Dear Natural Selection,
Can we have a chat about weeds?
Snail eradication (day 8).
Two new case studies on international clinical trials (and a plan to read them together).
Earlier this week, I found out about a pair of new case studies being released by The Global Campaign for Microbicides. These cases examine why a pair of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of microbicides antiretrovirals in preventing HIV infection were halted. Here are some details:
Snail eradication (day 7).
This morning I overslept, so I didn’t get out into the yard until 6:15 AM to commence the gastropod picking.
Either someone got to them before me, or there just aren’t many left in the parts of the yard I am actively patrolling.
Friday Sprog Blogging: bigger silkworms (part 2).
We offer a couple more video sprog segments with the much enlarged silkworms. It won’t be long before they’re spinning cocoons (we’re guessing — and the mulberry trees are hoping), so these may be the last of their baby videos:
Friday Sprog Blogging: bigger silkworms (part 1).
Those wee little silkworms which you saw in videos last week are growing at an impressive rate.
Here, see for yourself:
Snail eradication (day 6).
This morning’s garden foray was weird.
Where were all the gastropods?
Using analogies in ethical reasoning.
One of the things we’d like to be able to do with our powers of ethical reasoning is tackle situations where we’re not immediately certain of the right thing to do (or, for that matter, of the reason why the plan someone else is advocating strikes us as wrong).
A common strategy (at least in an ethics class) is to whip out an ethical principle or rule, try to apply it to the situation you’re pondering, and see what it tells you to do: What can I do here that respects the humanity of others and of myself? or, Which of the available courses of action maximizes benefits and minimizes harms (taking into account, of course, that benefits and harms to others matter just as much as benefits and harms to me)? The disadvantages of this strategy is that most of the ethical principles that yield clear judgments in decision scenarios also encounter decisions where they seem to break and give absurd judgments.
An alternative strategy is to take the situation we’re puzzling over and consider how similar or dissimilar it is from one or more cases for which our ethical judgments are clear. This strategy of using paradigm cases to guide our ethical responses to situations that deviate somewhat (but not too much) from the paradigm cases is called casuistry.
Snail eradication (day 5).
Today, I may have picked slightly more slugs than snails. And, in the process of acquainting myself with the ways of the slug, I discovered a very good reason to perform early-morning gastropod removal as a solo activity:
The ethics of snail eradication.
In the comments of one of my snail eradication posts, Emily asks some important questions:
I’m curious about how exactly you reason the snail-killing out ethically alongside the vegetarianism. Does the fact that there’s simply no other workable way to deal with the pests mean the benefits of killing them outweigh the ethical problems? Does the fact that they’re molluscs make a big difference? Would you kill mice if they were pests in your house? If you wanted to eat snails, would you? Or maybe the not-wanting-to-kill-animals thing is a relatively small factor in your vegetarianism?