Ethics of Brain Hacking

Brain hackers raise social questions about learning, understanding

June 28, 2013

 

Is it ethical to use “smart drugs” to improve cognitive function?

Legal concoctions of vitamins, herbs and nutrients are advertised as improving memory, focus and mental acuity. Some of these supplements claim they can produce lucid dream states and lessen the need for sleep. And prescription drugs are being used in illegal ways as mental stimulants, aimed at enhancing memory and concentration.

So-called “brain hackers” claim that cognitive function can be enhanced by sending mild electrical current through the brain. At least one company is marketing a trans-cranial electrical current device to video game players as an upgrade for the gamer’s brain.

Assuming that these things really work, one obvious ethical issue is health and safety. But if we assume that neuro-enhancers can be used safely, another ethical issue is fairness. It doesn’t seem fair for people to artificially enhance performance in school or in business, especially if these enhancements are not widely available to everyone.

One might also worry that the learning that occurs through brain hacking doesn’t really count. It seems like cheating. Of course, these products won’t do the learning for you. They help you focus and retain information better and faster. But you still have to do the studying. If it is acceptable to drink coffee during a cram session, is it also acceptable to use another, more powerful chemical that can help you focus even better?

If learning is primarily about creating pathways in the brain, resulting in new skills and abilities, then there is nothing inherently wrong with brain upgrades that help build those pathways more quickly. Flashcards help and so might a drug. Result-oriented learning will encourage the use of the most efficient tools. From a result-oriented standpoint, it doesn’t matter that you took a chemical shortcut so long as you actually end up knowing the thing you set out to learn.

But learning and thinking are not only a means to an end. They are also ends in themselves. Aristotle suggested this when he said that learning gives us the liveliest pleasure. One source of the pleasure of learning is the resultant mastery — the ability to perform or do something as a result of learning. But there is also pleasure in the very process of practicing and working at mastery. Is the road of learning enjoyable for its own sake; or is the point to achieve mastery as quickly as possible?

The brain-hackers want to shorten the process, perhaps underestimating the pleasures of practice and study. They are primarily focused on performance and achievement. If a short cut can be found, why not take it?

But Aristotle and others would argue that the road matters as much as the destination. Learning and thinking are also deeply social activities, which build connections with other people through the shared effort of the process. There is no mechanical or pharmaceutical shortcut to building community and developing relationships.

In a culture of high-stakes testing and dog-eat-dog economic struggle, it makes sense that people would want to hack their brains, looking for a competitive advantage.

In our culture, there are tangible rewards for those who can process and recall information quickly and accurately. Quick thinkers get better grades, bigger scholarships, and higher-paying jobs. Slow thinkers are left languishing in the dust.

But quick processing and recall skills are merely mechanical: machines can process and recall information much faster than we can.

Machines cannot, however, evaluate what is worth thinking about. The brain hackers are focused on the question of “how fast?” But they forget to ask “how come?”

There is no quick answer for the deeply human question of what matters and why it matters.

Existential questions require unhurried contemplation. But our caffeinated, video-game culture has no time for ruminating and mulling things over.

We spike our brains, filling them with images and words from dawn to dusk.

We are competitive thinkers, looking for an edge in a world that has little patience for the poets and dreamers who pause to wonder about the point of the hustle.

In the end, we may find that the faster we arrive at our destination, the less we understand why we wanted to get there in the first place.

 

Weighing in on the wicked waste of the West

Fiala on ethics: Weighing in on the wicked waste of the West

By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, May. 31, 2013 | 06:15 PM

As citizens of Fresno vote on how we manage our garbage, it’s a good time to reflect on the ethics of trash. Our waste-disposal habits have changed and they will evolve further.

My grandparents burned garbage and yard waste in an incinerator. My grandfather also smoked cigars and was fond of dirty language. He would have laughed at recycling. Although filthy language is still around, smoking and burning have given way to recycling bins and smoking bans. We’ve come a long way.

The new frontier in the ethics of garbage is the issue of quantity. Americans generate more than 4 pounds of garbage per person per day — well over 1,200 pounds per person per year. That’s the highest per capita garbage production rate in the world. The World Bank recently predicted that at current rates of development, the global garbage volume will nearly double in 15 years to more than 2 billion tons of garbage per year. Is there an ethical obligation to reduce the amount of garbage we create?

Some reduction would be easy. American trash includes hundreds of billions of disposable cups and plastic bags. Those cups and bags are single-use items; we use them once and throw them away. Plastic bags have been subject to special criticism. They deteriorate into small plastic bits, polluting the oceans. The bags blow loose from garbage bins and landfills, prompting some to call them “urban tumbleweed.” Some cities have banned them. The California Senate just rejected a bill proposing a state-wide ban.

Some may think that we are entitled to produce as much garbage as we can pay for. Is there a right to make garbage? Should the affluent be proud of their profligate trash production? Imagine a rich man gazing smugly at his overflowing garbage bin, thinking that its fullness signifies a life well lived. If that image is absurd, that’s because we’re not proud of waste.

The higher path may be the one strewn with the least amount of garbage. Some books and websites tout zero-waste lifestyles. Advocates of trash-free living brag that they no longer need to take out the garbage. And they view waste production as, well, trashy. Perhaps there is something indecent or tacky about creating lots of garbage. Perhaps in the future, we’ll be ashamed to ask for a single-use cup or a plastic grocery bag. And we’ll proudly display our reusable mugs and cloth shopping bags.

Social norms regarding trash disposal have progressed. Litterbugs and trash burners are subject to fines and social disapprobation. As of yet, there is no social penalty for filling your garbage can to the brim. No one views it as rude, obnoxious or selfish to pile up mass amounts of garbage. But as the population grows and the dumps fill up, we may come to be ashamed of the sheer quantity of our refuse.

One difficulty here is that it is not clear exactly who is harmed if you generate excessive garbage or who is benefited if your bin is empty. The harms and benefits of trash production are abstract, concerning ecological and economic issues. But the ethics of garbage may involve a more personal issue of spiritual hygiene.

The old saying that cleanliness is next to godliness points toward the need to minimize waste. The goal of reducing trash may be part of a broader ascetic discipline, which wants to eliminate spiritual garbage. A trash-free lifestyle might also condemn filthy language, scummy thoughts and dirty jokes. It might also warn against wasteful extravagance.

But you can’t live without generating a bit of waste. And sometimes a dirty word is the right word. The key is balance and moderation: to produce the right amount of garbage at the right time. The ancient Greeks revered Hygeia, the goddess of sanitation and hygiene. Hygeia also represented harmony and health.

Garbage-free abstinence is extreme. A devotee of moderation may still wonder, however, whether our prodigious garbage production isn’t a sign of imbalance and dis-ease. As our trash bins bulge, are we happy, healthy and harmonious?

Perhaps saintly beings can live purely, without trash. The rest of us struggle every day to keep our language clean, our minds out of the gutter and our garbage cans from overflowing.

 

Is helping the poor a moral obligation?

Is helping the poor a moral obligation?

By Andrew Fiala

Fresno Bee, Friday, Apr. 05, 2013

The President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, recently announced the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by the year 2030. Kim noted that there are 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty, 870 million who go hungry every day, and 6.9 million children under 5 who die every year as a result. Kim concluded that helping the poor is “a moral imperative.”

Moral imperatives establish duties and obligations. If Kim is right that there is a duty to help the poor, then it is wrong not to help them. If there is a duty to help the poor, we should feel guilty when we are not helping them.

Billions of people live on less than $2.50 per day — what we pay for a café latte or an ice cream treat. Should we feel guilty for indulging in such luxuries while children die of deprivation?

Most of us don’t feel guilty as we spend money on trivial luxuries. Perhaps we’re morally clueless. It is easy to ignore suffering that is hidden in distant places. But the more plausible explanation is that people don’t agree with Kim that helping the poor is a moral imperative.

We think it would be nice to help the impoverished. But charity is not obligatory. We might also think that global poverty is simply not our own fault. If we’ve done nothing wrong, then we should not feel guilty or blameworthy.

Most people would agree that there is a duty to help those whom we’ve wronged or harmed. If I am riding on someone else’s back, I have an obligation to get off his back. If I am somehow contributing to the problems of the poor, then I might be blamed for their plight.

But are middle-class Americans riding on the backs of the global poor?

We do benefit from cheap consumer goods and resources that are produced and extracted by the world’s working poor. Your clothes, for example, were most likely made by poor people working in dangerous conditions. In November, a garment factory burned down in Bangladesh. Clothing was manufactured there for American brands. More than 100 people died in the fire. According to the New York Times, the minimum wage for workers in that factory was about $40 per month — just over $1 per day.

The clothes we wear are manufactured by poor people, who may die as a result of dangerous working conditions. Does that create an obligation on our part? Or is that just the result of free market economics?

Thomas Pogge, an ethics professor from Yale, discussed this question last week in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Pogge received a prize for an article where he argues that the international system unjustly violates the human rights of the world’s poor.

Pogge thinks that injustices in the global economic structure create an obligation to the poor. He admits that failing to save people is not as bad as killing them. But Pogge claims that we are not simply failing to save the poor. Instead, he claims, the international system is rigged against them.

From Pogge’s perspective, we are riding on backs of the global poor, actively contributing to their poverty. Affluent nations extract profit and resources from poor countries, while poor countries cannot overcome the headwind created by international systems. We should get off their backs and compensate them for their predicament.

It might be that if we did not purchase products manufactured in foreign sweatshops, we would further impoverish the global poor. It might also be that donations to the poor cause dependency and corruption.

Those practical concerns do not weaken the moral claim that we have an obligation to the poor. We need to be careful and strategic as we readjust global economic priorities. But the President of the World Bank appears to agree with the ethics professor that there is a moral obligation to create a world free of poverty.

As you sip your $3 coffee, you might insist that the global economy is none of your business. But there is a growing consensus that it is our business to be concerned about the affliction of those whose labor fills our cups.

The Sometimes Difficult Path to Forgiveness

Ethics: The sometimes difficult path to forgiveness

By Andrew Fiala- Special to The Fresno Bee

Monday, Feb. 25, 2013 | 01:26 PM

It is easy to focus on justice, resentment and punishment. We forget that mercy and forgiveness are also important social values.

The conflict between justice and mercy is a central focus for Trudy Conway, an ethics professor from Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. Conway was in Fresno this week to give a lecture for Fresno State’s Ethics Center on her new book opposing capital punishment, “Where Justice and Mercy Meet.”

Conway’s work points toward a larger consideration of virtues such as hospitality, tolerance and compassion. She is interested in how those values help us develop genuine moral communities. In an earlier essay, Conway explained that compassion rests on “feeling myself into the other.” She writes, “it is only when I can see and feel the other’s pain and recognize it as in some way my own that I can begin to morally respond to the other.”

We often fail to see and feel other people’s suffering. Criminals obviously fail to consider the suffering of those they assault. Retaliation and retribution appear to offer compensation for the suffering of the victim. But Conway warns that the desire for retaliation can lead us to reduce wrongdoers to their worst moments and downplay compassion. She asks, how would you like to be judged and remembered for your worst deed? Mercy and forgiveness look beyond a person’s worst act, toward the dignity and worth of that person’s entire life, with compassion for their suffering, and hope for redemption.

Forgiveness and mercy do help us sustain ordinary relationships in a world where people make mistakes and do bad things. But murder seems different. The finality of murder appears to cut off the possibility of forgiveness by annihilating the victim, who cannot offer forgiveness. And there is something morally problematic about offering forgiveness on behalf of another. Forgiveness is a gift that can only be granted by the one who has been harmed.

But it is possible that those who are most closely related to the victim could offer a kind of forgiveness. One of the co-editors of “Where Justice and Mercy Meet” is Vicki Schieber, the mother of a young woman, Shannon, who was brutally raped and murdered. Schieber has actively opposed the death penalty since Shannon’s murder. She has been working toward the abolition of the death penalty in Maryland, a legislative outcome that may soon be accomplished.

In the concluding chapter of “Where Justice and Mercy Meet,” Schieber celebrates forgiveness, reconciliation and compassion. She describes overcoming the desire for revenge in Christian terms, as a process of un-hardening the heart, grounded in Catholic teaching about the sacredness of all human life.

The secular justice system is, however, not focused on those values. We expect justice to be impartial, equal and fair. Forgiveness and mercy appear to be too subjective and arbitrary for the institutions of justice.

But we forget that justice has an emotional component. Conway points out that concern for justice is linked to righteous indignation. It is appropriate to feel outrage in the face of wrongdoing. But Conway warns that “righteous anger” can devolve into the desire for “retaliatory revenge.”

The move from righteous anger to retaliatory revenge is a familiar one. Consider what happens when rude or disrespectful behavior occurs. Adrenaline surges and blood pressure rises in a variation of the flight or fight response. Righteous indignation is linked to the justifiable urge to fight back in defense.

But righteous anger can lead to resentment and an excessive desire for revenge. And this can blind us, preventing us from seeing others as persons, who make mistakes and deserve compassion. Compassion, forgiveness and mercy point beyond justice and anger toward a calmer, broader perspective that sees individuals as more than their worst deeds.

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True Love Overpowers Cynicism, Marketing

Ethics: True love overpowers cynicism, marketing

By Andrew Fiala

Thursday, Feb. 14, 2013 | 11:10 AM

Valentine’s Day celebrates the defiant, unruly and awe-inspiring power of love. Love is emotional, unstable and fleeting. But it offers hope, inspiration and a taste of eternity.

When we fall in love, we are overcome by desire for the beloved. We crave the other’s presence and feel incomplete without them. We will break rules and resist authority to be with the beloved. That’s the story of Romeo and Juliet: defiant teenage lovers who cannot stand to live apart.

The legend of Saint Valentine is also connected with the rebellious affirmation of love. Valentine supposedly married Christians in defiance of Roman law. This led to his martyrdom. Love arouses courageous resistance to authority and sacrificial deeds.

Philosophers have long noted the power of love. Plato suggested that love stimulates virtue. Love inspires us to become better, so that we are more deserving of the beautiful presence of the beloved. And Plato hinted that love and beauty were eternal goods.

Kant explained that beauty is a symbol of morality. When we love a beautiful object, we celebrate its inherent worth. True love is for the sake of the beloved. The Romantics extolled the experience of beauty and the spiritual power of love. Emerson explained “all mankind loves a lover.” We love to see people in love. The smiles and glances of those who have fallen in love are hints of joy and magic.

Love is enchanting and beauty is bewitching. Advertisers know this. They use love and beauty to sell us products, filling our screens with enticing appearances and images of lovers. Too much of a focus on beautiful appearances is a problem. It can lead us to see persons as objects. Facebook “friends,” pornography, video games and the icons of popular culture are pixels without personality. Such images are disposable and exchangeable. We use them, discard them, and move on to the next.

There is a risk that we will come to see living human persons this way, if we are too focused on beautiful appearances. The risk is that we will move through relationships and interact with people as if they were merely pictures on a screen. Attraction to beautiful images remains skin deep. Love aims deeper, toward the person who abides beneath changing appearances.

Shakespeare indicated this when he suggested that true love lasts beyond the changes of the seasons. In one of his sonnets, he says to his beloved, “thy eternal summer shall not fade.” Love remains devoted to the beauty of the other, the youthful summer day, even as time moves on. Great and beautiful love affairs are hints of eternity. The Shakespearian lover remains enamored of the beloved even as death approaches.

Some may deny that there is such thing as deep and abiding love. Critics will claim that attraction and appetite rule the day, that love is a flowery façade concealing primal desires. The critic will dismiss love with a cynical wink and a salacious snicker.

The cynic is right that love remains an ideal. It is obvious that we are seduced by appetite and appearance. But ethical love corrects the wandering eye and the hungry heart out of devotion to the beloved. If there is no such thing as true and eternal love, the lover claims that there ought to be.

Our culture celebrates the dazzling heat of young, impetuous lovers. But this ignores the fact that young love dies, as Romeo and Juliet did. Would Romeo still love Juliet as her beauty faded and her hair turned grey? Would Juliet love a pudgy, balding Romeo?

Lasting love requires commitment and care for the concrete reality of an actual person over time. Genuine love happens when you love the other person despite their changing appearance, through hardship, illness and despair. It happens when we see the summer day even in the gloom of February.

It is not always easy to see the beauty in the other. Some days it is quite hard to love ourselves, and even harder to love anyone else. But true lovers look for the ideal, defying the changing appearances and the ravages of time. They keep looking for the summer day. Nothing lasts forever. But true love comes close.

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