Nature Author's Oddball Piece on Bioethics

The journal Nature has published a lengthy Commentary piece by a UK based sociologist on Bioethics (the field, not the journal). It's part of a series of papers marking the journal's 150th anniversary. 

Sarah Franklin, the Commentary's author, apparently undertakes in her actual job research on reproductive sociology, as opposed to bioethics.Her Commentary describes aptly the rise of Bioethics as a consequence of funding generously offered to ELSI academics during the heydays of the Human Genome Project. Her take on bioethics is that we should do away with ethics in the context of biomedicine and replace it with freewheeling societal engagement, no doubt facilitated and led by sociologists like herself. She generally thinks that Bioethics began to wither once the HGP funding fell by the wayside. Franklin also thinks that 

'The stereotype of bureaucratic, box-ticking ethical compliance is no longer fit for purpose in a world of CRISPR twins, synthetic neurons and self-driving cars. Bioethics evolves, as does any other branch of knowledge. The post-millennial trend has been to become more global, less canonical and more reflexive. The field no longer relies on philosophically derived mandates codified into textbook formulas. Instead, it functions as a dashboard of pragmatic instruments, and is less expert-driven, more interdisciplinary, less multipurpose and more bespoke. In the wake of the ‘turn to dialogue’ in science, bioethics often looks more like public engagement — and vice versa.'

This truly amounts to a lovely mix of half-truths and nonsense. What she describes as box-ticking ethical compliance still has its place, of course, in the context of, for instance research clinical trials involving human participants (just check the binding national regulatory framework in your country for that). These documents were written by multidisciplinary teams of ethicists, lawyers, clinicians and patient representatives. Quelle surprise. Bioethicists offered here ethical analysis, input, background papers etc, but they never were the ones who single-handedly could have taken credit for such documents. In that sense, the field never relied on philosophically derived mandates codified into textbook format. I wonder whether Franklin ever had a look into bioethics textbooks. I rather doubt it. 

Franklin is mistaken when she claims that the field is less expert driven. Of course it is expert and expertise driven, even when it comes to AI in medicine (as I write this, significant funding for research precisely in the area of ethics and AI in medicine is made available in pretty much every Western country that I can think of!). It has always been a multidisciplinary field, but a field of multidisciplinary expertise nonetheless. 

An entirely different question, that she conflates with bioethical analysis, is how biopolicy ought to be developed in a democratic society. Bioethicists have never claimed that they ought to have the last word on it. That's not how democracy works. Invariably, on controversial subjects, there would be public consultations by policy makers, and in addition to expert analysis by bioethicists, and others, public opinions would be sought and engaged before eventually a parliament would take a vote on a controversial issue. Incidentally, that is even true with regard to court judgments. The Canadian Supreme Court in its decision on assisted dying took into account both ethical and legal arguments as well as empirical information on Canadians' views on the subject. Again, quelle surprise. 

What is mostly off-base about Franklin's take on bioethics is that she sees apparently no room for ethical analysis and expertise on matters biopolicy when we could have the freewheeling societal dialogue instead that she prefers. Clearly there is no contradiction in having both. The former should hopefully fruitfully inform the latter. 

Unsurprisingly, conservative commentators like the US based creationist 'think tank' Discovery Institute's Wesley Smith claimed that Nature  declared 'Bioethics is Obsolete'. Of course, Nature didn't declare that. A sociologist with no apparent expertise in bioethical analysis declared that in a commentary in the journal. Franklin, of course, has a minor conflict of interest here, depending - as she does - on research funding opportunities also accessed by bioethicists. Wouldn't it be convenient if bioethicists would just step aside for 'one of the world's leading experts on the social aspects of reproductive and genetic technologies, IVF, cloning, embryo research, and stem cells', as she describes herself on her departmental website? Probably, but that's not how that works in the real world. 

I do think that the kind of research Franklin undertakes is valuable. What's odd is that she seems to believe that it is the only thing that there ought to be, certainly bioethics should get out of her way. Editing two mainstream journals in our field, I have little to go by other than article downloads. Readership for bioethics peer reviewed expert content has never been greater. Submissions of papers to the journals have never been higher. None of these are signs of a field in decay. 

Incidentally, a good way to compare the academic relevance and impact of a leading bioethicist vs Franklin is probably citations. So, I checked on google scholar how Sarah Franklin (Cambridge) fares compares to Julian Savulescu (Oxford). 

Franklin citations

2017 - 593 ;  2018 - 668 ; 2019 - 503

Savulescu citations

2017 - 1695 ; 2018 - 2000 ; 2019 - 1750

Why am I thinking that there might just be a little life left in Bioethics?

The funniest thing about Franklin's attack on Bioethics, and Smith's full-throated support of her agenda, is that we see again feminism and conservative anti-choice activism finding common cause. It's not for the first time, it won't be the last time. Let's hope Franklin enjoys her new-found companions. 

The Facebook study scandal that wasn't

Here's a piece I have over at the Philosopher's Eye on the Facebook study alluded to in the post below.

PNAS, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published on June 24, 2014 the results of a study involving Facebook (FB) users. The authors wanted to ‘test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed.’ The researchers investigated this question by manipulating the newsfeeds of a few hundred thousand randomly selected FB users. Some received more positive messages, and some received more negative messages. The identities of these users were not known to the researchers in question. FB permitted social scientists to mess with some of their users’ brains for the purposes of a research project. It’s something that FB does frequently. The contents of its news-feeds are manipulated all the time, its algorithms changed often. FB users have agreed to this since 2012 when they signed up to a user agreement for the free service stating:

’… we may use the information we receive about you … for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.’

For reasons I still fail to understand fully, some high-profile US bioethicists came out in the typical fashion bioethicists have become notorious for – expressing outrage in various forms and shapes about the supposedly unethical nature of the study. My esteemed colleague Robert Klitzman, for instance, described the study as ‘scandalous’.

My own view of the study is that it isn’t scandalously unethical, even though it would have been better had the research participants been informed about being targeted for research purposes. It seems absurd to me that there are no complaints from these ethicists if FB does exactly the same thing (manipulating its news-feed algorithms to change its users – mine for crying out loud! – state of mind while we use their service). However, grandiose hand waving is triggered if researchers do the same in order to address important research questions. From a consequentialist perspective, this doesn’t make a great deal of sense. More than that, we FB users are informed that ‘information we receive about you’ may be used for ‘testing’ and ‘research.’ Bioethicist Art Caplan, meanwhile, thinks that telling us that we might be subjected to research projects is insufficient for us to truly comprehend that we might be subjected to research projects. Really!

Well, to cut a long story short, Michelle Meyer and other bioethicists – myself included – came together to pen a response to our outraged colleagues, defending the research in question. Nature, of all publications, took our commentary. Check it out some time, be it just to reassure yourself that bioethicists aren’t all about seeing scandal and problems in every corner of the universe. Since we wrote our piece, a number of bioethicists, including Dan Brock, Peter Singer, Dan Wikler and others have signed on to our statement.

Let the debate begin.

We argue in Nature today that recent FB research wasn't obviously unethical

Michelle N. Meyer, John Lantos, Alex John London, Amy L. McGuire, Lance Stell and I argue in today's edition of Nature that the recent, much condemned Facebook research wasn't obviously unethical. Our arguments are here, a list of supporters including luminaries like Peter Singer and Dan Brock can be found here. 

Let the argument begin!

Why mention countries or regions when that serves no purpose

I got an interesting letter the other day, from academics in Turkey. For reasons that will become apparent sooner rather than later, I will likely be criticized for mentioning the country where the plagiarism occurred. The letter writers essentially are annoyed that in reports about plagiarism country affiliations of researchers feature prominently. So, the headline could say 'Harvard Hoititoiti Lab Researchers Caught Plagiarizing', but instead it says that ' US Americans Caught Plagiarizing'. The authors of said letter criticize that Western media and Western academics (the target of their scorn is an article in Nature) go out of their way to point fingers at countries rather than individual academics, just as if individual academics in a particular country plagiarizing something implicate many or most other academic researchers in the same country with wrongdoing. In this particular instance, under a big heading mentioning Turkey, in a kind of block in the centre of the Nature article, an Italy based academic is mentioned as saying that in certain cultures plagiarism is not considered deplorable. Anyone merely browsing the pages of Nature could be forgiven for taking home the message that plagiarism is not considered deplorable in Turkey, when really in this particular instance Turkish universities withdrew papers they considered plagiarized. That does not exactly suggest that they considered plagiarism anything but deplorable. So, what purpose did it serve for Nature to mention that the transgressions occurred in Turkey, and for designing the article in such a way as to suggest to the superficial reader that plagiarism in Turkey is not considered deplorable, when the opposite is actually true.

Interesting point that is being made by these academics. This nearly falls into the same category as racist talk (aka Black people are this, White people are that), but not quite so, given that it is superficially linked to a particular case at least. Still, it makes me wonder whether we should take country mentions out of paper headings unless they are relevant to the case. That's not to say that we mustn't add this kind of information within articles or in reference sections.

'Unnatural' sex and its naturally not so bright opponents

This thing about 'unnatural' sex has been bugging me for a long time. For those of us who are trained to think about what we mean when we say certain things the term 'unnatural' carries no normative weight. For those who think less (either because they quite naturally or culturally cannot think a great deal due to a lack of gray brain matter or lack of education) about what they mean when they say that something is 'unnatural', the 'unnatural' charge routinely leads to demands that certain behaviours or products be outlawed.

Let me look at two examples just from this week, one from Uganda, the other from Jamaica, quite naturally both examples involve Christians on a crusade against gay sex. So, here we go:

Dr. James Nsaba Buturo is the Ugandan Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity. He announced this week that any attempt by donor agencies to have the country legalise 'unnatural' sex (and homosexual sex in particular) will fail. He went on to say that the government is prepared to fortfeit any [sic!] amount of donor money if that meant accepting homosexuality. I'm a consequentialist, so when someone says something like 'no matter what', which is what Dr Buturo's 'any' implies, I know I am seeing someone not too deeply rooted in reality. For the sake of the argument: what if someone gave Uganda enough money to resolve the problem of poverty among its people for good, offered in addition free education, state-of-the-art free health care to everyone living in Uganda etc, provided that consenting adults be permitted to engage in 'unnatural' sex if they so wish. Any government minister who would be prepared to sacrifice the well-being of the people in such a case for the sake of fighting 'unnatural' sex is obviously a nutcase. Consequences be damned is very Christian, of course, but it also not very smart.

Anyhow, I digress, I really meant to write about the 'natural' and the 'unnatural', and that I will do, but let me first give you the second example. We owe it to a Christian 'Senator' in Jamaica. I don't know Jamaica too well, so I presume Senators are not overly well educated people relying on tax hand outs for a living while preaching hate. So, without further delay, in her own words, Jamaican Senator Hyacinth Benneth: "For many persons that push a radical homosexual agenda it is claimed that homosexual behaviour is natural for them. That particuar [sic!] group has been quite successful in advancing their cause by using the rights based approach. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist but I have not seen where homosexual behaviour has been conclusively shown to be natural. In fact the dominant scientific opinion has been that no one can conclusively show that homosexuality is natural."

So, don't blame me, blame Dr Buturo and Ms Benneth for today's rant on nature.

Ms Benneth is probably unaware of the fact that there is no dominant scientific opinion on the naturalness or otherwise of homosexuality. The reason for this is that this issue is not a scientific question to begin with. It's a matter of what you mean when you call something 'natural'. In science EVERYTHING that is physically possible by necessity is considered a natural thing. Anything governed by the laws of nature is natural. So, for that reason alone there can't be a body of scientific opinion on the naturalness of homosexuality anymore than there can be a body of scientific literature on the naturalness of any number of other things that are happening within what the laws of nature permit (namely: everything that is physically possible). So, dear Ms Benneth, your claim about the views of 'science' on the naturalness of homosexuality (wrong as it is even in fact), also aims to take comfort from the wrong people. It's akin to someone saying in response to a question such as what is the proper way to lay pipes in a housing estate? that there is a consensus opinion of theologians on the matter. It makes no sense, and even if theologians had views on how to lay pipes in a housing estate they're not really competent to claim particular expertise.

What does this mean? Not too much. Gay activists, do not rejoice too quickly. A lot of crap happens in nature. Crocodiles eat tourists in the Australian Northern Territory just about every year. Very much a natural thing, but still it's not nice. Men (usually) rape women. Natural. People drive cars. Natural. People fly to the moon. Natural. People kill each other in genocides. Natural. People bake cakes. Natural. You get the drift, I'm sure.

What we could do now, of course, is to change our definition of natural. Say, we could add a bit of Christianity and dump an imaginary God into the equation. What the claim about the naturalness of homosexuality then means is that homosexuality is a violation of a normatively understood (human) nature. Of course, this has even less to do with science - poor Hyacinth, how did you manage to get all of this so badly wrong... - This, after all, is what really motivates our Ugandan and Jamaican crusaders. There's a lot of irony in this one, too. After all, if anybody is unnatural, God is. The God these folks have invented hovers above the laws of nature, this God even makes laws of nature. Now, if anything is unnatural, God is. Funny enough, they're not going on about outlawing God or God's unnatural behavior (say, 'miracles'). Nope, they aim to punish people who do things within the laws of nature that their imaginary (and all-powerful, and all-knowing, and 'good') God cooked up in a couple of days. So, if anything, even on their own perspective, it's probably not a good idea to question God's laws of nature and the conduct that happens as a result of God's magnificent work (including, of course, genocides, rapes, and other such niceties). If I was God, I certainly would be pretty miffed if my underlings (sorry, my chosen one's) would question my grand scheme of things.

There's other problems with 'nature'. We have seen already that so many things 'go' in nature that are clearly bad, that it is obvious to anyone other than Ms Benneth and Dr Buturo that nature is probably a bad yardstick to measure any kind of behaviour against. There's a logical reason for that, too, it's called a naturalistic fallacy. A naturalistic fallacy occurs each time when someone derives normative conclusions from a matter of fact. You can't do that. You always need normative arguments and analysis to achieve that feast. So, gay activists, from the fact that homosexuality occurs in nature it follows that it is natural. It does not follow that it is good. The same is true for ice cream, the new Boeing Dreamliner, sunshine and other such things.

What Ms Benneth and Dr Buturo REALLY are trying to sell to the unsuspecting public is a normative (as opposed to a scientific) understanding of nature. Ie they have decided that certain things in nature are bad and they label them unnatural. We can probably all agree that there's plenty of things in nature that are not nice. The thing is though, Dr Buturo and Ms Benneth need to argue their case. Some of their ilk have argued that homosexual sex is unnatural because it is not leading to reproduction. That is, the homosexuals' use of our sexual organs is unnatural because it doesn't lead to breeding. So, in that sense then some guy sticking his penis in another guys bum is an abuse of the penis (and presumably the bum), because the sperm is wasted in the wrong spot so to speak. Well, there's several problems with this: 1) Most heterosexual sex acts involving the penis and the vagina (or other orifices of the heterosexual sex partner) do not lead to reproduction. Should we outlaw those, too? 2) Why should we accept the argument that our bodily organs serve only one purpose and no other. After all, we are using our tongue to lick stamps these days, as well as ice cream and any number of other things. What is the natural function of the tongue in these circumstances? And, who is to decide? Hyacinth and her buddy from Uganda? 3) Why should we accept the idea that sex serves only one purpose, namely to breed? I mean, why can't we accept the novel idea that sex (hopefully more often than not) is kinda FUN, Ms Benneth and Dr Buturo? As you can see, your claim that some kind of conduct or other is unnatural alone won't cut it. In fact, if anything, it is begging the question.