The Journal of Medical Ethics infanticide debate and "acceptable" free speech

01 Mar 12 | Uncategorized

A controversial academic paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics has triggered a torrent of abuse, including threats of violence and death.

Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini, who wrote After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?,  argue that given that those who accept abortion typically do so for reasons that have nothing to do with the foetus’s health (even where the foetus clearly is a potential person), then where abortion is permissible, killing a newborn should be permissible, on grounds of consistency. Not a palatable conclusion for many of us, though it could be read as a Swiftian modest proposal that ultimately attacks the morality of permitting abortion.

But should we be free to discuss killing babies at all? Is that on a par with publishing articles that are pro-pedophilia? Julian Savulescu, the journal’s editor, has defended the decision to publish on the grounds that the goal of the publication is not to present an ultimate truth or a simplistic view based on morals, but rather to present well-reasoned arguments based on widely accepted premises. In this spirit, Savulescu is equally ready to publish coherent responses to the controversial article.

This is a test case for the liberal defence of free speech so eloquently advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Mill believed that dissenting, provocative and challenging voices jolt us out of the complacency of our dead dogmas. Mill writes that “Both teachers and learners go to sleep as soon as there is no enemy in the field”. Unless we have had our fundamental views challenged, we are likely to hold them in a drowsy fashion, scarcely aware of why we believe what we do.

Most of us believe that killing babies is wrong; here’s an argument that suggests that if you think that abortion on non-medical grounds is sometimes acceptable, then you probably ought to believe that infanticide is sometimes acceptable. It’s clear from the context of presentation in an academic journal, too, that this isn’t  an incitement to actual infanticide, but rather a provocative move in an ongoing debate, a plea for consistency. No doubt there will be a flurry of refutations submitted to the journal.

For Mill,  as for many who defend free expression, the limit of free expression is the point where someone incites harm. But the only people directly inciting harm here are those issuing death threats. They seem to have confused a contribution to an academic debate with an invitation to kill. Here context is all and quotation out of context likely to lead to misunderstanding. Yet we can take even this category mistake as a stimulus to clarify what it is we value about freedom of expression in this context and where its limits lie.

Julian Savulescu has taken just this opportunity: “Free speech” he told me, “is not valuable in itself — hate speech, for example, is not something we should seek to protect. Rational argument that seeks to engage others — that is worth protecting.”

Is transparency bad for science?

07 Dec 11 | Uncategorized

Transparency in science is in the news these days, from leaked emails on climate change to unpublished drugs trials and information being kept out of the public domain for reasons of confidentiality or copyright. But calls for transparency and openness are almost always met with claims that scientific research is potentially at risk from persistent FOI requests or demands from the public to make science more easily accessible.

Should raw data be available to everyone? What is the value of transparency? Is the sharing of NHS patient data an example of good transparency? Who defines what open access means?

These questions and others were up for discussion at  Index on Censorship’s “Data Debate” at Imperial College last night, marking the publication of the new issue of the magazine, “Dark matter: What’s science got to hide?”  The event was chaired by the magazine’s editor, Jo Glanville.

The philosopher Baroness O’Neill opened the discussion by pointing out that the Protection of Freedoms Bill places greater pressure on academics, calling as it does for openness. But this is not a new concept for scientists — the Royal Society is based on openness, viewing science as a public enterprise. What was difficult, she said, at a time when transparency is so valued by so many, is how open data might be “reusable” in a way that is useful and productive.

Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust,  agreed. “Science”, he said, “has led the way with openness”. But he warned against the dangers of raw data, which he likened to raw sewage (easily the most tweeted comment of the night, and repeated throughout the event’s discussion). Like O’Neill, Walport called for “useful” data sets to be available to the public so that serious misinterpretation of this unsorted data did not stand in the way of public knowledge.

But the journalist and campaigner George Monbiot called for full access to data, saying that it was counterproductive to allow scientists to determine who accesses information. He spoke of the public’s suspicion about science; at times communication between the scientific community and the public was simply a “tragedy of human incomprehension”. The public are told they need to know more and more about science and yet there are significant barriers to making this possible. He admitted the media were partly to blame, but stated that openness would help ease the public’s suspicion. As Fred Pearce writes in the magazine, “the fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasly unwilling to accept the message that ‘we are scientists; trust us’.”

Professor David Colquhoun called for greater openness in clinical trials. The competitive nature of the scientific community is exploited, he lamented, particularly within the drugs industry. As a result, important research is kept from the public, often because while clinical tests must be registered, the results do not have to be published. It’s a subject explored in detail by Deborah Cohen, BMJ investigations editor, in the current issue of the magazine too. Colquhoun offered that competition also meant that a huge amount of research was being carried out and not all of it to a good standard. Perhaps, he said, a reduction in the number of studies would bring about higher quality research.