blog.bioethics.net

Why use words like "stupid"? I've read Art's comments using the same word, elsewhere.
Why distort ANT as an altered embryo? I'm sure that you understand that the proposition is to alter the donor nucleus before transfer and that no one knows whether the division of cells will result in an organism - an embryo - or not.
However, the study designs are intended to avoid any possibility or appearance of the production of and destruction of human embryos. And to go as far as possible to *prove* that no embryo is produced, before any human DNA is used.
Why do you editors here at AJOB repeatedly display so much anger? What sort of vested interest could you have that influences you to display more emotion than those of us who actually do believe that humans are being killed in traditional "human" embryonic stem cell procurement? We've been conditioned to be reasonable and reasoning - why weren't you?

- by Beverly on Oct 20, 2005 at 2:54 AM | link

ha!

- by on Oct 20, 2005 at 3:00 PM | link

Yup, it just continues to amaze. Of course, at no point have any of you argued that ANT didn't actually work in this one small experiment, or that what is created can't actually end up being a non-embryo. And, of course, Dr. George published his own separate opinion in the Kass Commission report on this, going on and on, about how many of the same problems that one has to worry about in SCNT one still has to worry about in ANT (e.g. having to buy massive amounts of eggs from-probably poor women all around the world). And no mention that several of those other dreaded, "neoconservative" and "new- to-bioethics" members of the Council signed onto George's report. Pretty hard to say that all of conservatdom (oops, I'm sorry, make that "Neoconservatdom") is engaged in "flim-flammery" when the chief neocon himself is busy lowering expectations on ANT, isn't it sirs?
I see that there is still no answer to the question I possed earlier. At least ANT actually happened with these mouse cells. But, of course, Kant didn't actually endorse Cato's suicide, he did just the opposite. So Margaret Battin's Least Worst Death contains an outright falsehood. Do any of you care? Kant did not "rely" on Christian "theology" to oppose assisted suicide. He did the exact opposite. So Beauchamp and Childress' 4th Edition of Principles contains an outright falsehood. Do any of you care? Kant certainly did not come out in favor of dueling. In fact he did the exact opposite in the Metaphysics of Morals. So Lance Stell's article in vol. 90 of Ethics contains outright falsehoods. Do any of you care???
I'm still waiting. At some point, moderate and liberal constituional historians and historians of ideas will find out about what has passed for scholarship in all those "peer reviewed" bioethics journals over the last 30 years. And they aren't going to stay quiet "for the good of the team." It is beyond preposterous, you who write this blog are charged with teaching *Ethics* at your respective schools, and you have no problem with the total obfuscation of some of the most major texts in Ethics (Kant's, Locke's), but you will all go nuts because Nature published an article, that you admit is true, but just so unimportant that it shows conservative bias to even pay attention to it. (And you don't prove that point either.)
I'm still waiting. If bioethics before Bush and Kass came along was so very responsible why did the most respected bioethicists in America write works of history lite that any decent prof of history or law would give an F to for making up stuff.
Why?

- by Bradford Short on Oct 20, 2005 at 7:44 PM | link

If it's any help, I looked in my 5th edition the other night, and didn't find the Kant reference to theology.

- by Beverly on Oct 20, 2005 at 8:20 PM | link

Just out of curiosity, I decided to look up Ethics, Volume 90, with Lance Stell's article. Stell on page 21 is busy comparing Kant's argument against suicide in the Groundwork with Kant's views on killing during a duel. Stell very clearly states on this page that Kant in the Groundwork said that killing in the context of a duel is wrong. But Stell picks up on something else: that in a later work, the Rechtslehre, he apparently says something different. Here are the words of Kant:
"A military man who has been commissioned a junior officer may suffer an insult and as a result feel obliged by the opinions of his comrades in arms to seek satisfaction and to punish the person who insulted him, not by appealing to the law and the court, but instead, as would be done in the state of nature by challenging him to a duel; for even though in doing so he will be risking his life, he will thereby be able to demonstrate his military valor, on which the honor of his profession rests. If under such circumstances his opponent is killed, this cannot properly be called a murder (homicidium dolosum) in as much as it takes place in a field of combat openly fought with the consent of both parties, even though they may both have participated in it only reluctantly."
Stell goes on to say that the Rechtslehre position is 'strange' given what Kant says elsewhere. Then he tries to make sense of this conflict.
What Stell does not do is make the simpleminded claim that "Kant came out in favor of dueling."
So as far as Mr. Short's remark is concerned, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones: a fine rule, in a Kantian spirit.

- by Sam I am on Oct 21, 2005 at 1:48 AM | link

Oh, boy is this going to be easy:
"In this passage, Kant clearly commits himself to the view that the right to life is alienable and that voluntary consent is sufficient to exculpate the survivor of a duel from a charge of murder."
Stell, Dueling, 90 Ethics 7, at 21.
"Clearly committing" oneself is "coming out in favor." Having an "alienable right to life"-like all rights-justifies being "in favor" of being able to do the action the right entitles one to chose to do. Maybe it isn't "simpleminded", but it sure as hell is just what I said it was.
Hey Sam, did you think that I wasn't going to call you on this lie? you think people can't look it up themselves?
Your statements on the Grounding are also laughable. If you've studied Kant you should know that he never mentions dueling in discussing the examples of the categorical imperative. They are 1) suicide because one is weary of life, 2) getting a loan so as to commit larceny-by-trick, 3) wasting one's talents because of giving into lazyness and 4) giving alms. Kant didn't say ANYTHING about killing in "the context of a duel" in the Grounding. Stell's move is to decieve his readers into thinking that Kant is incoherant as he went from publishing the Grounding in 1785 to the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797-8.
Of course, you only quoted the misleading and incomplete passage Stell quoted in Dueling. It ends with:
"What, then, is the actual law of the land with regard to these two cases [dueling and infanticide] (which come under criminal justice)? This question presents penal justice with a dilemma: either it must declare that the concept of honor (which is no delusion in these cases) is null and void in the eyes of the law and that these acts should be punished by death or it must abstain from imposing the death penalty for these crimes, which merit it; thus it must be either too cruel or too lenient. The solution to this dilemma is as follows: the categorical imperative involved in the legal justice of punishment remains valid (that is, the unlawful killing of another person must be punished by death)..."
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, John Ladd's trans., at 106-107.
So I see Sam, Kant "*clearly commits himself* to the view that...voluntary consent is sufficient to exculpate the survivor of a duel from a charge of murder", except for that part where he said that "the unlawful killing of another person [in a duel] must be punished by death."
It does not take much study of logic for one to realize that Kant isn't "exculpating" anyone from a damn thing if he is saying that that person "must be punished by death."
What I've just quoted is *on the very same page* of the Metaphysics of Morals as what Stell quotes. It is ON THE SAME PAGE! Someone isn't merely making a "mistake" here, someone is lying.
But I shouldn't need to do this. I've published every word of this, and every blocked quote, and already given the citations. And people are going to look that up Sam, whatever falsehood you want to throw up on this site.
Stell didn't need to "make sense" of any conflict Sam, because there was not conflict there, period. Stell made one up out of thin air, to slap Kant in the face. His article shouldn't have been published because it slandered a dead man. It is YOU who live in the glass house, you who attack Nature for publishing articles that you merely don't like the politcal implications of, and never made Ethics take back the lies it published about Kant, that never, ever should have made it through peer review if that peer review meant anything.
Beverly: I never said it was in the 5th Edition, I explicitly said that bioethicists still use the 4th edition, and that until the 4th edition's dihonesty is retracted, not merely swept under the rug, there is no just resolution of any of this. The Acumen Journal of Sciences, vol. 1, no. 2, has an article that cites the 4th edition on page 68. It is from Aug./Sept. *2003*-or two whole years after the 5th edition came out. (It also has a particularly nasty editoral on Kass at page vii.) The five editions of Principles have each been changed from each other-it is entirely possible-and Childress and Beauchamp know this-that people will keep on using xeroxes of the 4th edition's chapters with their students even though they have bought the 5th for themselves-in fact, that probably happens a lot.
I sense that you (Beverly) don't like my extreme ire on this. I will only say this: you wouldn't like being slandered after death, even 200-300 years after death. We owe it to Kant and Locke (and everyone, including people *I* don't like-Hume, Hobbes) to argue with *them*, not a strawman, bizzaro copy of them, and we also owe it to our students not to pass off said bizzaro Lockes and Kants to our students as the real thing. That doesn't make Kant and Locke right, but it certainly still leaves open the possibility that they might be right. Read my articles all the way through. Look up the references and give them a non-Sam, thorough read through. And then see if you still think that this situation doesn't call for some harsh language.
Oh, and to all, I'm still waiting. Why is it O.K. to violate all just scholarly procedure if it helps save legalized assisted suicide in Oregon, but it is not O.K. for Nature to publish a true article that is (arguably) unimportant?
Why?

- by Bradford Short on Oct 21, 2005 at 7:48 PM | link

"It is YOU who live in the glass house, you who attack Nature for publishing articles that you merely don't like the politcal implications of, and never made Ethics take back the lies it published about Kant, that never, ever should have made it through peer review if that peer review meant anything."
These are the words of Mr. Short. And take a look what I wrote. I said nothing about the Nature article, and I wrote nothing about what political implications I would like to pull out of Kant's writings. So what kind of credibility do you have to defend the great philosophers, when you make wild overinterpretations of simple sentences on a blog?
I admire Kant's writings -- let him be rescued from his self-appointed defenders.

- by Sam I am on Oct 21, 2005 at 10:47 PM | link

This is rediculous. You explicitly said that Stell did not say that Kant favored a right to duel in the Grounding, when it is a fact that Kant never said anything about dueling in the Grounding. You explicitly gave Stell's dishonest quotation from Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals, and I showed that the next several lines prove, beyond all cavil, that Kant never supported dueling in either the Metaphysics of Morals or the Grounding. You directly inferred that the "stange conflict" between the Grounding and the Metaphysics of Morals is not obviously the result of dishonesty. That book exists, Sam. You can say that my language is too harsh all you want. That may work with bioethicists, but it works with about no one else. There is nothing "wild" about interpreting: "In this passage, Kant clearly commits himself to the view that the right to life is alienable and that voluntary consent is sufficient to exculpate the survivor of a duel from a charge of murder.", as saying "In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant came out in favor of a right to engage in dueling."
If you don't want to attack the Nature article, fine. I couldn't care less. Obviously, since these comments originate from some rather nasty attacks on the Nature article, the Nature article is at issue here. The fact is, if not for President Bush and the Kass Commission, James Childress and his fellow NBAC members would be sitting on NBAC in D.C. right now. If people are going to accuse the present Presidential commission on bioethics with creating disengenuous science, blatantly disengenuous history/history of philosophy by the alternative ought to be considered as well. If we are going to hear about how great "peer reviewed" philosophy/bioethics publications are, and how George, Kass, Gomez-Lobo et al. ignore them, then we have a right to asses whether those publications seem to use dishonest history lite to hurt the conservatives who presumably want to be able to use Kant/Locke's arguments if they could only be taught about them honestly. All of that is in play here, and I'm not going to let you artificially narrow the parameters of debate.
The fact is that you were blatantly dishonest about what appears on page 21 of vol. 90 of Ethics, or, you didn't know that when Stell said "Rechtlehre" (that is part of the German title for Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals), he was saying that Kant endorsed a right to duel in the *Metaphysics of Morals*, which is one of the works of Kant I listed bioethicists willfully misrepresenting in my initial post (along with the Lectures on Ethics). You evidently don't "admire" Kant enough to give a damn whether his works are being delibrately doctored when they are re-written as blocked quotes in modern American bioethics.
I will simply ask the question another way: If Robert George did to a section of, say, Hume's works what Beauchamp and Childress did to Kant's Lectures on Ethics on p. 61-2 of the 4th edition of Principles, would any of you fail to use that against him? To show that he is unqualified to be on the Commission? Would it not even be used against him for getting tenure at Princeton?
But James Childress did just that and had a perfectly fine time on NBAC from 1996-2001. Beauchamp did it with him, and *signed the letter* that Art Caplan put out a year and a half ago attacking Kass and the Council for the appointment of Schaub, Lawler and Carson. None of you cared. In the end, this isn't about "politcal implications"-if you want to disagree with Locke, Kant, Blackstone, whoever, and support suicide and suicide assistance, go ahead. I don't agree but it is not a dishonorable thing to do. But what is in these books and articles, and what Kant really wrote is plain as day. I see you didn't quote any more from page 21 of 90 Ethics Sam? Why didn't you do that? Why'd you play the "your too politcal card"?
It is because you are wrong and you know it. Kant deserves to have his real arguments aired, and those who tried to subvert that have violated the dignity of his person by violating his memory. That most certainly violates the categorical imperative.
People deserve the truth. You bioethicists-God help us-can slow the truth down. But you can't stop it. The truth will out.

- by Bradford Short on Oct 23, 2005 at 12:22 AM | link

First, Mr. Short, let me say this: I am not part of this left wing/right wing nonsense in American bioethics, which reduces the debate to the level of the Jerry Springer show.
But you apparently are. Your comments are graphically symptomatic of that trend: demonize your opponents and push your own agenda, in a tone of self-righteous hysteria. Don't get me wrong: BOTH sides do it. It is one of my beefs with the AJOB blog. And both sides will be the death of bioethical debate as public discourse, or it will continue to exist as a vaguely amusing circus sideshow.
So in the spirit of transcending the usual nonsense, let me concede a major point: reading over Stell's remarks and Kant's passages again, I now believe that Stell made a serious error in attributing an 'alienable life' argument within Kant's writings. It seems that Kant was making a distinction between a view that 'life is alienable' in dueling in an honor-based context, but he contrasts it with his own considered view based on the categorical imperative. If Stell failed to make this distinction between these two contexts in Kant's writings not out of knowledge but intentionally to push a political agenda in bioethics, well, shame on him. And shame on anyone who does similar things, no matter what political leanings they have, with the caveat that they do it intentionally. Am I clear? Do you read me?
But shame on you too, Mr. Short. Shame on you for painting me as a member of some alleged left-wing conspiracy devoted to misrepresenting the views of famous philosophers to support 'liberal' causes in bioethics, and throwing in all sorts of accusations and attributions of what I (or my 'kind') believe into the mix. Shame on you for your ugly confrontational stance, which assumes the worst about your perceived 'enemy' in a parody of intellectual debate. And doing this philosophical 'bear-baiting' while posing as an present-day representative for the great philosophers -- a crushing irony.
So go on: gloat.
That is what it is all about when your 'enemy' concedes a point, isn't it?

- by Sam I am on Oct 23, 2005 at 2:44 AM | link

In 1979 Lance Stell quoted Kant as saying:
"A military man who has been commissioned a junior officer may suffer an insult and as a result feel obliged by the opinions of his comrades in arms to seek satisfaction and to punish the person who insulted him, not by appealing to the law and the court, but instead, as would be done in the state of nature by challenging him to a duel; for even though in doing so he will be risking his life, he will thereby be able to demonstrate his military valor, on which the honor of his profession rests. If under such circumstances his opponent is killed, this cannot properly be called a murder (homicidium dolosum) in as much as it takes place in a field of combat openly fought with the consent of both parties, even though they may both have participated in it only reluctantly."
The whole passage from the Metaphysics of Morals runs as such:
"There remain, however, two crimes deserving of death with regard to which it still remains doubtful whether legislation is authorized to impose the death penalty. In both cases, the crimes are due to the sense of honor. One involves the honor of womanhood; the other, military honor. Both kinds of honor are genuine, and duty requires that they be sought after by every individual in each of these two classes. The first crime is infanticide at the hands of the mother (infanticidium maternale); the other is the murder of a fellow soldier (commilitonicidium) in a duel.
Now, legislation cannot take away the disgrace of an illegitimate child, nor can it wipe away the stain of suspicion of cowardice from a junior officer who fails to react to a humiliating affront with action that would show that he has the strength to overcome the fear of death. Accordingly, it seems that, in such circumstances, the individuals concerned find themselves in a state of nature, in which killing another (homicidium) can never be called murder (homicidium dolosum); in both cases, they are indeed deserving of punishment, but they cannot be punished with death by the supreme power. A child born into the world outside marriage is outside the law (for this is [implied by the concept of ] marriage), and consequently it is also outside the protection of the law. The child has crept surreptitiously into the commonwealth (much like prohibited wares), so that its existence as well as its destruction can be ignored (because by right it ought not to have come into existence in this way); and the mother’s disgrace if the illegitimate birth becomes known cannot be wiped out by any official decree.
Similarly, a military man who has been commissioned a junior officer may suffer an insult and as a result feel obliged by the opinions of his comrades in arms to seek satisfaction and to punish the person who insulted him, not by appealing to the law and taking him to court, but instead, as would be done in a state of nature, by challenging him to a duel; for even though in doing so he will be risking his life, he will thereby be able to demonstrate his military valor, on which the honor of his profession rests. If, under such circumstances, his opponent should be killed, this cannot properly be called a murder (homicidium dolosum), inasmuch as it takes place in a combat openly fought with the consent of both parties, even though they may have participated in it only reluctantly.
What, then, is the actual Law of the land with regard to these two cases (which come under criminal justice)? This question presents penal justice with a dilemma: either it must declare that the concept of honor (which is no delusion in these cases) is null and void in the eyes of the law and that these acts should be punished by death or it must abstain from imposing the death penalty for these crimes, which merit it; thus it must be either too cruel or too lenient. The solution to this dilemma is as follows: the categorical imperative involved in the legal justice of punishment remains valid (that is, the unlawful killing of another person must be punished by death), but legislation itself (including also the civil constitution), as long as it remains barbaric and undeveloped, is responsible for the fact that incentives of honor among the people do not accord (subjectively) with the standards that are (objectively) appropriate to their purpose, with the result that public legal justice as administered by the state is injustice from the point of view of the people."
While your last post isn't dishonest, it still isn't complete. Kant completely rejects the "view that 'life is alienable' in dueling in an honor-based context"-that is obviously from the use fo the word "must" in saying that winning duelists *must* be executed.
Now the next question to ponder is this: how can this be a mistake? The parts that Stell left out aren't in some other part of the Metaphysics of Morals, removed from this part by 25, or 50 pages, they aren't in another book by Kant (though Stell also implies to his readers that he has been thorough in looking through the Kant corpus), *they are on the same page.*
I contend, and I think mere common sense will bear me out, that when that "must" I am talking about appears a mere 116 words away from what Stell quoted (in a book translated by John Ladd that has maybe 300-400 words per page), it is simply sane to say "the principle of charity has been abused here, and I am going to start using words like 'falsehood' and 'lie.'"
I have read, and documents similar falsehoods performed by many other bioethicists. Every time, the end result is that the inalienability of life argument is made to be the fall guy. Either Kant was a theocrat, or he didn't really mean it because he thought it was right that Cato killed himself, or that some unwed mother killed her baby, or that a soldier killed one who insulted him in a duel, or Locke didn't believe in inalienable rights even though that vitiates the whole Glorious Revolution he risked his life to help pull off, or Kant was against suicide expect when one kills himself to help others (because, you know, if you were stealing a loan by lying to the loan officer, to give the money to the poor, that would be O.K. to Kant), etc., etc., on and on...
There is so much of this, that when I was at CMU from 1997 to 2000 many professors wouldn't even let me say, for a minute, in class that Kant was committing himself to the inalienability of the right to life in the Grounding. This was already "settled." I then spent years actually finding and reading all this gobbledegook from Nelson, Battin, Stell, etc. and found this that we arguing about here...passages that are clearly mangled, clearly doctored, by someone on purpose, or because of a total recklessness in writing papers. "Peer-reviewed" papers at that.
I'm not gloating, you came at me with charges of "throwing stones in glass houses" without having looked at the Kant and Stell I was talking about, in your first post you totally re-quoted the same dishonest blocked quoted that Stell had in Dueling. I don't care that this is only a "blog"-for every one person who reads the Metsphysics of Morals, 100 will read the Grounding, and as that mangled passage, looking that way, gets around, *everyone* will think that Kant supported, or could have supported dueling. That, I think self-evidently, violates the dignity in the person of Kant via his memory. I don't need to be "appointed" to realize that and act on it-everyone is empowered to do so; it is the right thing to do.
I lived through the 90's and I saw, personally, how important Stell, et al. are. I will continue to publicize these falsehoods as falsehoods until it is the standard teaching on Kant that he *did* believe in the wrongness of suicide per se and that he believed in the inalienable right to life. People are moral, free agents. They can reject Kant's argument on that point. But we are going to have a real arugment on that issue. And I am not going to stop just because you call it "bear-baiting."

- by Bradford Short on Oct 23, 2005 at 8:05 PM | link

Frankly, I lived through the 90's too -- that's why I'm still here -- and during that time I never once heard that Kant or Locke believed in the alienability of life. Not a single time. Nor did I even hear of Stell, until you raised him from (in my experience) complete obscurity. Perhaps we have been in different campuses, reading different books. Therefore I have the feeling that the vast majority opinion on Locke and Kant is that both philosophers hold life to be inalienable, and those who say otherwise do not constitute much of a genuine threat to this opinion. Sure, when people make errors about what Kant and Locke say, you should point it out -- but I think you exaggerate the significance of the threat in order to go off on a personal crusade. I reserve judgment on what the hidden agenda of such a crusade might be.
I see that you did not even try to address the bulk of what I said in the previous comment, which goes beyond the issue of what Stell says about Kant, and involves the integrity of bioethical debate in this country. I can see I am barking up the wrong tree, since you prefer to ride your hobby horse into the sunset. So I think it appropriate to sign off now, with the words of Daniel Callaghan, recently writing about the degeneration of American bioethical discussion into 'ideological advocacy':
"Advocates in whatever sphere are usually far more interested in side-winning than in a fair and generous reading of all sides or an even-handed analysis. Advocates, moreover, tend to like reading between the lines of their opponent's argument, looking for unstated beliefs and arguments driving their line of thought. The accusation that so-and-so's arguments are ostensively secular but in truth covertly religious is now employed with some frequency, as is the accusation that the real purpose of the President's Council on Bioethics is to further the Bush polical agenda and not at all to promote better ethical reasoning. Conservatives reply in kind, reducing much of bioethics to unalloyed liberalism, little more than a branch of left-wing Democratic politics. The culture wars are now on full display."

- by Sam I am on Oct 23, 2005 at 10:09 PM | link

"I lived through the 90's and I saw, personally, how important Stell, et al. are. I will continue ..."
The language makes you sound like an old hand. But I just noticed on your website that you were born in 1979. So the 1990's started, you were 11. When did your awareness of Kant's views on the inalienability of life (and the philosophical literature on the subject) first crystalize? Junior high?
Your views are alright, but don't make yourself out to be a wise old owl, junior.

- by The Great Santini on Oct 23, 2005 at 11:03 PM | link

I don't think I can post anything to this comments section any more of any length, so I've posted my last response to my own blog.

- by Bradford Short on Oct 24, 2005 at 7:59 PM | link

guys. get a room. seriously. this love-fest is just too hot for public consumption.

- by on Oct 24, 2005 at 9:26 PM | link