Compulsory Moral Bioenhancement Should Be Covert Says Academic Who Says Ticks Should Be Genetically Modified To Stop You Eating Meat

My heart soared like a hawk by the hundreds of supportive comments I got on Twitter from last week’s story about two academics who want government to genetically modify ticks so that more people suffer, possibly even fatal, allergic reactions when they eat red meat.

One person, sympathetic to the academics, did try to ask a good question, which could be put like this: if eating meat is morally wrong, then what is wrong with government making meat-eaters sick when they do?

The answer is easy: Not all crimes merit official punishment, and in the ones that do, the severity of any punishment ought to follow the evilness of the crime. Genetically engineering ticks to become weapons against this crime is like giving somebody fifty lashes for cutting hair without a license. Monkeying with tick DNA would also cause everybody to rightly, correctly and rationally distrust government, and the Experts in their employ, in all situations. You’d never know when they weren’t trying to poison or drug you.

Which is why one of the authors of the original peer-reviewed paper, Paul Crutchfield, wrote another peer-reviewed paper saying the government ought to do these things in secret.

The title is “Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert”, and is also in Bioethics.

Academics say people do bad things, and may do worse, and so “it is necessary to morally bioenhance
the population”, for instance by “infusing water supplies with pharmaceuticals that enhance empathy or altruism”. Or possibly by genetically modifying tickets to make you allergic to red meat? Crutchfield: “Not only should moral bioenhancement be compulsory, it should also be covert, conducted without the knowledge of those who are being enhanced.”

We need to know one term to read this paper: ultimate harm, by which Crutchfield and other academics mean wiping out all or most of man. Say, by embracing sodomy.

Kidding! He leaves unspecified how this “ultimate harm” can happen. He instead trots out the precautionary principle (PP; he doesn’t call it that):

Given that the costs of not preventing ultimate harm are indefinitely high, there is no intervention the costs of which would outweigh utility of the prevention of ultimate harm. Thus, if an intervention is necessary to prevent ultimate harm, and the intervention will actually prevent ultimate harm, then that intervention ought to be carried out, because the cost of not doing so is indefinitely high.

I used a version of this silly argument on Nassim Taleb, because he loves his PP, too. One can imagine an infinite number of possible causes of “ultimate harm”, and because for each the costs are “indefinitely high”, then anything and everything we can do to protect against them ought to be done. Which is absurd. For Taleb, I imagined an attack of Black Swans from Outer Space. Having had his sense of humor surgically removed after an unfortunate squid-ink accident, he didn’t get the joke and blocked me.

So it does not follow, at all, from the simple premise that man might engage in “ultimate harm”, that thus convert moral bioenhacement is obligatory. Which means Crutchfield’s entire paper is baseless. Yet let’s keep reading, because it is a good tool for revealing the mind of a typical academic.

Regardless whether it works or is unnecessary, he says, “If moral bioenhancement is unnecessary to prevent ultimate harm, it doesn’t follow that it shouldn’t be compulsory”.

This is so bizarre a conclusion I would ask local authorities to check this man’s basement.

He says bioenhancement is “a matter of public health”, by which he means that when government Experts conclude something ought to be done to you in the name of “health”, then it ought to be done because Experts have spoken.

Here is his main scenario:

When children are scheduled to receive vaccinations, they are at the same time given the moral bioenhancement, but neither the children nor their parents or guardians are told about the moral bioenhancement and it doesn’t go in their health records. The administration of it could be double, or even triple, blinded, so that only a few individuals are aware of the moral bioenhancement. Everyone would go on with their lives unaware of the moral bioenhancement.

You will notice he allows Enlightened Guardian Experts to be in on the secret, but nobody else. Just when adepts are initiated into his Cult of Public Health, and who will do the initiating, he does not say. What happens to those who break the Veil of Silence, he does not say. How to contain the secret once it’s out, he does not say. On how to test and determine “safe and effective”, besides just taking Experts’ word on it, he is silent.

But there is this: “If preventing ultimate harm requires lying, even by omission, then lie we must.” And “Even if a moral bioenhancement program does diminish a person’s autonomy, there is no implication that to do so is wrong.”

Now Crutchfield goes on like this, at length, insipidity followed by horror, page after page. But you get the idea.

The only thing missing is any notation of who paid him to write this. Government grant, maybe? There is this end note: “In addition to conducting research in bioethics, he teaches medical students, residents, and medical staff and conducts clinical ethics consultations.” Do not get sick, dear reader.

BONUS LINK!

Crutchfield is also co-author of the peer-reviewed paper “Abolishing morality in biomedical ethics“.

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