TY - JOUR
AU - Harris, John
AB - Abstract This commentary examines relationships between bioethics, research, and advances in technology. It explores the role of bioethicists in promulgating ‘blue skies’ thinking which might well be crucial in challenging the ‘received wisdom’ on how the regulation of technologies should proceed. bioethics, blue skies philosophy, ethics, science, technology Introduction On a recent trip to up-state New York, I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in neighbouring Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Norman Rockwell is one of the most famous illustrators of the last century producing distinguished, humorous, and beautifully drawn work on a regular basis over more than fifty years, for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications. There I saw a number of political interventions, not by an academic, nor a scientist, but by an artist and illustrator. This is of course a distinguished tradition dating back, in its self-conscious form, at least to Aristophanes, but continuing through most significant artists in most media and most times. I am thinking of Norman Rockwell's famous illustrations of and glosses upon Franklin D. Roosevelt's ‘Four Freedoms’, which he outlined in a speech to the United States' (US) Congress in 1941.1 These Freedoms are: My thoughts here relate to Freedom of Speech. Rockwell represents this in a picture of a meeting in a local town hall where an upright young man is obviously making a courageous and controversial speech, telling it like it is and not counting the cost, amidst some admiring, and some frankly apprehensive, glances from other members of the audience.2 Freedom of Speech; Freedom of Religion or Worship; Freedom from Want; and Freedom from Fear. Bioethics, which involves judgements about, and sometimes recommendations concerning, sensitive issues of both private morality and public policy are often a bit like Rockwell's painting. Like all good citizens, and indeed like all competent individuals, bioethicists thus have certain general obligations to ‘tell it like it is’ and to give honest counsel. This is particularly pertinent in the arena of technological advances, given the significant role of bioethics in influencing how, or indeed, whether technologies are permitted to be used or not. As bioethicists, we have a moral duty to advance the public good and not just defend the prudential illusion of precautionary approaches, which I discuss in more detail below. As bioethicists, we have also a responsibility to bioethics itself. This is the responsibility not simply to apply old, established, or borrowed principles and methods to the dilemmas of science or medicine and to our interactions with the biosphere, but to carry out original ‘blue skies’ research of our own. Medical ethics, bioethics, and now ‘science ethics’ have traditionally been thought of as applied disciplines under the generic term ‘applied ethics’. Nothing could be farther from the truth. An applied discipline has to have something to apply; bioethics cannot simply rely on ‘truths’ and methodologies discovered or developed in different times and places. We have to be at the cutting edge if we are to have something worth saying and if we are to have the credentials to convince others that this might be the case. In recent times, some of those others have included governments and powerful institutions. It is to this relationship that we must now turn. Freedom and Citizenship In emphasising the Four Freedoms, Roosevelt drew attention to the role of citizenship in a democracy. The freedoms he identified are required by citizens for the proper exercise of their responsibilities, a role re-affirmed, literally as I write, by the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, in a speech made to the people of Burma and to the wider world in which he explained the role of citizens in relation to the democratic state.3 This is a state in which citizens are constantly monitoring and indeed legitimating their government by their participation in civil society. All of us are in the business of giving advice to government. Sometimes we do it through the ballot box, sometimes by voting with our feet and abstaining. Equally such advice can be given by expressing our satisfaction and dissatisfaction in more informal ways. Advice to government consists of making proposals for proposals. Governments propose legislation, either in election manifestos or in ongoing summaries of their legislative programme for the next Parliament, Senate, or Congress. Those academics, scientists, or other private citizens who hope to have ‘impact’ also often choose to make policy recommendations or, more modestly, to offer advice to government, or more directly to the electorate, as to what should or not be done or permitted to be done. Their (our) credentials for so doing are partly based on our particular expertise, on our research; and perhaps partly on our experience in the field of public policy itself and in our reputation in that field or, as that rather strange and possibly pretentious beast: the ‘public intellectual’. However, the degree to which academics and scientists, when they make statements or draw conclusions of direct or indirect relevance to public policy, are actually attempting to influence that policy in a particular direction, or indeed to make specific policy proposals, or whether they should be taken as so doing, is a highly nuanced and complex process. This process is further complicated by the Internet, which makes it possible for academic arguments which may have previously gathered dust on bookshelves or indeed in the minds of other academics, to be transmitted across the globe and accessible to the interpretation of millions of readers within seconds. This paper is an attempt to elucidate some of the dimensions and problems of that process and the degrees of responsibility for what happens and what does not happen that are part and parcel of what it is to be a citizen who speaks out on public issues, or even a citizen who exercises freedom of speech.4 On the one hand, bioethicists have a duty to explore complex issues, and indeed enjoy the freedom to do so, whether this be through ‘blue-skies’ philosophical hypothetical cases, or using scenarios rooted in reality. On the other hand, the Internet and its role in the mass-marketing of academic arguments that may be intended for a niche audience burden us with certain responsibilities while writing. Changing Games We are all accountable for what we say and do, and equally accountable for what we do not say and do. But resulting from a literally game-changing development, what we say or do these days in our role as bioethicists, as academics and as citizens, unlike the brave remarks of Rockwell's citizen, is either actually, or potentially in the public domain. We are responsible in two ways: accountable and liable (to use Herbert Hart's famous terminology)5 on the one hand, and potentially, and often actually, talking to and impacting on many millions of people on the other hand. This comes about because of the dramatic possibilities created by the Internet (‘The Cloud’), for words to be streamed onto the Internet from a mobile phone or indeed any device connected or connectable to the World Wide Web. Equally works produced in the sober context of the academy or in the pages of learned journals may instantly find their way into the cloud in a bowdlerised or un-nuanced form. I have discussed some dimensions of this problem elsewhere.6 Here, I want to enlarge upon the responsibilities that flow from the fact that all our words that are recordable or transmissible electronically may end up on the Internet. Once in the Cloud they may well last forever and be receivable in all places; an indelible, if insignificant, contribution to knowledge or ignorance and to public affairs. It is this impact and its consequences and the question of whether or not this impact is intended or even anticipated, that concerns us here. If morality is the science of the good, as I believe it to be, then ethics is the study of that science. There are two kinds of bioethicists. One I perhaps unjustly associate with the country which Roosevelt himself represented is like the mother who says to her daughter ‘go and see what your little brother is doing and tell him to stop! ’ These bioethicists go and see what doctors and medical and life scientists are doing and very often tell them to stop or, even more helpfully, that they should never have started. I count myself as belonging to the other sort. When I go and see what the medical and life scientists are doing, and even what the doctors and nurses are doing, I usually think ‘great work guys, keep it up!’ This approach is of course widespread and it perhaps mirrors another distinction between clinical and analytic bioethics. There are of course exceptions, and these need to be stamped on and if necessary stamped out; but we do not represent bioethics well when we confine our role to that of watchdog. Nor do we serve the public good or even individual rights when we take too precautionary an approach. The Precautionary Principle7 UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee (IBC), reflecting on the ethics of tinkering with the genes, has maintained that ‘the human genome must be preserved as common heritage of humanity’.8 A number of bizarre assumptions are involved here: first, that our present point in evolution is unambiguously good and not susceptible to improvement; and second, it is assumed that the course of evolution, if left alone, will continue to improve things for humankind or at least not make them worse. The incompatibility of these two assumptions is seldom noticed. The common heritage of humanity is a result of evolutionary change. Unless we can compare the future progress of evolution uncontaminated by manipulation of the human genome with its progress influenced by any proposed genetic manipulations, we cannot know which would be best and hence where precaution lies.9 Put more prosaically, it is unclear why a precautionary approach should apply only to proposed changes rather than to the status quo. In the absence of reliable predictive knowledge as to how dangerous leaving things alone may prove, we have no rational basis for a precautionary approach which prioritises the status quo. The fatuousness of the precautionary principle was exposed by the immortal F.M. Cornford in his seminal work on political philosophy, the Microcosmograhia Academica as ‘The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent’: The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case … Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.10 It follows from the ‘Fair Trial Argument’ (another argument brilliantly summarised by Cornford) that a ‘Fair Trial ought only to be given to systems which already exist, not to proposed alternatives’. It is to this principle that bioethicists seem to be adhering when choosing to give the present state of the human genome a superior status over future or previous genomes in human evolution. Too often, bioethics has been synonymous with conservatism, with protecting the status quo; bioethics must be open to the advocacy of decisive action. Precaution misplaced can, and often does, cost as many or even more lives than does reckless enthusiasm. While conservatism may be ingrained in human nature for evolutionary reasons, bioethicists and philosophers have a duty to think beyond gut feelings or evolved pro-social responses and present arguments based on rational judgement. Blue Skies Philosophy Most of bioethics sees itself as an ‘applied’ activity, applied philosophy, and applied social science. What is sometimes neglected is what we might call ‘blue skies’ philosophy and ‘blue skies’ ethics, which can be equally applicable and impact producing. We are familiar with the idea of ‘blue skies research’: science that seeks answers without limits and without fear of, and perhaps even consideration of, consequences. Blue skies research is valued because targeted research – research designed to deliver a particular result – is often unsuccessful and following a question or a hypothesis literally wherever it leads has often produced spectacular results, as well as a satisfying journey of discovery. Belinda Linden has described the origins of the term ‘blue skies research’ as follows: The term ‘blue skies research’ derives from Julius Comroe, who explained in 1976 how scientific discoveries often arise from tortuous curiosity-driven paths, rather than a direct goal-driven route.11 Comroe used as his example a remark of Charles Wilson, President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defence and an opponent of basic research, who said: ‘I don't care what makes the grass green!’ Linden notes: Comroe claimed that Wilson might just as well have said, ‘I don't care what makes the sky blue!’ Comroe defended the need for basic research by describing the work of a British physicist called John Tyndall whose research in 186912 explained the blue colour of the sky by using a glass tube into which he introduced certain vapours. When illuminated, the tube filled with many fine particles. When a powerful beam of light focused on the tube in a dark room, a sky blue cloud filled the tube. Comroe describes how through this discovery, Tyndall's work explained many other unrelated concepts. His examples included the development of a test for optically pure air that was unable to develop bacteria … Tyndall also discovered 50 years before Fleming how penicillium bacteria could successfully destroy a mould13. He showed how a light beam followed a curved route, leading to the later development of the flexible gastroscope and bronchoscope.14 Tyndall's work therefore provided strong evidence to show that important discoveries are often curiosity-led rather than goal-driven. Other examples include Michael Faraday's research in 1833 which led to the development of semiconductors,15 and the recent development of the revolutionary substance ‘graphene’ which lead to the Nobel Prize for Physics being awarded to University of Manchester-based researchers, Geim and Novoselov, in 2010.16 Blue skies philosophy is not unrelated to blue skies science. It follows a line of reasoning, usually developed purely speculatively, wherever it leads and however startling, paradoxical, or challenging the conclusions. Jo Wolff has identified a rather less creditable reason that philosophers in particular might have for their blue skies activities: Philosophers become famous for arguing for a view that is highly surprising even to the point of being irritating, but is also resistant to easy refutation. The more paradoxical, or further from common sense, the better. Philosophy thrives on disagreement, and there is no pressure to come to an agreement. Indeed agreement is unhelpful as it cuts discussion short.17It is not only for fun or to be irritating (although it sometimes is for either or both of these reasons!), or indeed in the possibly vain (in two senses of that term) attempt to become famous, that philosophers pursue ‘blue skies’ ideas and follow their logic wherever it leads. Sometimes philosophers are also genuinely seeking to uncover the truth; or a truth or a part of the truth; to reveal facts about the world or about ourselves that might otherwise go unnoticed. The Repugnant Conclusion In his book, Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit outlines what he calls the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’. This Conclusion arises because, if we grant that a life that is barely worth living is better for that person than no life at all, we have a moral reason to produce new people so long as their lives are worth living, if only barely so. As Parfit explains: The Repugnant Conclusion: For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.18This larger population would be ‘better’ because, on the hypothesis that it is good to create a worthwhile life, it seems plausible to believe that more people enjoying a life that for them is worthwhile (albeit only barely so), the better! The logic of the argument seems to licence an ever increasing global population with an ever decreasing quality of life to the point at which such lives would still be worth living. In publishing this conclusion, Parfit was not advocating or even approving the creation of such a population. He was demonstrating, inter alia, a paradoxical conclusion of accepting certain premises and following their logic. The Survival Lottery In a paper I wrote while a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford in 1971 which was eventually published in 197519 I outlined the logic of, perhaps, an even more repugnant conclusion than that of Parfit. This conclusion was that given the assumption that it was morally important, perhaps even required, to maximise the innocent lives that could be saved, or the deaths that might be prevented, by the acceptance of any policy or practice, then, assuming the improvement of organ transplants to the point at which they could be described as safe, if there is a shortage of donor organs, the logic of life-saving might require that one innocent life should be sacrificed so long as two or more other lives might thereby be saved. Following this logic to what some would judge to be a reductio ad absurdum reveals a paradox in accepting certain moral imperatives, which requires resolution.20 I was not advocating or even approving the killing of one healthy person to save two or more in the circumstances described in my paper. I was pointing out how this follows from principles, which many advocate and practice. However, there are many compelling sources of the implementation of repugnant, but justifiable, conclusions in the real world. Coventry 1940 In 1939, British Intelligence obtained through the Polish Secret Service an example of the German cipher machine, known as ‘Enigma’. A team of cryptanalysts working at Bletchley Park succeeded in breaking the German Codes and were thus able to supply the Allies with much information about Axis plans. As a result, at 3 pm on 14 November 1940, the team at Bletchley intercepted a German signal which gave Churchill at least five hours' warning of the Coventry raid, which was a planned saturation bombing of the city. FW Winterbotham, the man responsible for passing information from what was dubbed ‘the most secret source’ to Churchill, saw the Prime Minister's dilemma as follows: If Churchill decided to evacuate Coventry, the press, indeed everybody, would know we had pre-knowledge of the raid and some counter-measure might be necessary to protect the source which would obviously become suspect. It also seemed to me … that there would be chaos if everyone tried to get out of the city in the few hours available and that if, for any reason, the raid was postponed … we should have put the source of our information at risk to no purpose.21As I noted in my book Violence & Responsibility, ‘Churchill had to balance the lives that might be saved by evacuating Coventry against the lives that might be lost by endangering the source and this cutting the Allies off from other information which might well shorten the war and save lives.’22 Probably many tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands more lives, were saved than were lost in Coventry. Coventry demonstrates that decisions not unlike those analysed in ‘The Survival Lottery’ are actually made and defended in the real world. While this may happen, and indeed may happen for the best, the philosophical principles that underpin and sometimes justify real actions and realpolitik do not themselves either advocate or license any particular course of action in the real world, with all its characteristically terrifying complexity. ‘Blue skies’ philosophy, of the sort demonstrated in the examples above and in many others, while usually intended to be taken seriously, is seldom intended to be ‘action guiding’ or to be taken as a recommendation, or as something advocated or even necessarily defended by philosophers. The same is true of science which might demonstrate how, for example, irreversible climate change might be triggered and hence how the world might be destroyed; or which shows how millions of people might be killed, by a mutation of the H5N1 virus, for example. In April of 2012, I spoke on scientific freedom at a meeting convened by The Royal Society in London which discussed the practical implications of H5N1 research.23 In 2011, two publicly funded research groups, one in the US and the other in the Netherlands, genetically modified the H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus so that it could be transmitted by an airborne route easily between ferrets. They were creatures that had been chosen because they were considered to be a good model and indeed a readily available animal model for the study of human disease. Avian flu is not easily ‘caught’ by humans but, where contracted, it has proved to have a high mortality rate. This research would enable the virus to be studied more effectively so that if it should naturally mutate into a form more transmissible to humans, treatments or preventive strategies could be more effectively developed. This and other recent research makes it clear that a small number of genetic changes could be made to H5N1, either via mutation or deliberately, to convert it to a pathogen easily transmissible between humans exposing us to the danger of a killer pandemic. Thus the steps necessary to study the dangers can also provide lessons in how to maximise those dangers, lessons which might interest malevolent extremists creating a so-called dual use technology capable of beneficial and harmful effects. The dangers of malevolent use led the US regulatory, or rather advisory body, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to recommend to two leading science journals, Science and Nature, that they suppress key parts of the scientific papers describing this research from publication lest the effectively free access to knowledge which scientific publication is designed to secure, should also provide terrorists with a ‘blueprint for bioterrorism’, presenting a major risk to public safety. The request by US government agencies to journals and scientists not to publish this research re-kindled a major debate with two related axes of disagreement. On the one hand, there is the question of the scope and limits of ‘scientific freedom’ and the very different sorts of justifications, both for such freedoms, and of limitations on that freedom. On the other hand, there is a debate about what might be considered to be two rival benefits of scientific freedom and two correlated rival dangers. These are the role of science and freedom of expression in protecting us all, individually and collectively, from present and future dangers and the fact that science can be, and has been, responsible, directly or indirectly, for creating a significant number of those dangers. However, the implications of important scientific endeavours are not to be taken as something the scientists are advocating, recommending, proposing, or defending. They are simply doing science and we are simply doing philosophy, or doing bioethics when they and we produce blue skies research. Green and White Papers Wolff's passage quoted above continues: In public policy, however, a report must be written, or a recommendation made, or a law or policy drafted, just as in science and social science a practical outcome is sought.'24This quote brings us nicely to two other colours that are of relevance here. There are also phenomena known as ‘Green Papers’ and ‘White Papers’, policy documents from time to time issued by departments of the UK government. Over the years, I have used analogies with Green and White papers to explain the difference between advocating something and defending it, between defending it and approving of it, and between all of these and proposing the imposing or lifting of regulatory or indeed criminal sanctions relating to it. The UK government defines Green and White Papers as follows: Green Papers are consultation documents produced by the Government. Often when a government department is considering introducing a new law, it will put together a discussion document called a Green Paper. The aim of this document is to allow people both inside and outside Parliament to debate the subject and give the department feedback on its suggestions. Copies of consultation documents such as Green Papers and White Papers which are produced by the Government are available on the related departmental websites.'25 White papers are documents produced by the government setting out details of future policy on a particular subject. A White Paper will often be the basis for a Bill to be put before Parliament. The White Paper allows the Government an opportunity to gather feedback before it formally presents the policies as a Bill.26The rough equivalent of ‘Green Papers’ in philosophy is an intermediate stage between blue skies philosophy and the philosophical equivalent of White Papers. I use the terms ‘rough’ and equivalent’ here because individual scholars are seldom in a position to influence, let alone initiate, public action and it would be risible for us to issue papers self-consciously offered as Green or White papers and expect them to be taken seriously, let alone hope that they would be so taken. The analogy with government papers is just that, it is intended to signal intent, the nature of the activity. However, I am not here issuing a White Paper recommending the adoption of a green and white light signalling system for published papers, nor yet a Green Paper suggesting its serious discussion. What I am doing is drawing attention to the different levels of approval or disapproval that may be signalled by following the logic of evidence and argument, wheresoever it leads. Think of prostitution, for example.27 It is conceivable that a defensible philosophical, legal, and socially responsible attitude to prostitution might be to suggest that it should not be illegal, nor criminalized and that none of the parties to it should be subject to criminal sanctions, nor necessarily to censure. This I take it is a mild, liberal position on prostitution, which is not a million miles from received opinion and government policy in most liberal democracies. However, to say something like this and even, perish the thought, produce arguments and evidence to support it is not thereby to approve of prostitution nor yet to defend nor advocate it. Someone who, like me, may find themselves defending such a position in public is not necessarily thereby recommending prostitution to their own son or daughter as a noble profession nor yet recommending it to anyone else's son or daughter, let alone inciting or encouraging them in the oldest profession. Moral Enhancement: A Clockwork Orange Morality is of course ‘action guiding’: that is its point. But blue skies philosophy is the name for those fundamental philosophical investigations that might inform moral philosophy and the principles of morality that flow from moral philosophy. Which brings us finally to the fundamental contrast between good and evil and the contemporary question of the extent to which our conceptions of good and evil or the attitudes and physiology that influence them are susceptible themselves of refinement or even enhancement. Good and evil seem to be symbiotically related, you seldom get one without the other. Classic definitions of either usually, for time honoured reasons, include the other. Understanding the nature of good and evil tells us something about the limit of our ability to control human behaviour, even with the best of motives. This is a topic of increasing academic interest; witness the contemporary debate on moral enhancement.28 Anthony Burgess, whose earthly powers29 were not far short of his intellectual prowess, anticipated the essence of a contemporary dilemma posed afresh by current interest in so-called moral enhancement. When Burgess published A Clockwork Orange in 1962, aversion therapy was being canvassed as a technique for moral enhancement. Aversion therapy has been defined as ‘a form of behavior therapy in which an aversive (causing a strong feeling of dislike or disgust) stimulus is paired with an undesirable behavior in order to reduce or eliminate that behavior’.30 In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess's anti-hero ‘Alex’, finds himself in prison being interviewed by the prison governor who tells him that no less a person than the Minister of the Interior wishes him to be the subject of an experiment to ‘turn the bad into the good’. Alex whose prison number is 6655321 is ‘offered’ an intervention that will enable him to be released from prison in a ‘little over a fortnight’ following a new ‘Reclamation Treatment’ which is clearly modelled on aversion therapy. It may not be nice to be good little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? … I realize sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer … And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good.31Alex 6655321 is beyond the power of prayer for many reasons, but one is that prayer would be directed to make him want to choose ethically, but the treatment he has received has deprived him of the ability to make an ethical choice. He has no alternative but to act in the ways in which he has been conditioned to respond. In this passage, Burgess is echoing John Milton's famous suggestion that God made man ‘just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ As I have argued elsewhere,32 when Milton has God say, earlier in the same passage, that mankind ‘had of me all he could have’, he is pointing out that while his God could have made falling impossible for us, even God could not have done so and left us free. Autonomy surely requires not only the possibility of falling but the freedom to choose to fall, and that same autonomy gives us self-sufficiency; ‘sufficient to have stood though free to fall’. Alex is beyond prayer because it would be pointless to pray to God to do things she could not do and remain true to her purposes for humankind. Concluding Remarks Offering advice, or more daringly, formulating policies directed to personal, and public good are fraught with dangers. These dangers have been exacerbated by the emergence of the Cloud,33 and one of them is the fact that we can no longer either choose or limit the audience for our remarks, however private the context in which we believe them to have been made. This is a game-changing development and it raises profound issues for freedom of speech and for the responsibility of all of us who speak, if not on the record, in a recordable or transmissible medium. This is the backdrop and the responsibility of all those who write and speak in the twenty-first century. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the stimulus and support of the Wellcome Strategic Programme The Human Body: its Scope Limits and Future (WT087439MF). 1 <http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/fdr-the-four-freedoms-speech-text/> accessed 1 December 2012. Interestingly, President Barack Obama recently made these freedoms the central theme of his address to the people of Burma on 19 November 2012. 2 <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574406903628933162.html> accessed 1 December 2012. 3 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUh6LaOH6mo> accessed 24 November 2012. 4 To speak freely is not of course the same as exercising freedom of speech. I (usually) speak freely when I order a morning coffee in the bar across the street, but only exceptional circumstances make this an issue of free speech. 5 HLA Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1968) 210 ff. 6 J Harris, ‘The Cloud and Freedom of Speech’ (2013) J Med E (in press). doi:10.1136/medethics-2012-100862. 7 Søren Holm and I discussed this principle in J Harris and S Holm. ‘Extended Lifespan and the Paradox of Precaution’(2002) 27 (3) J Med Phil 355. 8 UNESCO Press Release No. 97-29. See also UNESCO, Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights Published by UNESCO, 3 December 1997; J Harris, On Cloning (Routledge, London 2004) 50, 94; see also Harris and Holm, n 7, where we detail the incoherence to which I refer. 9 While some maintain that human evolution of the Darwinian sort is at an end because most humans now survive long enough to reproduce, this view overlooks the role of parasites in evolution. It also of course ignores our deliberate interventions in the evolutionary process. 10 FM Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica (Bowes and Bowes, London 1908) (this edition 1966). 11 B Linden, ‘Basic Blue Skies Research in the UK: Are We Losing Out?’ (2008) 3 (1) Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration 3, drawing on J Comroe, ‘Retrospectroscope—What Makes the Sky Blue?’ (1976) 113 (2) American Review Respiratory Disease 219. 12 J Tyndall, ‘On the Blue Colour of the Sky—the Polarisation of Skylight and On the Polarisation of Light by Cloudy Matter Generally’ (1869) 34 Phil Mag 384. 13 J Tyndall, ‘The Optical Deportment in the Atmosphere in Relation to the Phenomena of Putrefaction and Infection’ (1877) 166 Philosophical Transcripts 27. 14 S Ikeda, Atlas of Flexible Bronchofibroscopy (University Park Press, Baltimore 1971). 15 GL Pearson and WH Brattain, ‘History of Semiconductor Research’ (1955) 43 (12) Proc IRE 1794. 16 AK Geim and KS Novoselov, ‘The Rise of Graphene’ (2007) 6 (3) Nat Materials 183. 17 J Wolff, Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge, London 2011) 3. 18 D Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1984) 388. 19 J Harris, ‘The Survival Lottery’ (1975) 50 Philosophy 81. 20 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_survival_lottery> accessed 5 December 2012. 21 FW Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1974). There are conflicting accounts of just how much warning Churchill had of the raid, see A Cave Brown, A Bodyguard of Lies (WH Allen/Virgin Books, London 1976) and RV Jones, Most Secret War (Coronet, London 1979) 204. 22 J Harris, Violence & Responsibility (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1980) 91. 23 <http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/viruses/> accessed 5 December 2012. 24 Wolff, n 17, 3. 25 <http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/green-papers/> accessed 5 December 2012. 26 <http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/white-papers/> accessed 5 December 2012. 27 See generally J Harris, The Value of Life (Routledge, London 1985). 28 T Douglas, ‘Moral Enhancement’ (2008) 25 J Applied Phil 228; I Persson and J Savulescu, ‘The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity’ (2008) 25 J Applied Phil 162; see also J Harris ‘Moral Enhancement and Freedom’ MJ Crockett, L Clark, M Hauser, and others, ‘Serotonin Selectively Influences Moral Judgment and Behavior Through Effects on Harm Aversion’ (2010) 107 Proc Nat’l Acad Sci USA 17433; J Harris and S Chan, ‘Moral Behaviour is Not What It Seems’ (2010) 107 (50) Proc Nat'l Acad Sci E183; S Chan and J Harris, ‘Moral Enhancement and Pro-social Behaviour’ (2011) 37 J Med E 130. 29 A Burgess, Earthly Powers (Hutchinson, London 1980). 30 ‘Aversion Therapy—Causes, Effects, Withdrawal, Drug, Used, Medication, Brain, Skills’ <http://www.minddisorders.com/A-Br/Aversion-therapy.html#b#ixzz28PRoBek2> accessed 5 December 2012. 31 A Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (Penguin Books, London 1972) 76. 32 J Harris ‘Moral Enhancement and Freedom’ (2011) 25 (2) Bioethics 102. 33 Harris ‘The Cloud and Freedom of Speech’, n 6. © The Author [2013]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - IN SEARCH OF BLUE SKIES: SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY
JF - Medical Law Review
DO - 10.1093/medlaw/fwt002
DA - 2013-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/in-search-of-blue-skies-science-ethics-and-advances-in-technology-fOXQM919y5
SP - 131
EP - 145
VL - 21
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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