Swine flu outbreaks and the ethics of being sick.

Like a lot of other people, I’m watching the swine flu outbreaks unfold with some interest. As they do, I can’t help but think about the ethical dimensions of our interactions with other humans, since it’s looking like any of us could become a vector of disease.
There are some fairly easy ethical calls here — for example, if you’re sick and can avoid spreading your germs, you should avoid spreading them. But there are some other questions whose answers are not as clear.

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Swine flu and air travel.

Probably you’ve been reading about the new swine flu outbreak on Effect Measure and Aetiology. At this stage, public health officials are keeping careful watch on this epidemic to try to keep it from becoming a pandemic.
And this is the news in the back of my mind as I need to arrange air travel in the coming months. Nothing makes me want to book airline tickets more than the project of being in a metal tube with germy humans.
I did some poking around to see what kinds of measures the airlines might be taking to avoid helping spread swine flu and the people carrying it around.

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How to read the “cruelty free” label.

Yesterday I worked my way through the hundred’s of comments on PZ’s I am Pro-Test post. One theme that kept cropping up was that a great deal of animal testing is unnecessary, and that informed and attentive consumers should be able to kill the demand for it.

I thought, therefore, that it would be worth returning to a question I talked about a while ago, in a single paragraph of a fairly lengthy DVD review:

“Why do animal tests continue when cruelty-free products are available?”

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Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 8).

After considering the many different roadblocks that seems to appear when people try to discuss research with animals (as we did in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this series), it might be tempting to throw up your hands and say, “Well, I guess there’s no point in doing that, then!”
Resist this temptation!
As we noted in part 7, there are good reasons that we (by which I mean scientists and the public) ought to be engaging in dialogue about issues like research with animals. Avoiding dialogue altogether would mean cutting off the flow of information about what actually happens in animal research and about how animals actually matter to scientists and non-scientists alike. Given that what the public knows and cares about has some influence on how much public money is allocated to support scientific research and on what kinds of laws and regulations govern the treatment of animals (including the treatment of animals in scientific research), opting out of dialogue altogether is a risky move.
Therefore, in this post, I offer suggestions for how to have a productive dialogue about animal research.

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Framing poll questions.

Remember earlier this week when we were discussing some of the positions people might hold with respect to the use of animals in research?
These included animal rights positions, which held that animals have inherent rights not to have their bodies transgressed (or that, by virtue of their capacity to suffer, they have rights not to be used in ways that might lead to their suffering), and animal welfare positions, which hold that animal suffering matters — that it is something to be avoided or minimized — but do not ground the ethical importance of animal suffering in animals’ status as right-bearers. And, I wrote:

Besides the animal rights and animal welfare positions, there is also the possibility of staking out a position that holds that animals and animal suffering have no moral significance, that animals are not deserving of any special regard.

Today, DrugMonkey notes that the Los Angeles Times blog’s write-up of yesterday’s Pro-Test rally at UCLA is accompanied by a poll. The poll asks readers for their opinions of the use of animals in medical research, presenting these three choices:

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Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 7).

In this post, it’s time to pull back from the specific kinds of dialogue blockers we’ve been examining (here, here, here, here, here, and here) to start to consider other ways we might get around them. Here, I want to start with some insightful remarks from a friend of mine, philosopher Vance Ricks:

When you describe “dialogue” in that post, it sounds as though you’re mostly focusing on communication between A and B. One wrinkle in the animal research case (and many ethical cases generally) is that A and B aren’t just (not) talking to each other; they’re talking to each other AND to an indeterminate audience they’re hoping to reach.
I know (from my own experience) that there are plenty of times when I have not trusted my actual dialogue “partner” in the ways that you mention, but where at the same time I knew that behind/beside/near that person, there were other people who I did trust slightly more — and so, I wasn’t really addressing my ostensible partner so much as I was addressing a range of people including that person.
Do you think that that makes a difference to what we count either as “dialogue” or as impediments?

I think Vance raises a really important point.

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Book review: The Urban Homestead.

UrbanHomestead.jpg
The Urban Homestead: Your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city.
by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
Port Townsend, WA: Process Media
2008

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a brief review of a fascinating book about making your lifestyle more sustainable. While some friends of the blog jokingly refer to this as “that hipster survivalist book,” The Urban Homestead is not a book about how to be a green poseur. Rather, it is a book that breaks down various elements of living greener and lays out a variety of strategies — some easy and some ambitious — to make it happen

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Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 6).

So far in this series, we’ve talked about ways that attempts to have a dialogue about animal research can be frustrated by inability to agree on a shared set of facts as a staring point or by unclarity about the positions people are trying to put forward. Today’s featured impediment to dialogue has less to do with the mechanics of laying out and engaging with a clear argument and more to do with reasons people might be fearful even to voice their positions:
Ignoring the impact of the tactics used to advance a position.

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