The good son

The moment the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, I started worrying about India.  About my people in India.  About my parents.

What if something happened and I cannot go for months?

A year has passed.  The question remains.

As I noted in this post a few days ago, I am not the only one in the diaspora who is worried about these issues.  It is a surreal situation.

One person writes about this moral dilemma in her (his?) question to to the the NY Times ethics columnist, Kwame Appiah.  She writes about her husband who "is adamant that if his parents or sister become ill (with Covid or anything else), he will return to India to be with them."

She is, naturally, worried about her husband's stance.

In addition, if my husband got sick in India, I doubt he would be able to count on any medical care, and may be unable to return to the United States for many weeks, or even months, if the travel ban goes through and continues. I feel this risk is real, even though my husband is a U.S. citizen. The only things we have going for us are that we are both vaccinated and that we have a place in our home where he would be able to quarantine once he returns.

I have told him that if he goes, I will ready myself for the very real possibility that he may never return. Sadly, I do not think I am being irrational in thinking this.

She requests Appiah to "suggest a few things that both of us should consider so that we can make this decision together, carefully weighing and preparing for all the risks in the calmest state possible."

Before reading Appiah's response, or my excerpts below, think about what you would advise that woman.  Exercise your brain and mind on this ethical issue, which is real and not a hypothetical scenario.

Appiah being Appiah (there are other posts like this one in which I quote his wise words) he carefully weighs the issues and provides a reassuring response.  I am not going to excerpt anything from there; I encourage you to read it in full.

Appiah concludes with this:

[Relationships] have an ethics of their own, which isn’t reducible to a set of rational assessments. Love must be responsive to unreason. Your husband should take account of your own fears and needs, then, just as you should take account of his. In the end, however, the wisdom of preparing for the worst has its limits when — all things considered — it keeps us from doing what’s best.

The philosophy of life?

We are into the second year of the pandemic.

On January 21, 2020, there was confirmation of Patient One.  Six weeks after that, schools and offices closed, and working from home became the norm.

We knew that eventually vaccines will be needed to deliver us from the pandemic.  We knew that right when schools and offices closed.  Many of us assumed that the machinery of the government would create various task-forces in order to deal with the multiple aspects of vaccine delivery.

While that assumption is logical, it did not work out that way.  It has been a colossal failure.

They didn't even bother to layout a clear plan for priority among the population.  Who gets the vaccine first?  Who are the people who can be sent to the back of the line for vaccination?  Even worse has been the messaging about it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) developed a blueprint, which notes: "Setting priorities and rationing resources in this context means making tragic choices, but these tragic choices can be ethically justified. This is why we have ethics."

That is why we have ethics.  What a concept!

A commentary, in The American Journal of Medicine, on the ethical dimension of allocating vaccines during a pandemic, reminds us that "the benefits of vaccines are communal in the sense that vaccinating 1 individual confers benefits on other members of the community as well. What is to be fairly allocated, then,is not the vaccines per se but, rather, the benefits thereof."

If it is about the benefits of vaccination, then who gets priority?  What are the ethics in this?

Allocating vaccines to those most responsible for the trans-mission of COVID-19 may confer more benefit to the population at large. Allocation guidelines must balance the obligation to assist individuals most likely to benefit against the obligation to secure the greatest aggregate benefit across the population.

The greatest benefit across the population.  So, who gets priority?

It is one hell of a tough question, and I don't want to pretend that I know better than others.

Think about a person like my 91-year old father, who hasn't stepped out over the year, versus a 31-year old high school teacher.  Vaccinating which of these two will "secure the greatest aggregate benefit across the population"?  The elderly, in this logic, will have to step away from the line for now, right?

WHO notes in that blueprint that the population "falling into each category may change over time."  This is also something that leaders should have communicated to people, right?  They did not.

So, it is clear that confusion will reign.  "Is there something that you would offer us as a general guideline as people wait their turn?"

Maybe it's a time to think about character and personal values and emphasize the importance now more than ever of the virtues of patience, of empathy, of recognizing that not everybody can protect themselves the way perhaps I might be positioned or you might be positioned to protect themselves from infection and disease, and of solidarity. It maybe is a little bit too trite to say that we're all in this together. Some of us are suffering far more than others of us, but we are all really suffering. And so if we can remember - right? - to be patient, to be empathetic and to be committed to making this world better than it was before, I think we can get through this.

As we wait our turns, perhaps we can also read up and think more about ethics.  We don't have to abandon that effort just because philosophy departments are being closed down!

A nugget of life

In the summer of 2013, I blogged about meat that is grown in labs and bioreactors, which are essentially the prototypes of the factories of the future.  I wrote then: "It is only a matter of time before we perfect such techniques and produce beef or other animal foods without the animals."

It is not that I am a cave-dwelling carnivore.  Far from that.  As with any other development, this too fascinated me.  It interested me so much that I wove this news item into appropriate contexts in my introductory classes.  Student response was typically and overwhelmingly one-sided--meat that doesn't come from killed animals but is produced in factories is unnatural.

I would then nod along, and ask them if they eat pasta.  Of course they did.  "Isn't pasta produced in factories?  Have any of you tried making pasta?"

Once--and only once--a young woman's hand went up.  "Sometimes I make pasta with my grandmother," she said.  And then added that it was a lot of work.

My point was this: If students eat "factory-produced" pasta and hot dogs and whatever else, why should they view the lab-grown meat any differently.

I love this Socratic tradition, which I might not get to practice for too long though.

Seven years after that blog post, the world is now getting closer to making cultured-meat a reality in the marketplace.

The first lab-grown, or cultured, meat product has been given the green light to be sold for human consumption. In the landmark approval, regulators in Singapore granted Just, a San Francisco–based startup, the right to sell cultured chicken—in the form of chicken nuggets—to the public.

Just had been working with the regulators for the past two years and was formally granted approval on November 26.

You need a reminder on how this meat is produced?

Most cultured meat is made in a similar way. Cells are taken from an animal, often via a biopsy or from an established animal cell line. These cells are then fed a nutrient broth and placed in a bioreactor, where they multiply until there are enough to harvest for use in meatballs or nuggets.

There is no killing involved. "The cells for Eat Just’s product are grown in a 1,200-litre bioreactor and then combined with plant-based ingredients."   The fact that there is no killing involved makes all the difference to many millions. 

Of course, the killing is not the only issue, which is why there are many firms in the race:

Dozens of firms are developing cultivated chicken, beef and pork, with a view to slashing the impact of industrial livestock production on the climate and nature crises, as well as providing cleaner, drug-free and cruelty-free meat. Currently, about 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for meat, and 4 million pigs. By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild.

For now, as with any innovation, the costs are high, and the process is energy-intensive.  But, again as with most technologies, scaling will rapidly decrease costs and the demand for energy.

At some point, the US-based research/entrepreneur will go global--that's the plan: 

"We didn't work two years to get the approval just to sit on this," says Tetrick. "After Singapore we'll move to the US and Western Europe." But US availability won't be that simple: A regulatory process for cultured meat doesn't yet exist between the USDA and FDA

I imagine that tRump, who famously eats steak with ketchup, would have freaked out with this news story!

There are interesting parallels between the cultured meat and electric car sectors: Both are introducing a technology that can inspire initial resistance from consumers and existential alarm from conventional producers, both involve a major shift in infrastructure, and both need some degree of regulatory air cover to succeed.

It has been a long, long way from the African Savanna, and there is no going back.

What would Aristotle do?

Years ago, it was a young student who made me aware of something called “Nicomachean Ethics.”  Having grown up in India, and having gone to an engineering college, I found (find?) myself often playing catch up in the world of liberal education in which I feel truly at home.

Anyway, she then briefed me about it in the manner that most young people do when they get excited to teach their favorite topic to an older person.   In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle lays out how men should live.  (I assume that he literally meant "men" given his time period.)

Across the cultures of the world, philosophers and religious leaders have talked and written in plenty about how one ought to live a good life.  The best life.  I am not sure how much of all that talk and writing have gotten translated into everyday life.

Consider tRump's candidacy that led to his presidency.  And the past nearly four years of his rants and insults from the White House.  And the focus on the one question that he simply waffled at the debate--the one about condemning white supremacy.  He did not condemn it, similar to how he did not want to call out the torch-wielding neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us."

So ... Amy Vivian Coney #Barrett is thrilled to be nominated to #SCOTUS by this #POTUS who refuses to condemn #WhiteSupremacy?@VanJones68: https://t.co/UA3OZ8IYU6#Election2020 #Debates2020 #tRump

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) September 30, 2020

tRump has his voters.  His base.  Would you be friends with his voters?

I have dealt with this question directly with people I know who voted for tRump.  I terminated the friendship when they made it clear that they stand by tRump because, as Jamille Bouie wrote, there is no such thing as a good tRump voter.

That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice.

What do the Nicomachean Ethics suggest that I, or anyone, do in such a situation?

That is exactly what Kwame Appiah addresses in his Ethicist column.  He writes in response to a query from a reader who wonders whether she should continue the friendship with a friend who is racist.

Appiah writes:

“Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue,” Aristotle said in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” That is, and was meant to be, a pretty demanding standard. Given that your friend’s racist views, by contrast to your antiracist views, represent a vice, you are not alike in virtue.

But then nobody's perfect.  So, what do you do?  Tolerate that friend?

Friendship can and should err on the side of tolerance, but big-enough vices — beams rather than motes — can be an obstacle to it. The key point that Aristotle got right is that friendship is a morally freighted relationship; a friend’s character matters to a friendship.

Character matters.  (In choosing the presidential candidates too.)  "Let’s grant that, in Aristotle’s sense, you can’t be the best kind of friend with this woman. Is it worth being any kind of friend at all?" So, what do you do? 

Appiah being a philosopher par excellence, helps us think through and not merely give his bottom-line.  Well, he does give his bottom-line--but only after taking us through the process. He writes:

Still, when it comes to someone who, in this day and age, has remained attached to such views, I am not hopeful. If you withdraw from this friendship, it’s clear you won’t be doing so for a programmatic reason; you’ll be doing so for reasons of the heart. At the same time, what most effectively discourages the expression of backward views isn’t rational argument but social sanction. A loss to you could ultimately be a gain for others.

If my social sanctioning of another discourages people to change their backward views, then terminating friendship is the best thing that I could have done.  I am glad I did that.  But, I don't have any hopes that I am significant enough for them to consider the loss of my friendship as a reason to change their backward views on the human condition.  Further, a scorpion will be a scorpion, as the fable taught us.

It seems like I have done right by the Nicomachean Ethics. Maybe I should contact that former student, who is now a professor, to grade me here! 

The streets of ... name-your-town

The series of tents on the sidewalks was no carnival but the crude shelters that the homeless have put up for themselves.

It saddens me to no end.

It angers me that this is the reality in one of the richest and most powerful country that humanity has ever known.

This is not merely an Eugene story, but all across the country.  Therefore, it pisses me off that the federal government could not be bothered about it.  As I wrote here a few years ago:

I pay taxes. I expect the government to use the revenue to take care of my fellow humans in this country. Instead of doing that, my government spends gazillions on the military in order to bomb the shit out of countries and send them back to the stone age. A gazillion for defense, but ask for a couple of millions for some homeless program and they cry poverty. And I am forced to then deal with this reality on a windy and rainy night at the grocery store parking lot. Pox on the war-mongering demagogues!

The President one-ups every one who was in the White House before him; the President directed aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets" because he views that the homeless are living on the “best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings . . . where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige.”  The madman can only think about real estate and dollars, and 63 million people, including the "true" believers of Jesus, applaud his views!

My personal consolation is that my work does not require me to personally interact with the homeless.  Because, given my empathetic wimpiness, I would be paralyzed into inaction.

Consider, on the other hand, this lengthy note in the NY Times' Ethicist column:

I’m a doctor in an urban emergency room in California, and I’m struggling with two classes of patients who are becoming more common in our E.R: patients experiencing homelessness, and patients with chronic pain requiring opiate therapy. 
By law, E.R.s are required to medically screen and stabilize all patients. What this means is that any person can come to the emergency room with any medical complaint and be given a warm place to stay until said medical complaint is evaluated. While this law is being used appropriately by the vast majority of patients, a small subset of patients (often the most vulnerable) take advantage of it. They know that if they present to the E.R. with a medical complaint — real or imagined — they will be guaranteed a bed for a few hours and a meal (per California law). We will often see the same handful of people once or twice a day. We know that they often have no other access to food or shelter, and we want to be helpful. The problem is that the E.R. is not meant for shelter and food. First, it is a very costly use of resources. Second, these patients often divert scant resources such as ambulances and beds from others who have acute medical needs. We often have to weigh whether to provide the desired food, shelter or clothing or deny those resources in hopes that the patients are helped elsewhere.
Similarly, we have seen an uptick in chronic-pain patients abandoned by primary-care clinics that no longer administer opiates due to the unclear crackdown on opiate prescribing, even legitimate opiate prescribing. Patients often come in desperate because of their ongoing pain, or because of the withdrawal from medicines taken safely for years. Some will even threaten to start using heroin if we don’t prescribe opiates, which we know is a real possibility. And again, while we want to help, we cannot have the E.R. become the default place for people to get pain medicine when others won’t help.
I struggle with these questions daily. The reality is that it is costing the health care system $200-$300 to provide a patient with a cold turkey sandwich. How do I, as a physician, proceed? Name Withheld

The Ethicist, Kwame Appiah, who is one of my favorite contemporary public intellectuals, reminds us in his response that this is not the doctor's problem, but our collective problem.  Appiah wraps it up with this:

But at the moment, you have good reason to complain: That we still haven’t addressed these problems adequately makes it harder for people like you to do your job.

Playing god?

The anti-vaccination minority seems to be getting louder and more powerful with every passing day.  These are some strange times when it is people in rich countries who are opposed to vaccines, when it used to be the case even a decade ago that people in poor countries were the ones who needed to be convinced about vaccination!

Vaccinations have helped us defeat diseases, and even wipe out the nasty pathogens.  The small pox virus now lives only in highly secure test-tubes.  It is difficult to imagine that it was once one of the most feared monster diseases ever.  Even now my father has tales about the small pox wave that killed and maimed and disfigured children.

Defeating one disease after another, and coming up with ways in which we have effectively postponed death--which is what the remarkably high life expectancy means--is a tad like we are playing god, and very unnatural:

We play god when we vaccinate. We play god when we give women pain relief during labor. ... Our whole life is entirely unnatural. The correction of infertility is interfering in nature. Contraception is interfering in the most fundamental aspect of nature.

Where does "natural" end and the artificial begin?  We wrinkle as we age, for which there is now Botox and cosmetic surgery.  We grow bald: Hair transplant surgery has made Joe Biden look young again. Or, in tRump's case, he has become an orange monster!

An Oxford philosopher, Julian Savulescu, argues that we should go full speed into playing god:

The fact that we’ve done it or nature has done it is irrelevant to individuals and is largely irrelevant to society. What difference would it make if a couple of identical twins come not through a natural splitting of an embryo, but because some IVF doctor had divided the embryo at the third day after conception? Should we suddenly treat them differently? The fact that they arose through choice and not chance is morally irrelevant.

Is it morally irrelevant?

Consider blood transfusions.  Unnatural. We humans do it routinely these days.  Left to nature, we would die from blood loss. But, we play god by taking blood from people and infusing it into others who need that vital juice.  So unnatural and playing god this is that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that blood transfusions are disrespectful of life itself.

Is morality irrelevant when we play god?

"People will vote with their feet once those technologies offer significant benefits," says Savulescu.

People will choose the unnatural alternatives. We have plenty of problems coming our way, like this:

The interesting question is how long we should live. At the moment we’ve pretty much maxed out what we can do with treating cardiovascular disease or cancer. But if we could attack aging, which is the real disease that causes adult onset cancer and cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes, people could live healthily for 200 years or longer. Then we’ll face the deep question, how long should we live? How many people should there be? How we will pay for people living to 150? How will younger people carve out a place in society? Will life become boring? These are really deep and difficult questions. Is this something that people should be able to choose, or should we place termination criteria on how long people can live? It may be that our death starts to become not just our choice, but society’s choice. Is it better to have a society with 500 million people living to 80, or 250 million people living to 160? Those are difficult questions that we may well have to decide. This idea that we’ll just leave it to the market to resolve is not going to wash.

So, what is his greatest worry?

I think we are the biggest threat to ourselves. The elephant in the room is the human being. For the first time in human history we really are the masters of our destiny. We’ve got enormous potential to have unprecedentedly good lives.

Or unprecedentedly godawful lives.  The choice is ours. The moment is now.

Who needs the humanities?

We do.

In an oped a few years ago (I am unable to track down the post here for me to link it) I wrote that we will worry a lot in the future about various technological features that will become a part of our lives.  One of the examples that I mentioned there was genetic editing--designer babies, as we colloquially refer to them.  There are plenty of examples that we can easily think about, in which we need to systematically pause and ask ourselves how the new ways are redefining what it means to be human.

Of course, nobody cares for what I say or write; the story of my life!

While I didn't know how to articulate such concerns back when I was an undergraduate student, these are the kind of issues that led me to ditch electrical engineering in order to do what I do now.  The disconnect between technology and humanity bothered me, and it still bothers me.  In the contemporary academic world, to argue in favor of inquiring into the humanity is a losing proposition.  And this is in the US--it is way worse in the old country!

Philosophy departments are now an endangered species.  History and English are rapidly shedding their faculty.

While pushing science and technology, we forget that "science and technology aim to assist humans."  Yet, we do not want to understand humanity?  We ignore that "interface between humans and advanced technologies is a frontier where the humanistic perspective is indispensable"?

The author, who chairs the astronomy department at Harvard, writes that "the future belongs to the incorporation of liberal arts into science and technology."

A few contexts immediately come to mind. First and foremost, the study of ethics. There are major ethical questions regarding genetic engineering: Which revisions to the genetic making of humans should be engineered? Should we design the qualities of people that we wish society to have?

Yep.  Recall the oped that I referred to?

Or, how about this from the author:

Another area involves the implications of big data sets: How can we employ the vast information that is collected daily on people, and analyze it for the benefit of psychology and social science? Can we use these data to construct computer-based models that would forecast human behavior to guide policies or political decisions?

Recall all my posts on Facebook and algorithms and big data, thanks to which I even deleted my Facebook account a while ago?

Or, hey this one:

There are also existential questions about the purpose of human life: Will robots and AI replace human labor across the board from construction sites to scientific research? How will future economies adjust to a new reality in which humans have less to do? Will humans take a permanent “vacation”, and if so, what will the meaning of their life be if their dignity is not associated with mandatory labor?

The number of posts where I have worried about robots and what it means to be human!

Yet, inquiring into what it means to be human is not a major part of higher education.  Not even an afterthought.  What a shame!

Cheeseburger Ethics: Our Lives of Moral Mediocrity

By now, from the many posts, it will be clear that one pet peeve of mine is that for almost all--including me--the action does not match the rhetoric.

It seems like an overwhelming majority of us mortals lead lives of moral mediocrity at best, and often practically immoral lives, all based on our own individual moral codes--not even somebody else's code.

Suppose it’s generally true that we aim for goodness only by relative, rather than absolute, standards. What, then, should we expect to be the effect of discovering, say, that it is morally bad to eat meat, as the majority of US ethicists seem to think?

Imagine that--we don't aim to be good for goodness sake, but only for relative goodness?  If a whole bunch of people around are crappy, then I need to merely be slightly better than them and I am satisfied with this relative goodness?

You might hope that others will change. You might advocate general societal change – but you’ll have no desire to go first.

Hmmm ...

The author of the essay that triggered all these thoughts writes that lengthy piece in order to discuss:

Are professional ethicists good people? According to our research, not especially. So what is the point of learning ethics?

Professional ethicists apparently are no different from you and me, who are not professional ethicists.

Ethicists do not appear to behave better. Never once have we found ethicists as a whole behaving better than our comparison groups of other professors, by any of our main planned measures. But neither, overall, do they seem to behave worse. (There are some mixed results for secondary measures.) For the most part, ethicists behave no differently from professors of any other sort – logicians, chemists, historians, foreign-language instructors.

If even professional ethicists do not make sure their actions are consistent with their talk, then why complain about the everyday person who does not get paid to, for instance, think about killing animals for food or whether the rich should donate to the poor.

We aspire to be about as morally good as our peers. If others cheat and get away with it, we want to do the same. We don’t want to suffer for goodness while others laughingly gather the benefits of vice. If the morally good life is uncomfortable and unpleasant, if it involves repeated painful sacrifices that are not compensated in some way, sacrifices that others are not also making, then we don’t want it.

Seriously?

I’d be suspicious of any 21st-century philosopher who offered up her- or himself as a model of wise living. This is no longer what it is to be a philosopher – and those who regard themselves as wise are in any case almost always mistaken.

Such disconnect between the talk of moral code and action is what we see when Bible-thumping tRump's toadies gladly vote for tax cuts for the super-rich while taking away food stamps from the poor!

Genuine philosophical thinking critiques its prior strictures, including even the assumption that we ought to be morally good. It damages almost as often as it aids, is free, wild and unpredictable, always breaks its harness. It will take you somewhere, up, down, sideways – you can’t know in advance. But you are responsible for trying to go in the right direction with it, and also for your failure when you don’t get there.

Yep, it is up to you.  You are responsible for trying to go along the correct path.

(ps: Why "cheeseburger ethics"? Read the essay!)

Philosophy is for losers!

I shared with a few colleagues the higher-education related ethical issue that K.A. Appiah discusses in his NY Times column.

In his reply, one colleague wrote:

I am exceptionally pleased to discover that "The Ethicist" for the New York Times is finally employing an actual ethicist!

For almost three years, Appiah has been doing a phenomenal job discussing real-life ethical issues that we lesser mortals are often confused about.

There is a popular perception that philosophers tell us what to think.  If only!  Martha Nussbaum addresses this, too, when she says "I don’t like telling other people what to do."

Nussbaum, who is one of the sharpest intellectuals in my life, helps me out about my anti-trump emotions:

I think that the president has deliberately set out to feed fear of immigrants, racial minorities and of Islam and Muslims. These are ignoble fears, because they target large groups of people for sweeping condemnation without asking precisely who we are talking about and what the real issue is. They feed our ugliest tendencies—to scapegoat, to demonize, rather than to solve the real problem or even to ask what it is.

It is not that other politicians do not tap into our emotions.  They do.

The question is not whether politicians should appeal to emotions, but which emotions, and when, and in connection with which arguments. During the New Deal, FDR needed to convince Americans to accept a group of radical new proposals. He thought long and hard about how he could move voters to endorse the programs of the New Deal. We have Social Security because of the crafty ways in which FDR appealed to emotions. Similarly, we made much of our progress in civil rights through the ability of Dr. King to summon up positive emotions of hope and love in grim times. So it seems to me wrong-headed for liberals to say that we should not appeal to emotions. Imagine if Dr. King had spoken in the style of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls. He would have failed in the job he undertook.

I don't know how Nussbaum calmly states all those without getting emotional about trump!  Oh well ... but then it makes me feel good that even Appiah has taken to Twitter to vent about trump!

With Appiah and Nussbaum talking philosophy, it does not take much for any sensible person to understand the importance of philosophy.  If it were up to me, I would even make Appiah's columns a required reading for undergraduates.  But then, yes, there are all those people in the real world who believe that philosophy courses should not be required.  If people want to study philosophy, they should do that on their own dime.  Philosophy has no use.  We need welders, not philosophers!

I wonder when we will get out of this black hole!

God is irrelevant

One does not have to believe in a god to appreciate life.  This is paradise on earth.

Well, almost a paradise.

I passed a homeless man who was lugging his belongings on an overfilled backpack, with his dog walking alongside.

What is my obligation to that homeless man?

An atheist I am, I worry a lot about such questions.

I could choose to help him.  Or, I could ignore his very existence.  I could try convincing myself that it is somebody else's problem.  Right?

One does not have to believe in a god in order to answer that question.  Bringing god into this is a distraction.  God is irrelevant to figuring out how to react to the sight of a homeless man in this paradise.

If the case of the homeless person is not convincing enough, consider the following:

•            It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.
•            It is wrong to enslave people.
•            It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.
•            Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required
to try to stop it.

Aren't all those true.  Well, a dick cheney or donald trump will favor torturing prisoners of war.  An assad has no qualms killing his own people.  But, an overwhelming majority of us--irrespective of what we think about god or any religion--will agree with those statements, right?

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists.  That seems to me to be a remarkable claim.  If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.?  There’d be nothing wrong with torture?  The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

So, then, what has god got to do with any of those situations?

Over the years, I have come to understand that it is a humongous waste of time to argue over whether or not god exists.  It does not matter one bit.  What matters is how we live our lives, which includes our relationships with fellow humans and with other life forms and non-living matter all around us.

Consider the flowing river.  Will it be ok for me to dump sewage or factory waste into that river?  Whether it is about slavery or about dumping sewage, the question of whether or not god exists, or whose god is the real god, is immaterial, right?

The awfulness is how, for instance, slavery and Christianity coexisted, with religious folks explicitly justifying slavery. Or, even now, how the religious right considers coal as a gift from god that should be shared with the world!

So, back to the homeless person.   He makes me feel uncomfortable.  Not because I worry about the safety of my life or my property, but because I do not know how to react.  Should I ignore him?  Shrug my shoulders and move on?  Should I engage with him and try to help?  Should I donate to the organizations that help the homeless?  If I do not donate, does it make me a bad person?  Do I want to be a good person?  What does it mean to be a good person?  Why have I not figured out the answer despite all these years?

God is irrelevant in trying to sort out these questions.

A Very Stable Genius

I almost fell off the chair when  the computer mouse hovered over the Google doodle:

Har Gobind Khorana.

My generation of people from the old country know that name well.  He was a Nobel Prize recipient.  We boasted about Tagore, and Raman, and criticized the exclusion of Gandhi from the Nobel.  And were always unsure if Khorana was our man because he had become a foreigner--an American citizen.  We counted him anyway.  We consoled ourselves that one of our people doing awesome things elsewhere is, well, awesome.

Google honors him today, on what would have been his 96th birthday.

Khorana was the fifth child born to a Hindu family in 1922 in Raipur, a 100-person village in the Punjab region of what is now Pakistan.
He started his education at a village school that met under a tree and quickly demonstrated an aptitude for science, tempered with humility. He received a scholarship to study chemistry at Punjab University in Lahore, but he was too shy to attend the mandatory admissions interview and considered majoring in English instead.
The admissions committee was still impressed enough with Khorana’s application that they enrolled him anyway.

Throughout his life, Khorana was apparently a humble man.  "Despite his accomplishments, Khorana’s friends described him as a modest man who avoided publicity."

The doodle on Khorana reminded me about an op-ed that I read in the paper in the old country, which asked:

what is still holding our nation back from achieving large-scale global academic excellence which is commensurate with our intellectual heritage and calibre?

A fair question to ask, right?

What I liked about that argument was how the author drew a straight line between that question on the scientific enterprise with excellence as an ethical issue that affects pretty much every aspect of life in India.

Why do we in India accept extraneous considerations that militate against excellence? Of course our political culture is deeply implicated, which makes it ironic when our politicians ask why Indian scientists do not win Nobel prizes. But a part of the responsibility and the power to change lies within the academic community itself. The problem is our collective failure to articulate the goal of excellence and to exert firm pressure on anyone, however important, who blocks the path.

We in the US, on the other hand, have clearly demonstrated  our commitment to excellence as an ethical issue by electing to the highest political office a very stable genius, whose humility and genius far exceeds Khorana's!

Higher education is all about employment readiness

Over the years, I have written op-eds in plenty in my attempts to convince people about the importance of educating the youth in the humanities and the social sciences.  The logic is a no-brainer for me: The concerns and worries that we have are not always problems for science and technology to solve, nor can science and technology ever solve them.

Scientific and technological advancements will happen, and countries will grow and prosper, yes, but, we will face an increasing number of fuzzy issues for which decisions will have to be made by people, as individuals and as societies.  However, if people are not sufficiently educated on those, and if people do not have the skills to think through fuzzy and complex issues for which there are no cut-and-dried answers, then we are screwed.

But, hey, you know well that nobody listens to me.

Consider CRISPR.  Yes, I have blogged about CRISPR before, which you old-time readers know about.  I will refer the newbies to, maybe, this post.

I read the news, oh boy, and I immediately tweeted it.  (I don't care if anybody reads my tweet--I am fully prepared that nobody cares a shit about what I have to say.)

What was that news about?  Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University successfully targeted a gene associated with a human disease.

Mitalipov's team worked with human embryos produced by sperm from men with a genetic mutation, the report said, noting they were of "clinical quality." They then modified the mutation using a gene-editing technique, CRISPR.

So what, you ask?

The work offers the possibility that one day science will be able to modify genes in human embryos to prevent disease. Critics worry, however, that gene-editing in embryos opens the floodgates to the creation of "designer babies" in which parents specify traits they want their children to have.

Of course, we are long, long ways from "designer babies."  But, I don't think it is hyperbole to suggest that we are on the path towards it.  Which is why we need to start thinking about and discussing this fuzzy and complex issue.  "we do need to decide when and how we should use this technique."

Should there be limits on the types of things you can edit in an embryo? If so, what should they entail? These questions also involve deciding who gets to set the limits and control access to the technology.
We may also be concerned about who gets to control the subsequent research using this technology. Should there be state or federal oversight? Keep in mind that we cannot control what happens in other countries. Even in this country it can be difficult to craft guidelines that restrict only the research someone finds objectionable, while allowing other important research to continue. Additionally, the use of assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, for example) is largely unregulated in the U.S., and the decision to put in place restrictions will certainly raise objections from both potential parents and IVF providers.

And those are merely the beginnings, with a gazillion other questions, like:

Moreover, there are important questions about cost and access. Right now most assisted reproductive technologies are available only to higher-income individuals. A handful of states mandate infertility treatment coverage, but it is very limited. How should we regulate access to embryo editing for serious diseases? We are in the midst of a widespread debate about health care, access and cost. If it becomes established and safe, should this technique be part of a basic package of health care services when used to help create a child who does not suffer from a specific genetic problem? What about editing for nonhealth issues or less serious problems – are there fairness concerns if only people with sufficient wealth can access?

"Now is the time to figure out how we want to see this gene-editing path unfold."  Yep!

There is no way I want to leave these questions to some "wise men" (almost always men!) to decide on behalf of humanity.  But, if I want healthier deliberations amongst us all, then it gets back to the fundamental question of the purpose of education.  Should we invest in educating the youth so that they can think about such fuzzy and complex issues, and help a democratic society decide? Or should we let the prevailing forces channel higher education to be about workforce preparation, and just fuck the philosophy departments!

I know where I stand on this.  And, unlike the current president and his minions with their ackamarackus, mine is a principled and consistent stand.

Sex is for fun ... and a lab will be for reproduction?

My  comment at this post was tongue-in-cheek about sex being a cornerstone of most, if not all, religious beliefs.  Science and technology have continually pushed our understanding of sex and reproduction.  From preventing reproduction--thereby, rendering sex recreational--to various fertility enhancement technologies as well; the pill and the condom, on one side, and test-tube baby and womb-to-rent on the other side, have generated quite some headaches for the believers and their leaders.

As much as I have fun at the expense of believers in all these issues, I certainly empathize with their fundamental problem--the scientific and technological advancements challenge an understanding of what it means to be human.  If life--a baby--can be created in a petri-dish, then what does it mean to be human?  If materials from three "donor" parents can be assembled in a lab, and then that compound begins to grow in a womb as a baby, what does it mean to be human?  This atheist and many sincere believers struggle with that question of what it means to be human, while the vast majority--who are believers--seem to go about as if such technologies do not change a damn thing.

Everybody ought to think about that though.  Such thinking should not be outsourced to experts or--worse--to half-baked people like me.  But, most don't seem to be bothered--after all, there are a gazillion television channels to watch on top of those internet videos of cats playing piano!  While people are in a stupor with mind-dulling entertainment, there are more creepy things happening in the world of science.  Like this headline from the New York Times

Scientists Talk Privately About Creating a Synthetic Human Genome

It should have made people sit up and worry.  But, of course, this may not have even blipped through all those ballgames and viral videos!

What was that meeting about anyway?

Scientists are now contemplating the fabrication of a human genome, meaning they would use chemicals to manufacture all the DNA contained in human chromosomes.
The prospect is spurring both intrigue and concern in the life sciences community because it might be possible, such as through cloning, to use a synthetic genome to create human beings without biological parents.
While the project is still in the idea phase, and also involves efforts to improve DNA synthesis in general, it was discussed at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Routine news.  Yawn!  Bring on that video of a cat playing soccer!

Of course, we are a long way from creating humans in labs from chemical molecules without involving biological parents.  But, it is the trend line that should alert us.  Trends like this:

Right now, synthesizing DNA is difficult and error-prone. Existing techniques can reliably make strands that are only about 200 base pairs long, with the base pairs being the chemical units in DNA. A single gene can be hundreds or thousands of base pairs long. To synthesize one of those, multiple 200-unit segments have to be spliced together.
But the cost and capabilities are rapidly improving. Dr. Endy of Stanford, who is a co-founder of a DNA synthesis company called Gen9, said the cost of synthesizing genes has plummeted from $4 per base pair in 2003 to 3 cents now. But even at that rate, the cost for three billion letters would be $90 million. He said if costs continued to decline at the same pace, that figure could reach $100,000 in 20 years.

So, it is not that unimaginable that a breakthrough in the future would mean creating a fetus without bothering about an egg and a sperm.  A chemical kit that will be assembled.  Sex, for those humans who want it, will be recreational.  The end of sex as we know it:

The End of Sex is eye-opening about the prospects created by biomedical technology. Regardless of how we end up applying it, biotech has already transformed our view of what it means to be(come) human. ...
Yet the important question that Greely’s book raises is not so much whether his vision of near-universal “sex-free conception” will come to pass, but how we will cope with what current biological technologies make (literally) conceivable. On two occasions he confesses that, despite having studied this field for many years, he was caught unawares by suggestions of how the technologies might be used. One is “uniparenting”, whereby a person (either male or female) has both eggs and sperm made from their somatic cells and used to create a child – who would, because of the recombination of chromosomes during conception, not then be a clone in the strict sense. “The other is “multiplex parenting”, in which two people make an embryo which then in effect conceives a child through IVF with another embryo, by mixing their gametes. It would, says Greely, allow a couple to have their “child” mate with someone else without even first being born, let alone reaching puberty.” Such ideas, he concludes, are “evidence of just how wide-ranging and non-intuitive the implications of new biological technologies may be for human reproduction”. Even the experts concede that their imagination is boggled by the possibilities.

Imagine theologians trying to explain god's take on "multiplex parenting"!  

Nobody's perfect :(

By now, it would have become obvious to regular readers that I dish out the criticism if it is warranted.  That approach, in the pursuit of what it means o do the right thing, means that I have even wondered if my grandmothers could be called racists.  The grandmothers' who were and are dear to me, and whose stories I carry inside.  If I subject my grandmothers and myself to tough standards, then you think a magazine that I love has any chance?

That's what happened last week, when I tweeted this after reading an essay in the New Yorker:

As a long-time @NewYorker subscriber, I am disgusted that the magazine chose to publish the #GayTalese essay :(https://t.co/xE9Q909lcS

— sriram khe (@congoboy) April 9, 2016

At this point, you are perhaps thinking: Does anybody care whether I tweeted or if I felt disgusted with the essay?  Hey, it is no different from when I blog, right?  ;)

Why was I pissed off?  First, what is the essay about?  It is:

 about a strange man named Gerald Foos, who owned and operated a motel in Colorado. With the help and knowledge of his wife, he modified many of the motel’s rooms in such a way that he could watch his guests from above the ceiling. Although he admits to being sexually aroused by his spying, he is also intellectually curious: He fastidiously records details about the occupants (especially about their sex lives), and believes himself to be gleaning a great deal of sociological insight into them. As the story moves from the 1960s through the 1990s, he witnesses and catalogs various societal changes, such as an increase in interracial couples, that are compelling but ultimately unsurprising and never revelatory. The real interest of Talese’s piece, in other words, is Foos himself.

How did Talese get to know this?

Foos wrote to Talese in 1980, hoping someone would tell his story without revealing his name or blowing his cover. It’s here that things get murky. Talese traveled to Colorado to meet Foos and see the motel for himself. Immediately upon arrival in the state, the journalist also signed a document promising that, in his words, “I would not identify him by name, or publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver.” 

Yes, journalists want to maintain the confidentiality of their sources.  But, that is when there is a greater good that the report is about.  What is the greater good here?  How does protecting the privacy of the voyeur who was observing people in their most intimate moments contribute to a greater good?

There’s no greater good here; Talese has captured a strange and (briefly) compelling story of one man’s obsession and the extremes to which he will go to satisfy it.

Exactly!  The reporter is as much involved in this crime as the perv/perp was.

Talese was complicit in Gerald Foos' violation of his guests’ privacy, and not only because in the initial reporting of the story, he climbed into the motel attic with its owner and watched a young couple having sex. By failing to report Foos’ actions – either in an immediate story or to authorities – Talese enabled Foos' unethical and, indeed, illegal action to continue unabated for at least 15 years longer.
...
In addition, through his continued correspondence, Talese provided affirmation of Foos’ activity, helping him maintain the myth that his actions served some higher purpose, some noble societal goal, rather than simply gratifying his own sexual desire.

How did the editor of the New Yorker respond to people like me?

While the scene is certainly disturbing (Talese writes that he was ‘shocked, and surprised’ to read the account in the journal), the New Yorker does not believe that Talese or it violated any legal or ethical boundaries in presenting Foos’s account of it to the reader.

It was a bad, bad, bad editorial call.

But, it does not mean that I am going to cancel my subscription.  I recognize the blemish.  Nobody's perfect!

Your cheatin heart ... is NOxious

It turns out that the "business ethics" of Volkswagen has been educational about yet another oxymoron: "clean diesel."  For that enlightenment, we need to thank the lying, cheating, professionals at the company that Hitler was so excited about ;)

Volkswagen's atrocious business practice might have been merely about selling cars. but that affected way more than customers' wallets alone:

Volkswagen played a leading role in convincing people to accept a technology that in many countries is causing a precipitous decline in air quality for millions of city-dwellers: the diesel engine. Monitoring sites in European cities like London, Stuttgart, Munich, Paris, Milan and Rome have reported high levels of the nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, or soot, that help to create menacing smogs.

You see, diesel is not really "clean"--something we ought to have known on our own!

Diesel exhaust is laden with insidious soot particles, the so-called PM 2.5 (particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, or one-thirtieth the width of a human hair), which allow carcinogens to penetrate deep into tissues and organs. In other words, a driver who steps on the accelerator of a diesel car may be filling the lungs of nearby pedestrians, cyclists, infants in strollers and other drivers with potentially deadly particulate matter.

The price we are willing to pay for material progress!

It does seem like diesel for cars is now, ahem, exhausted ;)

Diesel trucks and large passenger cars, with their relatively clean exhausts, will doubtless soldier on. But who needs a small diesel? In terms of fuel economy, small turbo-charged petrol engines have all but caught up. The diesel version of the Chevrolet Cruze, for instance, gets 33mpg on the EPA's combined cycle, while the thriftiest petrol version of the same car gets 30mpg—and is a whopping $2,400 cheaper. The small, frugal diesel—upon which Volkswagen placed so much of its hopes for a future of green motoring—looks to have been left for dead by the roadside.

As with everything else, and even though the ethics of customers is no better, a better future depends on we the people:

In the end it may be up to consumers to force change. After all, while climate change caused by carbon dioxide is a somewhat abstract concept, the choking effect of NOx emissions is not just in front of but in their very eyes.

Or, we can always choke ourselves to death, like they do in Delhi even now :(

source

The ugly unethical consumer

The sign said that if I bought one I could buy another of that same for free.  Two for the price of one.

I stood there looking at the colorful packets, for what seemed like an eternity.  I then walked away.

After picking up a few things, I passed by the the same display.  It was too damn tempting.  It has been years since I ate them.  Even now, I can feel the saliva gathering in my mouth as I think about that taste.

I picked up a packet.

And then I did something that killed it all.  I looked at the nutrition label.

I put the packet down.  I checked out.

I reached home and ate a banana instead!

Being a mindful consumer is no fun.

I have blogged in plenty about this mindfulness.  Whether it is about my personal health, or about killing spiders at home, or about recycling or about flying ... the list is endless.  It is tiring, I admit, to always consciously choose something that is "better" than something else that is "worse."  Apparently this is not a typical consumer behavior:

No one wants to knowingly buy products made with child labor or that harm the environment.
But a new study shows that we also don’t want to work too hard to find out whether our favorite products were made ethically. And we really don’t like those good people who make the effort to seek out ethically made goods when we choose not to.

The friend passed along the news item about the research to me.  I wonder if I am supposed to read between the lines there and be less mindful and just live a little! ;)

Researchers have found that a) we’re lazy when it comes to investigating the ethics of our purchases, and b) we resent those who do take the time to research the social and environmental impacts of, say, a six-dollar T-shirt made in Bangladesh, and then opt for a more ethical alternative.

I suppose "ethical consumer" is as much an oxymoron as is "military intelligence" or "social science" ;)

We prefer to be ignorant.  Willfully, intentionally, ignorant.  We work hard to avoid knowing how the sausage is made.

The research findings are shocking statements one after another:

In fact, we denigrate consumers who act more ethically than we do, seeing them as less fashionable and more boring.

And:

Worst of all, seeing others act ethically when we don’t undermines our commitment to pro-social values.

And:

“You choose not to find out if a product is made ethically. Then you harshly judge people who do consider ethical values when buying products. Then that makes you less ethical in the future.”

Seriously? :(

What if the packages had information similar to the nutrition information on the Fritos bag that I put back?

Companies that use ethical practices in producing their products can help by making that information very prominent, right on the packages if possible. People are not going to go to your website to find out your company’s good deeds.

Yeah, right, like that will happen--after all, "business ethics" is an oxymoron!

The robots are coming, the robots are coming. Wait, they are already here!

"I just got this. You can read it first" the friend said.

What was it?  This magazine:

The OCD behavior of this professional academic manifests via reading and then blogging, so here I am ;)

I scanned through the content for this special on robots.  Familiar names in plenty and familiar ideas. I have already bombarded you with those names and ideas.  And will continue to do so unless and until the evidence convinces me that my understanding is incorrect.

What fascinated me the most was an essay about "the coming robot dystopia" by, get this, a "Professor of Robotics at The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University."  One of them robotics experts worrying about the coming dystopia!  I will not go into details of the essay, primarily because I want you read all that.  Instead, I want to focus on a bottom-line:

Robotic technologies that collect, interpret, and respond to massive amounts of real-world data on behalf of governments, corporations, and ordinary people will unquestionably advance human life. But they also have the potential to produce dystopian outcomes. We are hardly on the brink of the nightmarish futures conjured by Hollywood movies such as The Matrix or The Terminator, in which intelligent machines attempt to enslave or exterminate humans. But those dark fantasies contain a seed of truth: the robotic future will involve dramatic tradeoffs, some so significant that they could lead to a collective identity crisis over what it means to be human.

You see, that professor with immensely valued credentials delivers the same bottom-line that I harp on all the time: we need to understand what it means to be human, what it means to belong to humankind.  Unfortunately,

How robots interact with people depends to a great deal on how much their creators know or care about such issues, and robot creators tend to be engineers, programmers, and designers with little training in ethics, human rights, privacy, or security. In the United States, hardly any of the academic engineering programs that grant degrees in robotics require the in-depth study of such fields.

Again, no different from what I have been yelling about for years.  For decades, ever since it became clear to me that humans were not made for machines.  If only people listened to me!

Anyway, back to the expert:

A clear set of decisions about robot design and regulation stand between today’s world of human agency and tomorrow’s world of robot autonomy. Inventors must begin to combine technological ingenuity with sociological awareness, and governments need to design institutions and processes that will help integrate new, artificial agents into society. Today, all civil engineers are required to study ethics because an incorrectly designed bridge can cause great public harm. Roboticists face this same kind of responsibility today, because their creations are no longer mere academic pursuits.

Even at the small little university where I teach, computer science students are not advised to take courses in the humanities and the social sciences.  In fact, the advise students get makes them think that these courses are unnecessary hurdles that keep them from focusing on, well, computer science!  One brave computer science student is working on a thesis with me as her adviser.  Because, she is worried about some of the issues in society.  During one of our conversations a few weeks ago, I asked her if the computer science curriculum included any mandatory course on ethics.  Of course not. But, we faculty are good at shenanigans.  So, the catalog lists a course on ethical aspects of computer science but she has no idea when, if at all, that course is ever offered!

Read all the essays in the magazine, if the website grants you the access.

And then come back and tell me whether there was any argument in any one of those essays that contradicts anything that I have authored here in this blog--I want to feel good because the future is dystopian ;)

So, does that mean a robot will have virtual orgasm?

Even normally I feel like I don't belong to this age--I should have been born like, oh, thirty years ago at least, I think.  I am an old-fashioned guy trapped in a world that is not for me.  And then there are days like today when reading this in the WSJ makes me feel like I am Andy Rooney ready to complain about what the world is coming to!

Is another human being necessary for satisfying sex?

You see why I am feeling like I am the Andy Rooney incarnate?

Today’s sex robots are so rudimentary that they are essentially unusable. But as sex-robot enthusiasts are quick to point out, the shoebox-sized cellphones of the 1970s were nearly useless—but they were the first prototypes for today’s ubiquitous smartphones. Eventually, sex robots will have reasonably humanlike facial expressions, limb movements, voices and even odors. The futurist Stowe Boyd has predicted that by 2025, “robotic sex partners will be…commonplace, although the source of scorn and division.”

Ah, yes, the big sized cellphones of the old days.  But, robotic sex partners?  Commonplace by 2025?  So, then swingers will be swapping their robots?  What the hell is going on, right?

The author of that piece is a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins, which means that unlike me he is a real professor who knows what he is talking about.  He writes there:

Though the engineering challenges of simulating human sexual interaction are difficult, there’s no reason to believe that they are impossible to solve. Sex that entirely lacks human feeling and attachment may sound unappealing or even repugnant to many people, but at some point in the future, sex robots will become viable. A central question is whether that arc of progress will take so long that they will be leapfrogged by a different technology: neural virtual reality.

The neuroscience aspect reminded me of a post from about a year ago, in which I quoted about "connectome":

In 2005, two scientists, Olaf Sporns, professor of brain sciences at Indiana University, and Patric Hagmann, neuroscientist at the University of Lausanne, independently coined the term ‘connectome’ to refer to a map or wiring diagram of every neuronal connection in a brain. By analogy to the human genome, which contains all the information necessary to grow a human being, the human connectome in theory contains all the information necessary to wire up a functioning human brain. If the basic premise of neural network modelling is correct, then the essence of a human mind is contained in its pattern of connectivity. Your connectome, simulated in a computer, would recreate your conscious mind.

 Which means these neuroscientists are damn serious that they can track down the neurons that make use feel, well, ready for the hanky-panky:

The Holy Grail in neural virtual reality—for simulated sex or any other experience—involves the ability to precisely sense and control the electrical activity of many individual neurons in the brain with a device located outside of the skull. Even if we had this technology today, we would not yet be able to synthesize sensations with great finesse. No one yet knows the precise group of neurons in your brain that we would need to stimulate to make you see an attractive human face smile and wink at you. Nor does anyone know those that would give you the sensation of a warm hug.
When such a neural virtual reality device finally becomes available, it will be the ultimate feedback-driven experience.

Andy Rooney here is getting really agitated at where we are headed!  But, he feels a tad comforted with this:

Such technology raises profound ethical issues, even beyond those raised by sex robots.

That is a tad understated!

For now, it is just a speculative fantasy, and the best apparatus for physical intimacy remains what is has been for millennia: human touch.

True.  

But, I worry this is not for long.  My best hope is that all these will come to pass after I am dead. 

The Food Movement's “omnivore’s contradiction": “ethical butchers”

A few months ago, the New Yorker featured this awesome cartoon:

A punchline that would have anybody laugh and think.  Perhaps laugh first, and then think for a long while.

I was reminded of that cartoon, even as I started reading this essay in The American Scholar.  That cartoon is a wonderful example of a picture being worth a thousand words.

Anyway, the essay notes that the food movement (yes, think of the likes of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters) simply refuses to even acknowledge a basic question:

How do you ethically justify both respecting and killing a sentient animal?

It is one thing for the foodies to rail against the agro-industrial complex.  And there is a lot of merit to it.  But,

The Food Movement’s popularity is built upon this idea: that animals raised in factory farms have qualities that make them worthy of our moral consideration. Animals are not objects, and their welfare matters to the extent that they should not suffer the abusive confines of factory farms. They deserve the time, space, and freedom to exist as the creatures they were born to be. These concerns assume that farm animals—given their ability to experience suffering in industrialized settings—have authentic emotional lives and intrinsic worth. Our belief that they should not suffer abuse in confinement recognizes their fundamental moral status as sentient beings. They can suffer, and as a direct result, we should, whenever possible, avoid inflicting suffering upon them. If animals didn’t matter to us in a moral sense, then the harm systematically inflicted upon them in industrial operations would pose no ethical concerns whatsoever. We’d be indifferent to their abuse.
If the Food Movement’s stance on animals raised in factory farms is clear, it grows murky when applied to nonindustrial, more humane, farms. Indeed, that’s where the omnivore’s contradiction comes into sharp focus. The Food Movement’s premises about farm animals are (we will assume for now) adequately met on most small, sustainable, humane farms. Still, there’s no denying that even on the most impressive of these farms—no matter how much their owners talk about a respectful death—animals are raised for the ultimate purpose of being killed and turned into commodities. The Food Movement habitually minimizes this reality, but the fact remains: just as on factory farms, animals on humane farms are, on slaughter day, transformed through raw violence into objects, after which they are commodified, consumed, and replaced with all the efficiency of car parts.

Why is the killing of animals justified when a Michael Pollan kills one?  BTW, I wonder if Pollan has ever killed a cow. Maybe he did, eh!

Thus, the hypocrisy of it all:

the elevation of how animals are raised as a moral consideration (poorly in factory farms; well on humane farms) above why we are raising them (to kill and eat them in both cases). It is at this crucial moment in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the beast against its will—that the moral consideration so effectively deployed to condemn the factory farming of animals loses its punch and its plausibility.

So, if the foodies are really, really upset at the atrocious treatment of animals in the industrial process--and there any number of undercover videos one can watch till the point of puking is reached--then why don't they call for an end to killing animals, whether in the food factories or on the organic farms?

But they are not prepared to take that stand. This decision—this curious dodge—is bound to rot the movement from within. It’s a typical sleight of hand of which Pollan is a master. To wit, he explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2011 that after deliberating about the legitimacy of eating meat, “I came out thinking I could eat meat in this very limited way, from farmers who were growing it in a way that I could feel good about how the animals lived.”
How is it possible to ethically raise, love, and then kill an animal “in this very limited way”? If Pollan really does want to “feel good” about an animal’s quality of life—much in the way he would, say, his pet dog’s—then what’s the exact justification for cutting that life short (by something like 75 percent) for a menu choice? Wouldn’t it be better to spare the pseudo-philosophizing and just admit (as Comis did, until he announced on his blog in February that he had become a vegetarian) that he likes meat too much to stop consuming it? And if that’s the competing consideration—loving meat—then all humanitarian ballyhooing over animals in factory farms becomes meaningless, as do the arguments over animal suffering in general.

The likes of Michael Pollan have found a neat niche for themselves: they peddle a story that makes their faithful feel great about how they are being righteous about the whole damn thing.  That is all.  It pisses me off when they are all high and mighty about how they are a gazillion times better than those getting the "regular" meat.  Of course, there are plenty of those preachy types right here in Oregon, which is also why Portlandia did that awesome episode about the chicken order in the restaurant.

Owning animals for the purposes of slaughter and consumption means that ethical corners will be cut to enhance the bottom line. As competition for privileged consumers increases, this corner cutting can only be expected to intensify.
A short list of routine and sometimes unavoidable problems prevalent on nonindustrial animal farms, all noted by farmers themselves, includes the following: excessive rates of pastured animals being killed by wild and domestic animals, mutilation of pig snouts to prevent detrimental rooting, castration without anesthesia, botched slaughters, preventive (and illicit) antibiotic use, outbreaks of salmonella and trichinosis, acute pasture damage, overuse of pesticides and animal vaccines, and routine separation of mothers and calves. Animals granted a little more space, in other words, still suffer the negative consequences of being owned for exploitation. Given that they are destined to be commodities, not companions, this should not come as a surprise. Hence the ultimate cost of failing to address the omnivore’s contradiction: the ongoing suffering of the animals that farmers and foodies say they care so much about.

Yep, the foodies "say" they "care" about the suffering that the animals go through.

I have blogged enough here (like this one) about trying to make peace with killing animals for food. It is an ongoing issue for this atheist.  When everything fails, I turn to the New Yorker:

Cycle-rickshaws: hiring them means dealing with ethical issues :(

I had made reservations to stay at Hotel Ginger, which was right by the New Delhi train station.  From my two previous experiences with Ginger at two other cities, I was confident that I could count on a clean and spacious room, with clean bathrooms.  All for a price that the budget traveler that I am can afford.

The hotel website said it was a 200 meter walk from the station to the hotel.  I told my friend "S" about it. She was familiar with the hotel, and had a suggestion: "as you exit the station, get a cycle-rickshaw.  He might ask for about 30 rupees.  It will be better than you walking, because you won't be able to drag your suitcase through all that dirt."

It was a wonderful and practical suggestion, I thought.

Until ...

... I had to face the situation at 2:30 in the afternoon after I was swept out of the station by the exiting crowds.

I couldn't think of sitting there while another human pedaled away.  When machines power an autorickshaw or a car, it feels different from when a human powers the transport.

"Holy crap!" I thought to myself.

Meanwhile, my brain also recognizes the numbers of cycle-rickshaws there.  Their livelihood, and perhaps their families' welfare, depends on people like me using their services.

If only I had a 1-800-ethicist to call to sort this out!

Finally, I decided to look strictly from the driver's perspective.  Like somebody digging ditches with his muscle power in order to earn his parathas, a cycle-rickshaw driver trades his muscle power for earnings.  In my job, I try to use my brain power to earn my salary.  So, what if I focused only on the dignity of the labor involved and the laborer?

I approached a driver.  Pointing to the hotel, I told him in my awful Hindi, "humko woh Hotel Ginger jaana.  Kitne rupiah?"

He replied "Ththeese."

"S" was so right on the dot with her thirty rupees.

A little uncomfortably I sat on the seat, and he pedaled away.

When we reached the hotel, he stopped outside the gate.  I figured that the hotel didn't want cycle-rickshaws inside the property, and I didn't want to force any issue there.  I got down and paid him 30 rupees.

Later in the evening, when I was walking back after spending a delightfully refreshing couple of hours at the energetic Connaught Place, cycle-rickshaw drivers tried to get me to ride with them.  One after another approached me.  I kept walking.

And then I remembered another instance from a few years ago when I was traveling with my parents.  As we got off the train, dad looked around for a porter.  I told him that I would easily carry the bags.  Dad said it was his way of helping them out--the porters needed to earn money, he said.  So, we ended up hiring one.

I thought that I needed to spend the little bit of money I had, which will mean a lot to the rickshaw-wallahs.  When the next guy approached me, I told him "Hotel Ginger, station ke paas."  He wanted 50 rupees.

I sat while he pedaled away., and decided that I would ignore my own issues with hiring cycle-rickshaws!  Or, perhaps what I ended up doing is the right way after all.