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This alarmist comparison of yours would impress basically no one who has studied in relevant fields, such as bioethics. The relationship between ethics and res

by pryce 4y ago

This alarmist comparison of yours would impress basically no one who has studied in relevant fields, such as bioethics. The relationship between ethics and research has a fascinating and sobering history, one full of richness, horror, and a good deal of quiet ego shattering awe at all the multitude of different ways of being human we have previously organised to eradicate. The calls you see for greater attention to be paid to ethics in research are not coming from a sense of obsequioous piety and genuflection toward establishment interests wielding political power, but the exact opposite—a call to consider the effects on groups not wielding power, such as different minorities—and obscuring this crucial difference, the way your analogy does, comes pretty close to leaving your readers less informed about the issue of research ethic rigor than they were before encountering your comment. Bioethics researchers are regularly coming across questions like this one: Gay and lesbian people are no longer considered as having a disease or disorder by any reputable medical organisation, are experiencing, broadly, a widening acceptance from different societies and their governments. At the same time, there several prominent nations attempt to criminalise, suppress, ostracise and otherwise punish people for being gay or lesbian. Suppose tomorrow a set of genes are discovered that are strongly or even absolutely predictive of homosexual orientation. What would that look like for our society, when people could say have an embryological test that indicates whether their fetus is gay or not. Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child? What would the outcome of having a 'gay test' availble look like in the hands of oppressive regimes, like the Russian Federation. Would having that technology spark a literal genocide of sexual minorities there? Perhaps you feel you can dismiss this as maybe you (mistakenly or not) picture your own country as unlikely to regress to legally enabling persecution of gay or lesbian people, and think issues outside your own country don't matter. I can tell you there is basically no country in the world that people in the trans community would feel safe in, if we took my above example of 'suppose someone invented a genetic test for being gay or lesbian' and replaced that hypothetical example to detect trans people and/or gender dysphoria instead.

trashtester 4y ago
If a group has power to prevent other people from writing or saying things about them that they do not like, even otherwise legitimate scientific findings in a scientific journal, I would say it is proof that they DO have power. Kind of like how Putin and Xi are able to prevent citizens in their respective countries to write bad things about them. > Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child? Let's assume we're both pro choice, why should a mother be forced to carry a child in her womb that she doesn't want to give birth to? How would sexual orientation be different from having an abortion after getting pregnant because it contradicts with her vacation plans, career or maybe the father was not one she wanted to have babies with? Ok, I do know why, because it's the same as when people do not want to allow abortion when a baby is likely to have Down's syndrome or some other condition when born, as it is seen as invalidating the identity of those who already born with the same condition. In my opinion, though, as long as we prioritize the interests of the mother (lets say that most will do that at least for the first trimester), the mother should decide what conditions are justifiable for having the abortion.
- generj 4y ago
  Moving beyond the abortion issues, in the hypothetical above there’s a real chance various regimes would do blood work on their living populations and kill or imprison non-out LGBT people (plus whatever straight people get included due to measurement error). Knowing that this outcome is likely, is it ethically responsible to publish?
  - trashtester 4y ago
    With all due respect, I don't buy your premise. There is a handful of places in the world (mostly in the Middle East) that have the death penalty for homosexual practice, as it is seen as a sin. But in the cases I know, it is sin as a sin for being a voluntary act, not because it's in the DNA. The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight. You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?
    - generj 4y ago
      At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. And that surveillance would thus catch and punish more people. To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Voluntary acts feel much less voluntary when they are extraordinarily self-actualizing. I’m not informed enough about selective abortion to offer good thoughts. I tend to believe if a metric is not allowed for selection for one direction it shouldn’t be allowed in the other.
      - trashtester 4y ago
        > At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. Ok, now you're becoming reasonable > To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Some of those same countries do exactly that. What do you think happens to a woman in Iran who has sex outside of marriage? Anyway, why should a few crazy countries like that determine what can be published in Nature? If there are low-hanging fruits that they can abuse to persecute people, they will just fund the studies domestically. But honestly, this sounds just like paranoia. The real discussion is about the parent not wanting to give birth to a kid with trait X.

by pryce 4y ago

trashtester 4y ago

If a group has power to prevent other people from writing or saying things about them that they do not like, even otherwise legitimate scientific findings in a scientific journal, I would say it is proof that they DO have power. Kind of like how Putin and Xi are able to prevent citizens in their respective countries to write bad things about them. > Would we allow terminating pregnancy on the basis that the parents don't want to have a gay or lesbian child? Let's assume we're both pro choice, why should a mother be forced to carry a child in her womb that she doesn't want to give birth to? How would sexual orientation be different from having an abortion after getting pregnant because it contradicts with her vacation plans, career or maybe the father was not one she wanted to have babies with? Ok, I do know why, because it's the same as when people do not want to allow abortion when a baby is likely to have Down's syndrome or some other condition when born, as it is seen as invalidating the identity of those who already born with the same condition. In my opinion, though, as long as we prioritize the interests of the mother (lets say that most will do that at least for the first trimester), the mother should decide what conditions are justifiable for having the abortion.

generj 4y ago
Moving beyond the abortion issues, in the hypothetical above there’s a real chance various regimes would do blood work on their living populations and kill or imprison non-out LGBT people (plus whatever straight people get included due to measurement error). Knowing that this outcome is likely, is it ethically responsible to publish?
- trashtester 4y ago
  With all due respect, I don't buy your premise. There is a handful of places in the world (mostly in the Middle East) that have the death penalty for homosexual practice, as it is seen as a sin. But in the cases I know, it is sin as a sin for being a voluntary act, not because it's in the DNA. The abortion case is at least realistic. A lot of parents go through the effort of having children at least partly because they want to perpetuate the family line. Whether or not you respect such a goal, for someone with such a goal, it is more likely to happen if your children are straight. You can also imagine the opposite case. A lesbian couple that WANT to have only female, lesbian daughters, and wanting to abort fetuses that are unlikely to match that pattern. Should that also be illegal?
  - generj 4y ago
    At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. And that surveillance would thus catch and punish more people. To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Voluntary acts feel much less voluntary when they are extraordinarily self-actualizing. I’m not informed enough about selective abortion to offer good thoughts. I tend to believe if a metric is not allowed for selection for one direction it shouldn’t be allowed in the other.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      > At the very least those regimes would likely target additional surveillance towards people genetically predisposed to homosexuality. That’s oppressive in and of itself. Ok, now you're becoming reasonable > To flip things around, would it be justifiable to enable a society to punish voluntary acts of heterosexuality? Some of those same countries do exactly that. What do you think happens to a woman in Iran who has sex outside of marriage? Anyway, why should a few crazy countries like that determine what can be published in Nature? If there are low-hanging fruits that they can abuse to persecute people, they will just fund the studies domestically. But honestly, this sounds just like paranoia. The real discussion is about the parent not wanting to give birth to a kid with trait X.