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This Land Is Not Our Land

Photograph of tourists at scenic overview.

Evaluating Native American displacement from areas that are designated as protected land is not typical of tour guides or visitors to any of the United States’s 58 national parks. In fact, the origins of these hugely popular landmarks remain hidden and very few individuals understand and acknowledge this violent history. Multiple studies conducted as a part of a larger initiative called “Reclaiming Native Truth to gauge Americans understandings and attitudes towards Native American people found that only 34 percent of Americans even agree that “Native Americans face a great deal or a lot of discrimination.” With this minimal level of public understanding concerning Native Americans’ historical and modern struggles for equality, it is not surprising that individuals visit sites such as Yosemite without knowledge about the brutality behind the landscape. In a Huffington Post article, “The Forgotten History of Violent Displacement that helped Create the National Parks,” the author discusses the land of Yosemite as once being inhabited by indigenous peoples and rural poor who were forced out. If they wished to remain in their homeland, they “were forced to work humiliating jobs entertaining tourists as Indian performers.” Eventually, however, they [Native Americans] were all evicted by the national park burning down their homes. In fact, the federal government either ignored, invalidated, or simply refused to recognize the claims tribes had to ownership of lands including but not limited to Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. Historians have only recently begun to explore the histories of forgotten indigenous peoples in these areas, and their findings have provided insight into to the romantic notions associated with the land which eventually became national parks.

Manipulated ideas about conservation and protection of the environment also played a large role in the lands later designated as national parks; however, historians such as Karl Jaccoby argue that these conservationist ideas were racially motivated: “The only way you can come in and say ‘We [the state] need to manage this space and manage the environment,’ is you have to in some ways present the current managers of it the native peoples as incompetent.” Protection of these lands from those who lived there resulted in the case of Yosemite Valley with the forced labor of indigenous people as workers in tourist attractions across the park. An article written by Hunter Oatman-Stanford discusses how over time Native Americans have been erased from U.S National Parks, for example, following the immediate usage of Natives worked at Yosemite’s hotels, concession businesses, and selling merchandise to tourists as they walked through the now paved roads of the park.

Although the history of national parks remains disturbing and unveils a plethora of ethical questions concerning the education available at these tourist hot spots about the individuals who owned this land before. It also begs the question of what individual obligations are to preserving the culture of such lands and whether visiting is an ethical decision, or if understanding the past of these coveted locations is enough to free oneself from guilt. Hunter Oatman-Stanford said it best, “Uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved.” Understanding this concept of a fabricated wilderness created for only a sector of the American people will be critical as we move forward and advocate for more comprehensive knowledge about the true history of our national parks.

Depression, “Special K,” and the FDA

refracted rings of yellow light emanate from red core

Recently approved by the FDA is the newest groundbreaking antidepressant by the name of Esketamine. In the form of a nasal spray, the drug can treat symptoms of depression in a matter of hours. Esketamine is composed of the chemical ketamine and will be produced by the company Johnson & Johnson. This drug could offer relief to those who are suffering from Treatment Resistant Depression (TRD). TRD is when people have tried two or more antidepressants without success. Major depressive disorder effects 300 million people globally and approximately 1 in 3 people that suffer from depression would qualify for the treatment.

There are many positives that come from this new drug. Depression is still widely studied and is difficult to treat because everyone responds differently to antidepressants. Esketamine gives those who were once hopeless a new option for finding a successful treatment. Those who take the drug will no longer suffer from the very serious mood disorder that once hampered their daily lives.

In addition, this research has led to groundbreaking findings relating to the drug ketamine, the major component in esketamine. Ketamine is used as an anesthetic for “children or patients undergoing minor surgeries”and veterinary purposes. However another main use of ketamine was its infamous reputation as a party drug, called “special K.” Taken at high doses, ketamine can cause users to hallucinate and lose sense of time and reality. People “trip” on the drug in the same way they might trip on LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. The drug became such a problem that in 1999 the federal government classified ketamine as a Schedule III controlled substance to make an effort in stopping its recreational use.

Patients who take esketamine can experience side effects from ketamine. Such side effects are serious and can lead to memory loss, hallucinations, and loss of body control. That’s why ketamine is unique in depression treatment as the drug cannot be brought home. Instead, the antidepressant is administered from a certified treatment center. Patients are required to return to the treatment centers once or twice a week.

One issue to consider with ketamine is its limited accessibility. Because the drug needs to be closely monitored, the only people able to receive the treatment are those with access to authorized treatment centers. In addition, the list price of the drug is currently set at $590 to $885 per treatment session depending on the dosage. For just the first month of treatment, the expected price range is between $4,720 and $6,785. This limits the usage of the drug to only those who can afford to take it.

While the FDA approved the treatment, it was given a “black box warning,” the most serious warning that can be issued. “It will caution users that they could experience sedation, problems with attention, judgement and thinking, and there’s a potential for suicidal and abusive thoughts,” explains the Washington Post. The FDA advisory committee approved the drug in a vote 14-2. The approval process differed from other approved antidepressants. TRD qualifies the drug for “fast track” approval because of the severity of the disorder and the need of the product. Instead of having two positive short-term trials of the drug, keramine only had one positive trial. It then had a second trial that was a withdrawal study.

Kim Witczak is a member of the advisory committee and a consumer representative that voted against the drug. Witczak wrote in a blog that she feared the limited case trials and the serious side effects that come with the drug outweighed the potential benefit the drug can bring. She said, “I cannot vote for something when the perceived benefits do not clearly and demonstrably outweigh the potential for known harms such as sedation, dissociation, and long-term cognitive or memory loss — this is especially so considering the extremely limited positive clinical trial results.” In her rebuttal, she criticized the ineffectiveness of other trials and how there was only one positive short-term trial. There were also participant suicides that occurred during the trials that were “glossed over and presented as unrelated.”

Although Witczak is just one opinion on the FDA advisory board, it is still important to consider her objections. In particular, Witczak notes the conflicts at the heart of FDA drug approval. Should we “fast track” drugs that have an urgent demand? Should we scale down the process to help more people quicker?

The hope is that Esketamine is just the start of treatments that more effectively treat depression. Although it is called groundbreaking today, we could also consider other drugs that were groundbreaking at the time. Prozac was the game changer antidepressant in the 1980s and it was only after this that people discovered the true inadequacy of antidepressants and the dangers associated with them including suicide and withdrawal. With a drug with so many risks like ketamine it is intriguing to think of the impact it will make in the long run.

MAGA Hats, Nathan Phillips, & Journalism in the Social Media Age

photo of ABC "eyewitness news" news van

Social media inundates its users with information at a rapid rate. The intersection of seemingly boundless and immediate digital information with the expectations of traditional journalism poses some compelling ethical concerns such as whether journalists should be responding to news as quickly as it comes to them. The frenzy that was aroused from a brief video clip of a MAGA hat-wearing high school student and a Native American activist serves as a case-study of these concerns. That frenzy calmed, in part, because how the incident was originally portrayed was not entirely accurate. It is worth pondering if the inaccuracy was caused by the rapidity of information innate to our digital age.

In its original article, The New York Times described the setting of the video as: “a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys, predominantly white and wearing “Make America Great Again” gear, surrounding a Native American elder.” The reporter continues, explaining that the high schoolers in question were being investigated by their school, Covington Catholic High School, and could be subject to punishment by expulsion.

An effort was made to portray this video as being emblematic of the political division in the country:

The encounter became the latest touchpoint for racial tensions in America, particularly under Mr. Trump, who has painted immigrants in broad strokes as rapists and drug dealers and recently mocked Senator Elizabeth Warren with a reference to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, sacred ground for Native Americans whose ancestors fought and died there.”

This characterization arguably extends beyond the realm of objective reporting and flirts with editorializing. Some may argue that the article is simply situating the incident within a larger national context, attaching it to a larger issue to make its significance more clear. While this article, relying on incomplete information for its content, was never retracted, a clarificatory article was published the following day after a longer video became available, disproving early characterizations.

The New York Times was not alone in its haste to interpret the social significance of the video. Nearly all the major news sources did the same. Perhaps that is the effect of an era dominated by social media in which there is a free-flowing abundance of information. The major traditional news sources must compete not simply with each other but also with this waterfall of events and happenings to remain relevant. They are forced to respond to news as it occurs because everyone is receiving the information at the same time.

There are two issues of note: firstly, should journalists be taking a stand on newsworthy incidents? In other words, should they offer their opinion on events and should they be the ones to grant import or assign value to such events? And secondly, should journalists be responding so rapidly to the information they receive? There may be public value to having a detached fourth estate in society – one that is not only independent from ideology and does not advance political interests, but also refrains from offering “hot takes” on events as they occur. And there may be long-term value in allowing things to settle before attempting to make sense of them. The answer to both of these questions lies in what ethical obligations journalists ought to adhere to.

The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics provides a comprehensive list of objectives that the ideal journalist should meet. Of course, the SPJ’s code of ethics is not the end-all, be-all of ethically appropriate behavior, but it does provide a useful touchstone by which we can judge news stories. The maxims most relevant to the encounter between Nick Sandmann and Nathan Phillips are included below:

Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story…

Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant...

Avoid stereotyping. Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting

Label advocacy and commentary...

Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate…

According to the first maxim, The New York Times was well-within its ethical bounds to provide a larger context for the story. Although, the reporter (and numerous others) did so without complete information, which led to a misrepresentation of the incident.

The second, third, and fourth maxims relate to the question of subjectivity in journalism.

The misrepresentation of events by news outlets has greater significance today not only because political tensions are at their height, but also because of how quickly an incorrect portrayal can spread throughout the internet. Those two factors resulted in strong reactions. Nick Sandmann claims that he was subjected to cyberbullying and received death threats and is suing the The Washington Post for their alleged role in stoking the reaction. It would not be preposterous to suggest that the media’s portrayal was responsible for such a negative reaction to the incident.

Perhaps the journalists failed to follow the ethical dictums that inform objective journalism. Or maybe the age of social media has rendered those dictums irrelevant and in need of revision. Either way, a nation quickly formed an opinion based on an erroneous portrayal at a moment in its history when political friction sparks violence.

The Ethics of Vaccination Exemptions

photograph of H1N1 vaccine bottles

On January 28, 2019, Washington Governor Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency in response to a spreading outbreak of measles in Clark County, WA. Measles is a highly contagious airborne infection caused by a virus in the paramyxovirus family. Before a vaccine was developed in 1963, the disease infected over 3 million people a year in the United States and resulted in 400 to 500 deaths annually. In 2000, thanks to a highly effective vaccination system in the U.S., the measles disease was declared eliminated by the Center for Disease Control. However, measle outbreaks have begun to emerge again in recent years due to a growing number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children—often falsely claiming that vaccinations are either unsafe of unnecessary. Do parents against vaccinations, also called “anti-vaxxers,” have a legal right to refuse vaccinations for their children even if it means jeopardizing public health?

While the history of the anti-vaccination movement can be traced all the way back to the 1800’s, a study released in 1998 that claimed a false link between the measles vaccinations and autism has fueled much of the contemporary anti-vax fire. Author of the study, British doctor Andrew Wakefield, was found to have been paid by a law board to falsify evidence in support of a litigation case that claimed vaccines had harmed children. The study was formally retracted by its publisher in 2010 and Wakefield lost his licence to practice medicine in Great Britain. Since then, numerous studies (including one released on March 5th, 2019)  have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism.

There are legitimate medical reasons to delay or avoid vaccinations, but they are rare. While some doctors have decided to profit off the anti-vax craze by selling false medical exemptions to parents, most who refuse vaccinations for their children do so through non-medical, state-issued means. Most common is an exemption based on “religious beliefs.” Overall, no major world-religion has a theological objection to vaccinations. However, certain offshoots of ‘faith-healing’ denominations, such as Christian Science, reject modern medicine altogether. Some religious fundamentalists also claim that vaccines are unnecessary. Gloria Copeland, an Evangelical Christian minister who sat on the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board, claimed in a 2018 video on Facebook that Jesus was the best protection against the flu and people can avoid the disease by repeating “I’ll never have the flu.”

Many states also allow for “philosophical” or “personal” vaccine exemptions that do not require religious backing. Much of the motivation to acquire such exemptions stems from the spread of misinformation on social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Pinterest. Ethan Lindenberger, an Ohio teen who chose to get vaccinated against his parents wishes spoke of the necessity in addressing misinformation when he testified before congress on March 4th, 2019. Lindenberger said, “For my mother, her love, affection and care as a parent was used to push an agenda to create a false distress, and these sources which spread misinformation should be the primary concern of the American people.”

Non-medical vaccine exemptions (NMEs) endanger public health by reducing “herd immunity.” No vaccine is 100% effective, but when a population is highly vaccinated it prevents the spread of germs from one person to another—effectively protecting the population. The less vaccinated a population becomes the more susceptible both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals are to diseases. This is why public schools require vaccinations for children who attend. In 2015, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a ruling that students who receive religious exemptions can be kept out of the classroom during a disease outbreak. The court stated, “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or to the latter to ill health or death.”

Proponents of NMEs believe public health should not take precedence over individual liberties and that mandated vaccinations are a threat to personal autonomy. However, in the case of public spaces, such as schools, vaccines are analogous to other government mandated safety measures. Exceeding the speed limit, running a red light, or breaking other rules of the road is illegal when driving because it threatens the safety of others. The famous ‘harm principle’ of British political theorist John Stuart Mill argues that infringing on personal liberties is justifiable when it protects others from harm. Under this principle, vaccination exemptions should be highly restricted since they pose a threat to public health.

Dr. Barbara McAneny, the American Medical Association’s president, argues, “Protecting our communities’ health requires that individuals not be permitted to opt out of immunization solely as a matter of convenience or misinformation.” A 2013 measles outbreak in Brooklyn, New York that infected 58 people was caused by a single unvaccinated child. Such an incident shows that, to keep a population best protected from disease, vaccination exemptions should only be allowed for legitimate medical reasons. While preventing the spread of misinformation is paramount to combating the rising rates of NMEs that are endangering both domestic and global health, the most effective means of reducing communicable disease is to do away with NMEs all together.

The Gray Area at the Intersection of Gender, Biology, and Identity in Sport

Runner Caster Semenya running across a finish line on a track in a stadium

There is a case currently before the at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland in which South African runner Caster Semenya is contesting a new rule proposed by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) that aims to restrict the levels of testosterone in female runners.

Semenya’s challenge is being closely watched, as the ruling will have important implications for the category of women’s sport and the rights of intersex and transgender athletes to participate in it.

Caster Semenya is not a transgender athlete, she was born female and has always identified as female; she does, however, have naturally much higher testosterone levels than most women by virtue of a DSD condition. DSD conditions are congenital, and they cover a range of cases in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical.

DSD can stand for “disorder of sexual development,” which is essentially a medical term that takes intersex traits and other variant or atypical sex development as medical abnormalities. But, at least in the literature outside professional medicine, the terminology of ‘disorder’ is adjusted so that DSD stands for “difference in sexual development” to reflect dissatisfaction with classing intersex conditions as disorders that require correction, treatment or surgical intervention in favour of accepting these as natural variations in human anatomy and physiology.

The range of DSD conditions includes the presence of internal testes in females, which results in much higher than usual testosterone levels. Typical testosterone levels in women and in over 99 percent of  female athletes ranges from 1.12 to 1.79 nmol/L (nanomoles per litre), while the normal adult male range is 7.7-29.4 nmol/L. The IAAF wants a limit of 5nmol/L – which would exclude Semenya from the competing.

The IAAF argues that:

“If a DSD athlete has testes and male levels of testosterone, they get the same increases in bone and muscle size and strength and increases in haemoglobin that a male gets when they go through puberty, which is what gives men such a performance advantage over women.”

The rule, if upheld, would necessitate athletes like Semenya take testosterone suppression drugs for 6 months prior to competing.

Semenya contends that the rule is discriminatory, irrational, unjustifiable and a “violation of the rules of sport and universally-recognised human rights.” She says: “I just want to run naturally, the way I was born. It is not fair that I am told I must change. It is not fair that people question who I am. I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast.”

A central question here is why her physical competitive advantage should be treated differently from any other competitive advantage gained by a natural physiological trait –when natural physical strengths are the essence of elite athleticism.

It isn’t easy in this case to make a definitive judgement because of the fuzziness of operative concepts like female and male at the intersection of sex, gender, biology/physiology and identity. It goes to the heart of feminist and LGTBQI challenges to the notion that sex, gender and sexuality are correlated binaries.

The IAAF claims that it is not trying to cast doubt on Semenya’s gender, but just to preserve the categories of female and male sport so that the competition is fair for all, yet these seem like contradictory claims. At the very least the IAAF are making a determination on what counts as female in the sense that it is determining the parameters in principle of that category, physiologically, in a way that in effect qualifies or disqualifies someone from competition.

That a ruling must be made on something that is essentially not determinate makes it very difficult to balance rights of DSD athletes against those of women in sport, and points up the inherent tensions between fairness and inclusivity.

Until quite recently it has been usual practice for medical professionals to assign a gender at birth to intersex babies followed by socialization, and sometimes further or ongoing medical interventions. Intersex traits, and other DSDs do not of themselves cause medical problems, but have long been considered as abnormalities which necessitated the assignment of a male or female gender as a treatment or correction.

Intersex activists have been campaigning against medical jurisdiction over the intersex/DSD body as well as for non-interventionist policies including cessation of gender assignment surgeries and other medical interventions, on the basis that bodies that are gender diverse, or display differences of sexual development, are normal, healthy bodies which simply represent instances of atypical variations on the statistically average male/female body.

In light of these types of consideration, many, including the South African government, consider any rule requiring Semenya to take testosterone suppressant drugs to be a gross violation of human rights. By taking such measures, the IAAF would be implicitly treating her as having a deviant physiology which could be corrected to normalize her.

If the ruling holds, Semenya can compete only if she changes her own body’s natural process to bring it into line with typical physiology. Semenya’s high testosterone gives her a significant advantage – she is, as it stands, unbeatable in her running events by a typical female athlete. Yet it is difficult to escape the sense in which her ‘femaleness’ is implicitly put into question, since the IAAF rule is aimed at preserving the category of women’s competition.

Her supporters argue that she simply has a natural physical advantage – like long legs or extra muscle mass, and that there is no difference in kind between these sorts of physiological advantages, and that of elevated testosterone.  

The ‘categories’ of men’s and women’s sport exist because, in general, men have significant competitive athletic physical advantages over women. Testosterone increases in males at puberty and is thought to be responsible for increases in muscle mass, strength and haemoglobin carrying capacity of the blood, all of which increases strength and endurance, and which ultimately bestows  competitive advantages.

There are, however, some dissenting opinions on that. The available research to date on the question of whether testosterone plays a definitive role in the general advantage male athletes have over female athletes does not provide a definitive answer. (A paper published by Bermon in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2017, which claimed that elite women runners with high testosterone levels performed as much as 3% better than those with lower levels, has been heavily criticized by three academics – Roger Pielke, Erik Boye and Ross Tucker – who say that 17-32% of the data was erroneous. That looks immensely damaging to the IAAF’s case.)

It might be tempting for some to think that science could, in principle, provide an answer in the above-mentioned way. But that would be to ignore the vast wealth of feminist and queer theory, which questions the very idea that sex and gender can be made to adhere to a strictly binary classification.

Those arguing with the IAAF for testosterone limits are usually citing problems of competitive fairness in women’s sport which is, after all, a protected category. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that the category of women’s sport need be definitive for broader questions about gender binaries.

In a sense it is a practical problem of maintaining the categories of women’s and men’s sport, when some individuals do not neatly slot into those categories. Because of this practical problem, there does seem to be a significant clash between fairness in sport, women’s sport, and inclusivity.

Martina Navratilova recently drew strong criticism for weighing in. She argued that allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sporting tournaments was “insane and cheating.” Navratilova’s comments were called “disturbing, upsetting, and deeply transphobic.”

Semenya is not transgender, but it seems reasonable to segue from one discussion to the other; indeed it has already been noted that transgender activists are closely watching the case for the implications it will have for transgender athletes. As such, a question here that needs teasing out is whether there are any salient differences between born females and transgender females, relevant to the question of preserving fairness in the category of women’s sport.

Navratilova was expressing a view that it is not fair for (non-trans) female athletes to have to compete against male-to-female transgender women who may retain the significant competitive advantage of the male over the female athletic physiology. Does such a view make her transphobic? She denies that she is prejudiced. But the criticism she received highlights the issue of whether questioning trans women’s inclusion in the category of women’s sport is necessarily, of itself transphobic. Can the question of trans women competing against other women in athletics be discussed free from the assumption that a contrary opinion is necessarily a hateful one?

To sum up, the case of Semenya’s testosterone levels currently before the IAAF, and the segue made to trans athletes, raises questions which are not insurmountable, but may never be final or definitively settled. One is the question of the categories of men’s and women’s sport: how to understand them, and to make sure they do what they are there to do, which is to provide the opportunity for fair competition. Another is how those categories do and should relate to intersex and transgender identity and rights, and to medical views of transgender and intersex; and the difficulty of conducting rational and respectful debate about these issues. The IAAF has promised a ruling at the end of March.  

What Does It Mean to Be an Ally?

Photograph of protesters holding "Stop Police Brutality" banner

Despite the social progress the United States has made, it still has many shortcomings. Amidst its many flaws, race is always one that persists–specifically regarding the treatment of black people. As long as black people are judged and disenfranchised because of the color of their skin, race will remained unresolved in the United States–a mass of prejudice, discrimination, and injustice that dates back centuries. But there is some progress that has been made and some racial tension in the country has been assuaged. After all, white Americans have showed their support for black people as they struggled with police brutality, the killings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. But is the support shown enough? The term ally has often been used when referring to an individual who supports a marginalized group of people. Regarding the injustices done to African Americans, many white people have declared themselves avid supporters in their struggle. What form does this support come in and to what extent? What does it really mean to be an ally?

A year ago, DePauw University invited actress Jenna Fischer to speak as an Ubben Lecturer, serving as part of the Ubben Lecture series where notable public figures are invited to campus to interact with students and give a public address. Only about a week or two prior to Fischer’s arrival, a series of racially charged incidents occurred on DePauw’s campus. Racial slurs had been written on campus bathrooms and some large stones in DePauw’s nature park had been rearranged to spell out the n-word. Students of color on campus were infuriated and felt as if the campus administration was not doing enough to ensure the safety of students of color. The campus was filled with racial tension, and it finally erupted during Fischer’s lecture. In the middle of her address, one by one, students of color began standing up and declaring “we are not safe.” Eventually, the whole auditorium was filled with “we are not safe” chants. The protest left campus on high alert as tension between students rose. The protest also brought media coverage, with black students standing at the forefront.

Not too long after the Ubben Lecture protest, white students on DePauw’s campus began to show their support for students of color by taking to social media. All across Instagram and Facebook, white students declared that they stood in solidarity with students of color. On a tree in the middle of campus, white students also made a sign declaring that they stood with students of color. But even as white students expressed their support, was it enough? Did their actions embody allyship? Heather Cronk, co-director of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a network of activists that organizes white people to fight racial injustice, stresses that allyship, in terms of supporting black people, needs to consist of trusting black leadership to direct white allies in ways that are helpful to the movement. Cronk goes on to explain that allyship also means building deep relationships with black people and other people of color. The willingness to discuss controversial topics such as police brutality and educate oneself are other integral components to allyship as well. Simply being a physical presence also represents allyship. In photos of Black Lives Matter protests, white people can be seen marching with their black counterparts holding up the Black Lives Matter banner.

With allyship in regards to the Black Lives Matter movement in mind, did white students on DePauw’s campus really demonstrate allyship? Taking to social media and posting something on one’s Instagram story and hanging a banner in the middle of campus can have meaning and influence, but the extent of that meaning and influence is questionable. When people post to their Instagram and Facebook stories, they last for 24 hours and then disappear. It is likely that both the people who viewed the story and even the person who posted the content eventually forgets about it. Did the same situation happen when white students at DePauw posted about standing in solidarity with students of color? The social media posts are a form of support, but it could be argued that the white students who made them were simply trying to deflect any criticism from themselves. Perhaps the question of allyship comes down to the old saying “actions speak louder than words.” It’s so easy to declare one’s support, but how does one demonstrate it? What if the same white students on DePauw’s campus who declared their allyship passively watch as their friends use racial slurs and disregard the struggle of students of color? What if the same white students who showed support to students of color don’t understand the importance of recognizing the difference between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter? Is that still allyship?

If more white students on DePauw’s campus stood in black spaces and were willing to have tough conversations with students of color, would that be enough? Possibly. But the support that white students demonstrated through social media and the use of the banner cannot be ignored. Regardless of what the true definition of allyship is, perhaps it can be agreed that in order for racial issues to be resolved in the United States, black and white bodies must come together.

College Admissions and the Ethics of Unfair Advantages

A boy walks through an aisle of books in a library.

News broke this month of a college admissions scandal in which it was discovered that wealthy and powerful parents were paying thousands of dollars to have their children admitted to prestigious colleges. The fraud was committed in two ways: in the first, SAT and ACT scores were falsified (generally by having someone else other than the student write the tests), while in the second, profiles portraying students as elite athletes were forged (often with students’ faces being photoshopped onto pre-existing pictures) and used as part of a bribe for admission under athletic scholarship. The primary organizer of the fraud has been arrested and pleaded guilty, while as of writing an increasing number of parents are being sought for prosecution.

Continue reading “College Admissions and the Ethics of Unfair Advantages”

What’s Wrong with State Media?

Graffiti image of three happy individuals under communist flag with Vietnam skyline behind

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.


In a statement to the Washington Post earlier this month, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez announced that Fox News will not be allowed to host a debate for the 2020 Democratic Party primary election cycle. The DNC’s decision was based in part on Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article accusing Fox News of acting as a propaganda machine for President Trump’s administration. Mayer’s article points to frequent cross-hiring between network management and Trump’s campaign and White House administration, as well as the president’s consistent attention to shows like “Fox and Friends” to demonstrate the close relationship between the administration and the media outlet. The article even includes a quote from professor Nicole Hemmer, who calls Fox News “the closest we’ve come to having state TV.” Implicit in Hemmer’s statement and Mayer’s article is the premise that a state-run media network would be a bad thing for the United States. Leaving aside the debate over whether Fox News or any other news organization is disseminating propaganda, it is worth delving into why (or perhaps even whether) we should be worried about a state-run media in the first place.

A state-run news organization would seem to run counter to the values which inspired the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union specifically highlights the role of the press as a critic and watchdog of the government in service of the people. Investigative journalism is a necessary component of democratic society. The research undertaken by reporters into not only the government, but also businesses and wider societal trends helps the general public understand the world and current events. It seems likely that an organization funded, overseen, or otherwise closely involved with the government would experience a conflict of interest precluding the total fulfillment of this watchdog duty. Certainly, a country with only state-run media would be missing the opposition viewpoint critical to the democratic process. Without the full breadth of information, the general public would be unable to make informed decisions about the government, therefore depriving the people of the agency of self-governance that defines democracy.

The United States can look to other countries for models of what state-run media might look like. Russia, for instance, is widely regarded as operating state-controlled media: two of the biggest television channels, Channel One Russia and Russia-1, are controlled by the federal government, and the English-language network RT is also funded by the government. These media outlets tend to support the policies of the government, and some have accused these organizations of acting as propaganda machines for the Kremlin. In particular, RT has garnered attention because it is directed to a more global audience; while critics say it is designed to generate international sympathy for misguided or dangerous policies of Vladimir Putin’s administration, the network claims it is simply providing an alternative viewpoint to the largely anti-Russia opinions of other international news networks.

Many regard Russia’s control of media and restriction of free press as problematic. What is it about the media situation in Russia that constitutes a breach of ethics? Is it the presence of state-run media, or is it the absence of prominent independent media outlets? Perhaps the more pressing concern is the active legal restrictions on journalists who attempt to look too closely at issues like corruption. Journalists have been banned from Russia, sentenced to time in prison, and even attacked and killed, often under suspicious circumstances. These are obviously more severe threats to press freedom than state-run media, and one could argue that in the absence of such dire conditions, a state-run news outlet would not be an ethical violation in itself.

Being government-sponsored does not guarantee that a news network will collaborate closely with the government. One of the most well-regarded news organizations in the world is the British Broadcasting Corporation. While the BBC was founded by a royal charter and remains under the auspices of the government of the United Kingdom, its charter explicitly calls for the corporation to be “independent in all matters” and a provider of “impartial” services. One could argue that true independence is impossible while the future of the organization is determined by the government, but the presence of other, non-state news outlets in the United Kingdom suggests a much wider latitude of press freedom than in Russia.

Our fear of state-run media seems to stem from a fear of an Orwellian dystopia in which objective truth is hard to come by and public narratives are constantly malleable. The tendency towards a “post-truth” world seem ripe for sinister developments like manufactured consent, wherein public opinion is gradually and subliminally bent to suit the aims of policy makers and other power players. These fears seem even more troubling in the era of “fake news.” President Trump’s use of the phrase to discredit news outlets like CNN, as well as his suggestion for a state-run cable TV network, could be construed as part of a drive towards more extensive state control of the media.

But is there an upside to state-controlled (or at least state-funded) media? For several years, observers have been bemoaning the rise of clickbait — stories and headlines designed to grab immediate attention, often at the expense of in-depth reporting and thoughtful investigation. The primary motivation for this trend is to ensure a profit in the digital era. Free from the need to turn a profit, a state-funded media outlet would theoretically be better equipped to cover substantial, potentially unpopular stories. This is the mission of America’s Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a government-financed organization that provides some of the funding for public radio stations and other services.

All of this does not absolve Fox News from its duty to provide impartial coverage of government policy. Fox News is not openly an arm of the state: any connection or cooperation between the network and the Trump administration is covert. When it is perceived as an impartial, private corporation, any criticism or praise delivered by the organization to the government is taken as objective assessment, rather than propaganda. But precisely because it is perceived as a free agent, the network also has a duty to fulfill this expectation and act impartially; anything else would be misrepresentation, unethical not only to the extent that lying is unethical, but more so because of the special duty of the press in maintaining the democratic system. At the same time, it is difficult to ascertain true impartiality. The determining factor is intent, rather than outcome. An impartial organization coincidentally supporting the administration on every issue and a partial organization actively colluding with the administration would look practically identical to an outside observer.

Australia’s Pill Testing and Different Versions of Harm Minimization

Several different colored pills laid across a white table

Sadly, the Australian summer just gone has once again seen as increase in deaths and hospitalizations associated with drug use at music festivals. As of January 2019 the state of New South Wales (NSW) coroner’s office announced it would investigate five recent deaths at music festivals. For the past decade deaths and overdose hospitalizations following ingestion of MDMA, ecstasy or other party drugs at music festivals has prompted debate about whether pill testing services should be made available at such events.

Continue reading “Australia’s Pill Testing and Different Versions of Harm Minimization”

Military Propaganda and Empowerment in Captain Marvel

Photograph of a Captain Marvel poster above a movie theatre entrance; the poster shows Brie Larson as Captain Marvel standing with a star and flashing lights behind her

Captain Marvel, Marvel’s newest superhero flick, had a very successful opening weekend at the box office, despite backlash from Internet trolls and diehard comic book fans leading up to the release. Most of the negative responses have been what one might expect for Marvel’s first female-led project; many complained that Brie Larson sported stoic expression in the film’s poster, or that the feminist slant of the promotional material ended up “isolating the audience” (a baffling statement, as though the film was only meant to be viewed by men). Despite these complaints, the film has received overwhelmingly positive responses from female viewers.

This is hardly surprising, as film was clearly marketed as another fissure in the glass ceiling. It’s premiere date was set for International Women’s day, and Brie Larson even went so far as to call the project “the biggest feminist movie of all time.” In interviews, Larson expressed her hope that Captain Marvel will inspire a generation of young girls to pursue careers as pilots, saying, “I really do hope that it inspires girls and women – that if that’s the path that they want to take, that they know that it’s available to them.”

But the film has received negative responses from a more progressive quarter as well. Some critics have called the film military propaganda for the U.S. Air Force, denouncing it as little more than a flashy and expensive recruitment ad targeted at women. This reading has been bolstered by the film’s marketing strategy. Ads for the Air Force played before many screenings of the film, specifically linking the heroic character of Captain Marvel (who is herself a former Air Force pilot) to real members of the armed forces. In one, a female pilot proclaims that “Every superhero has an origin story. We all got our start somewhere. For us, it was the U.S. Air Force.” Real army pilots were included in press tours and other promotional materials, and were also used as extras on set. Dr. Roger Stahl, a professor of communications at the University of Georgia, said of the film in an interview with Los Angeles Magazine, “[The military is] killing a few birds with one stone with Captain Marvel. They’re recruiting, they’re rehabilitating the image of the Air Force, and they’re appealing to an elusive but desirable demographic.”

Modern propaganda is much harder to spot (and therefore much more insidious) than blatantly biased World War II posters and idealized statues of dictators from autocratic nations. It’s also especially damning when used as a label, which is why the army has tried desperately to distance itself from it. Phil Strub, a former navy officer who currently works as a liaison between the DOD (Department of Defense) and Hollywood, often consults on blockbuster films like Captain Marvel. When asked if military-sponsored films should be classified as propaganda in an interview with Outline, he rather defensively said,

“I associate [the word propaganda] with something that is not truthful. Something that is put together deliberately to mislead, to brainwash people, to twist the real. They whip [true and false] together in a smorgasbord. That’s propaganda. And maybe you’d accuse me of being too pro-military but to me, the movies we work with, they’re morale-improvement. We don’t say, ‘OK! Let’s see what we can do to exploit this opportunity!’ We’re not trying to brainwash people! We’re out to present the clearest, truest view.”;

The military’s official stance on Captain Marvel falls pretty closely in line with Strub’s viewpoint. The Air Force has denied that the film is a subversive attempt to boost enlistment, but claims that they worked with the production solely to ensure the military was given as “accurate and authentic” a portrayal as possible.

We should also understand that Captain Marvel isn’t the first big-budget film (or even the first Marvel film) the government has had a hand in. Iron Man, the very first movie in the Marvel cinematic universe, was backed and largely shaped by input from the DOD. The 1986 film Top Gun was also used to rehabilitate the public’s view of the military in the wake of Vietnam, boosting recruitment numbers by a considerable amount. However, almost none of these films have faced backlash to the same degree that Captain Marvel currently is. This might be because the recruitment is specifically targeted at women now, which not only indicates how the demographics of our armed forces are shifting but how much more of the population is being targeted by these efforts and implicated in warfare.

However, it’s pertinent to ask if the actual message of the movie itself conflicts with its purpose. As Elena Levin points out, the Skrulls, an ostensibly villainous race of shape shifters that Captain Marvel is pitted against in the first half of the film, are eventually revealed to be

“a refugee group being hounded across the galaxy by the military of a fascist hegemony […] that denies them their basic dignity […] The movie doesn’t just show the galaxy from the Skrull point of view, it asks viewers to identify with them. Like the Skrull, people conceal themselves in order to survive in an oppressive world. When they defend themselves, the oppressors call it war.”

Captain Marvel eventually joins the Skrulls and protects them from the Kree, the fascist hegemony she was brainwashed by in the beginning of the film.

There are some flaws in the movie’s anti-war message, though. Dr. Lawson, a defector from the Kree, professes that her aim is to end all wars, not win them. And yet Lawson, it seems, can only do this from within the United States military, which she works for as a research scientist after leaving her home planet. Despite this, the film ultimately sympathizes with those disenfranchised by imperialism, and Lawson’s goal (strange as her methods may be) is still portrayed as a pacifist one.

The conflict between message and purpose raises a number of interesting questions. Is it possible for a movie to be military propaganda and also advocate against war, or does the recruitment goal render the anti-war message hollow? Is the goal of the propaganda merely to inspire positive emotions associated with the Air Force (which it certainly does; the colors of Captain Marvel’s uniform are chosen because of their association with the Air Force), so therefore it doesn’t matter if it’s wrapped up in an anti-war package? Furthermore, is it ethical for us to feel empowered by this movie?

On the one hand, something about the film smacks of white feminism, namely in it’s disregard of the horrific experiences women of color from other nations have had with the U.S. military. This goes beyond general statements on the evils of imperialism, which the film certainly offers. Dr. Elizabeth Mesok, a researcher who studies gender in the military, said of the film, “If we’re going to talk about women’s equality and women’s empowerment but we’re going to divorce it from a conversation about the rights of Afghan women and the safety and security and wellbeing Iraqi women or women in Yemen, then that’s not a conversation that I think is politically fulfilling.” It might be compared to what what Sarah Banet-Weiser calls “empowerment feminism,” of the kind of feminism that encourages self-confidence and success under a capitalist system to the detriment of economic or political autonomy, which ultimately reinforces rather than dismantles patriarchal and white supremacist values. In that sense, we might hesitate before surrendering to the emotional high of the film.

On the other hand, the emotions elicited by the film are potent and may be understood separately from the pro-military message. There’s a wonderful moment near the end where Captain Marvel goes up against her former mentor, played by Jude Law, without giving in to the rules he tried to impose on her in the beginning of the film. He encouraged her to be emotionless and fight within the restrictions he provided her with, but she ultimately realizes that she has nothing to prove to him and triumphs over him her own way. It might be pointless to dismiss such genuinely uplifting moments as irredeemably tainted by their association with propaganda, and acknowledge their value for female audiences who may come away with no more interest in the Air Force than they went in with.

Like all films, we have to view this one with a critical eye, and understand both its actual purpose, how it’s meant to influence us unconsciously, and what we might consciously chose to take away from it.

Sparking Joy: The Ethics of Medically-Induced Happiness

Photograph of a sunflower in sunshine with blue sky behind

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.


Happiness is often viewed as an ephemeral thing. Finding happiness is an individual and ever-developing process. Biologically speaking, however, all emotions are the simple result of hormones and electrical impulses. In a recent medical breakthrough, a team of scientists has found a way to tap in to these electrical impulses and induce joy directly in the brain. This kind of procedure has long been the stuff of speculation, but now it has become a reality. While the technique shows a good deal of promise in treating disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress, it also presents an ethical conundrum worth considering.

On initial examination, it is difficult to point out anything particularly wrong with causing “artificial” joy. Ethical hedonism would prioritize happiness over all other values, regardless of the manner in which happiness is arrived at. However, many people would experience a knee-jerk rejection to the procedure. It bears some similarity to drug-induced euphoria, but unlike illicit drugs, this electrical procedure seems to have no harmful side effects, according to the published study. Of course, with a small sample size and a relatively short-term trial, addiction and other harmful aspects of the procedure may be yet undiscovered. If, as this initial study suggests, the procedure is risk-free, should it be ethically accepted? Or is there cause for hesitation beyond what is overtly harmful?

The possibility of instantaneous, over-the-counter happiness has been a frequent subject of science-fiction. Notable examples include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which featured a happiness-inducing drug called “soma”; and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later adapted into the film Blade Runner), which included a mood-altering device called a “mood organ.” Both novels treat these inventions as key elements in a dystopian future. Because the emotions produced by these devices are “false”—the direct result of chemical alteration, rather than a “natural” response to external conditions—the society which revolves around them is empty and void of meaning. What is the validity of this viewpoint? Our bias towards what we perceive as “natural” may be simply a matter of maintaining the status quo–we’re more comfortable with whatever we’re used to. This is similar to the preference for foods containing “natural” over “artificial” flavoring despite nearly identical chemical compositions. While we are instinctively wary of the “artificial” emotions, there may be no substantive difference to the unbiased feeler.

Of course, emotions exist for more than just the experience of feeling. The connection between emotions and the outside world was addressed by Kelly Bijanki, one of the scientists involved in the electrically-induced happiness study, in her interview with Discover Magazine: “Our emotions exist for a very specific purpose, to help us understand our world, and they’ve evolved to help us have a cognitive shortcut for what’s good for us and what’s bad for us.” Just as pain helps us avoid dangerous hazards and our ability to taste bitterness helps us avoid poisonous things, negative emotions help drive us away from harmful situations and towards beneficial ones. However, living in a modern society to which the human body is not biologically adapted, our normally helpful sensory responses like pain and fear can sometimes backfire. Some people experience chronic pain connected to a bodily condition that cannot be immediately resolved; in these cases, the pain itself becomes the problem, rather than a useful signal. As such, we seek medical solutions to the pain itself. Chronic unhappiness, such as in cases of anxiety and depression, could be considered the same way: as a normally useful sensory feedback which has “gone wrong” and itself become a problem requiring medical treatment.

What if the use of electrically-induced happiness extended beyond temporary medical treatments? Why shouldn’t we opt to live our lives in a state of perpetual euphoria, or at least have the option to control our emotions directly? As was previously mentioned, artificial happiness may be indistinguishable from the real thing, at least as far as our bodies are concerned. Human beings already use a wide variety of chemicals and actions to “induce” happiness–that is, to make ourselves happy. If eating chocolate or exercising are “natural” paths to happiness, why would an electrical jolt be “unnatural”? Of course, the question of meaning still bears on the issue. Robert Nozick argues that humans make a qualitative distinction between the experience of doing something and actually doing it. We want our happiness to be tied to real accomplishments; the emotion alone isn’t enough. More concretely, we would probably become desensitized to happiness if it were all we experienced. In the right doses, sadness helps us value happiness more; occasional pain makes our pleasure more precious.

If happiness in the absence of meaning is truly “empty,” our ethical outlook toward happiness should reflect this view. Rather than viewing pleasure or happiness itself as the ultimate good, we might instead see happiness as a component of a well-lived life. Whether something is good would depend not on whether it brings happiness, but whether it fulfills some wider sense of meaning. Of course, exactly what constitutes this wider meaning would continue to be the subject of endless philosophical debate.

The Politics of Ego

Photograph of former Starbucks CEO sitting on a stage gesturing with his hands spread

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.


It is no secret that hyperpartisanship amongst the American electorate is rampant and is only growing worse. In 1994, 17 percent of Democrats had a very unfavorable opinion of Republicans, with that number at 21 percent for Republicans’ attitudes towards Democrats. As of 2016, those numbers have risen to 55 percent and 58 percent, respectively. About eight-in-ten Americans now even say that Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on basic facts. This partisanship has had a paralyzing effect on American political functions in recent decades. The 100th U.S. Congress (1987-1988) was able to pass 7 percent of bills that hit the floor into law. For the 115thU.S. Congress (2017-2018), that number has been cut by more than half at 3 percent. However, at what appears to be the pinnacle of American partisanship, a push for centrism has emerged amongst the candidates for the 2020 presidential race.

Ex-CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, announced he is “seriously considering” a presidential bid as an Independent in January of this year. In a statement he wrote on Medium, Schultz called out hyperpartisanship, accusing  “the far right and the far left” of “holding our government hostage by engaging in revenge politics and preventing sensible solutions to big challenges.” He highlighted America’s “broken two-party system” which fails to give power to every person’s vote, and emphasized most Americans’ desire for “cooperation in Washington.” The solution to America’s shortcomings, in Schultz’s opinion, is to have a “credible, centrist independent on the ballot in all 50 states.” Schultz appears to believe that this “credible, centrist independent” is himself, given his interest in casting a presidential bid. Despite his apparent devotion to truly representing the American people, Schultz appears to be lacking a platform.

In an interview with CNBC, Schultz gave hollow answers about his political positions. For instance, when pressed about immigration, Schultz stated that the U.S. should pursue a “good immigration policy.” Similarly, when asked about the national debt, Schultz claimed that the debt is “the greatest threat domestically to the country,” but made no allusion to how it should be addressed. According to his original statement on Medium, his primary policy strategy is to “draw upon the best ideas from all sides.” Yet, on the issues, it seems as though Schultz is merely criticizing both sides of the political spectrum instead of highlighting their best ideas. A lifelong Democrat up until this point, Schultz believes that the Democratic Party is moving too far to the left, and has expressed disdain for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed Green New Deal. Schultz has been less specific in his criticism of the right, but has made his distaste for President Trump very clear, accusing him of “creating episodic chaos every day.” In an interview, Schultz claimed, “I will do nothing on any level to proceed [in his campaign] if I thought that in proceeding I would in any way persuade Americans to vote and re-elect Donald Trump.” Since Schultz was a lifelong Democrat, one might expect it would most effectively block Trump from being re-elected if he ran as a moderate Democrat and pushed bipartisan policy from there, as it would mitigate the risk of him splitting the Democratic vote. However, Schultz insists on running his campaign as an Independent, making it appear as though he expects the American people to trust him to be the solution to the nation’s woes. Schultz wants to run for president not because he believes he can fix hyperpartisanship, but because he believes he is entitled to the post.

Schultz’s ego infiltrating the political sphere is not an isolated case, nor have political egos ever been uncommon. The ex-CEO considering a presidential bid simply because he can afford to do so is somewhat reminiscent of Victorian-era monarchs and industrial party bosses from the U.S.’s Gilded Age. While those examples both lie in the extreme, ego in American politics now shows itself in more subtle ways. For instance, just earlier this month President Trump autographed Bibles while on a trip in Alabama to survey disaster damage from recent tornadoes. Similarly, and also occurring earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a sweeping voting rights bill from reaching the Senate floor. When asked why he would not even see the bill, McConnell responded simply by saying, “Because I get to decide what we vote on.” The egos that dominate the political sphere also trickle down to infect public discourse.

While not a direct cause, inflated egos in American politics definitely contribute to the nation’s hyperpartisanship. The most apparent example of this relationship is the bloated field of candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. So far, 13 candidates have announced their campaigns, while two more have announced exploratory committees. The large number of candidates has already begun a trend of hyperpartisanship within the Democratic Party, with centrists and progressives settling in to polarized camps. This not only poses the risk of the Democratic Party dividing itself and alienating potential voters, but also of an unrepresentative candidate being nominated as happened with Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2016 (the largest primary in American history). This is not to say that all of the Democratic candidates are running glamour campaigns, and even those who are do not rival the ego of Howard Schultz.

Schultz poses a particularly interesting case in ego politics, as he claims a platform of bipartisanship, while espousing beliefs that deepen partisan ties. In merely criticizing Democrats and Republicans alike, Schultz does not draw people closer to the center, but drags them further into negative partisanship. In order for centrism and third parties to be successful, they must forge their own path in addition to highlighting the shortcomings of other parties. This work, however, does not begin with a presidential candidate, but with a shift in political culture. A major weakness of centrism, and of third parties in the U.S. in general, is that it tends to lack a direct path.  Third parties in the U.S. typically fall into defining themselves by relative comparison to what they are not or what they are against, making them more susceptible to becoming about candidates rather than about ideas (as is the case with Schultz). Thus, Schultz’s potential campaign becomes a test for American centrists to either accept unhelpful criticism without resolve in supporting Schultz, or to forge their own initiatives to escape polarization if they truly wish to do so. America’s two-party system deserves to be reevaluated, but jumping onto the political scene without solutions does not offer any potential for progress.

Our Bodies, Ourselves?  Death, Values, and the Material We Leave Behind

Photograph of a replica of Lincoln's coffin. It is black and draped with white cloth and has a few flowers on top

Death of those we care about is deeply distressing for many reasons, one of which is that the empty space the person once occupied is often soon filled with dangling, unanswered questions. Many of these questions will likely never be answered, but some of the most captivating might be addressed by analysis of the biological material the person left behind. What considerations ought to guide our behavior when it comes to use of a person’s remaining biological material?

A fairly straightforward answer would be to say that there are no constraints that should govern our behavior. The motivating philosophy behind this view might be that when a person is dead, they can no longer be harmed, because that person no longer exists. If we find this argument compelling, we might have to rethink our attitudes about things like respect for a person’s wishes after death and about the moral permissibility of necrophilia. After all, if bodies are just things, we can’t do them any moral harm. Even the most expansive theories about the kinds of things that are deserving of moral consideration maintain that, for an entity to be morally considerable, it must have interests—there must be ways in which things can go better or worse for it. Dead bodies don’t meet this condition.  In this sense, a dead body is more like a stone or a glass of water.

Our social policies suggest that plenty of people disagree with this position.  Necrophilia is a crime, and we have many laws that govern the use of a person’s biological material after death. Many of these policies may be justified, but many may also not be.

One domain in which we seem to feel fairly comfortable treating a dead body as a thing is when we conduct autopsies on the victims of crime. One of the motivating considerations behind performing an autopsy is the idea that the body left behind potentially has many important secrets to reveal. Some of these secrets might turn out to be embarrassing or harmful to the ongoing reputation of the victim or might be painful to the loved ones left behind. Nevertheless, it seems that we have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that there are two related values that are more important in these kinds of cases than harm to the deceased—protection of the community against potential future crimes, and retributive justice.

On some occasions, bodies are exhumed so that genetic relationships can be evaluated. If they are old enough, some cases intuitively fall under the heading of forensic archaeology. When a body dating back to the 15th century was found under a Leicester car park in 2013, genetic tests were done to confirm that it was indeed the body of notorious British monarch Richard III. Officials have continued to take a different position when it comes to King Richard’s two young nephews. The bodies of two young boys were found in a wooden box buried on the grounds of the Tower of London in 1647. They were buried in Westminster Abbey, but their identity has never been confirmed. The concerns protecting the princes seem to be more pragmatic than moral in motivation. What should be done with the remains if the test reveals that they are not the princes? What might the tests tell us about lines of succession? In any event, it is interesting that time seems to make some difference in our perception of the moral landscape of these kinds of cases. Many seem to view disruption of a long dead body as morally neutral, while they view the exhumation of the more recently dead as disrespectful. Perhaps this is simply an irrational bias. On the other hand, it may well be that, at some point, the value of the historical knowledge we obtain from these kinds of cases outweighs the more limited privacy interests of the long dead.

Famous exhumations to test for parentage have been done in more recent cases as well. Famously, in 2017, the body of Salvador Dali was exhumed to determine if he was the father of Spanish astrologer and tarot card reader Pilar Abel. The result? Not the father. Similarly, chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer was exhumed in 2010 to determine whether he was the father of a then nine-year–old girl. The result? Not the father. There is an element of historical value involved in these cases as well—after all, both Dali and Fischer were famous individuals. There may be some value in knowing more of their stories. In addition to these considerations, one might think that children have the right to know who their parents are. For many people, knowledge about their parents is important on an existential level—it tells them something about who they are. One might also think that a person’s child has certain rights to inheritance that, at least at first glance, should be respected. On the other hand, anyone can make a paternity claim. Under what conditions would such a claim justify the exhumation of a body?

Moral dilemmas of this type don’t always involve exhumations. Sometimes they involve more accessible biological material—and sometimes that material is used for perhaps even more controversial purposes. Well-known utilitarian Jeremy Bentham left behind unusual instructions for his body. He wanted it preserved as an “auto-icon” and kept on display at the University College, London.His wishes were honored. Recently, scientists have collected biological samples that they intend to use to determine whether Bentham was autistic. Similarly, sheets on the bedding on which Abraham Lincoln died are being tested to determine whether the beloved president had a genetic condition known as Marfan Syndrome—a condition characterized in part by towering height and long limbs. These cases motivate important moral questions. Is it morally defensible to reveal a person’s personal medical information after they have died? Does revealing such information serve to further stigmatize and sensationalize medical conditions, or should we understand these revelations as normalizing and empowering? Should these decisions be governed by respect for the wishes of the dead, or should they be made in a way that promotes the best interests of the living?

Classics in the Era of Trump

Photograph of a bookshelf of uniform "harvard classic" books; visible titles are Don Quixote and The Aeneid

Classical studies, generally thought of as an elite and isolated corner of academic study, has been surprisingly prominent in headlines over the last few years. Victor Davis Hanson, conservative classical scholar and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has a new book coming out in March 2019, in which he draws parallels between ancient and contemporary politics. In The Case For Trump, as he explained in an interview with The New Yorker, he argues that we ought to think of Donald Trump as a tragic hero straight from the pages of Greek drama. The tragic hero, he says, is defined not by their bravery or altruism. Rather, “the natural expression of their personas can only lead to their own destruction or ostracism from an advancing civilization that they seek to protect. And yet they willingly accept the challenge of service.” As Hanson defines them, heroes are those who solve problems at the risk of vilification, which is exactly what he sees Trump as doing.

In all tragedies, Hanson explains further, “the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem,” so the community brings in an outsider, someone willing to get their hands dirty. Hanson is coy about what exactly our “existential problem” is, but the ambiguity is dispelled when he launches into an ill-informed and biased polemic against Mexican immigrants. We’re also left to wonder what “community” he’s referring to, as if the country wasn’t deeply fractured across political lines during and after the presidential election. When did all of us collectively agree that Trump was a necessary evil? Ultimately, we’re left to scratch our heads and ask ourselves why we ought to listen to a classical scholar’s opinion on politics and immigration at all.

The specific argument of his book is perhaps less important than the fact that a classical scholar is presenting an argument about modern politics. Classics has a reputation for being a bulwark of conservatism within academia and culture at large, a tool for enforcing power rather than dismantling it. This understanding is becoming less accurate as the discipline expands; writers from Virginia Woolf to Michel Foucault have used classical literature and mythology to challenge the hegemony of Christian belief (especially in relation to gender and sexuality), and scholars from increasingly diverse backgrounds contribute to ongoing research and debate. Emily Wilson’s version of the The Odyssey, the first English translation of the epic poem by a woman, was released only last year, an indication of how the demographic makeup of classical studies is shifting. Still, elements of conservatism persist within the field. The question becomes whether we should tell classical scholars to “stick to writing papers” (or whatever the equivalent here would be of telling football players to only focus on sports) without running the risk of anti-intellectualism. What do we gain and lose by these historical comparisons, and do they enrich or limit our political discussions?

In many cases, this discourse serves to express anxieties over the “fall of Western civilization.” Ancient Rome and Greece are well-established cultural touchstones, the foundation of our political institutions and beliefs. We want to place this tumultuous moment within a kind of historical continuity, which serves to both reify it and hold it at a safe distance.

This was evident in the production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that caused in controversy in June of 2017. The director created unmistakable parallels between Trump and Caesar, even giving Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, an Eastern-European accent. Gregg Henry, the actor playing Caesar, told The Washington Post that the point of the play is “that when a tyrant comes to power and the way you fight that tyrant, it’s very important how you then try to deal with the problem because if you don’t deal with the problem in a proper way, you can end up losing democracy for like, 2000 years.” It’s debatable whether this production is truly referencing classical antiquity or the English literary canon (are we reaching for Shakespeare as a touchstone here or Roman politics, or something else, that nebulous thing called Art?). Either way, the production lended a historical importance to our present moment that both paid homage to the particulars and lent it a timeless and universal dimension. One could argue that Hanson’s book serves a similar function, albeit with a different agenda. He’s trying to understand the Trump presidency through Greek mythology, to explain Trump as an archetypal figure. He pins him down as a definitive “type” while glossing over certain individual facets of Trump’s character (namely, racism, misogyny, and financial greed).

The intersection between classical studies and modern politics also reflects growing anxieties over populism. When democracy falters, we rush back to the source to understand what is happening and why. David Stuttard, scholar and Fellow of Goodenough College, London, published a book in late 2018 that served just that purpose. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, he writes that Alcibiades, a divisive Athenian statesman associated with the disintegration of Athenian democracy, wanted to “Make Athens Great Again.” Stuttard calls him the “Donald Trump of Ancient Greece” in another article, further driving home the point. While the comparison (an imperfect one, as pointed out by Ryan Shinkel in the LA Review of Books) is hardly the crux of Stuttard’s book, it is certainly another attempt to bring the past into the present, to make sense of 21st century populism by looking backwards. We see surface-level similarities, “strong men” shaping history, populist politics driven by forceful personalities, and the connections practically make themselves.

These are, in a sese, old problems amplified in our era but not altered beyond recognition. As famed classical scholar Mary Beard points out in her book SPQR, anxiety over shifting boundaries and national identity, of what it means to be a citizen in an ever-expanding world, is a question of perennial concern. Some classical scholars have even used global warming to link our world with antiquity; Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire examines the role climate change (albeit climate change beyond the control of the Romans) had in the fall of the Roman Empire, prompting us to consider the impact global warming might have on contemporary politics.

Most of this discourse relies on view of antiquity as a place of primacy, of visceral and material immediacy. Most of us assume that ancient history tells us what universal behavior is, that it gives us a no-frills look at human nature and is therefore useful for navigating our current political climate. This viewpoint assumes, however, that our experience of reality isn’t shaped by historically-specific institutions and social movements. Dr. Richard Cherwitz, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote an article in 2017 called “Why Classical Theories of Rhetoric Matter in the Trump Presidency” in which we see such thinking at work. He asserts, “While we think our discourse today is unique to the times and circumstances in which we live, the reality is that patterns of thinking and talking are inherent in the human condition and therefore may be time invariant.” He zeroes in on the Roman idea stasis, an ancient Roman theory by lawyers to assess guilt in the courtroom, specifically determining guilt from the way someone behaves. He writes,

“Many legal observers and members of the media reasonably ask: If Trump isn’t guilty of wrongdoing and subsequently of covering it up, why would he say and do the things he does?  After all, as the Romans knew, only a guilty person would behave that way. […] [This] indicates why we should remind ourselves and our students that the ways we think and argue are deeply rooted in the human condition and are explained by the rhetoricians who lived thousands of years ago.”

In other words, Cherwitz says, there is such thing as universal behavior, and the human condition (and rhetoric, a practice shaped by centuries of discourse, education, and specifically Western understandings of the public sphere) has remained virtually unaltered since the Roman Republic.

So what do these comparisons mean as a whole, and is it entirely ethical for us to make them? On the one hand, scholars are working to untangle the often inscrutable world of modern politics, to provide some solid ground in a civilization that seems to be losing faith in itself. They are reacting to and attempting to remedy our cultural anxiety, which can hardly be condemned. On the other hand, a troublingly one-dimensional view of the current administration can be gleaned in many of these examples. It is a gross oversimplification of reality to claim that authoritarianism, white supremacy, and discrimination against minorities are rooted in basic “human nature”. This pushes the workings of very specific historical processes and institutions to the background, erasing centuries of structural oppression and sidelining factors like class and gender. In that sense, comparisons with the ancient world can be employed as a tactic to deflect rather than elucidate, to shift the blame for our current political climate to human nature, something that is fundamental and immune to the influence of power.

We see a particularly insidious example of this in Hanson’s New Yorker interview, in which he essentially parrots the president’s famously blasé remarks on the Charlottesville riots. He argues that the Alt-right isn’t “monolithic,” that it’s more or less made up of unknowable people with no discernible common ground. In his view, they become a shifting amorphous crowd with no ideological foundation, and are therefore without personal responsibility.

Classical scholars, not without exceptions, generally speak from a position of privilege and are considered worthy of being listened to. We certainly shouldn’t tell them to stick to academic conferences and keep out of politics, as that places limits on the scope of our political discourse, but we ought to remind ourselves of the prestige enjoyed by classical scholars the next time we criticize an athlete (usually a non-white athlete) for “stepping out of line” and speaking out about oppression.

Classical studies is a deeply fascinating and multifaceted field, and includes scholars from all backgrounds and political opinions. It can be both a hotly-contested battleground and fertile terrain for making sense of the present day. However, we need to scrutinize the claims of classical scholars just as we would the claims of any other public figure, and understand the motivations and assumptions that underpin their ideas.

On the Just Treatment of Appalachian Coal Towns

A small town main street with a green mountain in the background and an American flag

Detroit had automobiles, Pittsburgh had steel, and Boston had textiles. Amongst these former capitals of industrialization in the United States is one that is seldom mentioned: the coal kingdom of Hazard, Kentucky. Hazard started booming as a coal town in 1912 when a railway along the North Fork of the Kentucky River was built with a station there. Soon thereafter, nearby coal mines started opening frequently, making for an abundance of jobs and a rapidly growing population. Between 1920 and 1930, the population of Hazard grew from 4,348 to over 7,000. The small city still hosts a Black Gold Festival every September to celebrate its industrial roots.

However, Hazard’s once rich history has now turned into severe poverty, unemployment, and addiction. The population is currently 5,600—shrinking over 1,800 since its peak in 1940 despite heavy national population growth. Additionally, Hazard’s median household income of $20,690 is almost $40,000 under the U.S. median, with about 31% of its small population living below the poverty line. Perhaps the darkest aspect of Hazard’s downturn is the opioid addiction crisis. Perry County, Kentucky (where Hazard is located) had the most opioid-related hospitalizations in the nation in 2017, with 6% of the county’s population having been hospitalized due to opioid abuse. Three counties surrounding Perry were also in the top ten in the nation.

Hazard, however, is not isolated in the challenges it faces. Towns all over Appalachia have experienced severe downturn characterized by these same issues. To illustrate, six of the 15 states with the highest opioid death rates are Appalachian states (West Virginia is first with 43.4 out of every 100,000 people dying of opioid overdose, followed by Ohio at third, Maryland at fourth, Kentucky at 10th, Pennsylvania at 12th, and Tennessee at 14th). Between the years 1999 and 2016, the number of opioid-related deaths in Pennsylvania jumped 736 percent, while those in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia jumped over 1,000 percent. These rates are compared to a national increase of 528 percent. With the opioid epidemic, Appalachian states also deal with unusually high poverty and crumbling infrastructure that has led to the contamination of drinking water.

Why is it that these challenges are so inflated in Appalachia? Why is a region of the U.S. that once prospered and was overflowing with opportunities for lucrative employment is now rapidly decaying? The most obvious reason is the decline in demand for coal. U.S. coal consumption peaked as recently as 2007 but has dropped 44 percent since then, reaching its lowest level in almost 40 years. This number is expected to drop another eight percent this year. Additionally, of the 1,470 coal-fired generators in the U.S. in 2007, 540 have been retired as of September 2018. The decrease in demand has inevitably resulted in a decrease in coal production, and therefore a decrease in coal jobs. Coal mining jobs in the U.S. have dropped a whopping 71 percent since 1985. This effect is more pronounced in Appalachia. Coal production in Appalachia fell 45 percent from 2005 to 2015, resulting in a loss of about 33,500 mining jobs since 2011. In Hazard in particular, the local coal industry now produces approximately 4.1 million tons of coal annually, dropping about 13 million tons since 2008, and losing about 13,000 coal jobs in eastern Kentucky since 2011. This year marks the lowest number of coal jobs Kentucky has had since 1898.

People across the nation have noticed Appalachia’s suffering, and have searched for causes behind it. Donald Trump in particular ran on a platform that included the revival of the Appalachian coal industry. He puts most of the blame for its recent lack of success on environmental regulations imposed by Democratic politicians. In one tweet referring to the Obama administration’s regulations on carbon emissions, Trump wrote, “Obama’s coal regulations will destroy the coal industry, put Americans out of work, raise electricity prices, and lead to blackouts.” Trump continues to tweet into his presidency about how he has “ended the war on coal.” The coal town of Hazard seems to agree, as 77.2 percent of voters in Perry County, Kentucky voted for Trump in 2016. However, Trump’s assumption that environmental regulations are destroying the coal industry and, by association, the economy of Appalachia, is overly simplistic. In fact, environmental regulations only account for approximately 3.5 percent of the total decline in U.S. coal production. The reality is that the coal industry is dying primarily of natural causes.

There are two main reasons behind the Appalachian coal industry’s decline: decreasing productivity, and competition with other energy sources. The former is caused by the dwindling supply of easily-accessible coal deposits in the Appalachian Mountains. After almost a century and a half of mining, miners now have to dig deeper into the mountains for usable coal. To offset this increased difficulty in mining, coal corporations have turned towards mechanization, which puts even more miners out of work. Even with a mechanized workforce, however, Appalachian coal cannot keep up with coal production in western states such as Wyoming, Montana, and Texas, where deposits are closer to the surface and therefore require less time and money to mine.

Along with challenges the coal industry faces to keep up production, it must also deal with higher competition with other sources of energy, namely renewable energy (wind power, solar power, etc.) and natural gas. Renewable energy is beginning to compete with coal because of rising concern amongst Americans about the environment. Burning coal is one of most harmful sources of electricity in terms of carbon emissions, and while it is cheap, Americans are beginning to prioritize environmental harms caused by energy sources over the economic costs they incur. This gives renewable energy sources (which are typically more expensive) an advantage over coal. Most competitive with the coal industry, however, is natural gas. In 2016, natural gas surpassed coal as the U.S.’s leading source of electricity. This is largely due to falling natural gas prices after the fracking boom of the late 2000’s. Natural gas is also cheaper to produce than coal, and burning natural gas puts out significantly less carbon emissions than coal.

Because the Appalachian coal industry is already becoming obsolete at the hands of struggling productivity and a more competitive energy market, it would be foolish and reckless for politicians to attempt breathing life back into it. Rather, these efforts should be put into diversifying Appalachia’s economy. Some coal towns are already beginning to do this. The residents of Hinton, West Virginia, for example, have started the Appalachian Beekeeping Collective, a nonprofit aimed at training out-of-work coal miners in beekeeping. This nonprofit has grown to operate in 17 counties throughout the state of West Virginia in just two years since its creation, and helps ex-miners earn money in a more sustainable field of work. Additionally, the state of Pennsylvania, which has traditionally been a coal state and is still one of the biggest energy producers in the U.S., is moving its economy to subsist on nuclear power and natural gas while coal is on the decline. Even Hazard is turning the site of one of its former surface mines into the USA Drone Port—a research and testing facility for drone companies to use. To supplement this, the Hazard Community and Technical College has introduced courses in unmanned technology, drone flight, photography, and videography: all skills that will translate well into USA Drone Port’s workforce. The Technical College has already graduated 200 students in these fields, many of whom used to be coal miners.

Unfortunately, the coal industry does not appear to be a significant part of the future U.S. economy. However, adapting to the future is possible, and many places around Appalachia are showing it. Appalachia is a region full of innovation, grit, and most importantly, people who are ready to work for the betterment of their communities, with or without coal.

 

Passing the Mirror Test and the Wrong of Pain

Photograph of a striped fish called a cleaner wrasse in front of coral with another different species of fish in view behind

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.


In mid-February, scientists announced progress in developing an understanding of consciousness. An international team collaborating in four countries discovered patterns of brain activity that coincide with awareness. Consciousness has long been a mystery, and there are many reasons to explore and figure it out. It seems like creatures who have some form of consciousness make up a special club, experiencing the world with more layers, perhaps with more complex agency, perhaps uniquely making up the moral community.

These potential steps forward in understanding our brain-based and embodied consciousness come alongside a purported broadening of the group of animals that scientists claim pass the mirror-test for self-awareness. As we try to put our fingers on what it means to be conscious, in the last century Western philosophers have become open to the idea that there is a rich arena of animal perspectives alongside our own. The variety of ways that we can imagine experiencing the world has grown with our study of human and non-human animal experiences. This has interesting implications for who we include in our understanding of our moral community and how we understand the ways we can harm these members.

Though it is pretty intuitive that causing harm is bad, explaining why can be notoriously difficult. One route is appealing to the negative experience of harm – primarily how bad experiencing pain is. This focus unites human and non-human animals that can feel pain into one morally relevant domain. If what is bad about causing harm is that it brings about this negative experience of pain, then we need to identify the sorts of creatures that experience pain and avoid bringing about those states without outweighing reasons. Thus, consciousness will be morally relevant insofar as it delineates those creatures that are in some way aware of their experiences.

There are two responses to this line of thinking. One direction argues that this grounding of the badness of causing harm is too narrow: there are harms that we don’t experience, so this understanding misses morally relevant behaviors. Another direction claims that this line of thinking is too broad: not all pain is morally relevant.

Consider the (false) common conception of the perspective of a goldfish, where their understanding of the world resets every 10 seconds. Would causing pain to a creature who would very quickly have no memory of it have the same moral relevance as causing pain to something that would incorporate it into its understanding of the world indefinitely? Take the faux-goldfish example to its conceptual extreme and imagine a creature that has the experience of pleasure and pain, but only has instantaneous experiences – it lacks memory. Presumably, it wouldn’t matter to the creature a moment after it felt pain that it felt pain a moment ago because it had no residual impact from the experience (unless prolonged damage was done). If you share this intuition, then something more than the mere experience of pain is involved in the morality of causing harm.  

The way to make pain morally relevant is to focus on the perspective of the creature experiencing the pain – that there is such a perspective extended in time that experiencing the pain will impact. We can imagine the fear of a non-human animal in unfamiliar circumstances and consider the anxiety that may develop over time if it is continuously exposed to such circumstances. Such creatures have a sort of “self,” in the sense that their experience of the world develops their mode of interacting with the world and understanding of the world over time.

There is an even more advanced way of being a creature in the world beyond stringing experiences together in order to have a perspective extended in time: a creature can be aware that it has such a perspective by being aware that it is a self.

A key experiment to check the development of a self-concept is the mirror-test, where an animal has a mark placed on their body that they cannot see by moving their eyes. If, when they see the mark on a body in a mirror, they come to the conclusion that their own body has the mark, then they “pass” the mirror test because in order to come to such a conclusion the animal must use an implicit premise that they are a creature that could be so marked. The mirror-test is thus meant to indicate that an animal has self-awareness. It relies on a variety of competencies (vision and figuring out how mirrors work, for instance), but has long been thought to be sufficient for indicating that a creature is aware that it exists in the world.

Humans don’t pass the mirror test until they are toddlers, and only some primates also are able to pass the test, along with sundry birds and other mammals. However, this past year a tiny fish – the cleaner wrasse – seemed to pass the test. It is a social animal, considered to be relatively cognitively advanced, but the scientists who advocated for the results of the mirror-test suggest that while yes, this is a smart and advanced fish, this may not mean that it is self-aware. The success of the small fish has raised issues in how we test for morally relevant milestones in non-human animals.

One interesting facet of the mirror test is that animals that perform well are social, which is often a morally relevant trait. If morality is a matter of treated others with the sort of deference they are due, then a sort of sociality for members of the moral domain makes some sense.

In defining our moral community, most theorists include some non-human animals, and most consider it relevant to identify the way creatures experience the world. These latest advances in mapping consciousness and advancing our interpretation of self-awareness tests will help us understand the spectrum of relationships possible in the animal world. 

The Environmental Impact of Mardi Gras Beads

A fence covered in Mardi Gras beads of various colors

This week marks the annual observation of Mardi Gras, the festive culmination of Carnival that inaugurates the religious season of Lent for Christians worldwide. Much like Christmas and Easter, it has become a holiday with more than just spiritual celebrants; people around the world will spend Fat Tuesday reveling in the celebration of pleasure through parties, parades, circuses, and other wild forms of entertainment. However, regardless of what one might think about the effects of such “debauchery” on the soul, the environmental impact of Mardi Gras is undeniably problematic.

On one level, the trash left behind after Mardi Gras parades is not much different from that found after any large public gathering: plastic bottles, aluminum cans, food waste, and the like litter roads and walkways for days following such events, despite many cities’ best efforts to clean up the garbage. But in places like New Orleans, which often sees more than a million visitors over the Mardi Gras holiday, this trash problem reaches new heights: literally tons of garbage will need to be processed over the coming week by facilities that are routinely over-stressed by the workload.

There is perhaps no icon of Mardi Gras more recognizable than its ubiquitous plastic beaded necklaces: colorful and cheap, Mardi Gras beads have become synonymous with the celebration – particularly in New Orleans. Although accurate estimates are hard to come by, any official prediction indicates that the amount of beads expected to be thrown from floats, balconies, and elsewhere this holiday will be best measured by the ton. And although some of those beads will be taken home as souvenirs, between four and eight thousand tons of trash is collected from the French Quarter after each Mardi Gras celebration.

In 2013, a study by the Ecology Center (in collaboration with Verdi Gras) estimated that “a single year’s inventory of beads used during Mardi Gras [in New Orleans] may contain up to 900,000 pounds of hazardous flame retardants and 10,000 pounds of lead.” When left in gutters, waterways, and landfills, these hazardous chemicals easily leach into the local environment, affecting plant and animal life (including human health) in a variety of negative ways. And although research labs at LSU and elsewhere are developing biodegradable beads that will not impact the local ecosystem as severely, such projects are still producing necklaces that are at least ten times as expensive as most other available options, suggesting that it will be difficult for them to realistically compete in a market that already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on beads each year.

Furthermore, as David Redmon’s documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China shows, the average beads are often so cheap because they are made in regions far from New Orleans in unsanitary factories that rely on the equivalent of child slave labor to make their profit margins.

And we haven’t even mentioned the sexual politics of how the beads are “earned.”

So, this year, perhaps consider ways that you might do your part to keep Fat Tuesday and the regions that celebrate it a little more sustainably positioned; even as you let the good times roll this Mardi Gras, be sure to pay a thought for how you can help keep the holiday purple and gold, but especially green.

Pinterest’s Block on Anti-Vaccination Content

Photograph of hands of a scientist, under a sterile hood, preparing a vaccine

Pinterest, the good-natured social media site where users re-pin new ideas and things to try, has made recent headlines for their stance against anti-vaccination propaganda. In fall 2018, Pinterest quietly removed results to vaccination-related questions from the search bar.  Now, when you type “vaccine” or “anti-vax,” a pop-up will relay that there is no related content and will provide a link to the community guidelines. Reported first by the Wall Street Journal, Pinterest finally disclosed their choice to censor the questionable health claims made by anti-vaccination groups.

Pinterest’s decision to block vaccines in their search domain was widely based on the fact that the site had become a hub for anti-vaccination activists. These groups aim to educate parents regarding the dangers of vaccinations but with theories that are unsupported by peer-reviewed, scientific research. The tactics used are typically fear-inducing photographs or stories about harm to children caused by vaccinations without any scientific proof. The groups claim to offer parents the “most transparency” but also don’t mention the dangers of not vaccinating. Pinterest’s response aimed to discontinue the spread of misinformation and falsehoods on their website.

When it comes to vaccines, the spread of misinformation could have a devastating impact on individuals and the society. There has been an increase in confusion and mistrust among the public when it comes to vaccines in general. One of the most noteworthy fear-causing publications was by the doctor Andrew Wakesfield, who suggested a connection between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the development of autism in young children. Although deemed fraudulent, it is considered the beginning of the anti-vaccination movement. This movement is equally seen in the cases of influenza in America. Last year during the 2017-2018 season, there was a record-breaking number of hospitalizations and deaths among children in the US with less than half of Americans receiving the flu shot. It is because of these that World Health Organization (WHO) has recently listed the anti-vaccine movement a top health threat for 2019. When Pinterest decided to curtail vaccine-related content on their site public, it raised the question; should social media censor for misinformation?

Pinterest’s new policy stems from the fear that misinformation can have “detrimental effects on a pinner’s health or on public safety.” The guidelines officially state that the website bans the “promotion of false cures for terminal or chronic illnesses and anti-vaccination advice.” A report found in 2016 claimed that 75 percent of posts on Pinterest referring to vaccines were negative. In addition, other studies have found that 80 percent of mothers and 38 percent of fathers in the US have used Pinterest. It is likely that mothers and fathers, looking for advice regarding their children’s heath, ran across posts on Pinterest with anti-vaccination rhetoric. One could argue that media sites have an obligation to censor this kind of propaganda for public health and safety reasons. On the other hand, even well-intentioned censorship threatens to intrude on our rights protecting free speech (also discussed in this Prindle Post article about the case of Alex Jones).

With a website that is used by mothers and fathers, restricting these groups’ ability to voice their concerns or opinions could be seen as a commentary on parenting styles. Vaccine hesitancy is often caused from worries about side effects, cost, moral or religious obligations, or lack of knowledge about immunizations. There is value in the autonomy that parents have in choosing whether or not to vaccinate their children because they have the right to make medical decisions focused around their own values. In addition, who is to say whose opinion is more valid regarding vaccinations? Who’s to say which opinions deserve censure? Pinterest approached this issue in banning all vaccine-related information, reputable or not. This absolute censorship, while avoiding the bias of what is considered a reputable source, could also be seen as problematic. It is taking the opportunity away from readers to decide for themselves what sources they think are credible or not and through Pinterest they cannot be educated on the subject to any extent. A spokesperson from Pinterest, Jamie Favazza says, “Right now, blocking results in search is a temporary solution to prevent people from encountering harmful misinformation.”

Vaccine misinformation isn’t only a Pinterest problem; other social media outlets like YouTube and Twitter have been infiltrated by vaccination misinformation as well. YouTube’s policy doesn’t allow ads for anti-vaccine videos. Twitter has no specific policy on the matter. A spokesperson for Twitter, Katie Rosborough, said that “We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth,” and also added that, “the company was working to surface the highest-quality and most relevant content first.”

Social media represents an open platform for people to voice interests and create spaces that unite beliefs. But should some spaces not exist and should some beliefs not be circulated? In the case of anti-vaccine movement, people continue to adhere to their beliefs which further energizes the movement and polarizes the theories. With our ever-growing reliance on social media for information, social media outlets have a reason to worry about the ramifications of their content, especially in influencing user’s decisions about their health.

Climate Change and the Philosophical Pitfalls of Grounding Duty to Future Generations

Two young women in the foreground of a protest march, with signs behind them saying "our future our choice"

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.


Reports of mass extinction, extreme weather events, speedily melting ice caps and the inundation of low-lying islands by rising seas suggest that the environmental disaster scientists and activists have been warning about for several decades, has now begun.  

On the face of it, there isn’t really a good argument to be made against a moral imperative to fight climate change. Those who voice opposition to, and those who lobby against, climate action generally deny climate change is real rather than argue against an obligation to do something about it.

Governments across the world are nowhere near where they need to be on acting to prevent worst-case scenario outcomes, even where climate change is grudgingly acknowledged by the powers that be and even as its effects start to become difficult to ignore.

In January this year, David Attenborough told a cohort of business and government leaders, diplomats and influential celebrities at the Davos World Economic Forum that “What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years,” and “Unless we sort ourselves out in the next decade or so we are dooming our children and our grandchildren to an appalling future.”

Few would now disagree that there is urgency about the issue of climate change; however, the question of our moral relation to future generations is philosophically complex. Does it make sense to claim that we have moral duties to persons who do not exist?  Do future persons, not already alive, have rights? How are the rights of future persons connected with moral duties that we have now?

There are some meta-ethical issues at play here (issues about what we take ethics to be centrally concerned with). A common foundation for morality is how the behavior of persons affects other persons (and sometimes other creatures/entities). The ‘moral community’ is that group to whom we owe moral consideration; whose well-being makes moral claims on us, or whose interests, or rights, provide imperatives and checks on our actions.

On one level, using a simple example given by Derek Parfit, we can see how, straightforwardly, the actions of someone now can harm an unknown, hypothetical person in the future. Parfit points out that, if I leave some broken glass in the undergrowth of a wood, which a hundred years later wounds a child, my act harms this child. This is of course familiar and quite intuitive reasoning; it forms the basis of things we tell our children every day, of the ilk: “don’t leave that there, someone could trip over it.”

Is it morally significant how far in the future that harm occurs? On one view it is not, as there is a direct causal relation between action of burying the glass and the child’s being cut by it. When I tell my child not to do something as it may harm someone, I am likely not to be thinking that far into the future as Parfit’s example, but this seems to be a result of the psychology, rather than the morality, of temporal distance.

However, it could be argued that moral accountability is weakened by temporal distance, because part of what it means to be in a moral community is that there is moral accountability, by virtue of reciprocity, between members – so that there is an in-principle possibility of the wronged party holding the other to account.

In response to Parfit’s example it should also be noted the person burying the glass is only causing a future harm as long as the child (or someone else) is later cut by it. That outcome is highly contingent. If the lack of reciprocity between individuals who are not one another’s contemporary, together with the contingency involved in any particular outcome, are problematic then it may be even more difficult to make decisions about the behaviour of a current population’s effect on a future population.

The question about how current people’s actions harm, or directly impact, future people encounters a paradox: because each person born is the product of so many and such complex contingencies, and all future persons are a product of actions taken in the present, a different set of actions (even one different variable) will produce a different human being.

Imagine two possible scenarios. In the first, no action is taken and climate change produces a disastrous future for all people on the planet. In the second, massive effort is undertaken, now with the outcome that disaster is averted and future generations are able to pursue happiness and have the opportunity to flourish.

Because of this paradox, it isn’t quite right to say that particular future persons will be better off if action is taken, since particular future persons who come into existence in the first scenario, if action is not taken, would not have existed in the second scenario. Can the people of the future in the first scenario really blame us, since had we made different choices they would not exist?

This line of thinking may appear to yield the conclusion that even if we do not conserve the environment for future generations of people, it cannot consistently be said that we have wronged them. But can we cogently argue that they cannot complain since in any other set of circumstances they would never have existed?

This is a difficult moral question – borne out in other problems or areas of practical ethics, such as whether to choose to have a disabled child. It opens up issues of how we value existence, what type of existence we value, and what level of difficulty we would be prepared to accept for the sake of existence itself. I shall not try to resolve this problem here – but it is not necessarily agreed that such future persons, in unbearable hardship, have no right to complain of the actions of their forebears that led to that hardship.

This paradox seems to arise in part where morality is taken to be centrally concerned with how actions of certain individuals affect other individuals – the problem here is that there is too much focus on particular individuals.  (Parfit himself thought that we should rescind the principle of morality being centrally concerned with individuals and employ a more impartial principle to ground morality in actions which produce the most wellbeing.)

But this solution creates another problem, which is encountered in consequentialist ethics of a utilitarian persuasion. Since utilitarianism is based on a principle of maximising happiness or wellbeing, it functions as a calculation of total possible happiness. This produces the counterintuitive outcome that a very large number of people who were borderline miserable would be preferable to a very small number of very happy people. Obviously this system cannot provide a foundation for a reasonable, binding, moral relation to future generations.

An argument from the notion of rights appears to fare better. If we acknowledge universal and inalienable human rights such as a right to life, liberty and security then, by virtue of their universality, we could extend them to future persons by including them in the moral community of holders of rights.

It has been noted by some philosophers, however, that the concept of rights is in some sense morally inadequate – it can fail to capture the moral seriousness of a situation. Imagine having to answer to future persons living with the devastation of our failure to act when we had the means and opportunity. It would not go all the way to the heart (so to speak) of their moral grievance to simply note that their right to live a full human life was violated – in the same way that the moral terribleness of murder is not adequately captured by noting that the murdered person’s right to life has been violated.

A still better grounding might be in a notion of moral duty as suggested by Immanuel Kant in the principle of universalisation: that we discover our moral duty by asking if we could will any action to be a universal law. Applying this principle our moral duty to future generations becomes clear when we simply ask what we would have endorsed were we to find ourselves in the same situation.

The window, we are being told by scientists, is closing fast. We may have little more than a decade to avoid unstoppable climate catastrophe. This means that the future is arriving. In a sense, the future is already here. Children born in this decade may be alive at the end of the century, and will be directly affected by our current actions or failure to act. Those future generations that appear in the abstract in the philosophical discussions of the past twenty to thirty years are already here. There are some hopeful signs; the new generation is starting to demand action as high-profile strikes by schoolchildren across the world put pressure on those in power to act to rescue the future they will inherit.