Ethics Palace: Where ethical questions go to live or die
bcohen | March 7, 2007Environmental justice and the local conditions of energy production facilities: some of the most significant reasons to be concerned about the recent enthusiasm for new nuclear power facilities.
Oil production and distribution in non-western locales is environmentally destructive. Why do we think nuclear facilities in non-western locales will be any better?
"Oil leaves its mark in Okrika, from a company umbrella to a trail of pipelines coiling through town. Since oil started flowing, most communities have seen living standards fall, betraying the hope that oil once brought to Nigeria…
bcohen | February 26, 2007China, the new great polluters. With their tremendous industrialization comes tremendous pollution. But what is the relationship between their shifting political system and the possibilities for a more ecologically sensible pattern of development (assuming that phrase is internally logical, "ecologically sensible pattern of development")?
Here is an interview from last Fall with Dale Wen, Chinese Native, Cal Tech PhD, and author of China Copes with Globalization: a Mixed Review, published by the International Forum on Globalization.
The interview touches on GMOs, western lifestyles in…
bcohen | February 20, 2007For example, I knew you would click on that.
Oh how coy.
Anyway, an article in The Guardian ("The brain scan that can read people's intentions") reports on this: "A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act."
A picture of Dave's brain on drugs
(ibuprofen, if I'm reading the scan correctly)
Quoth those Brits:
The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues…
bcohen | February 18, 2007This now becomes the third in an unplanned series on James Sherley's threatened, acted upon, and now ended hunger strike.
I saw notice of this in Science [print issue*] last week. Then, curiosity piqued once again, I found an article ("MIT professor ends 12-day hunger strike") from the Boston Globe about it.
The two reports offered different senses of what actually happened. Science made it seem that MIT administration had acquiesced and said (I'm paraphrasing) 'okay okay, we'll give your case more serious and immediate consideration.' Specifically, they said this:
[MIT] agreed this…
bcohen | February 17, 2007Jenna Fisher at the Utne Reader has a guide to green campuses. This helps with an earlier post I'd added last Fall about campus sustainability, which in turn is a continuation of the conversation on consumption patterns.
Quoth Utne.com:
In recent years, college and university campuses have proven crucial leaders in the movement to make large-scale, resource-demanding institutions more environmentally friendly. Many have implemented projects that promote alternative energies, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability. But not everyone's jumped on the eco-bandwagon. So who's doing…
bcohen | February 13, 2007(Thanks to Steven Starr, at the Energy Justice Network, from whom I got most of this.)
This is all strange to me. The January/February 2007 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says (on page 71): "Major progress towards a safer world would include engaging in serious and candid discussion about the potential expansion of nuclear power worldwide. As a means of addressing the threats from climate change, nuclear power should be considered as an alternative energy source." They also say that "nuclear energy production does not produce carbon dioxide."
They don't say anything about…
bcohen | February 9, 2007I mean the title in a different sense than most science bloggers or SciBlog readers will likely presume. I mean it as one who studies science, not one who practices it - given the complexity, esteem, importance, and promise of the scientific enterprise, such deeper understandings of what this science thing is would seem requisite. Thus, over the past thirty or forty years, a lot of people have worked to develop the area of study known as "science and technology studies" (or, with slightly differing emphases that I don't need to get into here, "science, technology, and society" - "STS" in…
bcohen | February 6, 2007Here's an update from a previous post about James Sherley, at MIT, who'd threatened late last year to go on a hunger strike to protest not getting tenure.
According to this story yesterday at ABC News (and, I now see, as also noted by Omnbrain), the guy is going through with it. Speculation following from my earlier post was that he'd either not do it, that it was strange to wait until now to start, or that there was more to it than we knew. I still don't know anymore about the case, and honestly forgot about it. But there he is, going through with it.
I wonder if anyone can help us,…
bcohen | February 4, 2007I teach engineering ethics, so I should be expected to have a more nuanced take on this, but this is where I am, as regards organic animal cookies: it just seems wrong.
Really, don't you think? I suppose vegetarian animal cookies would be weirder. And organic? Big deal. It's not necessarily a contradiction. But every time I see the box, it confuses me.
Maybe it's directional, the way you come at it. By which I mean this: it isn't so much that it's wrong, as much as it simply doesn't seem right. What will the kids think?
bcohen | January 30, 2007With alternative energy proposals, the environmental lines are certainly not clear-cut. I've already noted why I think this is the case (short answer: they foster consumption possibilities, not reductions in consumption). But now there is a precise example of the complexity of such issues in many states proposing what are called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS).
How could one resolve these tensions, when we don't know which alternative is an improvement? The go-to answer there is generally, ask science. Get the evidence to demonstrate trade-offs. But we can't assume science will…
bcohen | January 25, 2007[Category explanation: this post overlaps with so many of our Scienceblogs category options that I ended up just dumping it in philosophy of science as a default location.]
The ETC Group - dedicated, they say, to supporting "socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and it addresses international governance issues and corporate power" -- recently held a contest for the design of a new nanotechnology warning sign. But they should've put in a Steve Martin-related bit as one of the contenders.
They had 400 entries reviewed by a panel of judges. The…
bcohen | January 10, 2007A follow-up here, to this post a few days ago on ExxonMobil's reaction to a recent Union of Concerned Scientists report. I was led to the ExxonMobil report via The Morning News, and I wrote a quick sketch of the back-and-forth between UCS and ExxonMobil. I concluded the post with ambivalence, saying there wasn't anything in the report that anyone would be surprised by. Yet, it would be a pattern of ill-conceived acceptance to let egregious behavior go unnoticed for the mere fact that we expect such behavior.
Yet now ExxonMobil has removed their rebbutal to the report!
I went back to re-…
bcohen | January 8, 2007The UCS explains in a new report (here's a news story from the UCS website, and here's the pdf of the report itself) that "ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry's disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science."
ExxonMobil, in a reply, calls the report "deeply offensive."
They,…
bcohen | December 19, 2006Another way to seek solutions to carbon emissions and over-consumption without going nuclear. Prior posts on the same subject: tidal power, DG, campus sustainability, solar investments, ecological footprints, and consumption more generally.
Around Grounds here (they call it "Grounds," not campus, and don't ask), the leaders in ecological innovation are architecture, urban design, and engineering. Probably in that order. William McDonough, he of Cradle-to-Cradle and ecological sustainability design fame, used to be the Dean of the Architecture School, and now runs his company (McDonough…
bcohen | December 18, 2006Or not.
The Compact, in San Francisco, shows regular people doing regular things to reduce consumption. They don't buy anything new. Except maybe shoe polish. Or a drill bit. This Washington Post article discusses the group, whose Yahoo group stood at 1800 strong before the article ran. (They also saw a spike in attention last winter after a similar article in the San Fransisco Chronicle.)
"Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life." Other's haven't.…
bcohen | December 16, 2006This is a notice for a conference to be held in Belfast next year. I post it both to broadcast and to ask about techno-scientific input. (Well, also, if anyone's ever searching for "post-modernism" at Scienceblogs, to ferret out the Continentals in the bunch, they'll find this one.)
"Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands"
The School of English, Queen's University, Belfast
17th and 18th April 2007
"Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish":
Samuel Beckett's representation of the human condition as regulated by
waste in Breath , a playlet of 1969, now…
bcohen | December 7, 2006Katherine and Sarah have posted a conversation Janet and I had about Sir Karl Popper. It's "inside the Seed mothership" over at Page 3.14. Run, don't walk, to check it out. But then walk, and be careful, it's getting icy, back here and read all our posts again and again and again. You see that stuff Dave posted earlier? The Canuck's good.
bcohen | December 6, 2006How does science work in the court? How should it work? Who says? For what end?
The subject comes into public view every now and again, and an esteemed batch of science and technology studies (STS) scholars have done well to explain the relationships (Sheila Jasanoff, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government probbaly highest among them). This New York Times commentary yesterday (5 Dec) by science writer Cornelia Dean -- "When Questions of Science Come to a Courtroom, Truth Has Many Faces" -- broaches the subject in light of "the first global warming case to come before the court."…
worldsfair | December 5, 2006The folks from the Skeleton Project reminded me that it's Ninja Day today. And since I feel guilty that currently, there are no Ninjas nominated for our advisory board, then I thought it pertinent to present their one and only science-y episodes.
bcohen | November 16, 2006A story in the Post yesterday, "Think Tank Will Promote Thinking: Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy," begins this way:
Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.
It's being promoted by the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, which apparently also just put out a "Declaration in Defense of…