Electrical conduction in neurons is dependent on ion channels. Ion channels sit in the membrane and are dependent on its properties. If anaesthetics change those properties, certain classes of ion channels may not work particularly well. Some anaesthetics may interact directly with ion channels; some may act indirectly by changing lipid properties. I'm not seeing a huge problem here for the existing theory. In fact, I'm not seeing any problem.
The whole "sound" thing seems like poorly supported speculation to solve in a complex and finely-tuned manner a problem which already has a simple solution.
Claims that "X is refutable" are easy to make. For example, I could claim right now that your entire post is refutable. But this isn't very useful, except to demonstrate that I have a different opinion than you do. It provides no clue as to whose opinion might be more valid.
So, how about offering some refutations, or links to such?
I think we agree that we shouldn't invest the same amount in other animals' upbringing as we do in the upbringing of human children. But you didn't really respond to my point that this different investment makes children (and adults) more valuable to us. We have--as creatures with finite lifespans--literally given (some of) our lives to create and enrich thiers. It is therefore neither surprising nor inappropriate that we value human lives more highly than the lives of things that we haven't invested in so heavily.
In some cases, one can improve both human lives and other animals' lives by taking the same measures. But it's not clear to me that this must always be the case. Making roads where you can't hit a deer or porcupine requires additional structures during building (fences, plus underpasses and overpasses--not all animals will take an underpass, nor will all animals take an overpass--at a minimum). To provide the resources to do this, our modern economy will generate waste, strip-mine lands, destroy habitat, etc.; these resources will be ones that are unavailable to treat parasitic diseases or research cures to cancer or educate people or other things. Is this really worthwhile, once we've taken the easiest and least expensive steps to minimize the problems? It looks to me more like a conflict between interests, and in many cases we decide that the minor cost in human life (let alone the lives of other animals) is worth it.
I observe that in the US, which is a comparatively rich country with the demonstrated ability to not take the easiest path, babies with reduced resources are treated as equal in Singer's sense: "equality of consideration."
We do. And yet we do not do the same for animals. How do you account for this?
The problem with basing a moral system on observations is that you have a tendency to just end up describing what it is that people actually do. I think we're doing a little better than this, but if it's valid to point out that low-potential babies are given equal consideration (if not more, actually, because their conditions are often very difficult to treat), then it is equally valid to point out that animals are not. This would tend to argue in favor of my aesthetics point, wouldn't it?
And my point about the value of low-potential babies is rather unpopular in wealthy societies. But if you observe societies with sharply limited resources, you'll find that they very often choose high-potential babies over low-potential ones (even resorting to infanticide in extreme cases). If you look carefully at the conditions in these societies, in the vast majority they simply don't have the resources to take care of these children without risking the survival of the entire society. I am rather uncomfortable with any system of morality that demands that what is right is an action that will lead to the death of everyone under consideration, and the end of that society (and the end of their moral system, with it!).
This dovetails nicely with my idea that time (which I presume correlates with wealth for any continuously existing society) will be required for equality of consideration to become the norm. This both gives society a chance to develop deeper resources, become more sophisticated as to what we actually are (animals), and to develop a deeper and more widespread understanding of where the various animals stand in terms of cognition, an area we are woefully short of detailed information in today.
I agree on all points. However, you seem to think that we have adequate resources now to be able to afford giving other animals near-equal status with humans. Given that we seem to be depleting resources at an unsustainable rate just to maintain a human society that, among other things, manages to give equal consideration to low-potential babies, do you think it is realistic to extend that consideration to animals with our current level of technology?
Hm, that's an interesting point of view, and you articulate it well. Quite Singerian, actually. (I assume you're familiar with his works.)
However, there are three major principles that cast doubt on your reasoning.
The first is an economic principle of return on investment. We put a great deal of effort into raising and bearing our children; we do not put so much effort into raising birds. And for good reason; it takes a lot of effort to raise children, and if we devoted an equal effort to every other species (or genus or family) of animal(s) we came in contact with, we'd be unable to raise our own children or even have a significant number of them. Whether or not you think this is moral (thus far, I would tend to think that you'd say that we should spend a large amount of effort into raising non-humans), you at least have to agree that it is stupid, because if we do that as a species, we'll go extinct, and then we won't be doing it any more. But given that we do put vastly more resources into children than birds, it is also entirely sensible that we protect that investment by valuing children vastly more than birds. This is true regardless of the relative cognitive abilities of children at a certain age and adult birds. It is also true regardless of birth defects.
The second principle arises from future potential. You touched on this briefly, but rather rapidly concluded that non-developing babies were as valuable to us as developing babies. But I don't see that this is the case; in societies which are much more pressed for resources, imperfect babies are not given the same care as normal ones. Also, interactions with animals are very common, as are interactions with normal children; interactions with severely defective children are rare. Why not conclude that people just fail to distinguish, due to lack of practice, between normal children with enormous potential (and who are, of course, utterly vital to the continuation of our species) and children who have been born with serious genetic or other abnormalities that robs them of that potential? I see religions promoting equal treatment here, but we already see differential treatment on the basis of minor differences in potential (e.g. in education, we put substantially more effort into people with somewhat better academic performance), so future potential is clearly an important consideration in many aspects of human interaction. (Note also that an important part of the potential of humans is to give birth to and raise more humans, which is rather an important thing for any species, and would seem to justify some special attention.)
The third principle is based on intrinsic aesthetics. Seeing children injured, or even seeing them in conditions where we imagine they would be injured, is, for most people, profoundly disturbing. This empathetic emotion is extremely valuable in building and maintaining complex, functioning human societies. We don't, typically, have the same instinctive reaction towards other animals; for most people it's much weaker. This could be because we're trained that way, but again, this seems maladaptive. So part of our justification for treating children with limited potential differently than animals with similar potential is that it is simply profoundly disturbing for us to mistreat children; it clashes directly with the mammalian suite of emotions. Since this line of reasoning purely involves aesthetics, it makes our treatment of animals and humans with birth defects more of a luxury; if condtions are not too bad, we can have an environment which is pleasant in that we don't injure/torture/do anything uncomfortable-seeming with children with birth defects, say. If conditions are even more favorable, we can do the same thing with animals.
If any one of these three principles is an important consideration--and I think they all are--it invalidates or at least casts very serious doubt upon your claim that animal rights extremists are on higher moral ground. In particular, they are elevating
When vat-grown tissues are ready, I'll happily buy them. Should I have the opportunity, I will also support governmental research funding to assist this endeavor. I am unlikely to support new-harvest directly because I don't have the background--nor do they list the publication record--to evaluate the promise of and problems with their approaches.
You have demonstrated your consistency--which is admirable--but you neglected to explain why you think that animals and children have the same moral status. I'm curious about this, as most people seem to come to a different conclusion.
Also, there are lots of patents on products held by people who did the original testing. If you buy the products from those people directly, you're paying them for having done something immoral. Isn't that tacitly supporting their actions? If you buy from their competitors, they *still* get direct financial compensation via patents. So I'm not sure it's quite so clear how to mesh the absurdity of wasting knowledge with the moral danger of supporting an action you oppose.
ALF fits the loose definition of a group, even if it's not formally and hierarchically organized. There are places to send press releases, a web site, etc.; it's just a group with a very unusual set of membership criteria. I agree that it is not a group in the same way that PETA is a group.
But I've seen PETA protesting against animal experiments near where I work. They sure put a lot of time and effort into opposing behavioral task experiments where the animals have to be comfortable and calm in order to get good data. The researchers even have to cancel their experiments if some construction work is being done nearby because the noise spooks the monkeys too much. The protesters didn't know the difference between a fear grimace and a facial expression indicating pain in monkeys, and they have any idea what the experiments were trying to show.
So PETA is certainly involved in senseless opposition to animal experiments. It would have made a much larger difference in animal welfare if the same number of people had gone into grocery stores, stood by the eggs, and informed people about which company treated their chickens the best. I always wonder about that when I'm buying eggs.
Personal acts need not be nice. Some snake venom is excruciatingly painful (being crushed isn't too swell either).
And one can generally assume that Kosher food is prepared according to a special set of rules; if the demand were there, I imagine one could set things up such that one could be equally confident in the treatment of animals.
If it had eyes or a mother, yes, I may well eat it. I'll try to avoid giving food animals a miserable existence, but until there's a suitable alternative (reasonably convenient, with no health/performance side effects), I'll be an omnivore.
Suppose that the cosmetic product for the face is sunblock--to prevent skin cancer--or an acne medication that is designed to prevent severe acne that causes life-long scars. Maybe it is a topical antibiotic to treat skin infections. What then? Not everything is just "lip gloss", and as other posters have mentioned, the products that are testing-free are free of testing because they only use compounds that have already been tested. I fully support minimizing animal testing of cosmetics; if you make yet another shampoo with methylisothiozolinone, you don't need to test it yet again. But if you're trying to do something different (better!), then I think that not accidentally blinding people is a good idea. I also think that it's a good idea to try to do things better, since I like soap, shampoo, antibiotics, sunblock, etc..
If you're saying that there's a moral equivalence between abusing children and animal testing, then your answer is probably that all of these products are morally unacceptable until we find a different way to test them. To which I would respond: what about the moral culpability of people getting skin cancer when we could have prevented it, and how do you come to the conclusion that the two are equivalent? Should we, for example, charge people for vehicular avianslaughter if they hit a bird with their car unintentionally? Should we have safety regulations for windows so that they look much more like solid objects so that birds won't fly into them and die, much like we have regulations for balcony railings so people don't fall off?
It's unclear to me that you've really thought through the implications of your (apparent) proposal.
That said, there was a fifth reason that another poster gave that strikes me as quite likely:
(5) They like cute animals. Research is often done with cute animals, but we don't eat cute animals. They oppose the research not because of the pain and suffering per se, but because they feel uncomfortable thinking about something cute and fuzzy that might be suffering (or might not--but if something is cute you don't want to see any possible damage to it at all, so whether there's any pain is irrelevant).
We eat too much meat, but it is also the case that vegetarians have to watch what they eat much more than people who eat meat in moderation or they'll run short on protein or iron; if they're vegans, they have to be careful about calcium, too. People who don't digest beans well have additional problems, and men are probably better off not eating too many soy products due to the estrogen-like compounds most of them contain (fermented soy products like tempeh are okay; tofu usually is more iffy).
Fortunately for vegetarians, fortification with vitamins removes some of the need to eat meat, and vitamin pills take care of most of the rest. Unfortunately, battery hens are not, in most cases, treated any better than chickens raised for meat. Also, vitamins often come from animal sources. For example, fish oil is a very common source for Vitamin D. (It can be made with yeast instead; but the fish-oil vitamin D is more easily converted into the active form, so vitamin pills tend to use fish oil as a source.)
Anyway, the point remains: it takes more attention to what you eat to be a healthy vegetarian (with meat-eaters, they need to pay more attention to *not* eating more than they should), and if you really want to be consistent, you have to research products that most people don't think about.
But animals get eaten all the time in the wild. Is that not okay? If it is okay, wouldn't it also be okay if we, say, treated livestock fairly well, killed the animals humanely, and then ate them? It's a more pleasant life than most of them would have in the wild. (Especially for domesticated animals; many of them either get raised by us or go extinct.)
If you believe that we have a strong moral duty to protect animals and prevent their suffering, isn't your first priority to stop using animals for food? Many of the animals we eat are raised and killed in deplorable conditions; even the best facilities are unlikely to meet minimum standards for the ethical treatment of animals for scientific research. And with research, we gain something permanent: knowledge about how living systems work, which can be applied to produce a higher quality of life for humans (and for animals, should we want to--veterinary science, for example, has benefitted substantially from all the research we've done in the biological sciences and medicine!). With food animals, we just get food, which we then eat, and then it's gone.
(Annoyingly enough, we've evolved to be omnivores and have to be especially careful with our diet if we neglect any part of a normal omnivorous diet.)
So that leaves us with a question: why do groups like PETA and ALF focus their attention on research when they haven't got nearly enough manpower to make an impact on the worst abuses in the food industry, much less cover everything down to the relatively minor cases of animals used for vision research?
I can think of four possibilities.
(1) They're ignorant. Despite it being their mission to treat animals ethically, and despite the discomfort of, say, chicken-rearing warehouses being well documented, they don't realize how much suffering is being caused by that in comparison to all research put together. Since this supposedly what they care about, and the information is available, it has to be willful ignorance.
(2) They're luddites. Despite the amazing advances in health and medicine coming from research, and the extraordinarly broad evidence that animal research is essential in narrowing down ideas for treatments to those which are actually promising to humans, they distrust research and science. Perhaps they actively long for a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where we were plagued by a host of pathogens and had few methods to alleviate pain and suffering. Or perhaps they notice that our advanced technology has done a lot of damage to the planet, and are too lazy to figure out how technology should be used well; it's much easier just to think it should all go.
(3) They're cowards. They know much worse abuses exist, but they're afraid of powerful corporate interests, and by harassing researchers who are relatively isolated and poor compared to multinational food conglomerates, they can make themselves feel like they're doing something without having to risk the consequences that might accompany taking on the real problem.
(4) They long for a polarizing wedge issue that no longer exists. Animal testing used to be much less humane than it is now; but after the initial animal rights movement pointed that out, and research indicated that our self-interested assumptions that animals didn't feel pain were not borne out by evidence, the protocols have been modified to greatly reduce any suffering. That doesn't leave much room to be an activist; where's the fun in that? So, even though the battle has been won, perhaps some people want to keep fighting it.
None of these hypotheses is particularly flattering, and most of them boil down to animal rights activists being ignorant, hypocritical, or both.
And some of the moral protests are ill-informed. Suppose you're developing a new cosmetic product to be used on the face. Anything that people might put on their face could get in their eyes. What do you do? (By extension: is the claim that all cosmetics are bad and shouldn't be used? That we should blind people in order to test cosmetics? Seriously--what is the proposal here?)
It depends what you want out of your game. If you want to pick it up, play the kinds of characters you're supposed to for a few sessions, and then move on to something else, SR4 is probably better than earlier versions. It's simple to pick up, and by the time you've figured out enough of the shockingly problematic aspects of the rules, you're done, and are playing some other game.
Earlier versions of SR had remarkable flexibility for a non-generic game setting (i.e. not Rifts, not HERO), due to the core mechanics. Apparently, the decision was made to use a new WoD dice scheme (which does not have this flexibility) instead of trying to make simple and consistent rules while keeping the core mechanic.
So I wouldn't recommend SR4 for a long-term campaign or for players who like to run unusual sets of characters and still expect the rules to do anything but break in weird and amusing ways, such as it being just as easy to shoot someone running through a crowd at great distance whether or not you're wearing a blindfold, or it being next to impossible for even a master marksman to kill an unarmed human with one shot from a large-caliber pistol. But if you want to grab something quickly and experience a cross cyberpunk/magic setting...well, it's not going to be quick, but it's faster than it used to be.
The jury is still out on whether this strategy will pay off for Shadowrun in the long run. I have approximately $1200 of Shadowrun products on my shelves despite having essentially not played in the past decade, partly because I used to enjoy the plots and fiction, and partly because I appreciated the mechanics and wanted to stay up to date in case I had time to play again. But I have $0 of SR4 products, and will continue to buy $0 of SR4 products, because SR4 isn't robust enough to be worth my attention. Once the initial wave of excitement wears off, it doesn't take the loss of very many customers like me in order for the Shadowrun franchise to be worse off rather than better by making a product that is easy to pick up but with less reason to become a devotee.
(In case you're wondering, the SR4 is not worth my time because the system doesn't work over a wide enough range of abilities to adequately cover the normal range in humans--for very small or large numbers of dice, penalties become either insurmountable or negligible, which basically means that the system breaks down and the outcomes have to be adjudicated by the GM. If I wanted a system that had to be adjudicated by the GM, I wouldn't use dice at all.)
If you build cities on the edges of oceans, and grow crops in areas that are hard to irrigate, then yes, it is bad if the world heats up--at the very least you have to move a lot of expensive infrastructure.
If you build cities on the edges of flowing water and grow crops in areas that are in danger of getting frost, then yes, it is bad if the world cools down--again, you have to move a lot of expensive infrastructure.
Humans have increased CO2 levels in a hundred years to levels that have not been seen in millions. We're way outside the range for which the ecosystem has evolved. Is this bad? Maybe. Is it disruptive to existing ecosystems and economies? Most likely. Would we rather be less disrupted? Most likely.
Many companies have as their goal to do better than their competitors, preferably to the point where all their competitors are out of business. That's not illegal.
What is illegal is generating and using a monopoly to hurt consumers.
So, giving away software for free is fine, even if your goal is to put non-free software out of business. What is not fine is then charging exhorbatently for your product after there are no longer any competitors in the marketplace.
It's next to impossible to do that with GPLed code, because even if you relicense the code, the last GPLed version is still Free. Further, anyone can fork the code if they feel like it, so it's really hard to maintain a "monopoly" when there's any pressure for diversity or specialization. But, if someone figures out some way to use the GPL to hurt consumers, the appropriate time to bring a case would be then, when the damage is being done.
If some commercial software vendors cannot come up with any software that people are willing to pay for, that is unfortunate for them. They should work on something else. This is business. If your product is not needed, get out of the marketplace.
(You should try suing Wikipedia for dumping its encyclopedia, too while you're at it.)
I inferred what your position was, but I still think you were too generous in characterizing what they're doing as "logic". I can see where they're coming from: illogical association of everything relating to genomics and biotechnology with a catchy scare-word, biopiracy.
It's not logical to be unable and unwilling to distinguish baby from bathwater.
I can see some sort of process behind the selection of Google, but to call it logic seems unreasonably generous.
They're criticizing anything that has to do with obtaining biological knowledge from different environments. For example, they criticize Venter from having expiditions send him seawater samples, almost exclusively from international waters. That's it. He's taking seawater samples, and somehow this is piracy? Nobody owns the water, or the organisms in the water, or the genes in the organisms in the water, and by taking it he's not depriving anyone of anything. Calling that biopiracy is absurd.
It's the height of sensationalist idiocy. The site owners seem unable to distinguish between corporate thuggery (e.g. terminator seeds) and biological research of immense benefit to humanity (e.g. figuring out the genetic makeup of life). There are very serious concerns regarding how companies treat drugs, patents, genes, but it's essential to distinguish between the abuse of an area of research and research itself.
I get the feeling that if these guys had been around 300,000 years ago, they'd object to using fire to cook with because one guy hit another guy with a burning stick. Fire is therefore evil! If you have a fireplace, that makes you a pyromurderer!
It used to be that when people had sex, they tended to have children (no birth control). If the two people are not married (or barely know each other), then there are likely not enough support structures in place to take care of the child. The prohibition against sex can be viewed as a motivation to protect children.
With the advent of effective birth control, the rules have changed somewhat. Now, in many cases, what was once a protective edict is a historical, arbitrary edict--enshrined, unchanging, in a religious text. It's hard enough to follow those edicts which contradict predispositions but are for our own good and the good of society without adding in extra ones that aren't even for our own good any more!
A liberal view of religion might try to look past the exact restriction to figure out why it is there, and modify it somewhat as conditions change. Or, you could just insist that because it was useful and necessary 4500 years ago, it must be useful and necessary now, or that God likes setting arbitrary difficult-to-follow rules.
If you want to rapidly sort male mosquitos, you can use existing technology designed to separate fluorescent objects from non-fluorescent objects. An easy way to make male mosquitos glow is to make a male-specific tissue glow. Hence, the male gonad. It's an easy way to select male mosquitos.
Making mosquitos that don't bite people is pointless, as they need blood to reproduce--easier to just kill them or use sterile males to outcompete fertile males. Making mosquitos that don't transmit pathogens is extremely difficult, as different pathogens survive in different ways--and there is a good deal of research into how this happens.
Mosquitos do not contract diseases carried by mammals because they are insects. The biochemistry is different, and most diseases rely upon very specific biochemistry. Furthermore, we could drink a lot of blood and not contract that many diseases, because digestion is a nasty process. Eating raw flesh is just as bad as drinking blood from that perspective.
The author's whole premise is flawed. He's approaching it as though MA is attempting to have a low-cost, widely deployed document system right now.
He doesn't address the crucial point which is that data is important and needs to be accessible. It's very hard to guarantee that when using a proprietary product using a closed format. Maybe it's the most common now, but what if you want to read government records 50 years from now? Copying the data should be easy enough (data is data), but finding something that will read Word is a lot harder. Nothing will read OpenDocument format *either*, but at least it's spelled out.
If you view government business as transient, or you rigorously print and file every document ever created, and electronically index the paper documents in an open format, then the issue goes away. Otherwise, Microsoft simply cannot provide this service with a closed format. Nobody can provide the service with a closed format. That's the key issue to me.
Prendergast does make some valid (albeit overstressed) points about potential costs of switching document formats. He neglects to mention points (such as OO being free as in beer, and MS stuff being free as in "$$$, unless you threaten to switch to Linux, in which case it's only $$") that would suggest a potentially lower cost and greater accessibility for ODF documents. But if the principle is that "government documents should be preserved for posterity", then the practical argument about greater cost is only relevant to the extent that you're willing to compromise on principles due to economic reality.
Academic modeling of an economy is a good start towards understanding how it works beyond a vague gut-feeling. If they don't care about their own economy, they shouldn't study it. Otherwise, they might learn something useful.
How, exactly? Why are you allowed to allow Mozilla? Can you likewise allow SpyVirusBotWare? If you can, easily, you're liable to do it by mistake, which makes it a bad security practice. If you can't do it easily, it limits flexibility.
The point is that Default Allow is *not* a stupid idea for systems that need to be both flexible and secure. You Default Allow in those areas where you need flexibility--for example, allowing admins to install programs, because you trust that they know what they're doing. You Default Deny in those areas where you don't need flexibility--scripts downloaded from the internet probably shouldn't be reformatting your hard drive and flashing your BIOS.
But that won't work. The software will automatically be denied whether or not you read about it--otherwise it requires user education, which is bad.
If it's default accept for tech support and default deny for users, that's better. Kind of like root access on Unix machines. But that's hardly a novel concept.
If you're writing open source software, and you don't have the backing of AOL or IBM, how would you get your software validated? If it wasn't validated, why would anyone use it?
Sounds like a perfect lock-in model for huge corporate vendors.
If it's too easy to get your stuff validated, then malware, spyware, and the like will all get validated too. We're then back to Default Permit.
New Scientist has a strong tendency towards sensational articles (lots of stuff about difficult-to-test theories of quantum mechanics and cosmology, very little about well-tested and important research in developmental biology in fruit flies). It also has a bad habit of writing catchy-sounding covers that have barely anything to do with what the article inside is actually about.
They don't do a horrible job, but I would read something less sensational if I wanted to be informed about science. Science News is pretty good. It does tend to be just news (no lengthy reviews), but the news is well written.
Slashdot Mirror
Electrical conduction in neurons is dependent on ion channels. Ion channels sit in the membrane and are dependent on its properties. If anaesthetics change those properties, certain classes of ion channels may not work particularly well. Some anaesthetics may interact directly with ion channels; some may act indirectly by changing lipid properties. I'm not seeing a huge problem here for the existing theory. In fact, I'm not seeing any problem.
The whole "sound" thing seems like poorly supported speculation to solve in a complex and finely-tuned manner a problem which already has a simple solution.
(Yes, I'm yet another neuroscientist.)
Claims that "X is refutable" are easy to make. For example, I could claim right now that your entire post is refutable. But this isn't very useful, except to demonstrate that I have a different opinion than you do. It provides no clue as to whose opinion might be more valid.
So, how about offering some refutations, or links to such?
In some cases, one can improve both human lives and other animals' lives by taking the same measures. But it's not clear to me that this must always be the case. Making roads where you can't hit a deer or porcupine requires additional structures during building (fences, plus underpasses and overpasses--not all animals will take an underpass, nor will all animals take an overpass--at a minimum). To provide the resources to do this, our modern economy will generate waste, strip-mine lands, destroy habitat, etc.; these resources will be ones that are unavailable to treat parasitic diseases or research cures to cancer or educate people or other things. Is this really worthwhile, once we've taken the easiest and least expensive steps to minimize the problems? It looks to me more like a conflict between interests, and in many cases we decide that the minor cost in human life (let alone the lives of other animals) is worth it.
We do. And yet we do not do the same for animals. How do you account for this?
The problem with basing a moral system on observations is that you have a tendency to just end up describing what it is that people actually do. I think we're doing a little better than this, but if it's valid to point out that low-potential babies are given equal consideration (if not more, actually, because their conditions are often very difficult to treat), then it is equally valid to point out that animals are not. This would tend to argue in favor of my aesthetics point, wouldn't it?
And my point about the value of low-potential babies is rather unpopular in wealthy societies. But if you observe societies with sharply limited resources, you'll find that they very often choose high-potential babies over low-potential ones (even resorting to infanticide in extreme cases). If you look carefully at the conditions in these societies, in the vast majority they simply don't have the resources to take care of these children without risking the survival of the entire society. I am rather uncomfortable with any system of morality that demands that what is right is an action that will lead to the death of everyone under consideration, and the end of that society (and the end of their moral system, with it!).
I agree on all points. However, you seem to think that we have adequate resources now to be able to afford giving other animals near-equal status with humans. Given that we seem to be depleting resources at an unsustainable rate just to maintain a human society that, among other things, manages to give equal consideration to low-potential babies, do you think it is realistic to extend that consideration to animals with our current level of technology?
(And I basically agree wit
Hm, that's an interesting point of view, and you articulate it well. Quite Singerian, actually. (I assume you're familiar with his works.)
However, there are three major principles that cast doubt on your reasoning.
The first is an economic principle of return on investment. We put a great deal of effort into raising and bearing our children; we do not put so much effort into raising birds. And for good reason; it takes a lot of effort to raise children, and if we devoted an equal effort to every other species (or genus or family) of animal(s) we came in contact with, we'd be unable to raise our own children or even have a significant number of them. Whether or not you think this is moral (thus far, I would tend to think that you'd say that we should spend a large amount of effort into raising non-humans), you at least have to agree that it is stupid, because if we do that as a species, we'll go extinct, and then we won't be doing it any more. But given that we do put vastly more resources into children than birds, it is also entirely sensible that we protect that investment by valuing children vastly more than birds. This is true regardless of the relative cognitive abilities of children at a certain age and adult birds. It is also true regardless of birth defects.
The second principle arises from future potential. You touched on this briefly, but rather rapidly concluded that non-developing babies were as valuable to us as developing babies. But I don't see that this is the case; in societies which are much more pressed for resources, imperfect babies are not given the same care as normal ones. Also, interactions with animals are very common, as are interactions with normal children; interactions with severely defective children are rare. Why not conclude that people just fail to distinguish, due to lack of practice, between normal children with enormous potential (and who are, of course, utterly vital to the continuation of our species) and children who have been born with serious genetic or other abnormalities that robs them of that potential? I see religions promoting equal treatment here, but we already see differential treatment on the basis of minor differences in potential (e.g. in education, we put substantially more effort into people with somewhat better academic performance), so future potential is clearly an important consideration in many aspects of human interaction. (Note also that an important part of the potential of humans is to give birth to and raise more humans, which is rather an important thing for any species, and would seem to justify some special attention.)
The third principle is based on intrinsic aesthetics. Seeing children injured, or even seeing them in conditions where we imagine they would be injured, is, for most people, profoundly disturbing. This empathetic emotion is extremely valuable in building and maintaining complex, functioning human societies. We don't, typically, have the same instinctive reaction towards other animals; for most people it's much weaker. This could be because we're trained that way, but again, this seems maladaptive. So part of our justification for treating children with limited potential differently than animals with similar potential is that it is simply profoundly disturbing for us to mistreat children; it clashes directly with the mammalian suite of emotions. Since this line of reasoning purely involves aesthetics, it makes our treatment of animals and humans with birth defects more of a luxury; if condtions are not too bad, we can have an environment which is pleasant in that we don't injure/torture/do anything uncomfortable-seeming with children with birth defects, say. If conditions are even more favorable, we can do the same thing with animals.
If any one of these three principles is an important consideration--and I think they all are--it invalidates or at least casts very serious doubt upon your claim that animal rights extremists are on higher moral ground. In particular, they are elevating
When vat-grown tissues are ready, I'll happily buy them. Should I have the opportunity, I will also support governmental research funding to assist this endeavor. I am unlikely to support new-harvest directly because I don't have the background--nor do they list the publication record--to evaluate the promise of and problems with their approaches.
You have demonstrated your consistency--which is admirable--but you neglected to explain why you think that animals and children have the same moral status. I'm curious about this, as most people seem to come to a different conclusion.
Also, there are lots of patents on products held by people who did the original testing. If you buy the products from those people directly, you're paying them for having done something immoral. Isn't that tacitly supporting their actions? If you buy from their competitors, they *still* get direct financial compensation via patents. So I'm not sure it's quite so clear how to mesh the absurdity of wasting knowledge with the moral danger of supporting an action you oppose.
ALF fits the loose definition of a group, even if it's not formally and hierarchically organized. There are places to send press releases, a web site, etc.; it's just a group with a very unusual set of membership criteria. I agree that it is not a group in the same way that PETA is a group.
But I've seen PETA protesting against animal experiments near where I work. They sure put a lot of time and effort into opposing behavioral task experiments where the animals have to be comfortable and calm in order to get good data. The researchers even have to cancel their experiments if some construction work is being done nearby because the noise spooks the monkeys too much. The protesters didn't know the difference between a fear grimace and a facial expression indicating pain in monkeys, and they have any idea what the experiments were trying to show.
So PETA is certainly involved in senseless opposition to animal experiments. It would have made a much larger difference in animal welfare if the same number of people had gone into grocery stores, stood by the eggs, and informed people about which company treated their chickens the best. I always wonder about that when I'm buying eggs.
Personal acts need not be nice. Some snake venom is excruciatingly painful (being crushed isn't too swell either).
And one can generally assume that Kosher food is prepared according to a special set of rules; if the demand were there, I imagine one could set things up such that one could be equally confident in the treatment of animals.
If it had eyes or a mother, yes, I may well eat it. I'll try to avoid giving food animals a miserable existence, but until there's a suitable alternative (reasonably convenient, with no health/performance side effects), I'll be an omnivore.
Suppose that the cosmetic product for the face is sunblock--to prevent skin cancer--or an acne medication that is designed to prevent severe acne that causes life-long scars. Maybe it is a topical antibiotic to treat skin infections. What then? Not everything is just "lip gloss", and as other posters have mentioned, the products that are testing-free are free of testing because they only use compounds that have already been tested. I fully support minimizing animal testing of cosmetics; if you make yet another shampoo with methylisothiozolinone, you don't need to test it yet again. But if you're trying to do something different (better!), then I think that not accidentally blinding people is a good idea. I also think that it's a good idea to try to do things better, since I like soap, shampoo, antibiotics, sunblock, etc..
If you're saying that there's a moral equivalence between abusing children and animal testing, then your answer is probably that all of these products are morally unacceptable until we find a different way to test them. To which I would respond: what about the moral culpability of people getting skin cancer when we could have prevented it, and how do you come to the conclusion that the two are equivalent? Should we, for example, charge people for vehicular avianslaughter if they hit a bird with their car unintentionally? Should we have safety regulations for windows so that they look much more like solid objects so that birds won't fly into them and die, much like we have regulations for balcony railings so people don't fall off?
It's unclear to me that you've really thought through the implications of your (apparent) proposal.
That said, there was a fifth reason that another poster gave that strikes me as quite likely:
(5) They like cute animals. Research is often done with cute animals, but we don't eat cute animals. They oppose the research not because of the pain and suffering per se, but because they feel uncomfortable thinking about something cute and fuzzy that might be suffering (or might not--but if something is cute you don't want to see any possible damage to it at all, so whether there's any pain is irrelevant).
We eat too much meat, but it is also the case that vegetarians have to watch what they eat much more than people who eat meat in moderation or they'll run short on protein or iron; if they're vegans, they have to be careful about calcium, too. People who don't digest beans well have additional problems, and men are probably better off not eating too many soy products due to the estrogen-like compounds most of them contain (fermented soy products like tempeh are okay; tofu usually is more iffy).
Fortunately for vegetarians, fortification with vitamins removes some of the need to eat meat, and vitamin pills take care of most of the rest. Unfortunately, battery hens are not, in most cases, treated any better than chickens raised for meat. Also, vitamins often come from animal sources. For example, fish oil is a very common source for Vitamin D. (It can be made with yeast instead; but the fish-oil vitamin D is more easily converted into the active form, so vitamin pills tend to use fish oil as a source.)
Anyway, the point remains: it takes more attention to what you eat to be a healthy vegetarian (with meat-eaters, they need to pay more attention to *not* eating more than they should), and if you really want to be consistent, you have to research products that most people don't think about.
But animals get eaten all the time in the wild. Is that not okay? If it is okay, wouldn't it also be okay if we, say, treated livestock fairly well, killed the animals humanely, and then ate them? It's a more pleasant life than most of them would have in the wild. (Especially for domesticated animals; many of them either get raised by us or go extinct.)
If you believe that we have a strong moral duty to protect animals and prevent their suffering, isn't your first priority to stop using animals for food? Many of the animals we eat are raised and killed in deplorable conditions; even the best facilities are unlikely to meet minimum standards for the ethical treatment of animals for scientific research. And with research, we gain something permanent: knowledge about how living systems work, which can be applied to produce a higher quality of life for humans (and for animals, should we want to--veterinary science, for example, has benefitted substantially from all the research we've done in the biological sciences and medicine!). With food animals, we just get food, which we then eat, and then it's gone.
(Annoyingly enough, we've evolved to be omnivores and have to be especially careful with our diet if we neglect any part of a normal omnivorous diet.)
So that leaves us with a question: why do groups like PETA and ALF focus their attention on research when they haven't got nearly enough manpower to make an impact on the worst abuses in the food industry, much less cover everything down to the relatively minor cases of animals used for vision research?
I can think of four possibilities.
(1) They're ignorant. Despite it being their mission to treat animals ethically, and despite the discomfort of, say, chicken-rearing warehouses being well documented, they don't realize how much suffering is being caused by that in comparison to all research put together. Since this supposedly what they care about, and the information is available, it has to be willful ignorance.
(2) They're luddites. Despite the amazing advances in health and medicine coming from research, and the extraordinarly broad evidence that animal research is essential in narrowing down ideas for treatments to those which are actually promising to humans, they distrust research and science. Perhaps they actively long for a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where we were plagued by a host of pathogens and had few methods to alleviate pain and suffering. Or perhaps they notice that our advanced technology has done a lot of damage to the planet, and are too lazy to figure out how technology should be used well; it's much easier just to think it should all go.
(3) They're cowards. They know much worse abuses exist, but they're afraid of powerful corporate interests, and by harassing researchers who are relatively isolated and poor compared to multinational food conglomerates, they can make themselves feel like they're doing something without having to risk the consequences that might accompany taking on the real problem.
(4) They long for a polarizing wedge issue that no longer exists. Animal testing used to be much less humane than it is now; but after the initial animal rights movement pointed that out, and research indicated that our self-interested assumptions that animals didn't feel pain were not borne out by evidence, the protocols have been modified to greatly reduce any suffering. That doesn't leave much room to be an activist; where's the fun in that? So, even though the battle has been won, perhaps some people want to keep fighting it.
None of these hypotheses is particularly flattering, and most of them boil down to animal rights activists being ignorant, hypocritical, or both.
And some of the moral protests are ill-informed. Suppose you're developing a new cosmetic product to be used on the face. Anything that people might put on their face could get in their eyes. What do you do? (By extension: is the claim that all cosmetics are bad and shouldn't be used? That we should blind people in order to test cosmetics? Seriously--what is the proposal here?)
It depends what you want out of your game. If you want to pick it up, play the kinds of characters you're supposed to for a few sessions, and then move on to something else, SR4 is probably better than earlier versions. It's simple to pick up, and by the time you've figured out enough of the shockingly problematic aspects of the rules, you're done, and are playing some other game.
Earlier versions of SR had remarkable flexibility for a non-generic game setting (i.e. not Rifts, not HERO), due to the core mechanics. Apparently, the decision was made to use a new WoD dice scheme (which does not have this flexibility) instead of trying to make simple and consistent rules while keeping the core mechanic.
So I wouldn't recommend SR4 for a long-term campaign or for players who like to run unusual sets of characters and still expect the rules to do anything but break in weird and amusing ways, such as it being just as easy to shoot someone running through a crowd at great distance whether or not you're wearing a blindfold, or it being next to impossible for even a master marksman to kill an unarmed human with one shot from a large-caliber pistol. But if you want to grab something quickly and experience a cross cyberpunk/magic setting...well, it's not going to be quick, but it's faster than it used to be.
The jury is still out on whether this strategy will pay off for Shadowrun in the long run. I have approximately $1200 of Shadowrun products on my shelves despite having essentially not played in the past decade, partly because I used to enjoy the plots and fiction, and partly because I appreciated the mechanics and wanted to stay up to date in case I had time to play again. But I have $0 of SR4 products, and will continue to buy $0 of SR4 products, because SR4 isn't robust enough to be worth my attention. Once the initial wave of excitement wears off, it doesn't take the loss of very many customers like me in order for the Shadowrun franchise to be worse off rather than better by making a product that is easy to pick up but with less reason to become a devotee.
(In case you're wondering, the SR4 is not worth my time because the system doesn't work over a wide enough range of abilities to adequately cover the normal range in humans--for very small or large numbers of dice, penalties become either insurmountable or negligible, which basically means that the system breaks down and the outcomes have to be adjudicated by the GM. If I wanted a system that had to be adjudicated by the GM, I wouldn't use dice at all.)
If you build cities on the edges of oceans, and grow crops in areas that are hard to irrigate, then yes, it is bad if the world heats up--at the very least you have to move a lot of expensive infrastructure.
If you build cities on the edges of flowing water and grow crops in areas that are in danger of getting frost, then yes, it is bad if the world cools down--again, you have to move a lot of expensive infrastructure.
Humans have increased CO2 levels in a hundred years to levels that have not been seen in millions. We're way outside the range for which the ecosystem has evolved. Is this bad? Maybe. Is it disruptive to existing ecosystems and economies? Most likely. Would we rather be less disrupted? Most likely.
Many companies have as their goal to do better than their competitors, preferably to the point where all their competitors are out of business. That's not illegal.
What is illegal is generating and using a monopoly to hurt consumers.
So, giving away software for free is fine, even if your goal is to put non-free software out of business. What is not fine is then charging exhorbatently for your product after there are no longer any competitors in the marketplace.
It's next to impossible to do that with GPLed code, because even if you relicense the code, the last GPLed version is still Free. Further, anyone can fork the code if they feel like it, so it's really hard to maintain a "monopoly" when there's any pressure for diversity or specialization. But, if someone figures out some way to use the GPL to hurt consumers, the appropriate time to bring a case would be then, when the damage is being done.
If some commercial software vendors cannot come up with any software that people are willing to pay for, that is unfortunate for them. They should work on something else. This is business. If your product is not needed, get out of the marketplace.
(You should try suing Wikipedia for dumping its encyclopedia, too while you're at it.)
I inferred what your position was, but I still think you were too generous in characterizing what they're doing as "logic". I can see where they're coming from: illogical association of everything relating to genomics and biotechnology with a catchy scare-word, biopiracy.
It's not logical to be unable and unwilling to distinguish baby from bathwater.
I can see some sort of process behind the selection of Google, but to call it logic seems unreasonably generous.
They're criticizing anything that has to do with obtaining biological knowledge from different environments. For example, they criticize Venter from having expiditions send him seawater samples, almost exclusively from international waters. That's it. He's taking seawater samples, and somehow this is piracy? Nobody owns the water, or the organisms in the water, or the genes in the organisms in the water, and by taking it he's not depriving anyone of anything. Calling that biopiracy is absurd.
It's the height of sensationalist idiocy. The site owners seem unable to distinguish between corporate thuggery (e.g. terminator seeds) and biological research of immense benefit to humanity (e.g. figuring out the genetic makeup of life). There are very serious concerns regarding how companies treat drugs, patents, genes, but it's essential to distinguish between the abuse of an area of research and research itself.
I get the feeling that if these guys had been around 300,000 years ago, they'd object to using fire to cook with because one guy hit another guy with a burning stick. Fire is therefore evil! If you have a fireplace, that makes you a pyromurderer!
Ubuntu doesn't prevent the creation of a root password, that's just not the default.
I believe that
sudo su -
passwd
will let you set the root password, after which you can log in as root.
Sleep deprivation is a short-term antidepressant (which works until the person wakes up). Google for the relevant terms to find lots of links, e.g. http://www.psycom.net/depression.central.sleepdep. html).
It used to be that when people had sex, they tended to have children (no birth control). If the two people are not married (or barely know each other), then there are likely not enough support structures in place to take care of the child. The prohibition against sex can be viewed as a motivation to protect children.
With the advent of effective birth control, the rules have changed somewhat. Now, in many cases, what was once a protective edict is a historical, arbitrary edict--enshrined, unchanging, in a religious text. It's hard enough to follow those edicts which contradict predispositions but are for our own good and the good of society without adding in extra ones that aren't even for our own good any more!
A liberal view of religion might try to look past the exact restriction to figure out why it is there, and modify it somewhat as conditions change. Or, you could just insist that because it was useful and necessary 4500 years ago, it must be useful and necessary now, or that God likes setting arbitrary difficult-to-follow rules.
If you want to rapidly sort male mosquitos, you can use existing technology designed to separate fluorescent objects from non-fluorescent objects. An easy way to make male mosquitos glow is to make a male-specific tissue glow. Hence, the male gonad. It's an easy way to select male mosquitos.
Making mosquitos that don't bite people is pointless, as they need blood to reproduce--easier to just kill them or use sterile males to outcompete fertile males. Making mosquitos that don't transmit pathogens is extremely difficult, as different pathogens survive in different ways--and there is a good deal of research into how this happens.
Mosquitos do not contract diseases carried by mammals because they are insects. The biochemistry is different, and most diseases rely upon very specific biochemistry. Furthermore, we could drink a lot of blood and not contract that many diseases, because digestion is a nasty process. Eating raw flesh is just as bad as drinking blood from that perspective.
The author's whole premise is flawed. He's approaching it as though MA is attempting to have a low-cost, widely deployed document system right now.
He doesn't address the crucial point which is that data is important and needs to be accessible. It's very hard to guarantee that when using a proprietary product using a closed format. Maybe it's the most common now, but what if you want to read government records 50 years from now? Copying the data should be easy enough (data is data), but finding something that will read Word is a lot harder. Nothing will read OpenDocument format *either*, but at least it's spelled out.
If you view government business as transient, or you rigorously print and file every document ever created, and electronically index the paper documents in an open format, then the issue goes away. Otherwise, Microsoft simply cannot provide this service with a closed format. Nobody can provide the service with a closed format. That's the key issue to me.
Prendergast does make some valid (albeit overstressed) points about potential costs of switching document formats. He neglects to mention points (such as OO being free as in beer, and MS stuff being free as in "$$$, unless you threaten to switch to Linux, in which case it's only $$") that would suggest a potentially lower cost and greater accessibility for ODF documents. But if the principle is that "government documents should be preserved for posterity", then the practical argument about greater cost is only relevant to the extent that you're willing to compromise on principles due to economic reality.
Academic modeling of an economy is a good start towards understanding how it works beyond a vague gut-feeling. If they don't care about their own economy, they shouldn't study it. Otherwise, they might learn something useful.
"Ok, so now we explicitly allow Mozilla."
How, exactly? Why are you allowed to allow Mozilla? Can you likewise allow SpyVirusBotWare? If you can, easily, you're liable to do it by mistake, which makes it a bad security practice. If you can't do it easily, it limits flexibility.
The point is that Default Allow is *not* a stupid idea for systems that need to be both flexible and secure. You Default Allow in those areas where you need flexibility--for example, allowing admins to install programs, because you trust that they know what they're doing. You Default Deny in those areas where you don't need flexibility--scripts downloaded from the internet probably shouldn't be reformatting your hard drive and flashing your BIOS.
But that won't work. The software will automatically be denied whether or not you read about it--otherwise it requires user education, which is bad.
If it's default accept for tech support and default deny for users, that's better. Kind of like root access on Unix machines. But that's hardly a novel concept.
Like installing malware?
No, like installing Firefox.
If you're writing open source software, and you don't have the backing of AOL or IBM, how would you get your software validated? If it wasn't validated, why would anyone use it?
Sounds like a perfect lock-in model for huge corporate vendors.
If it's too easy to get your stuff validated, then malware, spyware, and the like will all get validated too. We're then back to Default Permit.
New Scientist has a strong tendency towards sensational articles (lots of stuff about difficult-to-test theories of quantum mechanics and cosmology, very little about well-tested and important research in developmental biology in fruit flies). It also has a bad habit of writing catchy-sounding covers that have barely anything to do with what the article inside is actually about.
They don't do a horrible job, but I would read something less sensational if I wanted to be informed about science. Science News is pretty good. It does tend to be just news (no lengthy reviews), but the news is well written.