Euthanasia - A Few More Resources Added

I've added a few more resources on euthanasia to the Religion and Contemporary Society Resource Page. Added since last time are some worksheets on the sanctity of life and Christian views on euthanasia, plus supporting video and web links. I'll hopefully get the rest of the unit, plus an outline scheme of work posted up in the next week.

Euthanasia Lessons

I've been meaning for a while to start to post some materials and lessons related to the Religion in Contemporary Society AS module for WJEC, with a view to (eventually) building up a fairly comprehensive set of resources to support teaching the whole unit.

Things get in the way (as they do), so I've not made much progress towards so far, but the first couple of lessons on euthanasia, plus an introduction to RICS, are now up. You can find them on the Religion in Contemporary Society Resource Page.

Animal Experiments - Resources For and Against

In class today, I showed my Year 13 students a video on animal experiments made by the charity Animal Aid, and I thought I would share a link to the video here. It's split into 4 parts. 

Although the video is intended for GCSE and A level students, it does contain distressing images throughout.

 

Part 1: How are animals used?

Part 2: Is it good science?

Part 3: Why do they do it?

Part 4: What are the alternatives?

Note that the video has a strong anti-vivisection agenda, I haven't posted it as objective summary of the debate. If you would like to hear the case for the use of animals in medical experiments, you can click here.

In related news,the European Union has recently acted to ban the testing of cosmetics on animals. I also posted about my own past views on vivisection here.

Confessions of a Denialist

A couple of days ago on Exploring Our Matrix (a blog I thoroughly recommend for RS students), James McGrath compared Jesus mythicists with those who spin conspiracy theories around the recent shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. McGrath took a bit of a pasting from some commenters on his blog, who found the comparison offensive.

I have mixed feelings about McGrath’s post. Upon reflection, I think McGrath was wrong to use the tragedy to score a cheap point in an academic debate. However, I do I think McGrath’s argument is a valid one: some of the reasoning employed by mythicists could equally be (and indeed is) used to justify all sorts of marginal theories, including thoroughly unpleasant positions such as 9/11 trutherism and holocaust denial. At the same time, I think it needs to be made clear that pointing out that (for example) holocaust deniers and mythicists employ similar arguments, or that the two movements share other characteristics, does not imply that there is any moral equivalence between these positions.

I thought it might be useful then, to make a comparison between mythicism and a different form of denialism, one where I actually sympathise with the ideology that underpins it. As it happens, I think I’m in a reasonable place to be able to do this because something has recently dawned upon me: I used to be a denialist.

Let me explain. Some of you might know that I’m a vegetarian. These days I’m a fairly sloppy sort of vegetarian: I wear leather shoes, I don’t obsessively check food labels for suspect ingredients, and I occasionally enjoy the odd pint of bitter, even though it might contain extract of fish bladder. In my younger days though, I took it all much more seriously. I kept a strict vegan diet, pitched up at animal rights demos, and saved up my pennies to buy vegetarian DMs. Thinking back, I’m amazed that my friends and family put up with me for as long as they did, I must have been a terrible bore…

Like many vegetarians, I became interested the debate about the legitimacy of vivisection, the use of animals in medical experiments. In particular, I held a view, common among people who hold strong beliefs about animal rights, that scientific experiments on animals are not only morally unjustifiable, but also scientifically flawed.

A few days ago, I read an interesting blog post on some of the tactics used by denialists and noticed that the author listed the anti-vivisection movement as an example of denialism. And of course he was spot on. I’d never really thought about it before but there it was: I used to be a denialist. 

As with other forms of denialism, the position of anti-vivisection campaigners is completely opposed to the consensus position among medical researchers (i.e. that animals offer the best model of the human body when testing new medicines or procedures). As with other forms of denialism, anti-vivisectionists tend to focus on the problems with the scientific case for animal experiments (such as the case of thalidomide, where animal experiments failed to identify a risk to unborn children). As with other forms of denialism, prominent anti-vivisection authors often (though not invariably) lack relevant qualifications and expertise. As with other forms of denialism, these authors tend to appeal directly to the general public rather than participating in genuine academic discussion (via self-published books and leaflets; we didn’t have the internet in my day).

And as with other forms of denialism, anti-vivisectionists tend to share a strong ideology that is obviously closely related to the debated issue. So just as holocaust deniers are usually characterised by anti-semitic views, and mythicists tend to share a militant form of atheism, anti-vivisectionists almost invariably share a strong commitment to animal rights.

One of my students once asked me whether I thought that denialists arrive at their views on the basis of their ideology and then manipulate the evidence to support their views, or whether it was more likely that their ideology predisposed them to look at the evidence in a particular way, such that they arrived at a conclusion that supported the ideology. It’s an excellent question, and the answer is, I think, a little bit of both.

Of course, denialists reject the idea that ideology has anything to do with their views on the issue being debated, and in a sense I think they’re telling the truth. Certainly I genuinely thought that animal experiments were scientifically flawed, and I could have given you plenty of evidence why that was the case. I’d say I was pretty good at debating with people on the topic, even people with more obvious qualifications than mine.

What I think what is happening here is that a set of ideological beliefs is predisposing the denialist to interpret the evidence that favours their existing beliefs. However, once this has happened, I think perhaps this reading of the evidence strengthens the initial ideology. Once the evidence (or at least your reading of it) has persuaded you that animal experiments aren’t even good science, wouldn’t that make you more convinced that you were right in the first place that animals are misused by scientists? Similarly, once the evidence has persuaded you that the holocaust is a hoax arising out of a Jewish conspiracy, wouldn’t that confirm your anti-semitic worldview? And when the evidence has persuaded you that Jesus didn’t even exist, wouldn’t that make you more convinced that religion is a lie? And so, as the ideology is reinforced, a denialist’s reading of the evidence becomes ever more biased, and the ideology becomes more and more confirmed – a denialicious circle.

That’s why I think it’s almost impossible to confront almost any form of denialism on the basis of the evidence. Actually, I’ll clarify that: mainstream historians and scientists should certainly address the flaws and errors in the arguments of denialists, but it’s as well to recognise that you’re not going to change a denialist’s mind merely by pointing out that their reading of the evidence is wrong. Denialists will either ignore or gainsay any evidence that you put forward.

I suspect that the only way that most denialists will change their minds is by coming to see that there is something wrong with the underlying ideology, or at least that things are not quite as black and white as they appear. Certainly, nobody ever persuaded me on evidence grounds that I was wrong about vivisection. Actually I could still put up a pretty good fight in a debate if you feel like a row about it.  What happened was that as time passed I gradually became less vegangelical. I lapsed to being a regular vegetarian, stopped reading animal rights literature, and generally found other things to think about. As that happened, I think that gave me the intellectual space to re-think my perspectives.

So today, while I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of vivisection, I’ve come to accept that they are scientifically valid. It would be convenient for me if they weren’t, but they are. Perhaps a necessary part of becoming a mature thinking person is realising that the world does not always arrange itself to suit our beliefs.

Life After a Face Transplant

The BBC World Service’s Witness programme features an interview today with Isabelle Dinoire, recipient of the world’s first face transplant.

You can read about her experiences here, or listen the podcast here.

Round Up - Ethics in the News

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog front over the last few weeks, partly due to half term break, mostly due to my school getting the dreaded call from OFSTED two days into the new term. I’m still recovering from the stress…

Anyway, in this post I’ll be flagging up a couple of stories that have been in the news over the last couple of weeks that should interest students studying Ethics and Philosophy.

Last Monday, there was an interesting news story about doctors using MRI scans to communicate with patients in a persistent vegetative state. The degree to which patients in PVS possess any type of awareness has been a matter of some controversy: one of the symptoms of PVS is an apparent lack of cognitive function. However, during this research, doctors were able to communicate with some patients in PVS by asking them to imagine certain situations (for example, playing tennis) while scanning their brain activity and comparing the results of these scans with those of healthy volunteers. In the most dramatic example one patient, Scott Routley, was able to tell his carers that he is not in any pain.   

In the past, patients in a PVS such as Terri Schiavo and Tony Bland have had the feeding treatment that they depend upon to survive withdrawn at the request of their families. The results of the experiment may change the way we think about and care for patients with PVS, and perhaps even enable them to have a say in their own treatment.

You can watch a Panorama episode about the research here.

Also in the news last week was the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian dentist who died at a hospital in Ireland after being refused an abortion. Ireland’s abortion laws are stricter than those of the UK, and while abortion is allowed in cases where the mother’s life is in danger (it is illegal in other circumstances) it seems that an abortion may have been refused because Savita’s unborn child still had a detectable heartbeat.

In the news this week is the imminent result of the Church of England’s vote on whether to allow women bishops.