I think this view is mistaken, but not because I’m some aesthete who thinks ethics has nothing to do with art. Rather, I think this view is wrong for ethical reasons. Being an ethical art consumer doesn’t actually have much to do with what art you consume. It’s how and why you engage with that art that matters.

I’m talking here about your average art consumer. If you are a person in a position of power in an arts institution, whether it’s a museum, a publishing house, or a production company, then it very much does matter what artists you work with. You are uniquely positioned to help prevent predatory artists from capitalizing on their fame to exploit vulnerable people. The Bill Cosby enablers of the arts world have done wrong, and the position I advocate here offers them no cover.

On the contrary, it’s because the average art consumer lacks power to prevent malicious artists from acting wrongly that other ethical considerations begin to matter. The contention that you should avoid the work of immoral artists depends on the idea that doing so achieves some good. In reality, it accomplishes nothing. I’m sorry to break it to you, but it makes no difference whether or not you stream a Woody Allen movie tonight or browse Chuck Close paintings on the internet. Even if a widespread boycott might send a signal—itself unlikely—your individual participation isn’t going to affect the bottom line.

The thing is, making a concrete difference isn’t all that matters morally. What we think and feel is morally significant too, and the arts are among the best conduits we have for engaging our thoughts and feelings.

Let’s say you followed the R. Kelly trial and you’re rightly concerned about what you heard about his abuse of young women and girls. Why think that avoiding all of R. Kelly’s music is an ethically important way to grapple with his actions? Maybe it would make you feel good, even righteous—but if you really want to sit with your moral discomfort about R. Kelly, it’s hard to think of a better way than by listening to “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,” a sultry R&B track that Kelly wrote for the then-15-year-old singer Aaliyah, to whom he was secretly married. You will not be able to forget Kelly’s misdeeds if his songs remain in your rotation, even benign hits like “I Believe I Can Fly.”

It can be a relief to ignore disturbing stories that we read in the news, and cutting an artist’s work out of your life can be just another form of avoidance. Opportunities for moral reflection, prompted by engaging with artwork, can help us avoid the impulse to simply turn away from the wrongs of the world. That doesn’t mean that any engagement with R. Kelly’s work would be beyond reproach. Blasting “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” with your windows down as a statement of pro-Kelly solidarity would be obscene. The point is that engaging with Kelly’s music need not be viewed as a way of endorsing or ignoring his immorality—it can also be a way of taking it seriously.

Especially when it comes to artists we love, the revelation that they are abusers or bigots can lead to emotional turmoil. Art punctuates important moments in our lives, whether it’s a song you danced to at your wedding or a favorite movie you shared with a parent. The immoral actions of beloved artists can taint more than just their art—they can intrude into our emotions and memories, creating a heart-wrenching tension between nostalgia and disdain. Maybe you adore Harry Potter but are disgusted by J.K. Rowling’s transphobic commentary. Maybe “Thriller” shaped your dance aesthetic but you struggle with the child abuse allegations against Michael Jackson. Banishing works we love from our bookshelves or playlists might help us avoid this discomfort, but eschewing art we’re truly attached to won’t help us improve our emotional lives. After all, ethics isn’t only about avoiding harm to others—it’s also about living a flourishing life. It’s hard to live the “good life” when you’re at emotional sixes and sevens with art that you love and the ethical dilemmas they ignite.

If we want to process conflicting feelings and achieve emotional balance, art has a role to play. Engaging with the work of immoral artists can be cathartic, not in the sense of expunging our emotions, but of clarifying them. In revisiting the artwork, we may find that the artist’s actions have infected it so deeply that there’s nothing left for us to appreciate; or, we may discover that our affection for the work can be maintained alongside contempt for the artist’s misdeeds. Maybe in rereading Harry Potter, you find that the values expressed in the story are flatly inconsistent with transphobia, and this offers you a way to maintain your love of the work while recognizing the flaws of the artist. Maybe you discover that zombie dancing has lost its charm for you, despite the apparent disconnect between “Thriller” and child abuse. The artwork provides a lens for reflecting on our feelings, and perhaps the promise of sorting them out.

None of this is to say that you must engage with the work of immoral artists. You might still choose to avoid their art. Maybe you just don’t like it, maybe it makes you feel sick. But just as we would be loath to dictate what art people must engage with, we should be wary of social pressures that decree what they can’t. The moral misdeeds of artists matter and should be taken seriously. The mistake lies in believing that people who engage with their work can’t themselves be morally serious.

The post Can We Still Bump n’ Grind to R. Kelly? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Do you want to join one of our meetings?” was the offer of a volunteer I met at a (virtual) university event. He knew I was researching public use of highly contentious technology. I could not turn down the opportunity to peek into the decision-making process of an organization providing one of those technologies to governments.

Four months later, I was still attending those meetings, and it was becoming clear how inadequately digital data and public health often intersect. Most of the public health officials we were meeting with did not seem prepared to include digital contact tracing apps in their operations, but governments wanted them anyway. So, their contractors were seeking the support of technology providers like the non-profit to deliver apps that were promising to slow the spread of the infection and still preserve privacy. Even now, one year later, there is limited evidence that those apps can accomplish both objectives. But in the midst of the pandemic, when the spread of the Coronavirus seemed uncontrollable, it was easy to be seduced by a pre-packaged solution.

Meanwhile, my own curiosity was piqued by the wealth of information that the non-profit was able to catalyze. Public health officials and technology developers frequently came together to tackle this new challenge by sharing good and bad examples from across the country and around the world. The non-profit was open to all, but I could only sneak into these conversations as part of its network.

This is how I came to know about the story of Hector Hugo, a 32-year-old urban planner, who used emergency call data to inform the COVID-19 response of Guayaquil, Ecuador. By the end of March 2020, the city of Guayaquil had become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America. The internet would show images of dead bodies in the streets of the city waiting to be collected. The political system was slow and unprepared.

Hugo came across the emergency call records of Guayaquil’s residents on the internet. He filtered those that seemed related to COVID-19 infections—calls about having trouble breathing or corpses to be collected—and then coded those as points on a map.

Access to data is typically a major roadblock in research, especially when the privacy of health-related information is in the picture. But apparently, these emergency call records were mistakenly uploaded on the cloud, meaning Hugo could just download them. With that data, he created a heatmap of cases—maps showing where the health crisis was most severe. Then, with the help of a Spanish data analyst, Carlos Bort, he crossed those with demographic data and was able to project the likely spread of the virus in the city. Long story short, Guayaquil had a roadmap to allocate healthcare workers and resources to the most vulnerable neighborhoods, those with the highest current and projected levels of contagion.

The number of cases and deaths in Guayaquil dropped in the months following the introduction of this new system. Nobody knows if it was thanks to those heatmaps or to the herd immunity that the city had acquired during the worst moments of the pandemic. Nevertheless, this is how a privacy breach will forever be remembered—as the lucky fluke that saved Guayaquil.

But data hacking is no public health strategy. In early August of 2020, data analysts from a development agency of a Mexican state were looking into digital contact tracing and exposure notification apps for their jurisdiction and reached out to our non-profit to explore feasible options. They wanted to add data analytics to their pandemic response, believing that, like in Guayaquil, it would help allocate public health resources and hoping that digital contact tracing could help.

“Bluetooth-based apps are quickly becoming the standard in this industry because they are highly privacy-preserving,” I explained. “The app collects encrypted identification codes from other app users that happen to be around you. If one of them tests positive to COVID-19 and uploads the test result, the app sends a notification out to those whose codes it had collected. Ideally, those people get tested and self-isolate to stop the further spread of the virus.”

“Does it work?” asked the inquisitive local official.

“Nobody really knows, there is not much evidence yet,” I replied. “A study released in April 2020 suggests that to be truly effective, roughly 60 percent of smartphone users need to download it.”

But 60 percent is a high adoption level. Most of the contact tracing and exposure notification apps launched so far don’t get to double digits. The most popular are now in the 20 percent adoption levels. And while the app might still be effective in conjunction with other measures, it cannot aid with those measures, due to individual privacy concerns. That’s because all data the app records remains safely stored on the smartphone, and does not go to a centralized dataset in order to preserve individual privacy.

It’s a Catch-22. Tech companies don’t trust governments with personal information, so no data ever leaves the individual smartphone. But people don’t seem to trust tech companies either, so they don’t download the app in the first place. Governments don’t trust themselves to be able to approach the pandemic without technology as a comfortable safety blanket, so they ask tech companies for apps. It’s a cycle that’s difficult to break.

In an optimistic shot, by summer’s end, most countries had decided that a contact tracing app was going to be in their future despite the uncertainties it carried. While digital contact tracing made sense in theory, there was not enough evidence that it actually slowed the spread of COVID-19. When two users meet, digital contact tracing apps record a contact. But they are ignorant of the context, and therefore cannot accurately predict the risk of infection. If the contact takes place in an open space rather than indoors, if masks were worn, the chances of transmission are lower. Blue-tooth signals travel across physical barriers, while the Coronavirus does not. If two phones were close enough, one could receive an exposure notification even if the COVID-19 positive person were on the other side of a wall that would prevent transmission.

It might unnecessarily alarm people, but at the same time might provide a false sense of security. With high rates of asymptomatic infections, apps can track the spread of the virus only if users were carrying their phones consistently with their blue-tooth or GPS systems turned on and if large-scale testing were available for those showing no symptoms. Virtually no country met those conditions at the time, and short of that, asymptomatic carriers might never receive an exposure notification and be led to feel confident about their health when, in fact, they were actively spreading COVID-19.

Whether privacy-preserving apps could consistently and accurately track contagion was still a mystery. Digital contact tracing apps were too novel and, being privacy-preserving, scant data was available to researchers. Countries like China had some success with it, but their solution was part of a large digital surveillance system, which was unrealistic in the privacy-sensitive West. The high levels of adoption required to make digital contact tracing work seemed attainable only with mandates requiring people to download the app—an obligation that many governments judged to be unethical and politically perilous.

The question was then how to nudge people into using the app. Nobody knew, so Belgium decided to ask them directly. In September 2020, it launched an open consultation. Anybody on the internet with enough digital literacy to upload a PDF into an online form could submit a comment on the design of the national exposure notification app and the policies that framed its use—such as what age minors should independently decide on using the app or what privacy statements should look like. It also inquired about the structure and composition of an independent oversight committee that would monitor the use of the technology to ensure it was not abused, that its uses did not impinge on individual rights, and that it did not outlive the health crisis.

It was an innovative example of an open, transparent, and crowdsourced approach to policymaking that acknowledged the risks of misuses and that took steps to mitigate them. Our team had been seeking exactly such arrangements earlier in the pandemic, when a technology contractor in a country with somewhat dictatorial leadership (according to many political commentators) had reached out to receive support in developing and deploying a contact tracing app.

As always, the non-profit enthusiastically accepted to help. But the project proved to be far more ambitious than a simple app. The contact tracing system would feed into a digital ID that acted as a pass. If one had tested positive or had been in contact with a COVID-19 positive person, the digital ID would deny access to public spaces. Ubiquitous digital readers would scan those passes and track individual movements. Cameras with recognition systems would match the identity of the pass owner to that of the smartphone holder.

It scared me. The technology of the non-profit was privacy-preserving, but in this country, the whole ecosystem planned around it was not. After such a large investment, it was reasonable to fear that this infrastructure would outlive the pandemic. I could not shake off the picture of a Big Brother following every step with its intrusive eye.

None of us inside the non-profit were ready to play a part in that process, to be its enablers. But the decision wasn’t easy. Digital contact tracing might have helped mitigate the rising number of cases in the country. If not us, then someone else would have done it, maybe some unscrupulous firm that was not concerned about the public’s well-being. There are no industry standards nor formal monitoring systems for this technology. Maybe the responsible thing to do was to engage in order to keep a foot in and an eye out.

Ultimately, though, the non-profit did not feel equipped to bear that burden. It was a difficult decision, but one made easier because the financial health of the non-profit was not at stake. None of the volunteers were risking their livelihood on a lost client. That is a privilege that few institutions enjoy.

For many companies, the COVID-19 healthcare crisis has been an opportunity: technological solutions like digital contact tracing and telemedicine suddenly have a market that is both open and, in many places, underregulated. In this context, the non-profit could have been the unicorn to set standards in an industry where technology providers had no formal obligations other than the judgment of history books. Whether it fulfilled or missed this responsibility still is an open question.

But that window did not stay open long. After a summer of glory, digital contact tracing and exposure notification lost their splendor in the fall, dried up as the days shortened, and fell before the winter was even over. Sustained criticism and lack of adoption had made digital contact tracing irrelevant. But the non-profit is not losing its spirit. It has already set its eyes on a sexy new gadget: digital vaccine passports.

The post What Happened to Digital Contact Tracing’s Summer of Potential? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I usually visit Pettibon’s work on my way back from teaching rounds with the medical teams in the Intensive Care Unit. Alone after raw encounters with broken and ailing bodies and disrupted lives, I often seek out the reminder: restoration may not be enough.

Pettibon’s work asks us not to accept the illusion of restoration to what was before. It calls on us not to lose lessons and opportunities that emerge through adversity. It reminds us that sometimes, in the seemingly unimaginable, we find an invitation to imagine anyway: to see our way forward, further than where our fates have brought us, beyond where we started.

I have visited Pettibon’s “Yes, but alas” hanging in its quiet hallway behind the chapel at least once a week since the pandemic began.

As I stand there, taking a minute to check myself, a thought revisits me: Maybe none of us, with our already strained bandwidth, can take on all the moral challenges raised by this pandemic. But perhaps we can take on some, or even one, of the concerns that we may not have recognized before.

Perhaps we can make space and time to accept and offer invitations to listen, whether in clinical or community contexts. We can think differently about our collective challenges, imagining beyond what we once thought we knew—not restoration, but regeneration.
 
II.
As a clinical ethics consultant, educator, and public scholar, I engage questions about complex moral experiences in healthcare settings. I work with patients, families, nurses, physicians, social workers, chaplains, lawyers, and administrators. When someone calls for a clinical ethics consultation, it is because they seek support in a crisis: there’s confusion or miscommunication to think through… an impasse to overcome… the aftermath of a disease or accident with which they must now learn to live. My practice is to make space and time for those involved to communicate and connect with each other, confronting what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is.” Together, we walk through their concerns.

Navigating the unwelcome uncertainties of giving and receiving care means brushing against structural factors that shape interpersonal encounters. Communal and institutional politics; local, state, and federal law; theoretical frameworks; and public health policies intersect actual people’s lives. In such moments of crisis, suddenly we see our taken-for-granted ways of being in the world, and often-unspoken values, come into sharp focus. Especially when they collide with those carried by other people.

I’ve learned that those collisions can be hard. In moments of uncertainty—medical and moral—it can be daunting to see beyond oneself, to imagine another’s experience and hear their perspectives. We have to choose deliberate understanding: what social psychologist Pierre Bourdieu describes as a focused attention to different people that lets us see them as whole persons, not just caricatures or types. Ethics consultants strive to make space in those morally and emotionally charged moments for people to do that: to pause, to see and hear each other and find ways through, as whole persons, together.
 
III.
COVID-19 hasn’t changed the character of clinical ethics work, but I have begun to see new parallels between conversations taking place in the hospital and conversations unfolding in our local and national communities. On patient wards and in neighborhoods, moral encounters emerging from the pandemic remind us of commitments and connections we often overlook in our everyday, pre-pandemic hustle and bustle. More clearly than ever, the “we” encountering moral experiences includes not only family and neighbors, but also unknown strangers, near and far, on whom we are dependent and from whom we can learn.

The pandemic has laid bare and exposed our interdependence in ways that deeply challenge the American mythos of rugged individualism. It has exposed the raw injustice we all suffer as what philosopher Herbert Spiegelberg calls “fellows in the fate of existence”: those persistent and deeply ingrained inequities that are taken for granted simply because some are born to more resources, safety, health, and community than others.

All anyone has to do, in any of our communities, is look around the neighborhood to find someone experiencing a very different pandemic than themselves. If some aspect of This Pandemic Life is difficult for me, that gives me an opportunity to consider how it might be for a neighbor, in different circumstances.

Making connections to these different experiences—even at a near distance within our neighborhoods, religious congregations, school communities, and “work families”—can help bring to light individual needs and challenges we may not have seen before. Those connections can introduce us to resources, coping mechanisms, and networks of support we haven’t yet considered. We haven’t yet had to, until now.

Inviting these connections is a kind of moral engagement: a listening and telling, an affiliation, as the philosopher and ethicist Richard M. Zaner has written. I help make space for these conversations in my clinical ethics work. They can be an avenue for understanding within and beyond our communities, even—or especially—in a global pandemic.

This kind of deliberate moral engagement feels strange for many of us—especially mid-pandemic, when everyday challenges make it seem flatly impossible to focus on how others feel. And yet, even in the collective upheaval, engaging in this way offers real possibilities as we look towards our post-pandemic lives.

Can we open to real curiosity, seeing near and far neighbors as they are, rather than as we have imagined? Can others’ perspectives help us see ourselves, our worlds, in new ways, rather than as we have imagined, or hold in idealized memory? Can we recognize that restoration and return to the pre-pandemic world isn’t possible, or even truly desirable?

If we are able to “see with new eyes,” as Marcel Proust invites us, perhaps we can connect our individual, interpersonal experiences and needs to our communal, collective challenges and actions.
 
IV.
This comes across vividly when we consider the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Vaccines are closely connected to hopes of returning to normal, to what we have always known and done. Yet in the difficult processes of allocation, distribution, and acceptance, we can see why a return to before is not possible—why restoration cannot be enough.

We should not continue, or consider returning to, a society where unequal access to vaccines takes egregious health disparities and widens them to the point where they are obscene. We should take a hard look at efforts of the well-resourced and privileged to move ahead in vaccine allocation lines. We should direct resources to communities struggling with diseases of poverty and limited access to primary care. We should learn from evidence of generational trauma that impacts community health and a healthcare system that systematically disenfranchises and damages people of color. We should engage with concerns around vaccine hesitance. We should alleviate the burdens on tech-limited Americans (rural and urban, older and poorer) that have made it so difficult for them to navigate online sign-up systems. We should start paying attention to distribution difficulties, material logistics, and systemic inefficiencies that few have had to know or worry about before.

Even as thumbnail sketches, our current vaccine challenges highlight pre-existing conditions that we can no longer ignore.
 
V.
One year into this overwhelming pandemic, I recognize that accepting responsibility for seeing with others and thinking differently feels heavy. But pandemic experiences also create possibilities for new ways forward. We have had to practice in own lives: seeing anew the way things were, revamping our activities and routines, and making things work in the new normal. We have adapted again and again, even as our surge capacity has been depleted and we’ve despaired that we can’t go on.

We go on (we hope).

Instead of following breadcrumbs of our deep yearning for pre-pandemic life and how things used to be, we continue into the unknown. We have learned by ourselves, from others around us, and from sheer necessity that we can learn to see differently, that we can make a deliberate choice to listen and tell, to understand, to go forward. Not back to before.

In clinical ethics encounters and community moral engagements, we can learn from each other in this unavoidable pause. We can carry on, together, into recuperation, rejuvenation, renovation, regeneration.

After all, as Pettibon reminds me every time I take a moment to stand in front of his beautiful, provocative print: We’re not going back. Too much has been learned—often hard-gained. Too much work lays ahead, for individuals and communities. Too many beloved people have been lost to be forgotten.

My hope is that none of us will paint over these months, grabbing at the blue sky we think we remember.

The post A Medical Ethicist Asks How Can We Regenerate, Not Restore, Life Before COVID appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two journalists who covered presidential campaigns in different eras—NPR To the Point host Warren Olney and Zócalo California editor Joe Mathews—visited Zócalo to discuss what campaign journalism means to the country right now, and how to make it more useful, during a Twitter Live event earlier today.

Their conversation focused on how campaign coverage—and its influence over the electorate—has shifted in five-plus decades since Olney began his career as a broadcast journalist. During the hour-long discussion, Olney recounted his time covering the Nixon presidency, drawing a comparison between criticism circulated by the campaign that the press was “hostile toward Nixon and favorable toward the Civil Rights Movement” to today’s anti-media rhetoric encouraged by the White House.

Mathews and Olney also considered the degree to which special access on the campaign trail may compromise the integrity of media coverage, and whether the successes of so-called “Teflon” presidents, like Reagan and Trump, represented the candidates’ talent in campaigning or a failure of the reporters responsible for covering their campaigns.

They both also spoke to the difficulty of reporting in an age of misinformation, gaining the trust of an increasingly partisan readership, and whether journalists in 2020 are sufficiently responding to criticisms of coverage of the 2016 presidential election.

”Quoted” with Warren Olney:

There can’t be a downside to revealing the truth about the campaign. And somebody will notice. Something might happen. You have to assume that that will be the case and hope for the best.

Watch the full conversation below:

Zócalo Live: What Do We Need From Campaign Journalism? with @warrenolney1 and @joemmathews https://t.co/RnGJ7jUGjU

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) September 10, 2020

The post What Do We Need From Campaign Journalism? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Strictly translated, it signifies authoritative power (kratos) by the citizenry or people (demos)—particularly the lower and middle classes—in the public affairs of a political order. Of course, this does not describe our reality.

We Americans live in a republic, whose laws are made by public officials in whom citizens invest power and authority, legitimating their power over the citizens who are governed. Citizens vote for their representatives, but there is often little relation between what citizens vote for and what their representatives do. Thus, President Lyndon B. Johnson campaigned on a peace platform in 1964; George W. Bush voted to keep America out of foreign entanglements in 2000; Donald Trump campaigned as (inter alia) a champion of the working man who would restore America’s infrastructure. The First Amendment grants citizens freedom of speech and religion, but those rights are extended only as far as is accepted by agents of the three branches of government. White supremacists can demonstrate in Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, but protesters at the Republican National Convention are put in pens far from the convention hall.

When today’s public officials refer to the American state as a democracy, they often do so to make themselves look good, not to be truthful. For few actually advocate programs that politically empower the people, and they often disregard the preferences of citizens. Polls show that a majority of citizens favor stricter regulations of guns and polluters; higher taxes on the wealthy; a relatively tolerant immigration policy; liberal views on “social issues”; and health care for all. Yet the Congress does not adhere to these public opinions—and I don’t think it’s because they’re smarter or more virtuous.

But the trouble with democracy transcends contradictions between words and deeds or citizens and their representatives. A fog blurs the meaning of democracy, especially when it is invoked to describe our political order. But that fog reveals a real question—is democracy a beneficial political order or merely a linguistic honey?

In my scholarship, I have found that confusion about democracy stems from the misunderstood and opaque relationship between democracy and ideas of goodness, especially goodness as it relates to common and public affairs. This misunderstanding is particularly disturbing in the midst of democracy’s invocation today: Few citizens understand democracy’s ability, practically or ethically, to improve our social lives, and few politicians genuinely want to.

Practical roots of this misunderstanding recur to the American founding. The drafters of the American Constitution did not intend to create a democracy—thus, the Electoral College and the Senate (although having two houses of Congress can have democratic benefits). To the contrary, they secured a republic that would regulate American democracy and protect slavery not only because of racism but also because they didn’t trust ordinary citizens with political power.

As the nation extended suffrage and abolished slavery and segregation, the political question became how democratic should the republic become. Americans may wonder whether greater democracy is even desirable, since few in the echelons of society that dominate public communications and our capitalist economy are prone to entrust more power to the many who are often seen as uncouth—incapable of political judgment and likely to threaten their positions.

While anti-democratic thought often stems from prejudices of one kind or another, it actually is true that democracy does not inherently provide an automatic guide for just political action. Democracy is not automatically just, because the demos is not automatically right. This is not a uniquely democratic foible; human beings are fallible. And it is not that we must fear “tyranny of the majority,” because a genuine political majority of a populace rarely exercises power. It was not a majority of the American citizenry that favored or fought for slavery; it was not a majority of the French citizenry that authorized the Reign of Terror; it was not a majority of the German citizenry that elected Hitler.

Besides this historical truth, political action in democracies and all other political orders occurs amid conditions of uncertainty. When citizens engage political dilemmas, they have reason to wonder exactly what the two conceptual pillars of democracy—freedom and equality— mean. What is political freedom for, if not anything should be allowed to “go”? How are we to put political equality into practice, if we do not seek sameness? This critique puts a moral and intellectual burden on the understanding and practice of democratic citizenship and governance: How can one be sure that becoming more democratic means that society and its citizenry will become better?

These questions of how and whether democracy produces goodness are serious and longstanding. Demokratia connoted the power of “the many” over “the few,” and noteworthy political theorists have argued that “the many” are more trustworthy political judges than “the few.” But neither is automatically good. Since its inception, democratic activity has needed ethical compasses to enable citizens who make decisions to do so beneficially, for the public as a whole. But there is no single intellectual or practical source for these compasses. Citizens may believe in God or think reasonably, but there is no God or Reason or website or algorithm that identifies the needs of democracy.

And that’s the point. We are not born with these virtues and practical skills. And yet everyone can learn the basic skills of political navigation, given the requisite general education and political experience.

This is why democracy can’t be only an ideal; it must be a practice of ongoing political activity wherever possible and practical to acquire this education and experience. When citizens’ political participation exclusively involves voting in official elections, it is reduced to being an adjunct to the agendas of the few individuals who both seek public office and have the wherewithal to be serious candidates. What I call the “political activity” of citizenship does not entail “activism” for all citizens, but it does require constant attention to the well-being of democracy. Every instance of democratic (not Democratic) opposition to republican (not Republican) rule needs to justify not only greater kratos for the demos but also political movement in a beneficial direction that reaches out persuasively to opponents. Every time women or subordinate races are mistreated as such, everyone should speak out on their behalf.

Citizens also need to explain to themselves and others why a political decision in a democratic society is good for the people. This calls for a kind of reconciliation between democracy and goodness that is hard to achieve. We must ask: How can democracy not only be an agent of power but also of goodness? And how can ethics, power, and knowledge operate practically in a way that benefit, rather than subvert, democracy? Without a democratic ethics, democracies will be run by factious majorities only interested in their own power. And with a democratic ethics that lose touch with actual citizens, a political elite may enact a morality that harms minorities or even the majority of those citizens.

Over the course of history in “the West” there have been various watchwords of goodness in democratic contexts that can be instructive. I have found five such watchwords that express ethical standards that complement democracy, although their benefits are no more automatic than democracy itself.

The first is “virtue,” used as a standard of political excellence. Today, it is hard to understand virtue in general, but we can identify unusual efforts to excel in honoring and promoting the well-being of the public realm—profiles in political courage. Among individuals, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr., strike me as good candidates. But note that each of these examples stand on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens that energized them.

A second notion that must complement contemporary democratic ethics is “representation.” This term became politically salient in the 17th and 18th centuries as secular states sought legitimation by reaching out to non-aristocratic and even (at times) non-property-holding men. We cannot do without representation today, as it is needed to link large numbers of citizens to modern political power. It can be done well by promoting dialogue between leaders and those they lead. But it also can be a tool for consolidating rule by a political elite over the majority of citizens.

Third, there is a sense of “civil rightness,” a neologism I have coined to refer to equal opportunity plus merit. “Civil rightness” is the achievement of goodness in civil society. It became the economic hallmark for equality amid the competition that marks job-seeking in modern societies. It can be used to open doors, when equality is extended to relatively powerless people and practices in civil society, or to close doors, when notions of merit are practically used to block access by the meritorious but unconventional. That said, it cannot be ignored in contemporary societies if they would be both democratic and good.

A fourth guidepost for complementing democracy and goodness today is “legitimacy.” Previously used to define rightful heirs in powerful families, including royalty, it has become more widely used in public discourse since the beginning of the 20th century, when and where no one ethical standard for a non-theocratic collectivity and government was accepted by citizens.

The final watchword for reconciling democracy and goodness today is “human rights.” In official international discourse, it is a kind of goodness that automatically complements the democratic character of modern states. It has risen in importance since the end of the Cold War, and human rights organizations do good work when they shine light on the horrible, politically caused suffering of human beings. But even attachment to human rights can become undemocratic when focus on their abuse distracts attention from a society’s common political needs.

The goodness of democracy also requires cooperation—so that winners and losers in political contests keep playing with and against each other in the same “game” of promoting the public interest (as each sees it) in society. Democratic citizens, therefore, need to reach beyond themselves when acting politically, lest power become the only name of the game. Only if citizens learn productive arts of cooperation amid the slings and arrows of fortune can democracy become good. That is not easy amid the obstacles generated by society’s dominant powers. But it is a task that everyone can accomplish. Undertaking it suits us to cast futures that are both democratic and beneficial for our mortal selves and endangered planet.

The post Can Democracy Be an Agent of Both Power and Goodness? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even science has carried this idea to extremes. Genes, for example, are said to account for the difference between people who are perpetual cheaters and those in a lifelong committed relationship. Genes are said to be the reason why some people vote conservative while others vote liberal and why some don’t vote at all. Genes supposedly determine our ability to get through those last years of college, to keep ourselves out of credit card debt, or to invest in the stock market in order to plan for our retirement. And on and on.

If you take this narrative literally, you might think that humans have little free will or sense of right and wrong, and that our environments, educations, and societies play a minor role in how we act or the choices we make. We are, in this version, fleshy computers running hardware provided by our genes.

Why are genes so popular now? Why do they seem to explain everything so perfectly? And how did we come to want to know ourselves through our DNA?

These questions first came to me as I was wrapping up a book on the Human Genome Project and ideas about race. Looking at the state of genetic science, I noticed a push toward investigating the genetics of social phenomena arising in my own field of sociology. I decided to talk to scientists, experts, and everyday people to get a sense of why so many things previously understood in terms of social relations and environmental conditions were coming to be explained in terms of our genomes.

What I discovered is that science and pop culture each spin a narrow version of what genes are and how they impact us, together professing that genes are the deepest essence of ourselves. These two strands combine and reinforce each other.

Recently, researchers, even social scientists, have been focused on finding genetic causes for things in ways that leave out the environment, culture, and social upbringing. Pop culture has seized on these scientific reports, relaying findings as the ultimate truth. And as public interest in genetics and genetic testing has grown, the organizations that fund scientific research have begun putting a premium on studies that seek answers in the genes, closing a feedback loop.

Looking at phenomena beyond disease has become the newest trend, and there is a great deal of energy being spent on opening up opportunities for it. Scientists who are willing to risk their reputations on the new arena of social behavior are being rewarded by the biggest funders and health organizations out there. The National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, for example, are eager supporters of studies as well as efforts to build out a new field of science wholly focused on the genetics of social phenomena.

The space opened up is now being populated by social scientists who are new to genetics, but who believe that they will be able to revolutionize the hunt for genetic associations. This is most striking in the spate of new gene-focused fields, fields like “genopolitics” and “genoeconomics,” that creatively mash up natural and social science methods to apply genetics to new arenas of life, such as political participation and financial decision-making.

A prominent example of the kind of research that these fields are doing is the ongoing search for genes associated with educational attainment. A consortium of political scientists, economists, and sociologists have been mining the human genome for genetic culprits that have an impact on how far people make it through school. Another example is the hunt for rage genes. Scientists have linked the MAOA gene to violent behavior, rape, and even gang participation.

Despite arising from complex interdisciplinary approaches, these hybrid sciences all too often promote genetic determinism. Though they aim to characterize the special way that genes and environments interact to make us who we are, most often they use methods common to genetic science that analyze only the DNA portion of the gene-environment equation. It is expensive and challenging enough to tackle genes alone, and funders do not require that genetic studies pay detailed attention to the environment, so scientists leave the environment out of the picture. Instead of showing us how nature and nurture work together, they reinforce a nature versus nurture way of thinking. This isn’t the fault of individual scientists, but rather is built into the way things are done when hunting for genes. Even the most seasoned social scientists end up checking deep environmental analysis at the door.

For the general public, an even more reductive sense of how genes work and what they mean reigns supreme. TV shows like CSI convince viewers that genes are entities that trump all else. Cultural analysts who have studied the rise of genes in pop culture say that DNA has a certain mystique, seeming indivisible and irreducible, like atoms. And in a world where everyday people are increasingly being asked to manage their own health, to optimize it in any way possible, genetic susceptibilities seem to be one bit of outside reassurance for an uncertain future.

This potent combination of data and cultural resonance gives relatively flimsy scientific conclusions tremendous potency. When I spoke with experts across society—teachers, attorneys, prison wardens, and more—about genetic tests, I learned that they believed that genes had a uniquely predictive power. Many were concerned that tests could be misused by non-experts, but they nevertheless believed that knowing about someone’s DNA would help in working with them. IQ tests could be used to track kids into different types of schools. Criminality tests could determine how to handle repeat offenders. Moreover, tests could be given in infancy, or even administered prenatally.

The belief that nature is really what’s driving us is not new. It’s an idea that can be traced to the earliest thinking about genes and evolution, back to Darwin—and also to his infamous cousin, the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton. Darwin allowed for nurture to kick in as soon as individuals were born, but Galton popularized the idea that the transfer of traits via DNA was all that mattered. In his version, nature and nurture were at odds, with nature winning every time. Francis Galton’s vision went beyond the notion that nature determined the essence of humanity; he believed that the only way to rid humanity of undesired traits was to rid it of the people with those traits.

Though most people today would not want to live in a eugenic society, where DNA decides everyone’s fate, it could be a real possibility if we don’t change the way we think about genes. Our increasing belief in genetic determinism, in an era in which tests are proliferating like mad, threatens to bring us to a world in which people will be slated for totally different experiences, relationships, and life outcomes based on their genes. This will be nothing less than a high-tech eugenic social order, even though people will feel they’ve bought into it voluntarily—through dating apps and hobby tests.

In fact, if you take our current cultural attitudes to their likely conclusion, eventually, there could be two genetic classes. The haves will be able to test their embryos and use IVF to select for things like high intelligence and bullish fiscal attitudes. The have-nots will be tested in infancy or as they enter school, where they will be tracked for certain classrooms and educational and fitness programs, or given no school at all. Educational institutions will become closed-off places where like meets like, as will the labor programs and trade schools offered to those who have “less fit” DNA. If we don’t develop a more critical approach to the information offered by DNA testing, a social order built from the most insidious inequality truly could be our future.

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In a liberal democracy, the purpose of collecting secret intelligence is to obtain information vital to our interests that potential adversaries—hostile leaders, dictators, terrorists, criminals, and shadowy figures such as cyber attackers—do not want us to know. Consequently, they will want to keep this information secret and may go to extreme and even violent lengths to prevent us from ever uncovering these secrets. It follows that to overcome the will of the people with the secret (and bearing in mind that the most important secrets will be the most closely guarded) we will have to use deceptive, manipulative, and intrusive methods.

This sets out intelligence as a distinctive ethical realm. We would certainly not want such methods to be used in everyday life; the equivalent of listening at keyholes, eavesdropping, recruiting informers to gather information on relatives, or opening the family’s mail. But without using such ethically problematic methods in the service of national security, we will never obtain secret intelligence.

Moral philosophers would say there are three approaches to addressing this dilemma that we could advise intelligence agencies to draw on.

The first is to judge the morality of intelligence agency actions by their consequences. This is the natural starting point for intelligence officers: they have noble purposes—national security and public safety—that legitimate their activity. Such consequentialist approaches are closely linked to the principle of proportionality: the idea that, for example, the degree of intrusion into the private lives of others should relate to the harm the intrusion is intended to prevent. But does this mean that if the threat is great enough, such as a terrorist gang about to commit mass murder, any measure would be justified in trying to stop them, including the extremes of extraordinary rendition and trying to extract their secrets by torture?

This is where the second approach to devising an ethical framework comes in, which is importing moral precepts from outside the profession. This is known as the “deontological” approach. To be deontological is to choose to follow rules. But which rules?

National intelligence professionals might ignore “thou shalt not steal” from the Ten Commandments, since the very business of intelligence is concerned with stealing secrets. The United Nations International Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent European Convention on Human Rights provide very relevant ethical rules, including maintaining the absolute prohibition on torture.

But while some activities are prohibited, others are qualified. In these documents, privacy is a qualified right and the authorities can intrude in defense of national security, upholding the rule of law and safeguarding life—provided this is done in accordance with domestic law, and independently overseen. In that way an intelligence code of ethics for a democracy can still allow intrusive methods to be used, provided adequate safeguards are built in.

It is, however, in the nature of intelligence gathering that it has to take place in secret, often in dangerous faraway places where the intelligence officers may have to make rapid decisions to protect themselves and their sources. As anyone who has brought up teenagers will know, house rules are certainly needed, but when they are out of your sight you cannot oversee them, and you have to rely on their having internalized enough of your code of values to keep them out of real trouble. So it is with intelligence officers.

For this reason, we turn to a third approach—that of personal value ethics. This sort of system affirms how one civilized human being ought to behave toward another, drawing in such considerations as personal respect, honesty, trustworthiness, and empathy. The best intelligence officers have a strong sense of personal ethics and are very aware of their moral responsibility towards their agents and their families including after their service is over.

In our new book, we draw a comparison between the ethic of intelligence and the warrior ethic, and we discuss how over centuries, scholars and theologians evolved a philosophy of “just war” to tame the worst excesses of violence in war. From the “just war” tradition it is possible to derive comparable concepts for “just intelligence” that can be used as guides to clear thinking in unpacking the many moral dilemmas that surround the gathering and use of secret intelligence.

We summarize these as:

• right intention—Intelligence officers should act with integrity—without hidden political or other agendas—including in the authorization of intelligence activity, the analysis, assessment, and the presentation of intelligence judgments to decision-makers.

• proportionality—Intelligence officers should keep the ethical risks of operations in relationship to the harm that the operations are intended to prevent.

• right authority—The level of authority required for an operation should correspond to the ethical risks, and the supervising officers should be held accountable for their decisions and oversight.

• reasonable prospect of success—To prevent general fishing expeditions or mass surveillance, individual operations should be justified through sound probabilistic reasoning of what they are likely to reveal.

• discrimination—The risk of collateral harm, including privacy intrusion into the lives of those who are not the intended targets of intelligence gathering, must be assessed and managed on both human and technological levels.

• necessity—Intrusive investigations should only be conducted with restraint, if no other reasonable way can be found to achieve the authorized mission at lesser ethical risk.

Talking of “principled spying” need therefore not be a contradiction in a liberal democracy provided the three Rs are observed: the Rule of Law is maintained; there is lawful Regulation and oversight; and intelligence agencies act with Restraint in their use of the coercive powers of the nation-state.

We are already experiencing what it is like to live in a digital age when our personal data is harvested and exploited for profit by the private sector. The intelligence and security authorities are also busy exploiting cyberspace to gather data to uncover and track targets and potential targets. All that increases a sense of public unease about whether there is any longer a right to personal privacy. Yet at the same time there is a pressing need for protection for the citizen from a wide range of potential adversaries such as hostile states, terrorists, and criminal groups. The need to clarify the rules over principled intelligence activity has never been greater.

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Human consumption is a primary driver of environmental problems. But our urge to consume is encoded in survival—it is clearly not going away.

That urge can also be harnessed to solve problems, though. Information is a powerful tool to enable and move consumers toward sustainable behavior, and it is more readily available than ever before. With information about the environmental impacts of products at their fingertips, consumers can make informed choices, driving a revolution of sustainability for whole corporate sectors.

So far, the revolution has moved slowly. Many companies have failed to translate green into gold. Firms tend to be idealistic about consumer behavior, underestimating their level of sophistication or relying too much on rational decision-making models that don’t account for biases in human decision-making. Furthermore, many have taken a piecemeal approach that decouples green messages from actual organizational practices, leading to inconsistencies and fomenting distrust.

People care increasingly about the environment but are busier and more skeptical about environmental claims. Products are usually not purchased simply because they are better for the environment, and product quality cannot be sacrificed for sustainable goals. Largely, today’s consumers are convenient environmentalists—they will buy green, but it needs to be on their own terms.

Complicating matters has been a steady stream of firms getting exposed for greenwashing and making other false representations. This has made consumers distrustful of green messages. And they are confused about what is really good for the environment in the first place. So, how do you reach these people—a majority of consumers— and convince them to buy green?

The answer lies in the green bundle.

Messaging that pairs sustainability with private benefits creates a win-win for consumers. They are not only doing right by the world but also doing the right thing for their own lives. In a sense, they get to have their cake and eat it too—they benefit psychologically from their altruism and benefit in a more tangible sense from added value.

Of course, to change consumer behavior, firms first need to get their message right. This goes beyond communications. It requires adopting a culture of transparency and framing authentic messages that resonate with consumers.

At a time when information zooms around the world in an instant from any handheld device, transparency is an unyielding force. In most cases, the cost of resisting is greatly outweighed by the benefits of embracing this force before competition.

To reach customers, green messages must pierce a busy cloud of green information. The message must be clear and credible. These may seem like simple imperatives, but many companies fail to hit all of the notes.

Practice green modesty and transparency. CEOs are pivotal to developing clarity and credibility. Rightly seen as figureheads for the companies they manage, they must exemplify a sustainable ethos in their personal and professional lives or risk damaging the credibility of the firm’s efforts. Going green cannot be delegated to a marketing department or PR firm. Indeed, one challenge that often arises (and leads to inadvertent greenwashing) is lack of coordination among different units of an organization. This can cause marketers, to overstate environmental benefits because they do not understand the complexity or impacts of a new product from R & D. To avoid this pitfall, CEOs need to set the tone by clearly stating their green modesty, instituting proper incentives, and relying on codes and standards that promote an ethical climate.

Although this may come as a surprise, even today many firms do not know the environmental and social impacts of their suppliers. Supply-chain environmental-sustainability scorecards are one way that companies can begin to take charge of this information. Once firms better understand the environmental impact of their products, they face the challenge of translating this information not only into a clear signal that can be understood by consumers but also into something that consumers care about.

The steps just described, though necessary, are insufficient to make consumers go green. Again, there is little willingness to pay for environmental benefits or the public good alone. Moreover, research shows that if there is any perceived trade-off in quality, even fewer people are willing to pay. Consumers’ willingness to pay is a less explored piece of the puzzle for green markets, but it is the key to developing effective informational strategies.

This is where the green bundle comes in.

Consumers will translate aspirational beliefs into actions when they see green products as being bundled with private benefits, such as health benefits or improved quality. Firms need to bundle environmental or public-good benefits with private benefits, including better performance, enhanced status, improved health, money savings, and even emotional returns.

Emphasize increased quality. Few are willing to pay a premium without some measure of private benefit. Conversely, with certain goods, such as cleaning products, consumers may confuse or associate eco-labeling with poor quality. It is therefore important to communicate quality alongside environmental virtue. The Clorox Company promotes the view that natural cleaners are at least as good as their conventional counterparts by boasting that products with the Green Works label “clean with the power you expect.”

In many cases, there is a natural overlap between quality and greenness. Performance, functionality, usability, durability, comfort, and convenience are all attributes that can be effectively bundled with sustainability.

Leverage peer pressure. Most of us care what others think, and we like to display the good things we are doing. The unusual appearance of the Toyota Prius became a selling point after the car was used to bring Hollywood stars to the red carpet of the Academy Awards. Suddenly, this strange-looking vehicle could make people look like stars themselves. Status is a powerful tool to compel behavior in the marketplace, and it is particularly effective when consumption is highly visible.

Promote health benefits. Research shows that the most important reason we buy green is for our health and the health of our families. Health is the main reason people choose organic products that are produced without chemicals. Thus, it was not surprising to see that, over a ten-year period, the organic-food market grew 238 percent, from $8.6 billion to $29 billion, while the overall food market grew 33 percent. Health attributes are an important private benefit that can be associated with green products.

But people do not always make the connection between environmental and health benefits. Information campaigns are one way to close that link, and there are critical times when consumers will be more receptive to campaigns about environment and health. These include national health crises, such as the water contamination in Flint, Michigan, which raise awareness and lead consumers to seek strategies to protect their health. They also include personal times in individuals’ lives, such as when they start a family or face health problems.

Unravel monetary returns. Money is the most cited reason to avoid or embrace green products and services. Premiums often scare consumers away, whereas monetary savings associated with saving energy or resources are appealing. But perceptions of premiums or savings vary widely depending on context or reference point. How financial incentives are framed makes a big difference. Small savings framed as a tax or a loss can be quite effective, and raising a product’s price can even help in some situations.

Stimulate empathy. The final piece of the green bundle is the emotional connection between the consumer and the sustainable products. Consumers will empathize with a cause when the story is told the right way. In addition, they need to believe their purchases will make a tangible difference. It is imperative to bridge the distance between green consumption and impact, making the benefits of consumption tangible by showing how they help a specific person.

The post Want to Save the Environment? Give Consumers More Benefits for Going Green appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Reading the article, you might be left with the impression that even thinking about designer babies would be alarmist, unscientific, or just silly.

As public interest advocates who are focused on the social implications of human biotechnologies, my colleagues and I see how often the term “designer babies” serves as a distraction in these discussions—and we usually avoid using it ourselves. But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s not the idea itself, but the way we’ve been talking about it, that’s the problem.

What if we could use discussion of designer babies productively, to unpack some of the complex issues surrounding gene editing? Actually talking about such imaginary babies—however far-fetched their existence seems—could help us start that discussion. Only by acknowledging that a future defined by designer DNA is possible can we decide whether we are comfortable with the risks, or even aspire to that future.

First of all, just thinking about designer babies could help people understand important aspects of new gene editing technologies, including the difference between two distinct applications that often get conflated. Both involve CRISPR, a relatively easy-to-use gene editing tool that has revolutionized genetic research. Using CRISPR, scientists can make pinpoint changes in the genes of many kinds of cells, from bacteria to plants to animals to humans. There is both great hope and great hype surrounding CRISPR, because it might prove useful for medical purposes. For example, editing the DNA of human blood cells could treat or even cure diseases like sickle cell or beta-thalessemia—providing tremendous relief to people who are sick.

Editing specialized cells in existing people is called somatic editing, and these kinds of genetic changes would not be passed on to the next generation. A very different application of CRISPR is required to make a designer baby: a scientist has to alter the genes in eggs, sperm, or early embryos, making changes that shape the human germline—the DNA passed down from one generation to the next.

Widespread media coverage has made this kind of gene editing experiment using human embryos seem ubiquitous. In fact, only a handful of researchers around the world have done this research and none have attempted to start a pregnancy using a genetically altered human embryo. Still, some of these researchers do hope to use germline gene editing for reproduction, and this is a disturbing prospect because it risks unintended permanent consequences, not only in terms of its safety, but also in its impact on society.

That’s why, before we decide whether to go forward with germline editing, we need to have a much broader society-wide conversation about what its risks are, technologically, socially, and morally. The way we talk about CRISPR makes that hard to do. For example, calling CRISPR a “gene editor” and comparing it to a word processor for DNA makes the technology seem relatively minor and familiar, when in fact it is neither. And vague terms like “genome surgery” conflate somatic gene therapies with embryo or germline editing. A more serious dialogue about designer babies could begin to change the conversation.

It also could help us unpack why “designer babies” come up in the media at all. Frequently, we find, proponents start talking about designer babies when they want to stop real discussion about the risks of gene editing. Hoover Fellow Henry I. Miller, for instance, dismisses concerns over genetically enhanced embryos as downright sinister—“excessive introspection” that will “cause patients to suffer and even die needlessly,” or, as prominent bioethicists Peter Sykora and Arthur Caplan recently charged, hold patients “hostage” to “fears of a distant dystopian future.”

In fact, there are no desperate patients who will suffer without germline gene editing, because by definition it will be done on people who don’t exist yet. Though some proponents claim that editing the genes of embryos is the best or only way to prevent the birth of children with inherited genetic diseases, another technology already exists that accomplishes the same thing. For decades, people who want children but carry genes known to cause disease have used pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to test embryos created via in vitro fertilization. With PGD, a few cells of a days-old embryo are tested for specific genetic conditions, allowing parents to identify and implant only those that are unaffected.

PGD carries its own ethical concerns: It prompts difficult decisions about what kind of children will be welcomed into the world and how those choices might stigmatize individuals already living with inherited conditions. But gene-editing human embryos raises such concerns to an even greater degree, by allowing parents to alter genes or even introduce new traits, and carries additional societal risks of increased inequality.

This brings up a third issue worth discussing: What makes a baby a designer baby in the first place? Some try to make a tricky distinction between “bad” reasons for germline gene editing, like enhancing appearance or talent, and “good” reasons for germline gene editing, like preventing serious diseases. Children who resulted from embryos edited for looks or smarts would be the “designer babies;” those created from embryos edited for disease prevention would be … something else.

But in fact such distinctions are difficult to parse in real life. Configuring the genetic makeup and traits of future children is a way of designing them—even if the choices seem unambiguously good, as when choosing to remove a genetic variant that causes serious disease. Any child born from an engineered embryo is, in a sense, a designer baby. Only considering the products of the most frivolous choices to be “designer babies” makes it seem as if there is a clear and easily enforceable line between acceptable and unacceptable uses of germline editing.

But we really don’t have a consensus about which inherited traits are desirable or undesirable. What counts as disease? What conditions are “serious” enough to correct? Who gets to decide? Beliefs can change over time in ways that underscore how problematic it would be to alter future generations. Up until 1973, to cite one example, homosexuality could be diagnosed as a psychological illness; we think about it much differently now.

Decisions to edit out diseases impose present-day values on future generations. Autism has been proposed as one of the serious diseases that might be prevented through embryo editing—but the definition of autism has changed radically over the past few decades. Would editing autism out of people’s genes really be a social good? Many people—advocates, authors, and even employers—argue that we should value the neurodiversity that the autism spectrum represents.

Already, a few scientists are drawing up lists of genes to target for enhancement, and transhumanist proponents of gene editing advocate that we should go beyond preventing disease. Some, including Oxford philosopher Julian Savulescu, argue that it would be unethical for parents not to try to enhance their children if the technology were safe and available. But that oversteps another important issue: If it were possible, who would provide consent? We don’t know the long-term health risks of germline gene editing for a future child or adult, nor for future generations as edited genomes are passed down. Would designer babies feel a loss of autonomy or individuality if they found out their DNA had been changed before they were born? Arguing that there is an ethical obligation to enhance children treats them like commodities—rather than people.

Finally, talking about designer babies can help us understand how germline gene editing would affect social inequality. Another meaning of “designer” is expensive or exclusive. It’s easy to imagine that if designer babies became possible, only the very wealthy would be able to access whatever real or perceived biological “improvements” the edits offered. The advantages that children of the wealthy already have would be reproduced in biology—or would at least be perceived as biological. But the problem is not just who has access: The idea that some genes are better than others has been the basis of dangerous social divisions and injustice, from racism to eugenics. Editing the genes of future generations could exacerbate the inequalities that already exist, and even introduce new forms.

Before we decide whether to go ahead with embryo or germline editing we need a broad societal consensus, and to gain that, the discussion must go beyond the experts and their issues, to a debate by the public at large.

When you dig deeply instead of dismissing concerns about designer babies, you can see what a complicated thicket of issues it presents. Human gene editing is complex—technically, socially, morally—and our discussion of this powerful emerging technology ought to involve everyone. Designer babies provide a figure around which people’s fears, hopes, and questions coalesce. We’re missing a chance to engage when we won’t talk about them.

The post Designer DNA Isn’t Just for ‘Designer Babies’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The National Institutes of Health recently announced that it plans to end the ban on funding research for part-human, part-animal embryos, raising urgent ethical questions such as, what if this produces an animal with a partly human brain?

But the origins of these very modern concerns date back more than a century, with lively discussions about “modernization” underway as early as the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. One especially compelling yet largely forgotten analysis was penned by Henry Adams, son of a congressman and diplomat, descendant of two U.S. presidents, and a highly regarded historian—and conflicted technology enthusiast—in his own right. His reflections were contained in his posthumously published autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

In a chapter titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he ponders the implications of the Machine Age, expressing deep concern over what he sees as a dangerous clash between the seductive grandeur of modern science and technology, which he calls “the Dynamo,” and the essential undergirdings of humanity—religion and traditional values—which he christens “the Virgin.”

More introspective than descriptive, The Education of Henry Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. It leads the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century, outranking Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Today, Adams’s work is not nearly as widely known as those, but not for lack of merit and timeliness. Indeed one could argue that “The Dynamo and the Virgin” is even more relevant today than it was when it was written.

After studying exhibitions on art, science, and technology at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, Adams concluded that—despite his own appreciation of the merits of “progress”—Americans were too ready to embrace new technology at the cost of traditional values. This raised for him a disquieting question for the dawning century: Will the human spirit survive the new Age of the Machine?

Adams was anxious that American culture was about to take a fateful turn, sacrificing traditional values on the altar of technology. Prompting his reflections was a visit to the Hall of Electrical Machines. He fixated in particular on one of the gigantic dynamos on display. Its purpose was beside the point. Adams’s focus—and his fear—centered on its size and mechanism, its “huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed” while making hardly a sound. Its workings, he wrote, were an unfathomable, but seductive, mystery—one that left him in awe. The dynamo became for him the incarnation of modernity and symbol of the “revolution of 1900”—interwoven revolutions in science and technology that ushered in, most impressively, the new age of electricity along with automated production, the car, and the airplane.

Henry Adams seated at his desk, 1883. Courtesy of Marian Hooper Adams/Wikimedia Commons.

And then there was the art. Adams contrasted the dynamo with the figure of the Virgin, which he suggested was the central inspiration behind much of what he had viewed in the fair’s acclaimed art pavilions. The Virgin became his symbol for Christian tradition and, equated by Adams to the Roman mythological Venus, the female force in general. Looking to the future, he wondered if the god of technology, the dynamo’s apotheosis, was on the verge of replacing, as he put it, the Church and the Cross. Adams was in fact seeking a middle ground between religion and science.

Adams’s guide through the Hall of Electrical Machines was a leading American scientist, S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Although holding Langley in the highest esteem, he wrote of being puzzled, and a bit disturbed, by the scientist’s laser-like focus on machines and forces, to the exclusion of the art displays and all else non-scientific at the fair: “Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit.”

Adams, writing in the third person about his experiences, described how Langley taught him to appreciate, if not really understand, recent discoveries in radioactivity, radio, and electricity: “He [Adams] wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly [inventor of the Branly coherer, one of the earliest radio wave detectors] had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo.”

Long fascinated by modern physics, Adams later experimented with applying physical theories, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, and “Maxwell’s Demon” (a thermodynamic thought-experiment by physicist James Clerk Maxwell), to the theory of human history, even in the face of skeptical feedback from scientist friends. But it was the dynamo that excited his strongest reactions at the Paris fair: “As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross … Before the end, one began to pray to it.”

Indeed, Adams later did pray to it, composing a poetic tribute, “Prayer to the Dynamo: Mysterious Power! Gentle Friend! Despotic Master! Tireless Force!” he wrote, with more than a hint of ambivalence.

The rush of discoveries in science and technology sometimes left him longing for the solace of tradition, security, and unity that he associated with medieval society and the Church. That people now seemed to be turning away from the Virgin worried him, for he believed it could mean the end of the great artistic traditions that were propelled by the power of Christian faith, “the highest energy ever known to man,” surpassing even the power of the steam engine and the dynamo.

Adams noted that in Europe the “force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays,” while “in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force.” Despite his personal religious skepticism, (he was attracted to religion, but remained agnostic, never really reconciling the truths of science and religious faith) he regretted that his countrymen were apparently throwing in their lot with the machine worshippers.

So, what does Adams have to say to us today as we confront the dilemmas of our own technological revolution? Adams was enthusiastic about modern science and technology—today we might refer to him as an early adopter—but he remained an essentially 19th-century man, mindful of the challenges to society posed by 20th-century technology. His hope was that dynamo and Virgin would ultimately join together in support of both our spiritual and material lives.

To be sure, we no longer speak of dynamos and Virgins, much less of “hugging dynamos.” Yet, in many ways, Adams was extraordinarily prescient. With today’s advances in artificial intelligences and genetic manipulation, we face the very existential crisis that Adams foresaw.

Precisely one hundred years after Adams’s toured the Paris Exposition of 1900, Bill Joy, co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote his now famous essay in Wired magazine, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” projecting a dystopian future in which “our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” Adams was not half so gloomy as Joy. From the vantage of the revolution of 1900, he welcomed our technological future, but with a crucial caveat: make sure our technology has a soul, not in the sense of superseding us as sentient human beings, but of living in spiritual harmony with our better selves.

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