(Cross-posted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.) 

When Hollywood movies depict mutated human beings — sometimes beautifully, grotesquely, or bizarrely transformed in appearance from the Homo sapiens norm — they draw upon traditions that are thousands of years old. Throughout recorded history, human myths, legends, and folktales have described recognisably anthropomorphic beings that nonetheless deviate from species-typical human morphology and/or possess greater than human powers.

Sometimes we also find them in travellers' tales and natural histories, which describe strange, yet humanlike, beings that dwell somewhere beyond the well-mapped places — perhaps, for pre-modern Europeans, in exotic regions of Africa or Asia — or beyond all maps in unknown lands, in Terra Incognita. These days, Terra Incognita is more likely to be another planet than an inaccessible part of the the Earth, though the more literal idea of an unknown land on our own planet has not been lost entirely, as with the various versions of King Kong and the extraordinary killer apes in Michael Crichton's novel Congo and its movie adaptation.

The eternally-fascinating idea of a powerful quasi-human creature took its first recognisably science-fictional manifestation in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Mary Shelley's Frankenstein depicted the use of science to manufacture life — the famous monster.

As described by Shelley, Victor Frankenstein has researched magical and similar lore before turning to science, and he exercises a power that had previously (in many earlier narratives) been portrayed as the domain of magicians or even gods. He is, indeed, a figure of Prometheus, bringing new powers to the human realm, but a quintessentially modern Prometheus, as intimated in the book's sub-title, one whose dubious gift (as Shelley portrays it) is the fire of science.

Then the idea of mutation gained in scientific rigour and credibility, opening up enormous possibilities for narratives of super powers and scientifically-rationalised transformations. Early-twentieth-century scientists began to speculate that spontaneous mutation of life forms played a role in the evolution of species, providing biologist with a far more powerful account of how natural selection could operate (since natural selection needs a source of differences, as well as environmental features that select some differences rather than others, and a coding mechanism by which "successful" variations can be passed on to later generations).

Biological science took a dramatic step forward in 1927, when H.J. Muller used irradiation to bring about mutations in fruit flies. The possibility of doing something similar to other animals, and particularly human beings, seized the imaginations of many story-tellers.

Stories of mutated humans first became common in the science fiction magazines of the 1930s, with mutation often providing a rationalisation for narratives that described the exploits of superhumans. Of the many science-fictional tales from the 1930s that concerned superhuman beings, Olaf Stapledon's novel Odd John (1935) is surely the best-known today and one of the finest of its kind ever written. Arguably, it was not equalled until the 1950s publication of More than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon. Here, Sturgeon depicts a group of mutants with psychic powers who can merge minds and form a single "gestalt" being of great power.
 
The explosion of the first atomic bombs in the 1940s, followed by continued nuclear testing in the 1940s and '50s, led to an even greater focus on genetic mutation in science fiction stories and movies. Among the mainstays of 1950s film were mutated monsters, such as the giant ants of Them! (1954). From this time, we see many more tales of mutated animals and humans. These include monsters, superheroes, supervillains, and freaks who belong readily to none of these categories but may nonetheless have strange powers.
 
Quite early in the history of narratives about superhuman mutants, authors saw the  possibility that a superior race or species might be subjected to persecution and forced to struggle. This theme is present in A. E. Van Vogt's Slan (which started to be serialized in 1940), and has since become most prominent in the popular  X-Men comic book, television, and movie, franchise (which commenced in the first X-Men comics in 1963).

In the world of X-Men, some mutants, most notably the charismatic and vastly powerful Magneto, seek world domination, whether out of personal megalomania or from a sense that this is the only way to survive the persecutorial tendencies of Homo sapiens. Magneto himself shows mixed motives, but his undoubted megalomania has been induced, in part, by persecutions that he suffered even before his powers developed fully. By contrast, the X-Men attempt to protect humanity and bring about a reconciliation of Homo sapiens and Homo superior.

An important feature of the X-Men universe is that the mutants are not presented with repugnance or fear — indeed, the fear of mutants expressed by many  ordinary humans within the diegesis turns out to be counter-productive. When mutants are persecuted, it provokes some of the most dangerously powerful mutants to schemes of domination and revenge.

Most notably, the storyline is open to symbolic interpretions, according to which it is not about mutations and super powers at all, but about the persecution of minorities. Read in this way, the mutants can be analogues for many kinds of oppressed groups (such as African Americans, Jews, and homosexuals), and the many writers who have worked with the franchise have brought out these comparisons quite explicitly.

At the same time, the mutants can be read simply as social misfits and isolates — not unlike young people who read comic books and science fiction, and are frequently stigmatised as "nerds". For them (speaking here from observation and personal experience), even the "evil" mutants have a certain allure, and the battles between "good" and "evil" mutants function as a rather harmless power fantasy. Of course, Van Vogt's work depends on similar kind of identification by the readership: hence one half-mocking, half-serious catch-phrase of science fiction fandom, "Fans are Slans."

Popular culture is somewhat divided in its presentation of mutated humans, emphasising both that the idea is "cool" and that such beings could be dangerous to the rest of us who lack their powers. <a href="http://io9.com:80/393502/posthumans-rise-up-and-destroy-hollywood">Here's</a> an interesting discussion of Hollywood's depiction of superhuman or posthuman beings more generally, written by Charlie Jane Anders (with some interesting discussion in the comments that follow). Among other points, Anders suggests that the X-Men movies are something of an anomaly in Hollywood; their relatively sympathetic depiction of the superhuman mutants, who are their main characters, is atypical. Other Hollywood images of mutated human beings, so Anders argues, show them to be monstrous and dangerous, with no overt equivocation about it. Indeed, the most sympathetic Hollywood images of posthuman beings are those whose origin can be traced to superhero comics.

I'm sure that Anders is correct about this, and it's easily explicable. After all, there's plenty of fear in any community about others who may, for one reason or another, be disruptive of ordinary assumptions about how the world works. Give those suspicious "others" great powers, and they become even more troubling. At the same time, Hollywood seeks to entertain by the presentation of conflict, danger, and suspense, so it is always likely to depict anything new as dangerous, rather than innocuous or beneficial.

Yet Hollywood also gives a certain glamorous, alluring, "cool" quality to whatever science-fictional innovations it portrays, often cancelling out (all or much of) the technophobia implicit in its cultural products. As I and others have remarked in the past, the technologically-created dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and its sequels actually end up seeming more cool than they are dangerous, and much the same applies to the grim, merciless, unhesitatingly homicidal cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.

For reasons like these, Hollywood's anti-mutant war is a rather equivocal one after all — covertly, if not overtly, it tends to produce a sub-text that mutants are cool as well as dangerous (as are cyborgs, robots, modern-day dinosaurs, and aliens from space). In this sense, its texts are at war with themselves as much as with science and technology, and (short of some kind of large-scale sociological study) it can be difficult to gauge the net effect on audiences. The technophobic elements may predominate on balance — at least some of the time, or even much of the time — and they are certainly worth exposing and challenging, but the sub-text of techno-allure is also worth our attempts to trace and understand. There's much room for sensitive discussion and exploration of Hollywood's ambiguous war against the mutants.

(Crossposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.) 

Over at the Bad Idea Blog, "Bad" notes that advocates of same-sex marriage often simply dismiss slippery slope arguments such as the claim that judicial rulings in favour of same-sex marriage would lead to the legal recognition of polygamy.

This is a horrible-result type slippery slope argument against gay marriage ... or it could be framed as a reductio ad absurdum argument against reasoning that is said to support same-sex marriage. But one problem for such slippery slope arguments is that they are sound only if the outcome at the bottom of the slope really is horrible. Similarly, reductio ad absurdum type arguments succeed only if what is entailed by the impugned premises and reasoning really is absurd. However, I see nothing obviously horrible about a society that is prepared to register polygamous marriages (assuming all parties involved are legally competent). Polygamous arrangements are already perfectly legal; they are just not officially "marriages" in most societies. If they were given such legal recognition, I don't see why that is so obviously a horrible outcome.

Similarly, if a legal argument in favour of same-sex marriage also entails that the state should recognise polygamous arrangements as "marriages", I see no evident absurdity.

Hence, the argument simply fails as a rational argument against same-sex marriage; strictly speaking, nothing more need be said.

However, I'll say some more anyway. Nothing above should be taken to suggest that I hold up polygamous marriages as an ideal. It certainly doesn't mean that they should become the norm for everybody to aspire to, as in some religious or cultural traditions. But liberal societies do not require that we all live in a way that is judged to be ideal or that any arrangement that is recognised officially is thereby promoted by the state as a norm for everybody.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, there's a brief attempt by Dale Carpenter to distinguish gay marriage from polygamous marriage. Although "Bad" is impressed by the attempt, I must say that I find it rather flimsy (I must, in fairness, also point out that Carpenter has written at greater length elsewhere, and I encourage interested readers to follow his links).

I don't have time to give my full reasons here, but all the arguments against recognising polygamous marriages strike me as contrived. Perhaps the strongest point against polygamy is that there might be social difficulties if polygamous marriages (in the form of polygyny) became very widespread. But, again, polygyny is already legal, just not officially recognised as "marriage". Nothing in the law prevents me from going off tomorrow to live in orgiastic, but perhaps distracting and exhausting, bliss with my four favourite women (who probably know who they are). What prevents it is that they'd laugh at me if I offered such a suggestion. More generally, what prevents polygyny in Western societies is just that women (far more often than not) don't and won't want it.

We do not usually take official action to discourage something merely because it would cause social problems if "everybody" (or, more accurately, a large fraction of the population) did it. Rather, we assume the reality of social pluralism - that different people are likely to live in accordance with many different systems of values.

If Western states began to recognise polygamous marriages it is doubtful that this would have any great impact at all on (for example) the percentage of polygynous arrangements or the percentage of sexually frustrated men, let alone the percentage who might thereupon become alienated and possibly violent. The fact is that most women would remain just as wary as they are now about entering into long-term polygynous arrangements. While some women probably benefit from polygyny in some circumstances, most Western women would, quite understandably, not be willing to enter into such asymmetrical sexual arrangements at all - and certainly not long-term or without the option of easily leaving and finding alternative partners.

(That said, some women from some cultural traditions, such as the Maasai, may actually prefer to enter into a long-term arrangement where they have female companionship within the arrangement. Such preferences are not out of the question. But if, by chance, a tiny number of such women are to be found in Western societies, why not cater for their preferences? Some value systems may seem strange to most Westerners, but, in the absence of significant harms, that doesn't entail that the state should consider them unwelcome.)

For a different reason, it is weak to claim that it's inexpedient to recognise polygamous marriages because it would require modifying such things as probate law. The modification might not be enormously difficult in principle, and the fact is that such problems could already arise in circumstances where, for example, a participant in some kind of legal (but unofficial) polyamorous arrangement dies intestate. If the opportuntity were taken to tidy this up, it might actually yield intuitively fairer results.

Polygamous marriages are not the ideal, but there may not be a single ideal. Societies where polygyny is held out as the norm are thereby likely to inherit some problems, but I am not going to condemn polygamists' view of the good for that reason. Even if I were inclined to do so, based on personal moral beliefs or social concerns, I don’t think that the state should be doing so in a liberal society. So, if we are going to give state recognition to marriage at all, why not to polygamous marriages as well (provided all involved are competent adults to the same extent as is required for "ordinary" marriage)?

In all, I consider this particular argument against same-sex marriage weak, because what is (supposedly) lying at the bottom of the slope does not seem all that horrible. If we end up officially accepting polygamous marriages, so be it. I believe that people who run this argument against same-sex marriage are essentially appealing to irrational fear and prejudice.

But there's another possibility. Perhaps what I've written so far is wrong, and some compelling public-policy reason can be identified for not recognising polygamous marriages in particular. This would, in other words, be some great problem if polygamous marriages were recognised by the state. In that case, the result is horrible after all - but the slope is not slippery. It's not slippery because, on those facts, a principled distinction can be made between recognising same-sex relationships as marriages and recognising polygamous arrangements as marriages.

All in all, this policy issue about same-sex marriage is not a case where you can, with success, simultaneously argue that the slope downhill is slippery and that the outcome at the bottom of the slope is (on appeal to reason, rather than mere prejudice) horrible.

That, of course, is the common problem with horrible-result arguments. It is very rare that such an argument can succeed by showing simultaneously that the slope is slippery and that the result is horrible. Generally, the more horrible the result the less slippery the slope.

All that said, I have repeatedly argued elsewhere that the optimal solution is not the official recognition of many different kinds of relationships as marriages.

Rather, we should simply continue to allow individuals to enter into whatever sexual, familial, and domestic relationships they want, with whatever support they can muster from their cultural and religious communities, their families, and their friends; at the same time, the state should cease recognising relationships that meet some prescribed template as being, officially, "marriages" (and so registrable as such by some public agency).

On that scenario, anyone - gay or straight, monogamous or polygamous, or whatever - can have a marriage ceremony, call themself "married", and have the "marriage" conducted and recorded by the religious or other organisation of their choice. Government forms would no longer ask people whether they are married, and the state would be neutral about people's personal relationships. People would remain free to enter into contracts, trust deeds, etc., to determine the distribution of property on breakdown of a relationship. Courts and legislatures could continue to develop principles to deal with unconscionable agreements or to divide assets in the absence of agreement (in the absence of appropriate legislation, courts began to develop such principles some decades ago for de facto couples, essentially expanding the operation of the law of trusts to fill what was then a serious gap).

I'll say once more, for the record, that I do favour political policies to introduce provision for same-sex marriage, but only as a realistic compromise in current circumstances, not as the optimal long-term solution in a liberal society.

It seems that traditional cultures have their "eternal verities" - things that seem to be immutably true about fundamental aspects of the human condition. I put the words "eternal verities" in scare quotes because some of these things may not be verities at all, and certainly not eternal ones. And they won't be identical across all cultures.

In modern, pluralistic societies, you'll get different verities believed in by different people - some may still be operating with an "eternal verity" that women are intellectually inferior to men, for example, even though this is neither true nor even a universally-shared illusion. Nonetheless, there are various fundamental "verities" that are likely to be widely accepted even within a pluralistic society. Sometimes, philosophers challenge them directly by arguing that they are not true or well-founded. Sometimes science and technology challenge them less directly. Either way, many people are going to be made very uncomfortable. They execute Socrates, try to deny women the vote, ban human cloning, beat homosexuals, get queasy about interracial marriage, etc. There may be some deeper explanation as to why the world is like this, but in any event I think it probably is like this.

The theory isn't mine by the way; I borrowed it from Richard Norman. It's Norman's theory of background conditions, or my restatement thereof. What I have been calling "eternal verities", Norman calls "background to conditions to choice" - the things that we can't choose because they are the "natural" backdrop against which choices are made ... or so it appears from within the culture concerned. 

Maybe there's a way of putting Norman's theory on a more rigorous basis, but meanwhile one questions that arises is: What role does religion play? How do religious doctrines relate to eternal verities or background conditions? I'm not sure that I have the full answer, but I think that a culture's religious beliefs and its pet "eternal verities" will co-evolve. As a result, the religion will be heavily invested in the local set of seemingly eternal verities. It will have influenced them and been influenced by them. It tends to preserve them and to resist challenges to them, whether from science or from experimental lifestyles, or wherever else.

Religious images of the world will be chock full of these eternal verities (I'll drop the scare quotes), whether it's the eternal verity of human exceptionalism, the eternal verity of free will (in a very strong sense), the eternal verity that women should act in such and such a way in relation to men, the eternal verity that sex is nasty and only redeemed by its procreative potential, the eternal verity that we have only three score years and ten, or whatever it is that the locals believe to be an immutable truth about the world and our condition within it.

Any attack on the local eternal verities, even if not actually intended as an attack on religion, is likely to receive strong counter-attacks from religious sources. Moreover, because religion has picked up a whole lot of these traditional fundamental beliefs that made some sort of sense once but are largely not true, it is always likely to imagine the world in a different way from the way it is imagined by the majority of people who are highly scientifically literate and are keeping up with the developing scientific image of the world. (The last few paras are my addition to the theory.)

If we really want to challenge the eternal verities (as they are imagined to be in our place and time), we can expect opposition from at least some - probably many - leaders and spokespersons for religion, and from many ordinary religious people. If we are serious, we may feel that we have to counterattack our religious opponents head-on, by pointing out that the religion that gives them their mantle of seeming authority is just not true in the first place.

E.g. to defend the morality and social acceptability of homosexuality, it may not be enough to argue that, by some secular principle, it does no harm. It may not be enough to put pressure on religion to reinterpret its doctrines to accept homosexuality. The best way of getting homosexuality socially accepted, and to stop people defending the local eternal verity that "homosexuality is evil", may be for at least some people to stop talking so much homosexuality itself, and about secular moral theories, or new theology ... and to spend more time promulgating scepticism about religion. If you really want a transvaluation of values, according to which many things once considered virtues in your society (such as chastity and certain kinds of pietistic humility) are now considered vices, and certain things that were once considered sins are now considered good or at least neutral (e.g. homosexual acts; so-called scientific "hubris"), one of the best things you can do is spread scepticism about religion.

Of course, the fundamentalist churches and the Vatican are already well aware of this last point, but whereas they call spreading scepticism about religion bad, I call it good.

(Crossposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.) 

Note: this paper was written for the context of Australia's current soul-searching about its future, but I believe that it is applicable, with very little change, to every contemporary (supposedly) liberal society. 

DO WE WANT A TRULY LIBERAL SOCIETY? AUSTRALIA'S STARK CHOICE

Russell Blackford, School of Philosophy and Bioethics, Monash University


INTRODUCTION
A key question that Australia now faces as a nation is whether we are prepared to build a truly liberal society in the twenty-first century, or whether we will continue on a path where individual liberties are at the mercy of the political process. We are confronted with a stark choice.

One spur to thought about this question is the hysterical response in recent years to the prospect of new biomedical technologies. Much of this was provoked by the 1997 announcement in Nature that scientists in the UK had succeeded in cloning an adult sheep using what is known as somatic cell nuclear transfer ("SCNT") (for the announcement, see Wilmut et al. 1997). This announcement immediately led to moral panic about the prospect of human reproduction by the use of SCNT. Since then, Australia has been one of the many nations that have taken a highly illiberal approach to the regulation of new or emerging biotechnology.

Commentators on new biomedical technology often appear to believe that we are faced with Frankensteinian possibilities that cry out for a regulatory response. This, however, is getting things exactly back to front. On the contrary, the problem that we currently face is that widespread fear of new technologies has created an atmosphere in which liberal tolerance is under challenge. In the field of bioethics, what we need right now is a truly liberal response.

I suggest that our approach should identify genuine dangers and concerns, but deal with them strictly in accordance with liberal values.

Before going any further, I must stress that the recent illiberal tendency in public policy cannot be confined to bioethical issues. Once the idea of liberal tolerance is abandoned, many practices may be suppressed by the coercive power of the state, should they fail to gain acceptance within the political process.

Thus, just as arguments can be put that human reproductive cloning should be suppressed because it is somehow "interfering with nature" or "playing God", arguments can be put for suppressing certain consensual sexual practices as "unnatural", for suppressing certain speech as "blasphemous" or "offensive", or simply "inappropriate". And so on. Much of our policy framework for dealing with recreational drugs seems to be driven by an illiberal moralism, rather than a concern with liberty (or even harm reduction).

Liberal societies should give no credence to any such arguments that are based on contested values and moral beliefs.


THE IDEA OF A LIBERAL SOCIETY
A liberal society embraces pluralism, in the sense that it does not seek to impose any one vision of what it means to be virtuous or to lead a good life. Within such a society, approval is commonly expressed for John Stuart Mill's view that "experiments in living" should not be merely tolerated, but actually welcomed and celebrated (Mill 1974: 120).

As Max Charlesworth writes, "In a liberal society personal autonomy, the right to choose one's own way of life for oneself, is the supreme value." He adds that this includes what he calls ethical pluralism: members of the society are free to hold a wide range of moral, religious, and non-religious positions, with no core values or public morality that it is the law's business to enforce (Charlesworth 1993: 1). Accordingly, a liberal society makes a sharp distinction between the sphere of personal moral views and that of the law; no one can use the law to impose their beliefs on others (16-20).

Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult to define the boundaries of liberal tolerance, and the broad idea has been formulated in different ways, even by its prominent defenders in the current debates about bioethics.

John Harris, for example, writes of what he calls "the democratic presumption", which he elaborates as the principle adopted in liberal democracies that the freedom of citizens not be interfered with without good and sufficient reasons. According to Harris, citizens should otherwise be at liberty to make their own choices, based on their own values; some serious real and present danger, whether to other citizens or to society, is required to rebut the presumption (Harris 2007: 72-73).

Similarly, Gregory E. Pence defends what he calls the "classic liberal view", though he notes that the label is confusing. This is the idea that we do not try to dictate decisions about the good to others, but leave them alone as long as they leave us alone. For Pence, the justification for this approach is simply that all the alternatives have led to disaster (Pence 2000: 167).

In a recent defence of liberalism, Paul Starr offers a richer description of the liberal ideal. Liberalism as Starr understands it has allowed people with different religious and moral commitments not just to live side by side, but to flourish together. A liberal state will not require everyone to worship in the same way, follow the same way of life, or profess an official ideology, but it expects citizens to show reasonableness and openness to ideas. It is not neutral about such values as disease and health, sloth and effort, deceit and integrity, cowardice and courage. There are, he suggests, excellences that it must promote to survive (Starr 2007: 176-77).

Nonetheless, Starr argues, a liberal state is neutral where divisions over the nature of the good life are deep and irreconcilable. Most crucially, the state apparatus of a liberal society allows a diversity of cultural and moral practices that cause no harm to others; this provides a framework for individuals' free development (Starr 2007: 22-23).

On such an account, liberalism can welcome any worldview that is able to endorse such ideas as mutual tolerance and the free development of autonomous individuals.1

As Starr points out, modern liberalism has also adapted to growing agglomerations of private power, the harsh collective and individual impacts of unregulated markets, social changes, economic crises, and unprecedented scales of warfare (Starr 2007: 85-116). As a result of social and economic change, the apparatus of the state now exercises extensive powers for the purposes of social coordination and to ameliorate the harshness of economic outcomes that would arise under a system of unbridled capitalist competition (see, e.g., Atiyah 1979: 571-779). However, these powers are explained in liberal thought on the basis that their use is meant to extend, rather than reduce, the practical autonomy of individual citizens (Lee 1986: 16-17; Raz 1986: 414-18).

Unless some kind of harm can be identified, a liberal society is generally reluctant to restrict the liberty of individuals to act as they wish with the resources available to them. Even the idea of harm is usually restricted to direct, significant, and wrongful harm to others. In particular, the harm described must be to secular interests, not to theological ones such as interests in personal salvation, holiness, purity from sin, or conformity to the will of a deity.2

As Charlesworth describes the position, in a liberal society there cannot be a consensus on such matters as the alleged superiority of heterosexual, monogamous marriage, or the idea that deliberately ending one's life is against God's will, or that organ transplants violate bodily and spiritual integrity, or that abortion is equivalent to murder of the innocent (Charlesworth 1993: 163).

In a liberal society, the coercive power of the state is brought to bear against individuals only with reluctance. Where individuals' personal lives and life plans are at stake, including their ability to express themselves freely, have consenting sexual relations, and make reproductive decisions, the state will be particularly solicitous of freedom of choice, unless a compelling reason can be found to do otherwise.3 Prima facie, the infliction or threat of force by the state is considered objectionable, especially so when very personal interests are at stake, as with choices about sexual relationships and family formation.4

BIOETHICS AND THE CHALLENGE TO LIBERAL TOLERANCE
This somewhat idealised picture of a liberal society and its ethos of mutual tolerance might suggest that a forbearing, if not welcoming, attitude would be taken to new or postulated forms of biomedical technology. For example, reproductive cloning might, one would think, be welcomed by a liberal society as an acceptable personal choice - particularly, but not solely, as a legitimate response to male infertility (and the preferences of some lesbian couples).

Admittedly, reproductive cloning is not currently a safe method of reproduction, in the sense that it would involve a high risk of congenital malformation. It is arguable that even the most liberal society has good reason not to tolerate the use of a method of reproduction that is unsafe in that sense. Such safety arguments, as they might be called, could also apply to other technological interventions, such the genetic engineering of human embryos.

However, the policy debate since the cloning of Dolly the sheep by Ian Wilmut and his team has been remarkable for the way that many participants have ignored, or even rejected, the liberal idea that experiments in living are to be welcomed. Prima facie, this Millian idea should apply to decisions about the full gamut of technological innovations, even though Mill himself could hardly have foreseen them. In the absence of some argument based in liberal values, liberal societies should allow individuals to decide whether or not to bear and raise children created by the use of SCNT.

Arguments about safety, or even about the welfare of growing children, do not explain the character of the actual debate or the real-world policy responses of liberal societies. The debate appears to be motivated in large part by a wish to impose certain moral or quasi-religious, ideals as social norms, and by a fear of the potentially strange directions that societies might take as biomedical technology develops.

In the early 1990s, Max Charlesworth complained about a gap between liberal ideas and the widespread hostility, within liberal societies, to a range of practices in health and medicine. On Charlesworth's account, one would expect to see liberal societies treating personal autonomy as central to ethical discussions about new reproductive technologies, and drawing a sharp line between the morality and legality of biomedical innovations. However, Charlesworth argued, the experience was that many of the policy responses of the time were illiberal - often authoritarian or paternalistic (Charlesworth 1993: 1-2).

The years since - and particularly those since the cloning of Dolly - have only made the gap identified by Charlesworth more obvious. We have seen the emergence of widespread and politically-influential opposition to many real or mooted technologies (e.g. embryonic sex selection, reproductive cloning, human genetic engineering, and radical forms of life extension). More than ever, we should heed Charlesworth's contention that those engaged in bioethical discussion, within liberal societies, must take account of the fact that they are, indeed, living in liberal societies and of a liberal society's basic values (Charlesworth 1993: 27).

In Australia, one outcome of the debate over new biotechnology has been the enactment of the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction Act 2002 (Cth). In its current form, as amended, this specifies a raft of criminal offences with maximum terms of imprisonment of fifteen years. These offences include any deliberate alteration of a human cell that would be inheritable, and intended as such (section 15), and any action that involves placing what the Act calls "a human embryo clone" in the body of a human being or another animal (section 9). The legislation proscribes germ-line manipulation of embryos for any reason, along with actions needed for reproductive cloning; further, it imposes prison sentences appropriate only for major crimes.

This federal statute operates in conjunction with numerous other restrictions under state legislation and guidelines issued by the National Health and Medical Research Commission ("NHMRC"). In particular, the use of PGD for embryonic sex selection, a technology that is already available, is proscribed by NHMRC guidelines and prohibited by some state provisions such as Victoria's Infertility Treatment Act 1995 (Vic.), which provides a maximum two-year penalty for any attempt to predetermine the sex of a child by technological means, except where necessary for medical reasons (section 50).

I submit that little of this can be justified on grounds that would be acceptable under the Millian harm principle or any principled extension of it, such as might be found in the comprehensive review in Feinberg's four-volume The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (Feinberg 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988).

CONCLUSION
While the focus of this paper is on bioethical issues, where my recent research has largely been concentrated, it has implications that go far wider. A truly liberal society would be reluctant to interfere in many issues relating to sexuality, free speech and expression, family formation, and other matters involving deep disagreement about values and the good life. Once a society goes down the path of allowing law-makers to impose their views about these matters (or the views of an electoral majority), liberty is threatened across the board. Such an approach cannot be confined to one set of issues, such as bioethics.

We can expect the future to bring new political issues of many kinds. Some of them will provoke anger, fear, and other strong emotions, as did the cloning of Dolly and the prospect of reproductive cloning for human beings. Next time such an issue emerges, and grants law-makers in liberal societies, such as Australia, the opportunity to demonstrate their credentials as successors to Locke and Mill, they should not squander it.

A good start would be for opinion leaders to begin right now in identifying the issue of whether we want Australia to develop as a truly liberal society. This is, I submit, an idea whose time has come.


NOTES
1 This is a central theme of John Rawls's Political Liberalism (Rawls 1993).
2 An early version of this idea can be found in John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration, in which Locke assigns to the civil magistrate protection of "things belonging to this Life" but not "the Salvation of Souls" (Locke 1983: 26).
3 In so doing, the governing philosophy of liberal society will foster autonomous choices, even where this requires a redistribution of economic resources. In this respect, it differs from political libertarianism.
4 Compare Hart (1963: 21-22), which emphasises the importance of sexuality to individuals. The same point can be made about individuals' reproductive decisions.

REFERENCES
Atiyah, PS. (1979). The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract. New York: Oxford University Press.

Charlesworth, Max. (1993). Bioethics in a Liberal Society. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feinberg, Joel. (1984). Harm to Others. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. (1985). Offense to Others. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. (1986). Harm to Self. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. (1988). Harmless Wrongdoing. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harris , John. (2007). Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hart, H.L.A. (1963). Law, Liberty, and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lee, Simon. (1986). Law and Morals: Warnock, Gillick and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Locke, John. (1983). A Letter Concerning Toleration. First published 1689. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Mill, John Stuart. (1974). On Liberty. First published 1859. London: Penguin.

Pence, Gregory E. Re-Creating Medicine: Ethical Issues on the Frontiers of Medicine. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Rawls, John. (1993). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Raz, Joseph. (1986). The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press.

Starr, Paul. (2007). Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.

Wilmut, I., et al. (1997). "Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells." Nature 385: 810-13.

(Crossposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.) 

Now <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org:80/pub_releases/2008-02/uow-rca021108.php">this story </a>is really weird.

Apparently, most Americans reject the morality of nanotechnology on religious grounds. At least that's the inference drawn by Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication. In addressing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 15 February, Professor Scheufele presented survey results seeming to show the effect of religion on public views of technology in the United States.

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable!

According to the story, similar European surveys that posed identical questions about nanotechnology produced a very different result. In the United Kingdom, 54.1 percent found nanotechnology to be morally acceptable. In Germany, 62.7 percent had no moral qualms about nanotechnology, and in France 72.1 percent of survey respondents saw no problems with the technology.

Scheufele is quoted as saying: "There seem to be distinct differences between the United States and countries that are key players in nanotech in Europe, in terms of attitudes toward nanotechnology."

The reason that he gives is the role of religion:

"The United States is a country where religion plays an important role in peoples' lives. The importance of religion in these different countries that shows up in data set after data set parallels exactly the differences we're seeing in terms of moral views. European countries have a much more secular perspective."

According to Scheufele, Americans with strong religious convictions lump together nanotechnology, biotechnology and stem cell research as means to enhance human qualities. These religious Americans see researchers "playing God" when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine.

If this research and the author's analysis are accurate, the effect of irrational thinking on public perceptions of science in the United States is even greater than might have been feared. Admittedly, there may be misuses or hazards associated with nanotechnology as it develops, as with any powerful new technology, but that is not a good reason for holding that nanotechnology in itself is morally unacceptable.

More research surely needs to be conducted to confirm whether the basis for widespread moral rejection of nanotechnology in the US is primarily religious in origin, particularly whether it is based on fears of "playing God". However, the reported research is certainly suggestive of such thinking. If that's correct, we have another example of why popular US-style religion is incompatible with the development of a broad public policy based on freedom, reason, and the advancement of science. It's not necessarily a matter of explaining the situation more effectively: the people interviewed were not ignorant, so it's claimed, but morally opposed to something that they actually did understand.

It appears yet again that the ultimate solution is not more explaining, spinning, "framing", or what have you, even if these are necessary. We need a direct, long-term, unremitting campaign to weaken the cognitive and moral authority of religion. We need to attack the root of the problem by doing whatever we can to create a more rational and sceptical ethos in Western societies, the US above all.

Even the figures from the UK, Germany, and France are worrying. About 45 per cent in the UK did <em>not</em> find nanotechnology to be morally acceptable. Almost 40 per cent in Germany. Almost 30 per cent in France.

Again, nanotechnology will surely create risks, but that does not make it essentially immmoral. So why, in those relatively secular countries of Western Europe, do we still find very large numbers of people who consider it so? Is the quasi-religion of an inviolable nature having an influence here, or is there some other factor that hasn't yet been identified?

The Journal of Evolution and Technology has published a new article, this one by Bill Hibbard, entitled "The Technology of Mind and a New Social Contract" .

Hibbard's main concern is with the prospect of super-intelligent beings coming into existence in the future, and how they will interact with the rest of us ordinarily intelligent beings.

Hibbard argues that we currently live in accordance with a social contract that is based on assumptions that we rarely question: that all humans have roughly the same intelligence, that we have limited life spans, and that we share a set of motives as part of our human nature. New technologies will invalidate these assumptions and inevitably change our social contract in fundamental ways.

He suggests that we need to prepare for these new technologies so that they change the world in ways we want rather than lead us stumbling into a world that we don't. In particular he argues for a new social contract between the super-intelligent and the humanly intelligent, according to which super-intelligence will be a privilege that carries responsibility for the welfare of others.

Hibbard concludes: "The technologies of mind and life are coming and will bring enormous benefits. They will also change assumptions that underlie the social contract that governs interactions among humans, with potentially undesirable consequences. Some advocate banning these technologies but, given the promised benefits, this is politically impossible. Instead, we should support regulated development to ensure that all humans benefit from these technologies, rather than a small group benefitting at the expense of most other humans. In particular, minds should be permitted to have significantly greater than natural human intelligence only if they value the long terms life satisfaction of all other intelligent minds."

Read the whole thing - and feel free to comment on his argument, either here or at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.

(Cross-posted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.)

I have been appointed, as of today, as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Evolution and Technology ("JET") , IEET's flagship on-line refereed journal. For personal reasons, it will take me a little time to be fully active in this role; on the other hand, I've been associated with the journal for some years now as a semi-regular referee, and I already know much about how it works.

Henceforth, we plan to publish two issues per year, uploading articles and reviews to the JET site as and when they are approved and finalised.

Since its inception in 1998 (originally as The Journal of Transhumanism), JET has been publishing high-quality, fascinating, and important material about the human or post-human future. It is a key journal for transhumanist, technoprogressive, and technology-positive thought. Its implicit premise - at least on my interpretation - is that there's now a real prospect of human beings taking our further evolution into our own hands, using technological means.

That prospect merits investigation from many viewpoints - scientific, philosophical, historical, literary, and so on - but it is important that the investigation not be left in the hands of nay-sayers who are ideologically or emotionally wedded to current and historical understandings of the human condition. JET provides a high-level forum for those of us who are open to the possibility of change, whether we advocate a radical transhumanist agenda or whether we are more cautious, and simply willing to consider the issues rigorously and on their merits.

JET is open to a wide range of viewpoints, and seeks to encourage rigorous, systematic discussion of future prospects for humanity. Then again, it will never appeal to the same audience as a technoconservative journal such as The New Atlantis (but on the gripping hand, there may well be some individuals with viewpoints that are welcome in both).

There's much work to be done to raise JET's public profile and to expand its reach and prestige within the academic world, while we continue to find the outstanding articles, reviews, and other material that JET needs in order to thrive and to influence public policy. I, myself, need to think more deeply about my vision for the journal - beyond these very preliminary observations.

I'm excited to be making a start, and I'm looking forward to the challenges.

This image posted on my regular blog, Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, is fascinating. It shows the positions on the Political Compass of me and a group of fairly random friends (17 when I first wrote this post, with a few more since). Counting me, about half a dozen of the people represented here are prominent in the transhumanist movement and/or with IEET. The rest are various folks who (1) have accounts on Facebook and (2) are people whom I've encountered in various circumstances and get along with. It's an incomplete, but not bad, sample of my friends, colleagues, and allies.

Every single one of us so far falls within the left-libertarian green square, i.e. we are all to some extent left-wing on economic issues and libertarian on social issues. I (the red dot) am actually quite moderate by the standards of this group; in fact, the image explains why I sometimes feel like a nasty right-winger on economic issues, given that my friends tend to be (even?) more economically left-wing than I am. Fortunately, there are a few who are slightly closer than me to the left-right centre line. Even on social issues, where I am definitely pictured as a libertarian, my views are not all that extreme by the group's standards, although they do fall within the more socially libertarian area of the "cloud".

Actually, the image suggests a bit of a danger. The positions taken by these people, including me, are obviously not at all typical of the wider community. That doesn't mean we're wrong, just that if we all hang around with people like ourselves all the time (as I certainly tend to do) we run a risk of losing touch with what the punters think and feel.

When I posted my comments, to similar effect, at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, someone commented that academics (I take it this extends to include academically-oriented people of various kinds, whether or not they are actually employed by universities) tend to take more left-wing positions because they are more in touch in a specific way. Ie., we are more knowledgeable about the world, ideas, other cultures, etc., than most, and this leads us to such political positions. That may be true - I like to think it is - but we are still in danger of getting a false sense of what is on the minds of more typical voters in our societies.

Somewhat scarily, the Political Compass website claims that almost all the party politics in the US and (to a less extreme extent) Australia is currently being fought out within the blue box: the home for various economicallly right-wing and socially authoritarian positions.

(Crossposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.)

The Journal of Epidemial Community Health has published an important article by Jane Henderson, Ulrik Kesmodel, and Ron Gray, entitled "Systematic review of the fetal effects of prenatal binge-drinking". This analyses the effects on babies of so-called "binge-drinking" by pregnant women, reviewing the large body of academic literature published between 1970 and 2005.

The study considered a wide range of adverse outcomes that might be attributed to "binge-drinking", including miscarriages, still births, intra-uterine growth restrictions, low birth weights, and birth defects. The conclusion of the article is, perhaps surprisingly given the moral panic about this issue, that there were no consistent significant effects on any of these, though there was a "possible" effect on neurodevelopment that would need to be confirmed by further research. Except for that possibility, the study found no convincing effects of any adverse outcomes from "binge-drinking" while pregnant.

Note: I am placing the expressions "binge" and "binge-drinking" in inverted commas throughout this post - except in the sentence at the very end where I use the word "binge" correctly. Why? Simply because these expressions are now used by medical researchers, bureaucrats, and the media in a way that is totally different from both their original meanings and their ongoing popular connotations. On occasion in the past, I've had the experience of complaining about this sneaky shift and have been told in response that, of course, concern about, say, "teenage binge-drinking" is related to serious alcohol abuse, not to levels of drinking that many of us consider moderate, reasonable, and civilised. But there's no of course about it.

In recent years, the prigs, prudes, and puritans who are determined to raise the ... ahem ... moral tone of our society have been redefining the word "binge" - and related words or expressions such as "binge-drinking" - while trying to retain the nasty, blaming associations of the old meaning.

The article by Henderson et. al. also makes mention of this tendency, though in a less blunt manner:

"The definition of a binge has changed radically over the years. In the past, it meant an extended period (usually several days) of intoxication; now it commonly refers to drinking six UK units or more on a single occasion - that is, only two or three large glasses of wine - and, in most studies of pregnant women, it has been defined as five or more drinks on a single occasion."

With that out of the way, what can we draw from the article?

An examination of the entire article does, in fact, show some associations between "binge-drinking" and various birth and post-birth problems, but the authors do not consider these to be of any established importance: the data from different studies are not consistent; any effects seem small and are often not statistically significant; the effects of "binges" as opposed to consistent "heavy drinking" are not easy to separate out, and so on.

Sensibly, Henderson et. al. do recommend discouraging "binge-drinking" during pregnancy since, irrespective of whatever else can be gleaned from the data, there's a possibility that the one-off presence of significant amounts of alcohol could harm neurodevelopment. Although there is little actual evidence of this in humans, animal studies support the possibility. I agree that that is enough to give somebody good reason not to drink significant amounts of alcohol - even amounts that would normally be considered moderate, reasonable, and civilised - while knowingly pregnant or while trying to get pregnant.

But the paper also observes that the risk seems minimal and that it is important not to introduce undue anxiety in women who have occasionally engaged in "binge- drinking", in the absence of a consistently high daily alcohol intake.

The bottom line is that women who know they are pregnant, or who are trying to get pregnant, would do well not to engage in significant social drinking, even of the moderate and reasonable amounts that get referred to, in these priggish days, as the lower levels of "binge-drinking". Women have every reason to continue leading normal lives that involve ordinary convivial use of alcoholic drinks; but if an individual woman is actually trying to become pregnant (and may already be) or knows that she is already pregnant, she has reason not to drink much on any one occasion.

In any event, panic, anxiety, and guilt are best avoided. For example, rushing off for an abortion because you had a small number of drinks on a one-off occasion, before you realised you were pregnant, would be a massive overreaction (even though I'd defend your right to overreact in that way).

Finally, next time you see a wowserish newspaper article - or hear a prude or prig whining on - about "binge-drinking", at least try to establish what definition of "binge" is being used before you accept it at face value. The enjoyment of two or three (or even five) large glasses of wine with a good meal is civilised dining; it is not going on a binge.

(Reposted from Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.) 

Now and then - much more often than I'd like - I come across a claim to the effect that science is merely "a way of describing the world, among other ways." This bold claim is usually made by an academic in literary or cultural studies, but sometimes by somebody from sociology of science or "science studies", sometimes by a person based elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences. The particular formulation that I've quoted above is due to literary academic Peter Brigg, but he is far from being the only offender, or the worst.

Science, we are so often told, is just one way to understand the world - and the same applies to rational thought in general. There are, so the thesis goes, "other ways of knowing", all equally legitimate, even when they are inconsistent with well-corroborated scientific findings or other products of reason. I suppose that this is attractive because it fits in with a kind of post-colonial angst about reason and the Enlightenment.

Too often, such assertions about the nature of science are supported by vague references to Thomas Kuhn's early book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). There is seldom any analysis of Kuhn's arguments in that book, or of those elaborated by Kuhn's many critics. There is usually little sense that the writer knows that the position asserted assumes a highly controversial epistemological theory. It's a theory that many philosophers of science reject, while real working scientists generally seem to have little patience with it.

A more plausible account of science is as follows.

Science is continuous and consistent with other means of rational investigation of ourselves and the larger reality in which we find ourselves. There is no sharp dividing line between science and philosophy, or between science and everyday reasoning. The philosophical investigation of ourselves, and our world, segues into science as and when it becomes possible to make cognitive progress in certain fields of inquiry through the use of what are known as "scientific" means. These include hypothetico-deductive reasoning, controlled experiments, mathematical modeling, and observations with instruments that extend the human senses.

The boundaries of science are blurred, but that is not a terrible problem because science is part - though an increasingly large part - of the general endeavour that we could call "rational inquiry". It does not stand in opposition to, or in competition with, other components of that wider endeavour. If reality is self-consistent and regular, as it appears to be so far, the methods of rational inquiry will produce convergent conclusions. The ideal is an eventual unification of knowledge.

On this understanding of science, its answers to our questions are provisional, but they are far more than interpretations, or optional descriptions, of reality. Well-supported scientific theories provide our best conjectures about many aspects of ourselves and the Universe. At this stage of human understanding, it would simply be irrational to reject such scientific fndings as that certain diseases are caused by bacteria or viruses, that the Earth revolves around the Sun (not vice versa), that our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved from earlier life forms, that DNA encodes for proteins in a way that provides a mechanism for biological heredity - and many others. There is no rational alternative to accepting these theoretical claims that emanate from the practice of science.

I am troubled by the propensity of many academics in the humanities and social sciences (but usually not in the field of analytic philosophy) to pass on wild, highly-contestable claims about the nature of science to new generations of undergraduates, as if these claims were uncontroversial. That is not the case at all.

Well-corroborated scientific findings, such as the proposition that we live within a Solar System (our planet and others revolving in orbit around a star), are not merely descriptions, or interpretations, of the world that can co-exist with equally acceptable non-scientific alternatives. Such propositions make substantial assertions about an objectively-existing reality ... and they are almost certainly true. Propositions that are inconsistent with them are almost certainly false.

None of those pesky other ways of knowing can tell us, with the same authority as science, that our beloved Earth is (after all!) at the centre of the Universe, or that it's the centrepoint (after all!) of our local system of a sun, planets, moons, and other astronomical objects. It simply isn't either of those things. Nor was it created ex nihilo in the last six or ten thousand years. Rather, it has an origin in deep time, over four billion years ago.

AIDS is a viral infection, the moon is not a hollow spaceship, and Tyrannosaurus rex did not live by using its long, curved teeth to crack open coconuts.

There's nothing relative about this. There's no genuine competition.