Ethics

The goal of this page is to look at contemporary ethical issues in a way primarily accessible to the STEM-minded among us, since historically academia has not been kind to disenfranchised groups, and it’s important that we as scientists look at things in an objective and consistent way (something which I argue is incompatible with the aforementioned disenfranchising). I will not attempt to write long essays here, if only because it would be too time consuming to write and nobody would read it. I’ll instead endeavor to provide a summary of these issues and the results of my thoughts, conversations and research on them. Perhaps more valuable is that I will also provide some links to some material from people who have dedicated much of their time to issues of morality and logic, and do an amazing job in my opinion. Again, the most important things here are not my words, but the works I link to. Finally if there’s something you disagree with, fantastic! Please email me and we’ll have a discussion, where I’m happy to have my mind changed entirely.

Veganism and Plant-Based Diets: A Good Place to Start

tl;dr There is a truly disturbing amount of suffering at play in this conversation. At the very least, we are responsible for making very, very sure that what we are doing (supporting and engaging with the meat industry) is ok. Unfortunately, upon scruity and any attempt to account for bias, it seems very likely that we are terribly in the wrong. For reasonable summary of the main arguments against veganism, and why they are logically unsupported, see this video WARNING: graphic imagery is regularly used. If you are sensitive to abuse as I am, you could simply listen to the audio of this video and get the majority of the value.

There are three viewpoints which account for most of the people I encounter:

1. Meat consumption is an environmental issue, which should be addressed due to its eventual impact on humans
2. Meat consumption is a moral issue, which should be addressed due to the suffering it breeds
3. It’s both

Of course one could also say “there’s no issue at all” which ignores an overwhelming amount of climate science at the very least, or even “it is an issue and I don’t care”, but I don’t believe a productive conversation will come from this line of thinking. Dealing with the above three then, I offer the following:

• If you believe its an environmental issue only, then the pressure is on. The rate of meat production is on the rise and is not slowing down (see here for one example). Make changes to your own lifestyle, and when you have become comfortable and established, invite people to join you in certain small ways first. Preaching gets us nowhere unfortunately, as people are more likely to stick with something if they decided to do it themselves. Also I ask you to consider looking into the morality of it all; listen to “the other side” for a little bit and see if anything is convincing. Make up your own mind while attempting to account for any biases based on what is “normal” or simply what you’re used to. There’s an unimaginable degree of suffering on the line, so we should be extremely certain that what we’re doing is fine if we are to continue doing it.
• Morality is notoriously complicated and immutable, and so if you think this is primarily an issue of morality, you may have a very hard time convincing people of your stance. Consider inviting people to do some thought experiments to deal with the morality side, and perhaps educate yourself on the human risks due to climate change that the meat industry brings, so that even people who dont care about animals at all will understand they have a horse in this race. Nobody in history has ever responded well to being told they were committing amoral acts for the sake of profit or convenience, so approach things with great caution, and rather than accusation, prefer conversation and listening.

In all cases, eating some more vegetables is not a bad place to start. Future generations may well look back on how we currently commercialize life with a disdain not dissimilar to how we view so many barbaric practices of the past. If you haven’t thought about it very much, intentionally or otherwise, please consider spending some time researching. No matter what your current opinion, you can only benefit by performing some independent study on both the environmental and moral consistency of the meat industry. Here are some useful links from only one person, of course there are a host more amongst which I encourage you to find your favorites:

Here is a video from CosmicSkeptic last year, which is a purely philosophical and moral discussion about veganism, from the perspective of a person who at the time, did eat meat. (No slaughterhouse videos, no climate change graphs). This avoids the appeal to emotion which doesn’t always lead us in morally consistent directions.

Here is a more emotive appeal which came about one year later, presumably after he received no convincing rebuttal to the points made in the first video. This deals much more directly with the cognitive dissonance involved when an individual feels empathy for charismatic megafauna (like a dog or a penguin) but doesn’t think about the literal millions of animals suffering beyond comprehension their entire lives for the meat industry.

Gender Identity and the Importance of Fabric Shape

I will have less to say here, as it seems pretty clear that the world is moving in the right direction. In the end I see this as an issue of empathy and critical thinking, in the following manner:

1. Does it actually matter¹ what cloth a person uses to cover their body? Does it actually matter if you typically associate a person’s personality traits with another class of people?
2. Even if these things did matter (they dont), does it improve the world more than it damages it for you to speak out against such things, with violence, aggression or legislation?

Some people answer these questions in the positive, and I have seen many such people make the mistake of confusing correlation and causation. If you answered “yes” to any of the above, I encourage you to think carefully about your reasons, account for bias, and keep the fact that correlation and causation are very different in your mind.

To those among us who want to be accepting of people and do good in the world, but struggle with the logical consistency of what could be described as “modern” gender identity politics, I offer the following overview of the modern view on gender: Understanding Gender.

In emergent phenomena as complicated as human beings and the society we have established, it would be unreasonable to suggest that we can place all of humanity into one of two boxes, and expect everybody to feel comfortable in those boxes. One’s box determines many things about their life, including how people value them, treat them, the opportunities they are offered, and the shape of fabric which people consider acceptable for them to wear on their bodies.

Ideas of this nature came to a head recently, as many people lost their minds over Harry Styles wearing a dress, and subsequent people lost their minds over people losing their minds. Indeed, this is such an odd thing to be upset about, when one takes a step back and tries to be a little more objective. It’s important to note that there’s no shame in being surprised by the Vogue cover, or by the cut of the clothes on a person one may encounter on the street. Simply because of it’s rarity, many of us would look twice at a man in a dress, but the point is that to achieve a world in which everybody can feel comfortable, that must be the end of it. One can be surprised by something, and then recognize that really, nothing is amiss at all, and we can all go back about our business. In fact in the end, I believe the goal is to no longer see a “man in a dress”, where we assume what role a person wishes to play in society based solely on their bone structure or hair or anything else superficial, but rather to just see a person, without feeling the need to put them in one of those boxes, and treat them with the respect we would anybody else. Us scientists love to categorize things, and put them neatly into boxes. This works sometimes, like when we arbitrarily assign the name “green” to a wavelength of 550 nm, but green doesn’t have feelings, and green doesn’t quite have the same right to choose it’s place in society the way a human being does. Move a little to the one side of green and you’ll find dark green, the other side and you’ll find light. We don’t have such simple qualifiers for human beings, even sex is not as binary as one may think! (See above link to understanding gender).

If you want to get used to seeing “men in dresses” and have an amazing time while you’re at it, check out drag queens like Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova. They have a Youtube series called UNHhhh, and it’s how I got into the scene. It quickly became one of my favourite things I’ve ever seen, and it really helps one get over the ideas that would serve to do little but make people feel uncomfortable for no good reason.

Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs

Summary: It is easy to say “the solution to $x$ discrimination is to discriminate based on $y$ ????” which does indeed feel like a fallacy, however in truth the true goal of programs such as these is not to eradicate discrimination (though this should be and is a goal of society), but rather to correct for the mistakes of the past, and to account for their very real modern-day ramifications. To correct for the subtle societal barriers to entry that were born of mistreatment of minorities and women in the past, it is necessary to make some concessions in the present. I am a heterosexual white man, what I am saying (if immediately adopted by everyone who hasn’t already) would serve to weaken my opportunities. This does not make me a good person, and we’ll ignore the possibility that this is all virtue signaling, but rather this is the most ethical way to approach this topic. It’s not admirable to support these initiatives, it is a minimum requirement.

It is also possible to think that the gender gap in science is justified. This theory one may have encountered via public figures like Jordan Peterson, or this infamous talk at a women in physics conference. A response to the points made in this talk which I rather like can be found here on the Quantum Messenger blog. One of the major problems with arguments to the effect of “nothing is amiss at all, if anything we are starting to be sexist towards men” is that for the few claims that are backed up by some data, the data they use comes from the current and past academic system. They present things like “male physicists produce papers which are cited more as their academic careers progress, as compared to female physicists in the same positions”. What they fail to realise in this however, is that this is part of the problem! Unconscious (or even conscious) bias and unaccounted for responsibilities and barriers experienced by women in STEM result in them receiving less opportunities and being taken less seriously. Citations have an element of being a scientific popularity contest, and the works of women have long been unfairly overlooked (in a statistical sense, of course not every woman and every paper a woman is involved with is passed over). Thus using citations as a metric to say women are treated completely fairly, as the less scientifically-inclined on average, is complete nonsense. Its like taking money from a persons pocket, then they complain that they are poor and would like the same amount of money as you, and you say “of course you’re poor, look in your pocket, everything checks out! In fact, you’re harassing me asking for money!”. The difference here of course is many men are not aware that they have taken the money, nor are they aware that their predecessors in the field had been embezzling for years, but the analogy has likely gone too far.

In the Works:

1. Teaching children how to think, not what to think
   That people who consider themselves “progressive” with respect to the social issues of their youth often find themselves resistant to social issues of their later lives has many sources. These sources could include the faster development of personality and stronger desire to associate with a group (for reasons of building self-identity) present in young people, but I believe it also has a root in how we teach young people to be accepting of certain things. It is precisely that: we teach young people to be accepting of certain things. This makes sense of course, if a groups’ rights are in jeopardy, it is necessary to focus on that group and enact change accordingly. But when we reach our later life and another group shows up whose rights are again in jeopardy, unless there is an easy comparison to be made between the movement which one supported in the past and the current issues, it can be difficult for people to think critically about the modern social problem. This could be addressed (with the goal of swifter reform in future for issues affecting marginalized groups) by putting more emphasis on teaching young people the process of identifying biases and prejudices, and maintaining a consistent ethical framework. Of course the issues of the day also have to be addressed directly, but big picture this may smooth things out a bit. I require more research into this topic to test the legitimacy of the claim.

2. How much should we give? Answer: More than we currently do
   tl;dr consider looking into effective altruism, and deciding if you can make use of any of its principles.
   I struggle with my own level of comfort in a world where so many are not afforded their basic human rights (as I should), and a natural question to come upon is “how much should I sacrifice in order to improve the lives of others?”. This is essentially a monetary problem, as a small amount of money can save the lives of starving children or malaria patients, depending on who you give it to. I believe the answer may be that if all humans were reliably good and virtuous, we could efficiently and effectively eradicate poverty and drastically improve the quality of life for the most disadvantaged people in the world. We could do this simply by adjusting our allocation of resources, as there is certainly enough to go around at the moment, though it would require the sacrifice of some comforts for the middle to upper class. Unfortunately, countries will not decide to do this, as to divert resources to improve the lives of people across the world, when you have many complaints and issues at home, is not viable. It could be viable if we could rely on other countries not to be opportunistic and take advantage of any power vacuum left by our extensive philanthropy, but the reality is that by weakening one’s own position, we create opportunity for those who care the least about human rights to gain power and influence. It would be somewhat of a cop-out to then throw our hands up in the air and declare we should do nothing, so instead the most practical solution (though it is certainly not the most virtuous without unreliable extrapolation to potential suffering in the future) is to give as much as one can, without significantly increasing the risk of requiring governmental assistance oneself. For those in the middle class like myself and likely you too, this translates to considerably reducing frivolous spending (baselessly expensive brands, items we wont want in a week) and instead focusing on becoming financially stable. Upon gaining financial stability, the goal then becomes regularly giving time and/or money to causes which efficiently improve the lives of those in need. Such causes can be found at https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/