Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (GINA)

My Congressional Rep., Louise Slaughter, sponsored a House Bill to protect Americans from workplace and insurance discrimination based on their genetic profile. Currently, there is no certain legal protection against such discrimination. One result is that people are discouraged from being genetically tested when knowing test results might help them to better prepare for or treat a genetic disease. In addition, if the hopes of some medical researchers for "personalized medicine" pan out, genetic testing would play an even more important role in preventive treatment. (I'm putting on hold other concerns we may have about personalized medicine.)

GINA is the result of over a decade of work and advocacy. The need for such a bill was raised already in the early 1990s. It passed the House in April with overwhelming support--the vote was 420 to 3.

There is also support for the bill in the Senate and from the President. However, Senator Coburn from Oklahoma has used Senate rules to place a "hold" on the bill, which prevents the Senate from voting on it.

There is more information here and here.
And Representative Slaughter has a petition to sign here.

Breastfeeding-ignore it and it will go away?

The New York Times is reporting on the case of Dr. Sophie Currier, a breastfeeding mother who has gone to court to ask for extra break time during her medical boards to pump milk. Apparently, since breastfeeding is not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is not a valid reason for being given extra break time. The medical boards, by the way, are a 9-hour exam. She has been given the same amount of break time as other test-takers and is allowed to pump breastmilk during that time in a monitored room with glass walls. (For anyone who has not had the experience of pumping milk, it is time-consuming and awkward, and if a breastfeeding mother does not do it, she will be in pain.)

While the board is unwilling to grant Dr. Currier privacy, they claim their privacy policy prevents them from commenting on the case.

The American Academy of Pediatrics strongly supports breastfeeding from a medical standpoint. Apparently, though, the medical profession does not support this recommendation for their own members.

The Times writes that “The case…is a harbinger of what could be a growing problem.”

Why does the Times think this will be a “growing problem”? Because more women are studying medicine! And because these future doctors are following the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation to breastfeed!

Pesky women. Why don’t they realize it’s either motherhood or career but not both? Next thing you know, they’ll be demanding unreasonable things like maternity leave.

More info and an opportunity for action are at MomsRising.

Disturbing Landscapes

Over at Politics, Theory & Photography, Jim Johnson has posted some haunting photos of once-beautiful landscapes. Documenting uses and abuses of land shows sights that are often hidden from roads and other sight lines.

I would not say that industrial use of the land is always bad. There are dolomite mines in a suburb not far from my house that are hidden behind berms. We need roadbeds, no doubt about it, and I am also glad that the mines are hidden from sight. But there are huge differences in degree between a limestone pit and these images.

Photographs like these move us in ways that words alone, I think, cannot. To see clear cuts in person is even more shocking.

Women Philosophers Website

Kate Lindemann has done some impressive work in setting up a website honoring women who have made contributions to philosophy throughout history and around the globe, from ancient times to the present. The Women Philosophers website chronicles the history of women in philosophy. It gives information about their lives and their works. Many excerpts are included, as well as links to websites with additonal or related information. This site is a magnificent resource for researchers, students, teachers, and others who are interested in the important role that women have played in intellectual history.

The research that went into this website is especially appreciated because the list of notable women in history goes beyond the few that are commonly mentioned as figures of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, such as Christine de Pisan, Princess Christina of Sweden, and Olympe de Gouges. The women that are included expressed their thoughts not only through discursive writing but also through stories, plays, and poems.

The Women Philosophers website also solicits suggestions for other philosophers who may be included on the site and research about them. You can learn about contributing here.

Many thanks to Dr. Lindemann for setting up this resource!

Update:
An interview with Kate Lindemann at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog.

Pacific SWIP CFP

Below is the Call for Papers for the fall meeting of Pacific SWIP, with a fast-approaching deadline.
A couple of great ideas have been added to the program--workshops on pedagogy and on publishing, and an Author-meets-Critic session that discusses a not-yet-published manuscript.
These sessions should generate wide interest--who wouldn't benefit from sharing ideas about teaching and publishing? They will be a great venue for getting to know other women in philosophy, especially women outside our narrower research areas.

CALL FOR PAPERS

SOCIETY FOR WOMEN IN PHILOSOPHY

Pacific Division
Fall Meeting: October 13-14, 2007

California State University, Sacramento
Local Host: Christina M. Bellon

Submissions on any topic are welcome. For this fall's meeting, P-SWIP is especially interested in works in progress and author meets critics sessions. Authors with completed manuscripts are invited to submit abstracts. Paper submissions should be prepared for a presentation time of 20 minutes.

New Workshops!
This fall, SWIP will host two workshops, one on pedagogy (teaching women philosophers, as in teaching content provided by women philosophers, and teaching philosophy to women students) and another on publishing (the ins and outs of getting that manuscript published). Individuals interested in participating in one of the two workshops should contact Amy Coplan.

New AMC Session ­ Pre-Publication!
This fall, SWIP will also host an Author-Meets-Critics session, but with a twist ­ the author of a fully developed manuscript will meet with several critics to give commentary on the text prior to its publication. Too often, we hear authors begin their responses with "I wish I heard these criticisms BEFORE the book was published!". Well, this is that opportunity! Authors who would like to take this opportunity to have their manuscript critiqued pre-publication, and members willing to serve as critics, please submit a proposal with an abstract of the book manuscript to Amy Coplan. The manuscript must be available to distribute to the readers by Sept 20th.

SWIP members will be given priority, but others are welcome to submit their work. Some funds may be available to help support graduate student travel.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 10, 2007
Electronic submissions are encouraged.
Please send submissions to: Amy Coplan (acoplan@fullerton.edu)
Department of Philosophy, Cal State Fullerton, P.O. Box 6868
Fullerton, CA 92834-6868

Notification of acceptance will be sent by September 20, 2007.
More info on the P-SWIP webpage.

Book review of Potter's Feminism and Philosophy of Science

Alexandra Bradner has written a thoughtful, sympathetic review of Libby Potter's Feminism and Philosophy of Science: An Introduction, Routledge, 2006.

How we'd love to have time on this blog to discuss many of the points the review raises! Alexandra's review is worth reading itself, but here let me pick a few highlights:

1. It's nice to see someone call out the PSA for their lack of attention to feminist philosophy of science at the latest (2006) conference. I would add that in recent years the pages of the journal have also overlooked work in this area and appear to underrepresent women, especially when writing explicitly from a feminist perspective.

2. There is much attention paid to the status of women in science by the NSF, the AAAS, and other organizations interested in science and science education. Such attention is not so often paid to the humanities, whether because gender disparity is not apparent in the humanities generally or because our national interest is not pinned to the humanities as it is to the sciences. But figures (nicely summarized here and more links here) show that, as a discipline, philosophy lags behind most life and physical sciences in terms of the representation of women. Thus, Alexandra is correct to draw attention to how

...although Potter's own philosophers take time to discuss the gender construct in which science is produced, there is no attention to the gender context in which philosophy is produced -- the number of female philosophers, their ranks, salaries, editorial roles in journals and major anthologies, differences in training, extra-career obligations, etc.

3. Bradner praises Potter for how

this introduction makes it clear that philosophers interested in the fact/value distinction (that is, all philosophers) ignore feminist philosophy of science at their peril.

4. Finally, Alexandra writes that she wonders

what exactly is feminist about Potter's conception of feminist philosophy of science, for although feminists are certainly interested in value intrusion and naturalized epistemology, there is nothing especially feminist about these interests.

This is a delicate point. Feminist philosophy is of interest to all philosophers precisely because the issues and oversights that it raises highlight ways of thinking that have the effect of marginalizing women. And usually, insofar as these ways of thinking affect some people differently from other people, they signal a more general and not specifically gender-relevant problem. However, as our attention is shifted to the more general problem, the relevance to feminism drops out of sight.

Building Biophilic Communities

Over at The Splintered Mind, guest blogger Dan Haybron examines a Social Biophilia hypothesis. Extending E.O. Wilson’s idea of biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life,” Haybron proposes that humans have an unrecognized psychological need to be in nature, and to be in nature in communities with others.

The biophilia hypothesis has some empirical support: across cultures, humans respond similarly to cute furry animals, prefer open, grassy landscapes, and keep pets and plants in and around their homes. Wilson proposes an evolutionary explanation for biophilia. Humans evolved in complex wilderness landscapes, so our brains are suited for handling the problems that arise in natural settings. We can identify many types of plants and animals by sight, by sound, by smell; we can manipulate natural environments in ways that have allowed humans to thrive in nearly every area of the globe. Wilson believes that in cultures that are alienated from natural settings, psychological well-being (“sanity”) is depressed.

Haybron gives an explanation for why humans flourish in natural settings but why this psychological need (assuming it exists) is not readily recognized. If the need was always met in human evolutionary history, then there would not have been a reason for it to rise to the level of a conscious desire to be in nature. Humans were already living in nature. We have not been living in urban settings for very long when measured on the time-scale of generations and selection pressure.

© The Landmark Society of Western New York

So although we so seem to be happier in nature, this is not so obvious to us that we forego other pleasures or goods that are best accrued in developed communities. There are also various other forces, like the location of employment opportunities, that push us into constrained urban surroundings. Sure, people go hiking, camping, fishing. Municipalities build parks and we set aside federal lands for recreation. But these activities are in decline, and when cities expand parkland, they are now more likely to construct fields for organized sports than to preserve groves of trees.

© Bob Darling Photography

In a recent Harper’s piece, Edward Hoagland wrote

Politically, in the grabby phase we’re living through, this impulse doesn’t take the form of widely wanting to preserve nature as a public domain. Rather, we’ll tend to hire a backhoe to dig a private mini-pond and plant nursery vegetation, after chopping down whatever had grown up naturally in the vicinity before. A guy next door to where I used to live simply poisoned all of “his’ frogs in the pond outside his house because they sang when they mated in the spring. He had thought he was buying silent water.

This raises the thorny question of what counts as a nature experience for the sake of satisfying the supposed biophilic psychological need.

I always find discussion of a “return to land communities” unrealistically romantic. Life on the farm and life in the woods is harsh. Not having a reliable water and sewer system is decidedly unromantic and can reduce happiness, certainly. I wonder about the practicality of such visions of the good life. To take an example, Wendell Berry’s agro-romanticism is seductive, but does he earn his living working his small family farm or through his writing and speaking?

So I think the resolution to these questions lies not in comparing land communities with pavement communities, but in evaluating how the psychological benefits of meeting biophilic needs can be met by building from and changing the communities that we already live in.

Journal Rankings

In the last few weeks, philosophy bloggers have posted their various evaluations of the European Science Foundation's journal rankings. For a partial list of the journals and bloggers' comments, see Leiter Reports, Lemmings, Feminist Philosophers, Gone Public, and Brooks Blog.

Although analytic philosophers seem to be mostly satisfied with the list as a rough cut, continental and feminist philosophers have raised some concerns that it reinforces a popular but not universally accepted standard for what counts as the best philosophical writing.

John McCumber has made several important points:
1. that the European Science Foundation has a questionable agenda in ranking journals in the humanities.
2. that simple rankings invite mis-use by tenure committees looking for easy to make and easy to enforce judgments about research quality.
3. that although the list's purpose may be in part to promote rigorous (blind) peer review, not all the journals in the A-List are peer-reviewed in the standard way.
4. that the list is based on journals' "reputations" but it does not say how those reputations have been evaluated. Indeed, McCumber points out that the analytic focus of the A-Listed journals coincides with the analytic research interests of the committee that compiled the list.

There are a number of reasons to be wary of ANY simple ranking scheme.
1. Lists serve the status quo.
Any list is bound to favor older, well-established journals that publish papers across a range of areas in philosophy. These journals have well-earned reputations. But they are less likely to publish philosophical papers that attempt to push philosophy in new directions—that are multi- or cross-disciplinary, that challenge analytic methods and styles, that deepen newer paradigms, such as environmental and feminist frameworks, or that apply philosophy to solving practical problems, as in medical ethics. Most specialty journals--and all specialty journals that are not analytic--are classified as B-List. But the criterion that journals not specialize does not speak to the quality of the papers they publish.
2. Many of the journals on the list are not double-blind reviewed, and as McCumber points out, a decision of whether or not to publish a paper

needs to be blind, and preferably double blind. The way major philosophy journals are editorially reviewed in this country simply reinforces the dominance of the old over the young, and is I think a major reason why there are so few new ideas in American philosophy compared to other disciplines.

3. Lists can serve the interests of administrators looking to deny tenure, but cannot so easily be used in the interests of younger members of the profession. It is not helpful as a guide to where to submit papers because it does not reflect considerations such as acceptance rates, moratoriums, the time it takes to get a response from the journal, reputations within particular sub-disciplines of philosophy, and citation rates.

Indeed, it is not clear why this or any other list would be superior to a simple citation ranking as is used in the sciences (though even that type of ranking is subject to all the above faults and is too often mis-used).

My final thought about journals is a question raised by my friend Jim Johnson, who asked why the prominent philosophy journals are not published by professional organizations. And I don’t know the answer. In political science, two prominent journals are published by professional organizations. This is also common in the sciences, where both the general interest journals (like Science) and specialty journals (like Ecology) are published by organizations (AAAS and ESA, respectively). When journals are published by organizations, then they have a tighter connection with the organization’s membership and a direct duty to be responsive to the profession, and particularly to the young members of the profession. (Although no doubt this accountability causes head-aches for journal editors!)

FEMMSS at NWSA

The U.S. National Women's Studies Association held its 2007 annual conference at the Pheasant Run Resort in St.Charles, Illinois, just outside Chicago. While attending, a number of scholars who've been involved with FEMMSS (Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies) began a series of discussions we hope to continue in 2008 at the NWSA in Cinncinati, Ohio.

Philosopher Nancy McHugh organized an informal breakfast meeting to discuss some FEMMSS planning, given that it is a virtual organization at the moment. I think we might be encouraged that the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, a similarly interdisciplinary international group originating in philosophy has existed for over ten years without any structure but with a series of very successful biennial conferences drawing a wide range of international scholars. However, it was clear at the 2007 FEMMSS conference hosted by Arizona State University (Tempe) that future biennial conferences are just the beginning of what our group wants. We want outreach to public policy, publications, workshops, and more.

Unfortunately, our breakfast meeting was cut short, but fortunately the reason was that our timing conflicted with a scheduled meeting of the NWSA Taskforce on Science and Technology. We adjourned our meeting to join theirs, and it turned out we increased their numbers from about four to about ten. Their group has a narrower academic domain (excluding larger epistemological and metaphysical issues) and a more U.S. membership than FEMMSS. However, by coordinating our efforts we can all benefit by complementing each other's work, rather than competing for people's energy.

NWSA also can run bulletin boards and discussion groups for Science and Technology Studies! And this is a great opportunity for FEMMSS to connect with STS since we have not been strong in history or sociology of science.

Those of us who attended the Taskforce business meeting will receive messages, and we hope to organize some sessions for NWSA in June 2008. They already plan an informal, off-the-program session for us to share research and explore possibilities for collaboration during the "pre-conference" official sessions.

Nancy, Marianne Janack and I were on a panel entitled "Do We Know Better?: Discussing the State of Feminist Epistemology" which did generate some fascinating discussion, just as Evelyn predicted. In particular, I came to realize that my own view runs somewhat contrary to Nancy's. Nancy spoke about the increasing situatedness of feminist epistemology -- it's nice to know we practice what we preach! However, I raised concerns about the loss of the original rhetorical concerns of the feminist critiques of epistemology and of the history of science. Marianne argued Richard Rorty's epistemological cynicism about feminism is unwarranted (to be part of her upcoming edited Rereading the Canon volume on feminist engagements with Rorty). Despite unfortunate timing on the morning of the last day, and relocating ourselves from an absolutely frigid room, there was a good turnout, and I think we could have continued the discussion much longer. Fortunately, we will! See you in Cinncinati in 2008!

Midwest SWIP Fall 2008 CFP

A note about Society for Women in Philosophy and their sponsored conferences:
SWIP is divided into regional groups in the U.S. -- East, Midwest, and Pacific. From what I can tell, the regional groupings serve little other than an administrative function.

Each group sponsors conferences at least annually. Eastern SWIP usually meets in the spring, sometimes in conjunction with other conferences. For example, in 2004 Eastern SWIP met the day before a conference sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State on the feminism-related topic of "Epistemologies of Ignorance." Midwestern SWIP holds a conference in the fall and one in the spring, and the Pacific group usually meets twice a year. The conferences are not strictly regional, though, since presenters may come from any area of the country. Indeed, since academics do move (at least once, from graduate school to other employment, and often more than that), the regional memberships do not always represent the members' current academic homes.

SWIP also organizes multiple sessions at each of the three APA division meetings, and often organizes sessions in conjunction with other groups with overlapping interests, such as the Society for Analytical Feminism or the APA's Committee on the Status of Women.

There is also a SWIP group in the UK and one in Canada.

I've attended two Eastern SWIP conferences and one Canada-SWIP. They are always programs that range over a wide variety of philosophical disciplines, and are a great place to network, especially for graduate students and young professionals. (See Sharon's earlier post here.)

Organizers of the Eastern and Pacific SWIP conferences, in particular, make an effort to construct programs that include both papers focusing specifically on feminism and papers that address women in philosophy more generally. That is, there are papers on feminist bioethics alongside history of philosophy papers alongside social epistemology and social theory. In addition to a number of feminist papers, they attract submissions that analyze, critique, and extend the work women philosophers (e.g, papers on Hannah Arendt).

Although I've never attended a Midwest SWIP conference, their cfp's and programs have always struck me as being more specifically focused on feminism and women's issues while being more inclusive in terms of format, encouraging presentation styles outside of the typical philosopher-at-the-lectern-reading format. (A footnote to this inclusive message, though, is that, as an analytic philosopher, I don't feel as welcome to submit to the Midwest as to the Eastern--I don't know if that's just me or if I'm picking up on a message that analytic philosophers have other venues.)

And now, the announcement:

Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy
Call for Papers

****************************************************
Midwestern SWIP has always had a practice of making
its programs spaces for work that develops feminist
ideas, theory, philosophy and practice. We have not
included on our programs work that is not engaged in
feminism.

At this time, we amend this practice so our programs
are spaces for work that, whatever else it does,
connects themes of feminism and male supremacy with
themes of anti-racism and white supremacy.

Midwest SWIP is an interdisciplinary conference with
a particular emphasis on troubling the discipline of
philosophy and the theory/practice dichotomy.

****************************************************
Fall 2007 Division Meeting
October 26-28, 2007
University of Toledo, Toledo, OH

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2007

We invite work in all areas relating to feminist
anti-racist theory/practice, from political theory and
ethics to metaphysics and epistemology as well as
papers, panels, and performances that engage feminist
anti-racist praxis and theorizing more broadly.

Papers, poetry, panel proposals and/or other proposals
and queries should be sent via email to each of the
following:
Gaile Pohlhaus at pohlhag@muohio.edu
AND
Sophie Vick at VickSoph@msu.edu

CFP: Special issue of Hypatia on Feminist Bioethics and Medical Biotechnologies

Call for Papers

Special Issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
Topic: "Medical Biotechnologies"

Edited by Marin Gillis and Inmaculada de Melo-Martín

Medical biotechnologies have been heralded as both the solution to most problems affecting human beings and their environments, and as a threat to all that matters to us. Feminist analysis of current medical biotechnologies has much to offer to this debate. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy invites
submissions that use feminist philosophy to evaluate medical biotechnologies.

Articles exploring feminist philosophical analyses of medical biotechnologies and those evaluating how feminist values might shape the development and implementation of such technologies are welcome. Also of interest are essays reflecting on the gendered, race, and class dimensions of medical biotechnologies, those evaluating the impact of globalization on these biotechnologies and vice-versa, and articles offering new insights into the effects of medical biotechnologies on social and political arrangements.

Although feminist work in biomedicine is frequently assumed to be about women's capacity to procreate, this issue seeks to highlight other dimensions of medical biotechnologies, including human genetic modification, cloning, xenotransplantation, chimeras, pharmacogenomics/genetics, and human genetic
databases.

Papers should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography, prepared for anonymous review, and accompanied by an abstract of no more than 100 words. Please provide a cover letter identifying your paper as a submission for the special issue "Medical Biotechnologies." The deadline for submissions is 15 March 2009.

Papers should be submitted by electronic attachment in Word to Marin Gillis at mgillis@medicine.nevada.edu. Submissions should follow Hypatia guidelines (see http://www.msu.edu/~hypatia/).

What is experience?

I’ve been thinking a little about what philosophers and scientists mean by “experience.”

Science is empirical; it is based on what can be observed, what can be experienced. This has several important implications. First, explanations are natural, not supernatural. Second, scientific knowledge is based on observed data, not on guesswork, tradition, or sentiment. And third, evidence must be public. In principle, more than one person should be able to observe the evidence; indeed, anyone who is properly positioned to have the experience should have it.

But this is not the only meaning of experience, or even the primary one, in many contexts.

A part of the controversy over evidence-based medicine can be traced to different ideas about the kind of experience that is the basis for medical knowledge. Evidence-based medical practitioners think of medicine as being like a science, for which controlled empirical studies of large numbers of patients provide the best evidence for which treatments work. Others see medicine as being more like a craft that is based primarily on the clinical relationship between doctors and their patients. For them, experience is personal, and some doctors believe that what they have learned from their experience treating patients as distinct individuals cannot be replaced by generic studies.

In an April 2007 New Yorker article by John Colapinto titled “The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?”, the linguist Dan Everett claims that members of the Piraha tribe are “the ultimate empiricists.”

Colapinto writes

The tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Piraha do not think, or speak, in abstractions - and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word “xibipio” as a clue to how the Piraha perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience–which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Piraha say that the person has not simply gone away but “xibipio”–”gone out of experience,” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light “goes in and out of experience.”

The extreme attitude toward experience of the Piraha points out the limits of empiricism, and why a culture that is empiricist to such a degree could never develop anything resembling modern science, because science is just as dependent on the trustworthiness of testimony as it is on the trustworthiness of direct experience.

On the one hand, our culture, which is a culture thoroughly permeated by science and technology, is resolutely empiricist. On the other hand, we are reliant on information about experiences that are not our own.

I’m reading a book about children and education that quotes ecological psychologist Edward Reed:

There is something wrong with a society that spends so much money, as well as countless hours of human effort—to make the least dregs of processed information available to everyone everywhere and yet does little or nothing to help us explore the world for ourselves.

and

[We are beginning] to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well.

I have a hard time seeing that what we mean by experience is at fault, or that abundance of information is necessarily a barrier to having first-person, direct experiences.

Although Reed is allied with pragmatists James and Dewey, to hold that our concept of experience (as second-hand, testimonial information about the world rather than direct perception) strikes me as less than pragmatic. Isn't it possible that our easy access to information, and increasingly good and well-vetted information, may serve us in gaining direct, first-hand experience? For instance, if I’m interested in trees, I might look up what trees grow in the forest outside my back door, learn that tulip trees are common and a little about them, and then by going into the forest be able to distinguish tulip trees from other trees by their flower and leaves. Although this is not the same kind of activity as aimless noodling about, I can learn to be a better direct observer by having access to second-hand information.

In the context of childhood education and the value of spending time in nature and time in creative play, then it seems to me that it is not the meaning of ‘experience’ that is at fault but an education system that is relentlessly competitive on many different levels and that relies on simple tests to gauge complex learning. A completely different matter.

National Women's Studies Association Annual Meeting

The NWSA is meeting June 28-July 1 in St. Charles, Illinois, west of Chicago.

Philosophers who are presenting at the conference include Nancy McHugh, Marianne Janack, and Cate Hundleby in a session on feminist epistemology.

Their session has the provocative title "Do We Know Better?: Discussing the State of Feminist Epistemology" and is scheduled for 9:30 to 10:45 on Sunday morning, July 1. It should generate fascinating discussion!

Ethics and Science

By advancing Reason as the basis of intellectual authority, the Age of Enlightenment initiated both the rise of modern science and the elevation of humanism, individualism, and democracy as the basis of the modern state. It was discovered that the Earth is not the physical center of the universe, and liberal political views developed which eventually led to abolitionism, anti-racism, and sexual equality.

But it has been only about 500 years since Copernicus, and apparently radical ideas take time to catch on. Here, Cosmic Variance puts a poll on interracial dating (83% of Americans find it acceptable) into perspective with the acceptance of heliocentrism (74%).

Who would say that in 500 years there hasn't been just as much progress in ethics/philosophy/politics as in science?

Climate change and the role of philosophers

Last week NASA administrator Michael Griffin questioned the urgency of global warming, commenting to NPR's Steve Inskeep that NASA should have a lesser rather than a greater role in performing climate science and monitoring climate change. While Griffin does acknowledge that the global climate is warming, his comments support Bush Administration cutbacks to earth observation work.

The comment that caused the fuss:

I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings -- where and when -- are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

This comment begs for analysis, and there's a fine one here, at Adventures in Science and Ethics.

NPR ran its own commentary later in the day, an interview with Penn State geosciences professor Richard Alley.

First, he addressed Griffin's claim that we cannot evaluate whether the current climate is the optimal one. Rather than drop his jaw in disbelief at the question of optimality (as many commentators did), Alley notes that biological sciences do have reasons for saying that some states of affairs are better (for us, and for other living creatures) than others. This is because we can assume that living creatures have, to some degree, adapted to the current conditions. Of course, adaptation is continuous (e.g., there is still on-going postglacial migration of tree species in North America), but humans are more likely to be able to cope with climate conditions in which they already thrive than with alternatives.

Second, interviewer Michele Norris asked Alley "Are we tiptoeing into the realm of philosophy?" by considering how to respond to climate change. Alley says

If we aren't, I think we should be. The energy system, the climate in which we live...are such big questions that it would be the height of arrogance to leave them to no one but the scientists and the engineers. I certainly hope that the philosophers and theologians are thinking about these too.

Thus, there is a point of agreement between Michael Griffin and his critics. The point is made over and over again in this debate that there are scientists (they are the ones that measure things) and then there are people who are qualified to make assessments of what the science means and what should be done. They are variously called policy-makers, philosophers, or the public, and they are not always educated in the relevant sciences. To be fair, Alley says only that it should not be only scientists who think about what should be done, while Griffin's position is much stronger. A few days after the NPR interview, the AP reported that

Griffin reiterated that NASA’s job was to provide scientific data on global warming and leave it up to policy makers to decide what to do with it.

There is some irony in this, and especially in Alley's appeal to philosophers to get on the job of evaluating the moral response to climate change. Namely, philosophers, by and large, do not do that kind of work. Consider a recent table of contents from The Philosophical Quarterly, "one of the most highly regarded and established academic journals in philosophy... [which publishes] high-quality articles from leading international scholars across the range of philosophical study." It is all fine work, but mostly in metaphysics, and not relevant to applied policy decisions.

What many people believe philosophers do and what philosophers actually do are two different things.

However, in the third part of Alley's commentary he goes on to do himself just exactly what he thinks philosophers are best equipped for--to give a sensitive overview of the ethical implications of climate change. He argues that Griffin is correct that some people will no doubt benefit from climate change (Alley omits mentioning the insurance business as most likely to profit) and others will be harmed. And there is ethical weight to identifying who these parties are. He says that places that have winter, places that have air conditioners, and places that have bulldozers at their disposal for shoring up sea-walls will all be harmed less than poor nations and people who live at the equator and near the poles.

It is a fiction that only professional philosophers are equipped to make such judgments, and it would be harmful to wait until the philosophical community came to recognize the importance of focusing on such issues. Scientists themselves can and do make value judgments.