Posts Tagged ‘ethics’

Last week, myself and Elina headed down to One Life for their session on Ethics, to explain to all the young people why they are wrong. As expected, most people there argued that morals were subjective, so I put forward the case from Sam Harris’ excellent book, The Moral Landscape, which I will be blogging about shortly.

Currently, car insurance providers offer cheaper premiums to women than they do to men. Purely because of your gender.

That’s discrimination, it’s immoral and thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Justice, it will be illegal from the end of next year. Yet most, if not all, still seem to carry on with the practice.

Having discussed the problem at work today, we decided to put it to the test on a price compassion site. Here were the results. The bottom quote I used the name Mr Chris Worfolk, whereas in the one above, I used the name Miss Chris Worfolk.

As you can see, there is a £60 difference. For Jason, the difference was far bigger – over one hundred pounds, just because of his gender.

Interestingly, just after I had generated the second quote, I received a call from Hastings Direct asking me if they could fill in some further details to complete my quote. I politely explained to the woman that I only generated the quote to prove they immorally, and soon to be illegally discriminate based on gender.

Now, you can argue that males should pay more for their car insurance because they cause more expensive accidents and so it is statically justified.

But, you would be wrong. This is exactly what discrimination law is designed to deal with. After all, just because a small minority of males do drive like boy racers have have some pretty big accidents, doesn’t mean that one individual, such as myself, is any more of a high risk than a female driver – so why should I be punished?

It’s easier to see how wrong it is, when you look at other factors you could discriminate on. Lets use the classic example – you wouldn’t charge someone more for their car insurance because of the colour of their skin, even though we have the same as to what skin colour we are born with as we do over what gender we are born into – none.

You could argue that there won’t be a statistical difference between sin colour, but again this doesn’t hold up because you could look at an area where there is a statistical difference – crime for example.

Non-white minorities are more likely to be convicted of a crime. There are a number of reasons for this, most notably that these minorities tend to be in lower social brackets and lower social brackets produce more crime, so even though for those social brackets minorities have a similar conviction rate to majorities, overall they have a higher conviction rate – but the one thing I think we can all agree on, it isn’t because they are black.

But if you go purely on statistics for an entire group alone, as car insurance companies do, we should be more suspicious of black people in the UK and police should stop and search them more.

We don’t do this, because it would be utterly wrong.

We treat people like individuals and don’t hold them accountable for what people who share arbitrary characteristics with them such as skin colour, ethnic origin, sexual preference or (usually) gender. Because to do so would be wrong. Including if you’re selling car insurance.

On Wednesday, we headed down to Sheffield Humanists for their talk by Dr Natalie Hammond, “Paying for Sex.” She had recently completed her PhD on the subject, specifically men who pay women for sex and the law surrounding it.

After the talk, there was a group discussion which took a while to get going, initially with people discussing the laws surrounding the topic, but finally someone got up and moved the discourse to where we really wanted it to be – the ethics.

Naturally, being a progressive group, most people were in favour of women having the right to do as they wish and rational enough to see that it is just the same as selling your body to any labour (I sold my body to McDonald’s, doing hard labour for far less money for example), and supporting decriminalisation so that victims are not afraid to come forward and the industry can be properly regulated.

A good parallel between this with the law surrounding abortion. Even if you disagree with abortion, it still makes sense to legalise it because of the harm caused by back street abortions and driving the practice underground.

Similarly, the harm caused in prostitution is nothing to do with any inherent problems in the industry, it’s the fact that we drive it underground and as a consequence the pimps, the human traffickers, the drugs, etc, etc get involved and that is what causes the problems.

Luckily, there were a few people in the audience with more regressive views, so some great debate got going :D.

Laster this month will see the inaugural Genital Autonomy conference taking place in at Keele University. It’s a two-day event looking at “Law, human rights, and non-therapeutic interventions on children.”

My friend Antony Lempert from the Secular Medical Forum will be speaking on the subject of “Conscience and Foreskins: A Medical Paradox”, which is well worth attending as anyone who made it to his talk at Enquiry 2010 will know.

I’ve recently re-read Ray Kurzweil “The Singularity is Near”, which is nothing else, really enlivens your passion in AI. One of the many interesting points made in the book was the idea that we will eventually be able to grow new body parts in a lab.

This has one great advantage for animal welfare – the idea that we could grow lumps of meat in a lab.

This would essentially end the need for vegetarianism.

For vegetarians like myself, who really, really love meat, this really would be a utopian future. Vegetarianism is based on the idea that it is wrong to kill conscious animals for food (some so called vegetarians say it is because of the taste, but these people aren’t real vegetarians), and this would entirely get round that.

We could eat our lab grown meat, without having the ethical implications that you where causing the death of an animal by doing so.

Of course, people would object that they didn’t want to eat meat grown in a test tube. But then, the fact that people can stomach meat now is mainly thanks to the lack of thought put into the factory farming and slaughter methods already in use.

Other advantages of doing this include:

* It will, at least after the initial development, be much more cost effective that having to rear an entire animal for an extended period of time and use less resources to satisfy our meat needs. Meat is incredibly inefficient, the amount of vegetarian food it takes to feed one animal to produce some meat is huge.

* Given the reduced cost and increased efficiently, there would be more food available for the third world, both vegetarian and meat.

* While we’re doing this, it’s a lot easier to generically engineer (or even using traditional refinement methods) to make the meat higher quality.

This post is aimed primarily at my vegetarian friends.

I’m going to put this forward as a supposition: you believe that for a number of possible reasons including the good feeling from being ethical, the health benefits associated with avoiding meat, the fact that meat can be expensive (though some vegetarian alternatives are also) it is better to be a vegetarian.

Surely it follows then that if only more people tried it, more people would become vegetarian and this would be good because you think vegetarianism is the best, most ethical position.

So how about this idea: Try Vegetarianism Week. It is a week (or a fortnight, or a month, it might not work over such a short time period) in which one of your friends gives up meat and tries vegetarianism, and in exchange, for period of time, you eat meat.

This would mean that many more people try vegetarianism and hopefully some of them like it and stick with it and as a result, we’ve won a fresh convert.

Of course the next likely question is “why do I have to eat meat instead of them?” The reason is that most meat eaters are arrogant bastards about it, using quips like “we’re naturally meat eaters” and “I’m a real man” and “why don’t you eat eat, you giraffe, you!”

Indeed, there is nothing most of them would enjoy more than a vegetarian eating meat. That’s the hook, that is what sells them. Most of them would never try vegetarianism (otherwise they would probably be vegetarians), but breaking a deal with them such as this could finally get them to give it a go.

Secondly, it doesn’t increase the number of animals being killed for food by you eating meat for that period because they will have stopped eating meat, so it balances out (and hopefully in the long term reduces the number of animals breed and killed for food because they will hopefully like being a vegetarian and convert).

Thoughts?

Btw, to my non-vegetarian friends, just as a quick gauge of its popularity, who would be interested in this?

Friday saw us kick things off with One Life, this week’s session being about ethics. As John was running late I started the session as chair for the first half an hour or so raising a few topic discussions before the real content matter was entered when John arrived. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough plates and cutlery for the committee ended up eating out of a cup with a spoon!

Afterwards we headed up to City Church on Headingley road who were running re:fresh, a free BBQ and hot drinks session to catch drunk people Otley running it. We would have had a few drinks in the old bar first but as they were Christians they had to go to bed at 11 so we had to go there first 😀 .

Having come direct from One Life we were of course in our Atheist Society hoodies which made for a fun time – of course they were very welcoming though the hoodies did get described as inappropriate by a girl on a fancy dress Otley run dressas as a Roman which we didn’t find at all ironic. After all, what have the Romans ever done to Christians? 😉

Having an affair with someone who is engaged is one thing but would you then post on their wall knowing full well their other half is on Facebook? Am I just getting old? Is this the socially acceptable thing to do these days?

Once again Friday saw a well attended One Life course where we were discussing ethics. It was an interesting session, we spent most of the night with me arguing in favour of objective morality to get the debate going which was fun 😀 .

Photos of the event can be found on Facebook.