Author Archives: lberr25

Section 102: Peer Review of Group 3 by Group 2

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Having never heard about B Corporations, I found this proposal both informative and interesting. I think the critique of B Corporations was very insightful, and I found the comparison to Fair Trade to be helpful in explaining the project’s goals. I furthermore completely agree that its approach is problematic, since it only requires a vague and potentially unvalidated pledge of ethicality. However, I disagree with your statement that becoming an ethical company to gain the B Corporations stamp of approval would ultimately hurt the business’ bottom line; products that are USDA Organic, non-GMO, Fair Trade, or Certified Vegan, or donate a percentage of their profits to charity, appeal to specific audiences, and by selling well to these growing niches, the ethical designation often increases profit in the end.

I appreciate that you recognize how incredibly challenging it is to measure something’s ethicality and find the suggestions you’ve brainstormed to be creative and reasoned. Still, I have to wonder whether ethicality is too subjective to be measured at all. You suggest average wage and the origin of raw materials as potential factors, but while one person might claim that high wages and environmentally sustainable sources are markers of ethical soundness, another might claim that freedom, such as the freedom to pursue individual success, is more vital, so wages and sourcing should be determined by the free market. Perhaps more people agree with the first point, but that doesn’t make it the only defensible ethical stance. I find this problem even more significant once the government comes into play, as it would if ethical tax cuts were to be instated. Consider how the different political parties might view the ethicalness of a manufacturer of birth control or a shop that sells assault rifles. Of course, if you’re only considering factors such as the way employees are treated, that won’t be relevant, but that seems unlikely to occur in the political sphere, where appearance and hardline party tactics are so strongly relevant.

I’m also curious to know your justification for stating that “more ethical companies would increase the health of our economy as a whole.” It doesn’t seem to agree with your earlier statement that I addressed in my first paragraph, wherein you claim that becoming more ethical hurts businesses because of the added expense of paying workers fairly and so on.

Summarily, it seems amazingly difficult to determine a company’s ethicality, especially once politics are thrown into the mix, but it’s a very interesting and creative idea, and I wish you the best of luck!

Group Project Proposal: Section 102, Group 2

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Dagdelen, Taner
Hoxha, Ori
Berryman, Laura
Clemens, Ben

The fundamental goal of our group project is to establish ethical guidelines for the growing movement known as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Biology. The definition of DIY Biology, also known as biohacking, is self-explanatory: it refers to biological research conducted outside of the government, academia, and the corporate sector in an attempt to innovate in or expand the common understanding of biology, bioengineering, and biomedical science. What makes this recent movement unique is that its adherents often operate without going through the extensive process of attaining graduate-level education and training in their respective fields, instead typically relying on knowledge passed down by experienced professionals through highly informal (and thus variably reliable) mediums of communication such as blogs.  Furthermore, there is currently no official protocol for oversight of these so-called “biohackers”; there is only a self-instituted “neighborhood watch” system of moderation.  This lack of official oversight and monitoring, along with possible dangers such as the creation of new viruses and antigens, is raising concerns about the ethics and safety of DIY biology.  The extent of these concerns is evident in the recent attendance of FBI representatives at formal DIY biology conferences in efforts to acquire an understanding of the movement’s dynamics.

Quite naturally, a breadth of ethical questions and implications has arisen as a result of this movement; however, the DIY biology community still does not possess an effective and universal method for addressing these issues. We therefore sought to find a way to apply our understanding of ethics and engineering to provide such a resource for the members of existing biological forums.

Originally, we considered starting a blog about ethical considerations and concerns within the field of DIY biology in order to encourage discussions about what does and does not constitute an ethically grounded practice. Through our research, we determined that blogs such as this are already in existence, and many biohacking blogs also contain information about ethics, but these webpages are not immensely effective; more needs to be done in order to generate progressive discussions about ethics. All of the blogs that we read provided excellent information regarding biohacking and the ethical considerations that must be made, which encompass topics ranging from bioterrorism to patents to censorship. As readers, though, we experienced difficulty connecting the various discussions in a cohesive manner: the lessons and insights from one discussion were hard to apply to another, and sometimes, conclusions were even contradictory. The various bio-ethics blogs lacked a unified ethical perspective and often had unreasonable or imprecise suggestions regarding practical applications of ethical principles, which inspired us as to how we may innovate in our own way.

From our interview assignment, we know that there are many resources that delineate the ethical rules of a particular field, and we easily found a few codes of ethics that were specifically made for DIY biologists. However, there was a huge disconnect between these codes of ethics and the various ethical discussions taking place on the blogs; there seemed to be little attempt to apply the abstract code to concrete experiments. What’s more, we saw that this same disconnect exists in the larger field of biology.  There is an enormous and well-established field called bioethics that includes many useful resources, such as the extremely well-established Nuremburg Code of Bioethics. And yet, despite the coexistence of these two promising sides of the ethical discussion, nobody in the blogs tried to connect the ethical goals enumerated in codes to the conversations about real experiments.

Somehow, we have to bridge this gap between the subjective, ethically nebulous discussions taking place on these blogs, which are the main resources that DIY biologists use to learn more about the field, and the more objective codes of ethics that are established to ensure safety.  With this in mind, our proposal is the following: we will write to the administrators of the ethics blogs, suggesting that they 1) post the generally accepted code of ethics that they adhere to in a very obvious place on their blog, and 2) require that every seed post (the first post to a blog thread) specifically reference one or more of the points in the code of ethics in their discussion or propose an amendment to the code if it is believed to be insufficient.

These changes will root all of the diverse discussions on a blog in the same ethical foundation, clarify the relevant ethical issues at stake, and allow the lessons, insights, and conclusions gained from one discussion to be more fluidly applied and connected to future topics.

No Spine, No Statute: Loopholes in Animal Research Regulations

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Ethics in the News, Section 102, Laura Berryman

1/15/14: When is an animal not an “animal”? Research ethics draws the line.

Every day, as we smash spiders, eat pigs, and gush over viral videos about puppies, we are subconsciously placing different animal species into a hierarchy of importance. Kate Lynch’s article, “When is an animal not an ‘animal’?”, describes one way in which these biases have become law: in scientific experiments, the use of vertebrates and some cephalopods is regulated, but invertebrate animals have absolutely no legal protection. This is mainly because vertebrates are thought to experience pain and distress similarly to humans, whereas little is known about pain transmission in invertebrates. This topic raises many ethical questions. For example, which species are entitled to our ethical consideration and why? Is the ability to feel pain a valid requirement for protection? And is animal research itself even ethically justifiable?

I was drawn to this article by my sympathy to the animal welfare movement, so I was disheartened to learn that invertebrates have no legal protection when used in research. I think that whether or not they can experience pain is largely irrelevant, considering the frequency with which animal experimentation leads to death. I believe that all sentient beings are deserving of ethical consideration and that invertebrates are not inherently inferior to vertebrates; we only think so because of our bias, as humans, to favor animals that we can more closely relate to. (This last claim is supported by Lynch’s article; she mentions interacting with a class of elementary schoolers who thought the value of an animal’s life could be determined by its cuteness.) I’m not free of this bias myself, and I honestly can’t feel a great deal of empathy toward insects, but I believe it’s important to recognize that animals don’t exist for the use of humans and are all worthy of ethical consideration. Still, I realize that protection for invertebrates would be difficult to implement. Not only would it be hard to gauge the effects of research on these animals, many of whom we know very little about, but this type of regulatory legislation would impede research progress and would receive very little sympathy from the public.

Lynch’s article encompasses two viewpoints: one states that all animals deserve legal protection in a research setting, and another argues that only vertebrates are entitled to these rights. However, there are many more perspectives that she doesn’t address. For example, there are staunch animal rights activists who think that protective regulations are insufficient and animal research should be abolished entirely. On the other end of the spectrum are Descartes-style speciesists who think that non-human animals deserve no rights whatsoever. If proponents of these two viewpoints were to make utilitarian means-end arguments for their positions, as described in the textbook, the activist would consider the deaths of billions of animals to be too high a price to pay for scientific advancements, whereas the speciesist would consider the ends to justify the means. Most people lie somewhere in-between these two perspectives, perhaps judging a species by its apparent intelligence, cuteness, or ability to feel pain, unsure of how to answer the question: how much is an animal’s life worth?