PHIL 3345. Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James
"...if we don't attend to it, the people creating the technology will be single-handedly in charge of how it changes our lives.
Those people are bright, no question. But, without being in any way disrespectful, it's important to say that they are not typical. They have particular skills and affinities, and particular values. In one of the best moments in Patel's book, he asks Sutskever what he plans to do after A.G.I. is invented. Won't he be dissatisfied living in some post-scarcity "retirement home"? "The question of what I'll be doing or others will be doing after AGI is very tricky," Sutskever says. "Where will people find meaning?" He continues:
But that's a question AI could help us with. I imagine we will become more enlightened because we interact with an AGI. It will help us see the world more correctly and become better on the inside as a result of interacting with it. Imagine talking to the best meditation teacher in history. That will be a helpful thing.
Would most people—people who are not computer scientists, and who have not devoted their lives to the creation of A.I.—think that they might find their life's meaning through talking to one? Would most people think that a machine will make them "better on the inside"? It's not that these views are beyond the pale. (They might, crazily, turn out to be right.) But that doesn't mean that the world view behind them should be our North Star as we venture into the next technological age.
The difficulty is that articulating alternative views—views that explain, forcefully, what we want from A.I., and what we don't want—requires serious and broadly humanistic intellectual work, spanning politics, economics, psychology, art, religion. And the time for doing this work is running out. At this point, it's up to us—those of us outside of A.I.—to insert ourselves into the conversation. What do we value in people, and in society? Where do we want A.I. to help us, and when do we want it to keep out? Will we consider A.I. a failure or a success if it replaces schools with screens? What about if it substitutes itself for long-standing institutions—universities, governments, professions? If an A.I. becomes a friend, a confidant, or a lover, is it overstepping boundaries, and why? Perhaps A.I.'s success could be measured by how much it restores balance to our politics and stability to our lives, or by how much it strengthens the institutions that it might otherwise erode. Perhaps its failure could be seen in how much it undermines the value of human minds and human freedom. In any case, to control A.I., we need to debate and assert a new set of human values which, in the past, we haven't had to specify. Otherwise, we'll be leaving the future up to a group of people who mainly want to know if their technology will work, and how fast."
Jaron Lanier, VR pioneer and author of "You Are Not A Gadget," says you're still not.
"...Why work on something that you believe to be doomsday technology? We speak as if we are the last and smartest generation of bright, technical humans. We will make the game up for all future humans or the A.I.s that replace us. But, if our design priority is to make A.I. pass as a creature instead of as a tool, are we not deliberately increasing the chances that we will not understand it? Isn't that the core danger?
Most of my friends in the A.I. world are unquestionably sweet and well intentioned. It is common to be at a table of A.I. researchers who devote their days to pursuing better medical outcomes or new materials to improve the energy cycle, and then someone will say something that strikes me as crazy. One idea floating around at A.I. conferences is that parents of human children are infected with a "mind virus" that causes them to be unduly committed to the species. The alternative proposed to avoid such a fate is to wait a short while to have children, because soon it will be possible to have A.I. babies. This is said to be the more ethical path, because A.I. will be crucial to any potential human survival. In other words, explicit allegiance to humans has become effectively antihuman. I have noticed that this position is usually held by young men attempting to delay starting families, and that the argument can fall flat with their human romantic partners..."
1. "Gen IVF women" like Miriam Zoll began thinking what, in the 70s and 80s, about their prospects for motherhood?
2. Women who experience failed fertility treatments often exhibit symptoms of what?
3. The ART failure rate for American women over 40 in 2012 was what?
4. How much does surrogacy typically cost in the U.S.?
5. Zoll and her husband were "aghast" at what, during their search for an egg donor?
6. What has become a cultural expectation for many LGBT people?
7. What's the Internet's role in fashioning "queer intimacies"?
8. Who fills the need of outsourced surrogacy?
9. Artificial gametes and cloning would not help who, but would negatively impact who?
10. New reproductive technologies provoke a rethinking of kinship markers while raising what questions?
DQ
Why do so many couples have an "obsession to procreate"? Would they be well-advised to try and re-direct that obsession to parenting (and perhaps adopting)?
COMMENT on any of the "ten things I wish someone had told me..." (323 f.)
COMMENT on the "new grounding assumption..." (329)
COMMENT on any of the questions at the bottom of p.334.
What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill
What is MacAskill's book's worldview, and what is his preferred definition of it? ix What does he want us to be? xiii
What was MacAskill's initial response to longtermism? What metaphors illustrate his current view? 5-6 What tyranny does he say we should abandon? 9 What is his aim in this book? 21-2
COMMENT?" Do you see a connection between l'ism and John Dewey's continuous human community? (*below) Or Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation?
COMMENT:? "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain." --William James
COMMENT:? "Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." --Albert Camus
How is humanity like a teenager? 19 What reckless behavior did MacAskill indulge in, as a teen? 34, 39
Climate change highlights what? How is decarbonization a win-win-win...? 24-5 What's our outsized opportunity? 28
What killed off the megafauna? 30
What do Frank Capra and Bill McKibben have in common? What lesson about "plasticity" did McKibben learn? 42-3
Longtermism
https://www.williammacaskill.com/longtermism
Longtermism is the view that we should be doing much more to protect future generations.
Longtermism is based on the ideas that future people have moral worth, there could be very large numbers of future people, and that what we do today can affect how well or poorly their lives go. Let’s take these points one at a time.
First, future people have moral worth. Just because people are born in the future does not make their experiences any less real or important. To illustrate this, we can put ourselves in our ancestors’ shoes and ask whether they would have been right to consider people today morally irrelevant by mere fact of not having yet been born. Another way to look at this is through considering our ability to harm future people. For instance, consider how we store nuclear waste. We do not simply set it out in the desert without further precautions, because it will start to leak in several centuries. Instead, we carefully store it and mark it for future generations, because we recognize that it would be wrong to cause future people foreseeable harm.
Second, there could be very large numbers of future people. Humanity might last for a very long time. If we last as long as the typical mammalian species, it would mean there are hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. If history were a novel, we may be living on its very first page. Barring catastrophe, the vast majority of people who will ever live have not been born yet. These people could have stunningly good lives, or incredibly bad ones.
Third, what we do today can affect the lives of future people in the long run. Some might argue that it is hard or impossible to predict the future, so that even if future people are morally important and even if there will be many of them, we cannot predictably benefit them beyond a hundred years time. However, while it is difficult to foresee the long-run effects of many actions, there are some things that we can predict. For example, if humanity suffered some catastrophe that caused it to go extinct we can predict how that would affect future people: there wouldn’t be any. This is why a particular focus of longtermism has been on existential risks: risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential. Risks that have been highlighted by longtermist researchers include those from advanced artificial intelligence, engineered pathogens, nuclear war, extreme climate change, and global totalitarianism. Besides mitigating existential risks, we can also predictably shape the longterm future by changing the trajectory of humanity in a persistent way, like through changing what it values.
William has a book on longtermism called What We Owe The Future which was published in August and September 2022.
Learn more about longtermism in an excerpt of What We Owe The Future in The New York Times, an introductory article in BBC, and a long-form piece in Foreign Affairs. The links below are also helpful:
A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of “What We Owe the Future,” from which this essay has been adapted
Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth.
Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first, then the third-ever person, and so on.
One hundred billion (or so) lives later, you are the youngest person alive today. Your life has lasted somewhere in the ballpark of four trillion years. You have spent approximately 10 percent of it as a hunter-gatherer and 60 percent as a farmer, a full 20 percent raising children, and over 1 percent suffering from malaria or smallpox. You spent 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth.
That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present.
But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammal species (about one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just a few months old. The future is big.
I offer this thought experiment because morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore... (continues)
==
* "The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant." —From A Common Faith by John Dewey
Hosted by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
CULTURAL RACISM
Linda Alcoff, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College and the Graduate Center,
City University of New York
Friday, April 11, 2025 • 5 p.m.
College of Education, Room 164
Linda Alcoff will define what cultural racism is and argue that it is central to understanding racism today, though it has receded into the background. Biological claims about race that justified racial rankings have long been disproved, and such approaches also lost influence after World War II because of their association with Nazism. But racism simply shifted to the terrain of culture, in which cultures are taken to be just as unchanging as biological races once were. Culture is used to explain differences in economic development, to justify disparities in global power, and to limit migration.
The principal antidote to cultural racism is a more accurate understanding of cultures as hybrid and inherently dynamic. As a corrective, Alcoff develops the concept of “transculturation” from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. This helps us to foreground the colonial context of cultural ranking systems and offset the tendencies toward reification and determinism.
While transculturation often emerged from colonial practices including enslavement, the fact remains that mythic narratives of Western self-creation are simply false. A more accurate understanding of the formation of cultures will disabuse us of ranking and demand a re-understanding of the formation of racial groups as well.
…Today, while we have made significant strides in recognising gender equality, we also see growing recognition of animal rights, such as laws against cruelty and exploitation. What was once dismissed as laughable—the idea that animals deserve moral consideration—is now widely accepted.
This brought our conversation to a contemporary question: with the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, could similar arguments apply to AI? I asked Prof. Singer: based on this logic, shouldn't moral consideration also be extended to AI if it exhibits sentience? Prof.'s response was thought-provoking. He explained that if AI were to develop genuine consciousness—not merely imitating it—it would indeed warrant moral consideration and rights. He emphasised that sentience, or the capacity to experience suffering and pleasure, is the key factor. If AI systems eventually demonstrate true sentience, we would have a moral obligation to treat them accordingly, just as we do with sentient animals.
This possibility raises profound questions about the future of ethics. How would we recognise true consciousness in AI? What responsibilities would we have toward such entities? And how might our understanding of moral consideration evolve further? The boundaries of ethical reasoning are never fixed—they expand as we deepen our understanding of the world and the beings within it.
Later, after our breakfast and during the car ride back (thanks to Bro. Jono!), I thought of putting AI to the test. Because I just learnt from Prof. about an AI chatbot modelled after him (freely accessible online) at
I decided to ask the chatbot the same question posed to Prof. ("What is wisdom?"), compare its response with his actual reply, and share it with him on the spot! (Continues)
== And I asked Scarlett about Peter Singer's chatbot, and other things...
1. How did James Rockwell and his subject cohorts sabotage their drug study?
2. Why is speed critical in getting drugs approved and on the shelves as early as possible?
3. What motivated homeless alcoholics to participate in trials for Eli Lilly, according to its director of clinical pharmacology?
4. Guinea pigs rely mainly on what to insure their safety?
5. The target audience for the jobzine Guinea Pig Zero was who?
6. DARPA projects include research on drugsto keep soldiers awake and fed for how long?
7. Radiation exposure from nuclear testing on American soil in the '50s was comparable to what?
8. Fear of chemical weapons during the Gulf War led to the administration of what vaccine prior to FDA approval?
9. Gulf War vets and their children have been diagnosed with what?
10. What percentage of DARPA projects fail?
11. How did New York city law enforcement officials help researchers in the mid '90s?
DQ
Should "guineau-pigging" be a job?
For how long should drug patents be issued?
Have you participated in any drug trials? Do you want to?
"What happens when both parties involved in a trial see the enterprise primarily as a way of making money?" 292
Are for-profit IRBs inherently compromised?
COMMENT on the Susan Endersbe case. 295
How should test subjects be procured? Should there be a cap on how much doctors can earn for procuring them?
How would you fix our "patchwork regulatory system"? 300
Should medical research aimed at enhancing soldiers' competence, stamina, and endurance be held to different ethical standards? Is all really fair in (love and) war?
Is there an ethically-defensible military rationale for "race-based" or "man-break" tests? 302
What's your response to any of the questions at the top of p.302?
Should all soldiers be required to sign waivers allowing the administration of any drugs deemed necessary or appropriate? Does military service tacitly allow drug experimentation in the interests of "national security"?
CB part 9, epilog
What is the IGI, why was its original name rejected, and what is one of its core principles? 401 -2
What role did university research labs begin taking on in March 2020? 411
How did Doudna expedite the legal process of getting approval to test outsiders? 417
What's SHERLOCK? 424
What did Doudna call "the awesomely good thing about this terrible [COVID] situation"? 430
Biology should not remain what, says Isaacson? 445
In what "larger" sense do CRISPR treatments come from reprogramming? 457
Why have blacks historically distrusted medical trials? 461
What standard constraints did not apply in the race to beat COVID, with what result? 473-4 What fundamental aspect of science will remain the same? 475
What promise of CRISPR might also be its peril? What does Isaacson now see more, peril or promise? What does he think we should decide? 480-81
Time to SIGN UP for final report presentations, beginning Apr 1 (no foolin'). We'll do one or two presentations per class. Indicate your preferences in the comments space below.
Presentation to be complemented with a final report blog post,* discussing and elaborating the main points of your presentation, due May 2. Everyone will need to sign up as an AUTHOR on this site. Post an early draft for constructive feedback or to use in your presentation.
* 1,000 words minimum, plus bloggish content: embedded links, relevant images/video etc.
APR
1 Beyond 28-31; Codebreaker Parts Seven, Eight-The Moral Questions, Dispatches from the Front.
3 Beyond 32-34; Codebreaker Part Nine-Coronavirus.
8 Beyond 35-36; Future Part I-The Long View. Presentation: Jaxon
10 Beyond 37-39; Future Part II-Trajectory Changes. Presentation: David
15 Beyond 40-42;Future Part III-Safeguarding Civilisation. Presentations: Tara, Danny (be sure to coordinate, to avoid redundancy)
17 Beyond 43-50Future Part IV-Assessing the End of the World. Presentation: Devin
22 Beyond 51-54; Future Part V-Taking Action.Presentation: Martha
24 Final report presentations conclude (or we'll have a study/review day)
29 Last class. Exam 2 (NOTE: Exam 2 is not a "final exam," it is the exam covering material since Exam 1.)
MAY
2 Final blogposts due (post early draft for constructive feedback)
Conclude Midterm report presentations, begin Final report presentations... Martha, Aidan
1. The greatest advances in health and longevity should go to what?
2. Why was BiDil removed from the market?
3. What broad consensus now obtains regarding health differences between and within groups?
4. Funding in 2014 was 50% greater for research areas including the word gene (etc.) than for those including the word _____.
5. Name an "unthinkable" medical experiment to which incarcerated individuals have been subjected.
6. Creating ethical standards for medical research is the flip-side of what "coin"?
7. Most viewers of The Constant Gardener would probably conclude what, mistakenly, about its fictional drug company?
8. Apart from being extraordinarily lucrative for the local doctors who procure test subjects in developing countries, what's another important reason why so much human research is conducted in Africa and other poor regions outside the U.S.?
9. Research in Nigeria for Pfizer was compromised by an apparently fraudulent claim involving a nonexistent what?
10. What two questions should be prerequisite to conducting research in the third world? What should precede human research anywhere in the world?
CB 7-8
With what deep moral and spiritual questions will we have to wrestle in the coming decades, and what's the continuum conundrum? 336-7 What categories of genetic modification might we want to add to treatment and enhancement? 339
What does the complexity of sickle-cell anemia remind us of, when we're contemplating "messing with Mother Nature"? 343
How is the moral status of deafness different from skin color and sexual orientation? 348
What DARPA enhancement project is already underway with Doudna's lab? 351
What does Isaacson say about Nozick's Experience Machine thought experiment? 353=4
What was John Rawls's position on genetic engineering? What was Nozick's response? 358
What was Michael Sandel's argument against "playing God"? 365
Doudna became more sympathetic to what view about gene-editing? 369
Should Steve Jobs have thought differently? 371
What's Feng Zhang's objection to making enhancements? 376
What became of Isaacson's edited gene? 383
How did James Watson cross a line? What's the Jefferson conundrum? 386, 390
DQ
Do you have a duty to be your best self? To whom?
Is aging a "scourge worse that smallpox"? 265
How can emergent biomedicine be suitably tailored to public (not just personal & profitable) health?
COMMENT: "Health is determined by far more than health care." 269
What forms of preventive medicine/health care do you think would have the greatest constructive impact on health in the U.S.?
Is there any rationale for ever using human "guinea pigs" for research?
Are adequate safeguards in place to prevent future research abuses targeting prison populations?
What do you think of South Carolina's kidney proposal 278
What's wrong with offering incentives to imprisoned women to donate their eggs?
Have you read and/or seen The Constant Gardener? What's your review? (If you haven't, are you mad at Marcia Angell for her spoilers)?
What do you think of CG's Hollywood ending (in the film)?
"…a lot has changed. Many Americans have lost trust in public health agencies and the advice they offer, especially in more conservative parts of the country like mine. That declining trust is showing up in personal choices: In 2018, some 46,000 Texans requested vaccine exemption forms from the Texas Department of State Health Services. In 2024, more than 93,000 did.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd still follow my pediatrician's advice and vaccinate my children. But in the years since Covid, I increasingly understand the thought process of my neighbors who do not..."
The Department of Health and Human
Services has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to
states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health
services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.
The cuts are likely to further
hamstring state health departments, which are already underfunded and struggling with competing
demands from chronic diseases, resurgent infections like syphilis and emerging
threats like bird flu.
State health departments began
receiving notices on Monday evening that the funds, which were allocated during
the Covid-19 pandemic, were being terminated, effective immediately.
“No additional activities can be
conducted, and no additional costs may be incurred, as it relates to these
funds,” the notices said.
For some, the effect was immediate.
In Lubbock, Texas, public health
officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that
helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, according to
Katherine Wells, the city’sdirector
of public health.
On Tuesday, some state health
departments were preparing to lay off dozens of epidemiologists and data
scientists. Others, including Texas, Maine and Rhode Island, were still
scrambling to understand the impact of the cuts before taking any action.
The Food and Drug Administration’s
top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said
that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was
irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.
“It has become clear that truth and
transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient
confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to
Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in
an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about
what is making him followers.”
Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned
to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that
he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the
matter.
Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center
for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the
safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and
gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid
pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to
companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.
"…What keeps epidemiologists up at night is a scenario where bird flu gains the ability to spread efficiently among humans. Letting the virus spread widely among animals increases its chances of evolving to do so. And if we do end up in this nightmare scenario, the virus will already have mutated — so there's no way to know if such a variant would be milder, or much more deadly. It's also worth remembering that a virus doesn't need a mortality rate of 50 percent to devastate society. Some scholars estimate that the mortality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic was most likely only around 2 or 3 percent..."
"…a growing market of A.I. products promise[s] users an experience that closely approximates the impossible: communicating and even "reuniting" with the deceased. Some of the representations — like those offered by HereAfter AI and StoryFile, which also frames its services as being of historical value — can be programmed with the person's memories and voice to produce realistic holograms or chatbots with which family members or others can converse.
The desire to bridge life and death is innately human. For millenniums, religion and mysticism have offered pathways for this — blurring the lines of logic in favor of the belief in eternal life..."
"…Ms. Kali had grown up in a family that revered the principles of all-natural living. She liked her burritos G.M.O.-free and her milk raw. She was wary of medical interventions that exposed the body to chemicals and radiation. Sometimes she suspected that the entire medical system had been captured by special interests. She wanted health care that felt caring, not the impersonality and inaccessibility that she encountered in hospitals. And so while she agreed to undergo surgery to excise her tumor, she declined to follow up with an oncologist. Instead, she began searching for alternatives.
While only a small percentage of people diagnosed with cancer reject standard medical care entirely, surveys have found that one in five Americans has used alternative medicine in place of conventional medicine at some point. Nearly one in three Americans has reported avoiding doctors, often owing to distrust of the medical system or a history of negative experiences.
In her quest for options outside traditional medicine, Ms. Kali found herself part of what has become known as the health freedom movement. In the past 25 years, the movement has stitched together yoga moms, flag-waving anti-maskers, alternative healers, disenchanted doctors and other fellow travelers who believe that the government has no business meddling in personal health decisions. With the installment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, what was once a fringe coalition of grass-roots activists and libertarians now controls the regulatory halls of power..."
