24 posts tagged “ethics”
Dr Ben Goldacre who blogs at Badscience.net posted the following on 5th Feb: Er, “help”. Legal Chill from LBC 97.3 and “Global Radio” over Jeni Barnett’s MMR scaremongering
LBC have instructed their lawyers to contact me.
Two days ago I posted about a broadcast in which their presenter Jeni Barnett exemplified some of the most irresponsible, ill-informed, and ignorant anti-vaccination campaigning that I have ever heard on the public airwaves. This is important because it can cost lives, and you can read about the media’s MMR hoax here.
To illustrate my grave concerns, I posted the relevant segment about MMR from her show, 44 minutes, which a reader kindly excerpted for me from the rest of the three hour programme. It is my view that Jeni Barnett torpedoes her reputation in that audio excerpt so effectively that little explanation is needed.
LBC’s lawyers say that the clip I posted is a clear infringement of their copyright, that I must take it down immediately, that I must inform them when I have done so, and that they “reserve their rights”.
~Click on the link I posted to read more.
The issue seems to be that the people who are backing the bad science are being legal bullies. Legal in that they are likely to be legally correct in applying the law. Bullies in that they are really trying to suppress a particular opinion. I don't know lots about the issues (I do know a bit about the MMR issue, that is different) and invite people to check it out for themselvs.
The Philosophy of the IPRP:
The purple ribbon, like the Purple Heart, symbolizes the injury and suffering
of victims of violence, in this case not victims of war or political
violence, but of violence in our homes, schools, neighborhoods, and society.
Interpersonal violence is first learned as violence in our homes. We want to
promote healthy values: Love and respect for self, others, family, and
community.
I learned about this from Team Vox.
Interesting. I like the idea that there is an umbrella concept of anti-violence. BUt I don't know much about it ~ is it US only?
Surfing I located a link that lead me to a link that.... you get the picture.
From the Istitute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
[ieet] Mormon H+ responds to Ed Miller's piece on future of marriage / http://www.mailbucket.org/ieet-news-5354361.html
The Future of Marriage / Edward Miller / http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/miller20080312/]
Vox works in a different way to Livejournal, but some aspects may carry over. Due to a discussion on a LJ community I was thinking about the rights & wrongs of community posts, and who owns the posts, and what the non-virtual world manners mean in a virtual world.
OK, This is my blog. Now who owns the comments? Does each individual own the comments they make on either this Vox blog, or on my LJ or in any community?
The physical world equivalent is paper. Now if I send a letter to be published in a newspaper, it is in the public domain. I cannot be surprised to see that people have written to the paper and the paper has posted them in response. What right do I have to demand that the paper not publish, or remove, responses I don't like? I suspect in the main the newspaper would tell me where to go unless the comments were defamatory or libelous in which case they may not be published.
If I post a round-robin letter to a select few of my friends I would not expect it to be in a newspaper, or to get letters from people I have never heard of, or find out that the information within was the subject of public gossip. OK, I may happily accept that Auntie Jane told Cousin Max about the contents, or let him read it, but not down the pub. Having said that, what if Auntie Jane knows I fell out badly with cousin Max & she still shares the information? I get hurt, angry & rant I guess. And don't send Auntie Jane anything I need to trust her not to share.
The equivalents are posting in a community / public blog posting or restricted blog posting.
Now some of this doesn't quite work. Bits of paper can more easily be shared around or accidentally left where someone else could read it. Restricted membership of a newspaper/publication doesn't restrict it to only those people.
We think the virtual world is 'safer' in some respect as when we call ourselves something patently not our 'real' name we expect privacy from people in our physical world (unless we tell them our alias) and get shocked & horrified to find out that we have been 'outed'. equally we think that if a post is locked to a specific list of people (friends only / Neighbourhood only / community membership only) that the information will not spread. mmmmm. Well, it is certainly bad manners to do so: like gossip ~ I tell you something in strictest confidence but you have to respect that confidence.
Blogging Etiquette ~ the modern minefield.
People like rules. If you follow rules then you are ok, and right, and are a Good Person.
Rules are simple. Yes no, black white, stop go. Super Simple, mmm? You follow and it is Good. No need to question or judge, it's done for you.
But following rules without thinking about them is the fastest way to personal damnation that I can think of.
"The Bible says"
Yes, but does God mean you to be mindful or mindless?
Sure, its hard. And you judge. You judge all the time anyway, so why not be honest about what you do?
Giving a begger some money? Drug addict waste of time? Mentally ill? Bad times hit all of us? Who is s/he, why begging? Go get a job? Charity case or basket case? You judge. You choose.
So why do people do it over the other things?
Tattoos? Meaningful body art marking life stages, a story in skin and ink? Cheap nasty tramp stamp cause its cool an everyone has one? Prison side hard man or New Age primitive?
Thou shall not......
Thou shalt think.
Following on from Debating the angles of Birth control: Questions / issues
Any discussion on the medical appropriateness of contraception, in particular hormonal contraception, should compare the impact of contraception, pregnancy and neither.
Taking any medication carries risks. This includes hormonal contraceptives. However, when discussing the rights & wrongs of contraception the point that taking contraception for social reasons is a bad idea as you are stuffing your body with chemicals that are not natural, disturbing your body while carrying short & long term health risks needs some careful evaluation.
There are side effects of hormonal contraceptives, and risk factors ~ it is not generally prescribed if you have a history of thrombosis, various heart diesases, sickle cell, hepatitis, porphyria, or a number of other diseases/disturbances in the healthy working of your system. Special precautions are generally taken if the woman is diabetic, or has a history of risk factors.
Specifically the risks of NOT taking the contraception.
Some women have medical disorders that make pregnancy a bad idea, and some are at high risk of pregnancy related medical disorders (Complications of pregnancy) such as:
Pre-eclampsia aka Postpartum toxemia, is a form of hypertension specific to pregnancy with associated protein in the urine. You are more likely to get it if: it is your first pregnancy, you have hypertension, diabees, an auto-immune disease, family history or having had it previously. It can occur up to 6-8 weeks after birth.
It occurs in 6% of pregnancies. In the UK this translates to 1/2000, and 1.8% of those mothers die.
The only 'Cure' is to deliver the baby although there are therapies to help stabalise the condition. Also it appears that sex during pregnancy may help reduce the chance of developing it.
One variant of this is HELLP syndrome with some scarey figures as, although it occurs in only 0.2-0.6% of all pregnancies maternal mortalitiy is 7-35% and perinatal (-5 to +1 month) mortality of the child may be up to 40%.
OK, that is a small example of what can go wrong during pregnancy. Then you have women who use contraception to control other gynaecalogical problems: Menorrhagia (excessive flow), Dysmenorrohea (Uterine cramps) are simple examples.
Women with endometriosis who take certain medication have their fertility compromised, or are required to take contraception. some drugs used mimic testosterone, which can cause masculisation of a female feotus. And this is just an obs/gye example. An epileptic patient may be told that she shouldn't take her full medication while pregnant, or have to change medication as some drugs affect the foetus (thalidomide is used to treat leprosy so there is a HUGE reason to have mandatory BC during that treatment!)
Some of these can be treated with non-contraceptive medication, some only require short durations of abstinance during treatment. But not all of these work for everyone, and sometimes there are very few, or very bad options, for the woman involved.
There are also occassions (increasingly) where medication taken by a potential father could be of risk to the child: I am involved in clinical trials and rarely there is the requirement for a MALE on a drug to ensure conception cannot take place (usually involving both partners using contraception, including a barrier) due to the possible increase in poor quality/defective sperm causing birth defects. It is quite standard to require females to avoid pregnancy while testing new drugs due to fears that the foetus may be affected by the drugs.
This is all before you discuss BC as a social phenomena: women wanting to control when & if they are become pregnant and their futures as mothers. The flip side is fertility medicine: when women cannot become pregnant easily/normally without medical assistance.
Hum, this rant may have to take place over a number of posts / days (particularly as this is my lunch period)! I started with Questions/ issues. This is on the basic medical issues & risk factors. Their is the social dimension of fertility and that is before I get to the various religious / moral discussions ~ and that could involve multiple religions & view points. I should probably stick to saying what I think (and why), with minor comparisons to what others think.
Thanks to the comments notification on Vox I re-commented on KatieKat post of well over a month ago now, about birth control (BC from now on) access. While commenting i was looking up a few things, thinking about a few things and wanted to put some of it on my own Vox.
The usual debate is around 'is it morally right according to [religionX]?' Often the argument of whether or not it is MEDICALLY right also gets mentioned.
What I mean by medically right is along the lines of increased risk of DVT, the possible side-effects of introducing a drug into your system, the interference of natural body functions, long term risks versus short-term gains, etc.
Back to my point / thoughts:
Is it moral for one person to be allowed / able to place their own value system on another? This stems from the original debate on whether or not a pharmacist should be allowed to refuse to fill a BC/morning after prescription as they believe it to be wrong VERSUS being forced to be complicit in / accessory to something they believe to be wrong.
At what point does an individual count a form of BC Acceptable? Are behavioural methods OK, but not barrier or hormonal? Or are barrier ok, but not hormonal? Or with hormonal, is it ok if it stops the egg & sperm meeting but not OK if it prevent a fertilised egg from implanting?
Is Birth control (or even abortion) OK if the reason is based around the health of the mother? Or, if you are 100% against interfering with the production of children, are there circumstances in which you would allow something to be done?
I have posted some of the questions. Lets see if I can explain my thoughts
We put people and things into boxes, neatly labelled, for our ease of understanding. It is a form of shorthand to understanding a person, to describe a person as such&such.
Then we file people inside.
But it carries dangers. When we put someone in a box labelled 'Woman'' we expect them to match our contents list. And if they don't? Or we discover that someone else has the same box, but different contents list.
Do we move them out of that box? We can't necessarily - they match most of the contents - do we change our list, but that is messy and *hurts*. It hurts because it makes us feel bad, wrong, and out of control.
We make our lists, our labels to make us feel secure. So that we make the right choices and decisions based on our quick-file system. If the system is wrong, or inaccurate, then we have made a mistake, we are wrong.
No one likes being wrong.
But the big thing about this sort of labelling is that it is individual, and we should not forget it is a shorthand system, incomplete and nothing more than a precis of the obvious characteristics.
Woman: XX, Breasts, vagina, ovaries, uterus, curvy, smaller, weaker, child-bearing, breast-feeding, emotional, empathic, feminist, smart, capable.
And each of those words are in fact themselves summaries.
We get confused when we meet someone that sort of fits but doesn't. Androgen Insensitive Sydrome women. Trans-women. Women who don't like kids. Women who are infertile, don't want kids.
Or, for me, are not feminists (and here again: believe in equality rather than superiority). WANT their men to take care of them, act silly/blonde (I removed dumb as that has its own chain of issues ~ dumb: unable to speak).
But it isn't only people. Things, philosophies, religions all have their own boxes.
Christian: Bible (Old testament, new testament), Jesus, Cross, Crucifixion, Virgin birth, Holy Trinity, Priest (male, female), prayer, Do unto others.., compassion, crusades, missionary work.
But many Christians don't believe all of that, some believe in other things as well. And what of Messianic Jews?
Yesterday I posted something that irritated me, about Malaysian Islam, and yesterday I read of Feminists who have set ideas about what it means to be feminist.
So, Islam. What do you write on your contents list under 'Islam'? Mine certainly doesn't apply to all muslims, I know that. I know that comparing moderate Muslims to their rabid cousins is akin to comparing Anglican's to the Westboro Baptist church.
But we still fall into the trap.
The New York Times ~To Commit a Hate Crime, Must the Criminal Truly Hate the Victim?
It is an interesting conundrum: If you target a minority because you think they are an easy target, can this legally be considered a hate crime and thus earn the perp's extra time under the legislation dealing with Hate Crime?
Summary of the crime: a group contacted a gay man through a chat room, inviting him to meet up. They then robbed & beat him, then chased him into traffic. He was hit & died.
They have been charged with Murder Plus, aka Murder under the (US / NY State) Hate Crimes Act 2000 which mandates longer sentances those committing crimes “in whole or in substantial part because of a belief or perception regarding the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation of a person.”
Well, their belief (apparently / allegedly) was that a gay man would be less likely to fight back, and less likely to report them.
The debate is: Did they HATE gays? And does it matter if they didn't actually hate gays, but just targeted a gay man as being 'easy', in the same way they could have targetted an old woman?
Effectively, does the intent, the mind-crime, matter more or less than the actual physical crime?
If someone targeted me, as a woman, because they felt I was likely to be weaker and hence easier to rob is that different to someone who targets me as a woman as they felt women were secondary, and shouldn't be walking around alone and that doing so made it my 'fault' as I was a 'bad woman' for not having my male protector with me so deserved to be put in my place by being robbed.
An interesting debate sparked, in part, by Babble.
Now a person coming to Vox may not know an awful lot about Livejournal, but may know something about Six Apart. Well, 6A own & run both.
The point of this is that the blogging team at 6A have worked with community sites awhile, and while they occasionally screw up, they generally get it reasonably ok.
One of the big things over on LJ over the years I have had an LJ account (Created: 2002-04-08 09:05:23) is the issue of ownership, particularly in communities (the LJ name for groups).
The community can have rules about what can be put there, and the owner of the community, well, owns it too. I created Weird_News on LJ and Weird World on Vox. I moderate both, alone. I make the rules and enforce them as I see fit. Or rather I generally don't give a rat's arse as very few of my communities get drama.
Within a community the programming rules that underly LJ & Vox give the person who writes a post or comment the right to edit it or delete it. The community owner on LJ (and I presume Vox) the right to delete it, and on LJ, the right to freeze comments so they can't be replied to or delete individual comments..
This stuff is made clearer on Vox by the fact that one post is in two places ~ Your own Vox & the community. On LJ this doesn't happen, you post to each separately, have separate comment streams etc.
I can't imagine too many of us being happy with people saying we couldn't edit a post in our own blog.
Interestingly Vox does have an extra layer of 'ownership/censorship': You can post something to be viewable to anyone but restrict comments to only a subset. On LJ those that can see it can comment ~ the only censorship is to turn off all commenting.
So, censorship or ownership?
A delicate balance to be struck out here in the bloggosphere, where different people have different ideas on what is acceptable versus bad manners. Ethical blogging with responsibility.
Update: A lot of LJ communities have rules on what you can post, requesting that people do not delete comments, freeze them etc, and those that break the rules are banned/moderated whatever.
I think, at the end, it is about manners. Changing a post may make a comment look 'bad' or 'stupid' when the post was altered in response to the comment. On the other hand it also make the post more correct from the point of view of the poster.
