hopes of various religious figures, however, there is no “Christian America” because the pluralistic structure of its constitution forbids it.

There is also the issue of whether liberal constitutionalism requires some kind of Christian ethic to sustain it (i.e., virtues promoting trust, cooperation, sacrifice, etc.), but the specific virtues usually associated with such an ethic tend to be what medieval theologians called “natural” virtues, in contrast with supernatural ones like faith, hope, and charity, meaning they could be practiced by non-Christians.

All of this to place Michael Barone’s recent column into context. He calls on Americans, especially on the secular side, to take a deep breath, and rejects as paranoid fears that America is becoming a theocracy. Just because America hasn’t become fully secular, doesn’t mean it’s going to become a theocracy:

America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite. Economist Robert Fogel’s The Fourth Great Awakening argues that we’ve been in the midst of a religious revival since the 1950s, in which, as in previous revivals, “the evangelical churches represented the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological and social changes that undermined the received culture.” In the 2004 presidential exit poll, 74 percent of voters described themselves as churchgoers, 23 percent as evangelical or born-again Protestants, and 10 percent said they had no religion.

That said, American exceptionalism will continue mainly because churchgoers tend to have more children:

Who inherits the future? In free societies each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birthrates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests. In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in The Empty Cradle and Ben Wattenberg in Fewer, birthrates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in “family values” are more likely to have families.

This agrees somewhat with Pippa Norris and Ronald Ingelhart, who, in Sacred and Secular, argue that demographics tends to explain the worldwide resurgence of religiosity (that is, outside of Europe and Canada).

So, fears of America becoming a “theocracy” are really an expression of failed expectations on the part of secularists, whose Enlightenment dream of a “rational” society has not taken hold:

This doesn’t mean we’re headed toward a theocracy: America is too diverse and freedom loving for that. But it does mean that we’re probably not headed to the predominantly secular society that liberals predicted half a century ago and that Europe has now embraced.

One clue of where we’re headed may be found in the most recent example secularists cite as the theocratic turn: Senator Bill Frist’s speech at a Family Research Council sponsored even protesting Democratic filibusters, and general rally against secular influence. As the San Francisco Gate observes:

the Senate majority leader neither referred to religious faith nor addressed criticism that the event was inappropriately dragging religion into a partisan dispute.

Instead, he focused on the allegations of Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic minority leader, that Frist was a radical Republican for participating in the telecast, which was designed to build conservative Christian support for his threat to eliminate the filibuster of presidential nominees — a parliamentary tactic that allows a group of at least 41 senators to reject a nominee by refusing the 60 votes to close debate and call for a vote. Democrats have threatened to virtually halt Senate business if Frist follows through.

“I don’t think it’s radical to ask senators to vote,” Frist said. “Now, if Sen. Reid continues to obstruct the process, we will consider what opponents call the ‘nuclear option.’ Only in the United States Senate could it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote. Most places call that democracy.”

In other words, Frist appeared via video (not in person) and spoke about the procedural issues (and their impact on the political views of the nominees) but spoke not once about religious faith as the event’s sponsors had done (and perhaps hoped Frist would as well).

Frist’s appearance is the classic equipoise of a politician seeking a broad base of support. He appears (on video!) to solidify his core support, but doesn’t commit himself to all their views in order to build coalitions with a broader part of the population that does not necessarily include Focus on the Family people.

This seems to be the more likely future course of religion and politics in America: more of the same, as formed by the Constitution with its checks and balances.

Meanwhile, Winfield Myers and Professor Bainbridge and others continue debating whether Democrats exhibit anti-Catholic bigotry in filibustering Bush’s judicial nominees (see my previous post on that subject).

Canada: Next Failed State?

Austin Bay makes some prognostications about the future of Canada in the wake of Adscam:

Canadians in the western and maritime provinces already dread the political power of populous Ontario. (Quebec serves as a political balance to Ontario.) If Quebec bids adieu, “remnant” Canada’s political rules will be subject to revision. Subsequent regional bickering could lead to further fragmentation.

…

Quebec has the people and resources to make a go of it, though the economic price for its egotism will be stiff. British Columbia also has “nation-state” assets: Access to the sea, strong industrial base, raw materials and an educated population.

Oil-producing Alberta might join the United States and instantly find common political ground with Alaska, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. Canada’s struggling Atlantic provinces might find statehood economically attractive and extend the New England coastline. A rump Canada consisting of “Greater Ontario” — with remaining provinces as appendages — might keep the maple-leaf flag aloft. As for poor, isolated Newfoundland: Would Great Britain like to reacquire a North American colony?

Well, don’t forget the Alberta-Colorado connection, with Ian Tyson as the new republic’s troubadour.

Fight Club and cynicism in consumerism

The book (and movie) Fight Club contains, amongst its many attacks on consumerism, the following gem from the employee of a “major” car manufacturer:

You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.

In the film, Edward Norton recites this to a concerned-looking woman on an airliner. Her look of shock and horror is understandable now that consumerism and profit have become almost taboo. But what is really so bad about this scenario?

On the face of it, a car company is playing risk-assessment with human life. It is the case that this would be exploitative if the resources available to car manufacturers were infinite. However, despite the claims of Marxists who believe that if we all just adopt socialism the earth will give up her bounty (a claim which the current status of the Third World and of our own pre-industrial existence proves wrong, showing that the only way to create the commodities we demand is with increasingly vast amounts of capital and labour), resources are not infinite. As Jean-Baptiste Say demonstrated, when we buy and sell we are actually trading commodities for each other. Money is just a means of extending and easing the barter system, your paycheck is a simple way to exchange your labour for the commodities you desire. The Law of Scarcity tells us that when commodities are finite in supply (as opposed to, for instance, air, which is infinite and therefore not a subject of economic discussion), that supply will never meet demand since human demand is ever-increasing. We already live lifestyles unimaginable to medieval peasants, and yet we unceasingly demand more and better, and always will. The natural human drive for improvement means that want-needs will never be satisfied.

Taking all this into account, it is the case that this “major car company” described by Chuck Palahniuk is merely weighing finite and valuable commodities against each other. It could potentially save more lives by spending more resources, but then these resources would not be available for allocation elsewhere, since resources are scarce. The Law of Diminishing Returns dictates that there will come a point at which more resources allocated to car safety will bring better returns elsewhere, for instance, in healthcare or food hygiene (if they did not from the start). To allocate resources to car safety beyond this point is to actually cost lives, not to save them. Logically, all we need to do to maximise life and safety is to find that point, make cars safe until we reach it, and beyond it to allocate our resources elsewhere. However, it’s a moving target. Advances in airbag technology could make car safety cheaper, union action in car manufacturer labour could make it more expensive, and this quite apart from developments in other industries.

How best to find this point? The Soviet Union clearly demonstrates that a central authority cannot plan these exchanges with even a semblance of accuracy or efficiency. Leaving the Stalinist mass murders aside, countless mistakes have been made by the Soviet leadership that detracted from the welfare of their citizens. For instance, Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to stagnate the consumer-goods economy in favour of a military buildup which Reagan proved he couldn’t win, the disastrous Soviet nuclear power programme (the IAEA finds that the Chernobyl disaster was the result of a faulty reactor design that was nevertheless pushed into service), avoidable casualties sustained by the Soviet military and the space programme even in peacetime, and so on.

Moreover, the point is further confused by the fact that, in our world of scarce resources, many people would prefer to see those resources allocated to things other than health and safety. Excluding the substance-abusers and the extreme-sports people, even someone who forgoes an Audi to buy a Ford so that they can afford a big-screen television or another consumer good has made a similar judgement. Therefore, it makes the most sense to put these decisions in the hands of individual consumers, and this is what free-market capitalism does. You can freely make your choices about how many resources should be allocated to your car safety, Honda and Audi make safer cars than Ford and GM, but they cost more – you make the choice! You could decide that Honda is past the point of diminishing returns, decide to buy a Ford and put the change into your healthcare, except, of course, that in Canada we have Soviet healthcare, so you can’t do that – bureaucrats make that decision for you, with consequences recognisably similar to the long string of disasters that marr Soviet history.

In short, while it might seem cynical to weigh human life against money, as Palahniuk implies, this is not what is being done at all. The real situation is that choices about how best to allocate scarce resources for best health and welfare are being made, and in the free market they are being made by those in the best situation to assess them: the people who those choices directly affect.

Legal Status of Fetus in Alberta

The Calgary Herald reports on a private member’s bill in the legislature that would enable a child to sue her mother for damages sustained while the mother was pregnant. This would allow the family to sue the mother’s automobile insurance company so they can get some financial help caring for the child, who is blind and brain damaged.

This of course enters that topic Canadians have supposedly put behind them: the rights of the fetus and whether, indeed, the fetus is actually a human being, despite how much Canadians ignore scientific evidence showing that it is.

Cases like this have arisen in the US as well.

“Nightmares”: Final Installment

This is my post of the 3rd part of the documentary, “Nightmares,” which the CBC broadcast on Tuesday night. I also posted comments on the Sunday broadcast of Part I (and here) and Monday’s Part II. I also posted comments connecting this documentary to broader trends among contemporary ideologies.

***

The bulk of the show punches holes in the view that al-Qaeda is a unitary organization with bin Laden at its head, which picks up on the theme of Part II.

It also parodies the paranoia in the US and UK over Al-Qaeda’s threat. I pointed out in my analysis of Part II how and why Al-Qaeda’s power has been overrated. Jason Burke, whom the documentary interviews, has been pointing this out in a series of books and articles over the past few years (see here and here). It also reveals the incompetency of various police organizations who’ve investigated and charged numerous individuals who’ve ended up being found innocent.

Fair enough.

However, it’s one thing to claim that Al-Qaeda’s threat is overrated but quite another thing to claim it is nonexistent. Moreover, the documentary fails to identify what groups constitute actual threats. The overall effect is that the documentary lulls viewers into thinking that all reported threats are simply “myths” created by the neocon cabal, which is highly irresponsible.

At one point the narrator claims that such simplistic “myths” are related to the power the media has in modern society to manipulate the masses. Is this the same media that produces “Nightmares” with its own simplistic vision of reality?

The narrator claims that postmodern societies now conduct themselves according to the “precautionary principle.” This means that they imagine threats and act decisively on them before those threats can materialize, and on the slenderest of evidence. Thomas Hobbes calls this diffidence, which is one of the 3 causes of war. This should make us skeptical that the “precautionary principle” is something new.

The narrator suggests that neoconservatives have been able to act according to this principle because it was pioneered and legimated by environmentalists all the way back in the 1970s. For the past 30 years, environmentalists have claimed the world will end in environmental catastophe unless precautionary measures, based on the slenderest of evidence, are taken. One need only consider the politics of the Kyoto Accord to see evidence of this.

An interesting suggestion, but hard to prove the connection with environmentalists, since the “precautionary principle” has been around for a very long time.

I think a better immediate reason is the fact that leaders like Bush and Blair simply had no clue of the threat Western democracies faced after 9/11. Recall the weeks after 9/11: fears of additional airplane attacks, anthrax attacks (no one’s been caught for those), etc. With the 9/11 Commission Report, we’ve come to learn just how ignorant Western intelligence agencies were of al-Qaeda or whatever you want to call the groups associated with bin Laden and radical Islamism. The 9/11 Commission Report was published after this documentary was produced, even though its contents, especially reports on intelligence gaps, were circulating long before the commission published its findings. The documentary interviews several former CIA people, who very likely had political axes to grind against the administration, though we don’t know what role these individuals played in producing the inept culture in the CIA and FBI that led to such intelligence breakdowns.

Lacking knowledge, it makes certain sense for leaders to overreact because failing to act could leave the door open for a catastrophic attack like 9/11. This is what Hobbes called “diffidence.” It is not necessarily a prudent strategy, but it has rationale.

Finally, a word on the basic premise of this documentary.

The narrator explains that the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” is part of a postmodern rejection of idealism in favor of a politics of fear:

“Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares.�

A society that believes in nothing, says one of the scholars interviewed, will base its politics on fear. It follows that terrorism is the worst nightmare. Nihilistic liberal democracies find their counterpart in apocalyptic Islamists.

The documentary implicitly draws on an “end of ideology” or “end of history” narrative where moral ideals and ideologies no longer play a part of framing political debate. Instead, postmodern cynicism expressed through the politics of fear is the new mode. In essence, it borrows from Francis Fukuyama’s claim that nihilistic boredom will characterize politics at the end of history (ironically, Fukuyama is one of the neocons mentioned in the documentary). Having nothing better to aim for, elites in liberal democracies will play cynical war games for the fun of it. Their subjects, still not evolved to the stage of postmodernism, will dumbly follow along along the lines the documentary suggests.

What the documentary’s premise overlooks is that ideological leaders (or those who provide a “vision”) have played the politics of fear as well. One thinks of the central role that fear plays in Thomas Hobbes’s political thought. Consider the fear of enemies of state that tyrants like Stalin and Hitler used. Moreover, fear has placed a central role for “ideology” since the term first entered political existence during the Napoleanic era. Fear is all ideologues ever delivered – both in practice and in the supposed logic of their visions. For details, see my post on ideologies (linked above).

Alexandr Solzehnitsyn observed of Soviet totalitarianism, and Hannah Arendt observed of Nazi totalitarianism, that its official histories were always getting rewritten. Partly for reasons of propaganda: people without memory are easily manipulated. And partly out of a historicist view of the world where things that mean something one day will mean another thing a week later.

A dozen or so years ago, a conservative, referring to Solzhenitsyn, told me that he thought within ten years leftists would claim that the Cold War never occurred. At the time I thought his comment was over the top.

With this documentary, I conclude that he had only underestimated how long it would take for them to revise history.

The CBC welcomes your comments about the show.

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