First gene-edited babies claimed in China

Marilynn Marchione

Associated Press
Originally posted today

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.

If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.

A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.

Many mainstream scientists think it’s too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation.

The researcher, He Jiankui of Shenzhen, said he altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments, with one pregnancy resulting thus far. He said his goal was not to cure or prevent an inherited disease, but to try to bestow a trait that few people naturally have — an ability to resist possible future infection with HIV, the AIDS virus.

The info is here.

An evaluative conservative case for biomedical enhancement

John Danaher
British Journal of Medical Ethics
Volume 42, 9 (2018)

Abstract

It is widely believed that a conservative moral outlook is opposed to biomedical forms of human enhancement. In this paper, I argue that this widespread belief is incorrect. Using Cohen's evaluative conservatism as my starting point, I argue that there are strong conservative reasons to prioritise the development of biomedical enhancements. In particular, I suggest that biomedical enhancement may be essential if we are to maintain our current evaluative equilibrium (ie, the set of values that undergird and permeate our current political, economic and personal lives) against the threats to that equilibrium posed by external, non-biomedical forms of enhancement. I defend this view against modest conservatives who insist that biomedical enhancements pose a greater risk to our current evaluative equilibrium, and against those who see no principled distinction between the forms of human enhancement.

Conclusion

In conclusion, despite the widespread belief that conservative moral principles are opposed to human enhancement, there are in fact strong reasons to think that human enhancement has conservative potential. This is because technological development does not take place in a vacuum. One cannot consider the effects of biomedical enhancement technology in isolation from other trends in technological progress. When this is done, it becomes apparent that AI, robotics and information technology are developing at a rapid pace and their widespread deployment could undermine much of our current evaluative equilibrium. Biomedical enhancement may be necessary, not merely desirable, if we are to maintain that equilibrium.

The info is here.

Academic Ethics: Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People?

Brian Leiter
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally posted October 25, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The issue is particularly fraught in one of my academic fields, philosophy, in which Gottlob Frege, the founder of modern logic and philosophy of language, was a disgusting anti-Semite, and Martin Heidegger, a prominent figure in 20th-century existentialism, was an actual Nazi.

What is a scholar to do?

I propose a simple answer: Insofar as you aim to contribute to scholarship in your discipline, cite work that is relevant regardless of the author’s misdeeds. Otherwise you are not doing scholarship but something else. Let me explain.

Wilhelm von Humboldt crafted the influential ideal of the modern research university in Germany some 200 years ago. In his vision, the university is a place where all, and only, Wissenschaften — "sciences" — find a home. The German Wissenschaften has no connotation of natural science, unlike its English counterpart. A Wissenschaft is any systematic form of inquiry into nature, history, literature, or society marked by rigorous methods that secure the reliability or truth of its findings.

The info is here.

Establishing an AI code of ethics will be harder than people think

Karen Hao
www.technologyreview.com
Originally posted October 21, 2018

Over the past six years, the New York City police department has compiled a massive database containing the names and personal details of at least 17,500 individuals it believes to be involved in criminal gangs. The effort has already been criticized by civil rights activists who say it is inaccurate and racially discriminatory.

"Now imagine marrying facial recognition technology to the development of a database that theoretically presumes you’re in a gang," Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense fund, said at the AI Now Symposium in New York last Tuesday.

Lawyers, activists, and researchers emphasize the need for ethics and accountability in the design and implementation of AI systems. But this often ignores a couple of tricky questions: who gets to define those ethics, and who should enforce them?

Not only is facial recognition imperfect, studies have shown that the leading software is less accurate for dark-skinned individuals and women. By Ifill’s estimation, the police database is between 95 and 99 percent African American, Latino, and Asian American. "We are talking about creating a class of […] people who are branded with a kind of criminal tag," Ifill said.

The info is here.

The Moral Law Within: The Scientific Case For Self-Governance

Carsten Tams
Forbes.com
Originally posted September 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The behavioral ethics literature, and its reception in the ethics and compliance field, is following a similar trend. Behavioral ethics is often defined as the discipline that helps to explain why good people do bad things. It frequently focuses on how various biases, cognitive heuristics, blind spots, ethical fading, bounded ethicality, or rationalizations compromise people’s ethical intentions.

To avoid misunderstandings, I am a fan and avid consumer of behavioral science literature. Understanding unethical biases is fascinating and raising awareness about them is useful. But it is only half the story. There is more to behavioral science than biases and fallacies. A lopsided focus on biases may lead us to view people’s morality as hopelessly flawed. Standing amidst a forest crowded by biases and fallacies, we may forget that people often judge and act morally.

Such an anthropological bias has programmatic consequences. If we frame organizational ethics simply as a problem of people’s ethical biases, we will focus on keeping these negative biases in check. This framing, however, does not provide a rationale for supporting people’s capacity for self-governed ethical behavior. For such a rationale, we would need evidence that such a capacity exists. The human capacity for morality has been a subject of rigorous inquiry across diverse behavioral disciplines. In the following, this article will highlight a selection of major contributions to this inquiry.

The info is here.

The Importance of Making the Moral Case for Immigration

Ilya Somin
reason.com
Originally posted on October 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The parallels between racial discrimination and hostility to immigration were in fact noted by such nineteenth century opponents of slavery as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. These similarities suggest that moral appeals similar to those made by the antislavery and civil rights movements can also play a key role in the debate over immigration.

Moral appeals were in fact central to the two issues on which public opinion has been most supportive of immigrants in recent years: DACA and family separation. Overwhelming majorities supporting letting undocumented immigrants who were brought to America as children stay in the US, oppose the forcible separation of children from their parents at the border. In both cases, public opinion seems driven by considerations of justice and morality, not narrow self-interest (although letting DACA recipients stay would indeed benefit the US economy). Admittedly, these are relatively "easy" cases because both involve harming children for the alleged sins of their parents. But they nonetheless show the potency of moral considerations in the immigration debate. And most other immigration restrictions are only superficially different: instead of punishing children for their parents' illegal border-crossing, they victimize adults and children alike because their parents gave birth to them in the wrong place.

The key role of moral principles in struggles for liberty and equality should not be surprising. Contrary to popular belief, voters' political views on most issues are not determined by narrow self-interest. Public attitudes are instead generally driven by a combination of moral principles and perceived benefits to society as a whole. Immigration is not an exception to that tendency.

This is not to say that voters weigh the interests of all people equally. Throughout history, they have often ignored or downgraded those of groups seen as inferior, or otherwise undeserving of consideration. Slavery and segregation persisted in large part because, as Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney notoriously put it, many whites believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Similarly, the subordination of women was not seriously questioned for many centuries, because most people believed that it was a natural part of life, and that men were entitled to rule over the opposite sex. In much the same way, today most people assume that natives are entitled to keep out immigrants either to preserve their culture against supposedly inferior ways or because they analogize a nation to a house or club from which the "owners" can exclude newcomers for almost any reason they want.

The info is here.

Trump EPA official who was indicted on ethics charges has resigned

Brady Dennis
The Washington Post
Originally posted November 19, 2018

A regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, indicted in Alabama last week on violations of state ethics laws, has resigned.

Trey Glenn, who oversaw eight states in the Southeast as the EPA’s Region 4 leader, faces charges of using his office for personal gain and soliciting or receiving a “thing of value” from a principal or lobbyist, according to the Alabama Ethics Commission. He was booked at the Jefferson County Jail on Thursday in Birmingham and later released on a $30,000 bond, records show.

The charges against Glenn and a former business partner appear to stem from work helping a coal company fight liability in an EPA-mandated cleanup of a polluted site in north Birmingham. Glenn has denied wrongdoing, but he submitted his resignation over the weekend to acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler.

The info is here.

Editorial note: Just another example of how the swamp only deepened in the current administration.

Even The Data Ethics Initiatives Don't Want To Talk About Data Ethics

Kalev Leetaru
Forbes.com
Originally posted October 23, 2018

Two weeks ago, a new data ethics initiative, the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, caught my eye. Funded by the Omidyar Network, Mozilla, Schmidt Futures and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the initiative will award up to $3.5M to “promising approaches to embedding ethics into undergraduate computer science education, empowering graduating engineers to drive a culture shift in the tech industry and build a healthier internet.” I was immediately excited about a well-funded initiative focused on seeding data ethics into computer science curricula, getting students talking about ethics from the earliest stages of their careers. At the same time, I was concerned about whether even such a high-profile effort could possibly reverse the tide of anti-data-ethics that has taken root in academia and what impact it could realistically have in a world in which universities, publishers, funding agencies and employers have largely distanced themselves from once-sacrosanct data ethics principles like informed consent and the right to opt out. Surprisingly, for an initiative focused on evangelizing ethics, the Challenge declined to answer any of the questions I posed it regarding how it saw its efforts as changing this. Is there any hope left for data ethics when the very initiatives designed to help teach ethics don’t want to talk about ethics?

On its surface, the Responsible Computer Science Challenge seems a tailor-built response to a public rapidly awakening to the incredible damage unaccountable platforms have wreaked upon society. The Challenge describes its focus as “supporting the conceptualization, development, and piloting of curricula that integrate ethics with undergraduate computer science training, educating a new wave of engineers who bring holistic thinking to the design of technology products.”

The info is here.

Moral leaders perform better, but what’s ‘moral’ is up for debate

Matthew Biddle
State University of New York - Buffalo - Pressor
Originally released October 22, 2018

New research from the University at Buffalo School of Management is clear: Leaders who value morality outperform their unethical peers, regardless of industry, company size or role. However, because we all define a “moral leader” differently, leaders who try to do good may face unexpected difficulties.

Led by Jim Lemoine, PhD, assistant professor of organization and human resources, the research team examined more than 300 books, essays and studies on moral leadership from 1970-2018. They discovered that leaders who prioritized morality had higher performing organizations with less turnover, and that their employees were more creative, proactive, engaged and satisfied.

A pre-press version of the study appeared online this month ahead of publication in the Academy of Management Annals in January 2019.

“Over and over again, our research found that followers perceived ethical leaders as more effective and trusted, and those leaders enjoyed greater personal well-being than managers with questionable morality,” Lemoine says. “The problem is, though, that when we talk about an ‘ethical business leader,’ we’re often not talking about the same person.”

The pressor is here.

The research is here.

Abstract
Moral forms of leadership such as ethical, authentic, and servant leadership have seen a surge of interest in the 21st century. The proliferation of morally-based leadership approaches has resulted in theoretical confusion and empirical overlap that mirror substantive concerns within the larger leadership domain. Our integrative review of this literature reveals connections with moral philosophy that provide a useful framework to better differentiate the specific moral content (i.e., deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism) that undergirds ethical, authentic, and servant leadership respectively. Taken together, this integrative review clarifies points of integration and differentiation among moral approaches to leadership and delineates avenues for future research that promise to build complementary rather than redundant knowledge regarding how moral approaches to leadership inform the broader leadership domain.