* Should Human Beings Have Sex? Sexual Dimorphism and Human Enhancement
* The Risks of “Sexual Normalcy”
* Humans Should Be Free of All Biological Limitations Including Sex
* Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Human Dignity and Transhumanism: Do Anthro-Technological Devices [nonbiological entities introduced into or attached to the human body] Have Moral Status?”
The whole discipline of bioethics is basically about trolling... or they're serious :/.
Abstract/Extract
Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine.
I thought "Bioethics attracts all the weirdos who want to propose really off the wall crazy crap" until I read that list. People actually get paid to write stuff like that?
Things vary considerably, partly because there's no real central registry for journal names: If you're the Journal of X, it just means you were the first organization audacious enough to pick that name, not necessarily that you're actually a legitimate representative of field X.
There are, fortunately, some somewhat more sane bioethics journals, like the one named Bioethics, which has article titles that at least seem to involve legitimate issues at the intersection of medical practice and ethics, like, "Addiction and Autonomy: Can Addicted People Consent to the prescription of their drug of addiction?": http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0269-9702
I can't build (for example) a doomsday device that will eliminate all life on Earth. I still think I should be allowed to disagree with the building of one.
Alright, let's ignore research because it complicates the matter. Correct doomsday device scenario to "I've never carried out genocide, but I still think I should be able to disagree with it."
But you shouldn't have the right to block research that could hypothetically one day lay the groundwork for building such a device. Otherwise let's shut all the physics labs tomorrow.
Your precious bodily fluids are about as impure as it gets. I mean, dude- what other aqueous solution can you think of that's 80% water and can stand on it's own like a pair of month-old socks?
"One person's right to drink lithium-free water is no greater than another's right to drink lithium-enhanced water."
Um... If you feel this strongly about it, then go put lithium in your water. Don't make me buy bottled water. I've been on lithium before. I'd prefer to spend the rest of my life as far away from ingesting it as possible.
Also, I highly doubt anyone has done a study on what tiny amounts of lithium ingested regularly would do to your kidneys. There is a reason your doctor wants you to get semi-regular kidney function tests if you're on lithium.
I won't speak for him but I've been on it before for the treatment of bipolar disorder. It works for some people. It didn't work for me - too poisonous - and I'm on something else now. But I don't blame his reaction; there were horrible side effects.
I must admit, I railed against adding Flouride for many years, mostly from a liberty / choice perspective, before finally accepting almost a century of scientific evidence and becoming a supporter. I need to know more about the science, both positive and negative effects, before doing the same here, but it is a nifty precendent.
As with fluoride, I wouldn't want my community to be the first to test it - perhaps if I can convince my neighbours to support a local nuclear power plant we would be spared being guinea pigs on the lithium issue.
One thing that's always been like a junk-science beacon for me in regards to water fluoridation is the decree that the ppm of fluoride in water varies depending on whether you're in a hot climate or a cold climate because "people who live in warm climates tend to drink more water".
That and systemic reviews such as the York review (http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/pdf/summary.pdf) which basically states there has been very little high-quality studies done on the effects of water fluoridation.
Admittedly that systemic review was released in 2000, and unfortunately for conspiracy theorists the York review concluded there may be a slight benefit and at worst a slight disbenefit to water fluoridation, but in their executive summary they did say:
"Given the level of interest surrounding the issue of public water fluoridation, it is surprising to find that little high quality research has been undertaken"
That's almost half a century since we've been touting the 'scientifically proven' benefits of water fluoridation, which I just find stunning.
So unlike yourself I'm very unimpressed with the scientific evidence, and have come to the conclusion that a half-baked health policy was implemented in an age of questionable scientific rigour.
Human and establishment tendency to refuse to admit fault or error has guaranteed this rather flaky practice continues in many parts of the west today.
I wouldn't want my community to be the first to test it
At the levels they are talking about, it seems like there are communities who for decades or longer have been "testing" drinking water with the proposed levels of lithium.
Of course, that's assuming that the deliberately introduced lithium is in the same form, with the same chemical availability. I would hope that would be a requirement if anyone actually decided to try and do this.
True. I know we had issues where I am (Brisbane, Australia) when fluoride was introduced. There was a lot of trial and error in ensuring the right amount made it into the water supply (not too little or too much), although the errors made (that we found out about at least) were all well within 'safe' levels.
Maybe they should check, or already have, if small doses of lithium make citizens more compliant and less critical of authority, especially with increasing the dosage of lithium in the water :)
This certainly does seem like a step above anything that's been done before. Fluoride is intended to be basically inert as far as ingestion goes--- its purpose is to improve tooth strength, but not to have any medically noticeable internal effects when the water's drunk. Adding a substance that is medically active when internally ingested as a default drinking-water option would be quite a step. At the very least, we might want to get a lot better handle on what the possible downsides are. There are these studies showing a good preventative association with suicides, but does increasing lithium intake do anything negative? It would be surprising if it had no possible negative effects, so the question is more what they are and how likely/serious they are.
The toxicity of lithium is a reality. To monitor the level of toxicity you need to check the concentration level in the blood. If you start to distribute lithium in water, how can you ensure that the level of lithium remains below toxicity in the blood of each water drinker (even if you control the concentration as you don't control the quantity of water used by everyone)? Lithium is often a salt and what will be the effect of the concentration when cooking or taking a shower?
Even if lithium was added in 7up[1] before the fifties, it's not drinking water and you don't take your bath with 7up or cook your potatoes with it...
Regarding the success story provided as precedent: I don't know the quantities involved, but if it is known that swallowing a toothpaste tube's worth of fluoride can kill a child, I'm not comfortable with the idea of tainting the drinking water with even "safe" amounts of this poison just so it will briefly pass by your teeth in its way to your digestive tract. Sounds reckless and extremely disrespectful to me.
Anytime anybody brings up fluoride somebody else brings up Dr. StrangeLove, it might as well be a knock knock joke. I wish people would actually look into the science. People thought DDT was unquestionably great too.
Banning DDT was one of the stupider things the government has done. The EPA studies showed no reason for it; the first EPA administrator just up and did it - against the professional scientists' recommendations. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which was the original "justification" for it was pure BS.
They don't put salt or caffeine in your tap water.
If they're going to make you drink something daily for a lifetime without your informed consent, I expect some reason better than cutting down a few bucks of dental care expenses.
The fluoride is in enough concentration to be effective in the brief time it passes through your mouth (that's the idea, isn't it? Or is it supposed to somehow work systemically after ingested?). A tube of toothpaste will last a few weeks. There is, in principle, reason for concern. To claim it's scientifically proven to be safe you need lifetime double-blind studies controlling for any pernicious effects, which they obviously didn't run before starting this. A shame, considering there's apparently plenty of people who would be happy as uncompensated guinea pigs.
Dental caries can kill - that's how the guy that played Lorne on Angel died - so we're talking about more than "cutting down on a few bucks of dental care expenses".
TFA doesn't even mention death by caries, only the savings. If avoiding those deaths was the reason, I guess lithium would have been used before fluoride. I don't know the stats, but I know of several people that committed suicide in my area and never heard of a single death by caries.
It's not like this is an anti-obesity drug to fight poor life choices and life styles. I really hope you don't feel that the majority of suicides were by people who simply made 'poor life choices' and needed to change how they lived.
And, even when the condition can be remedied by life changes, good or bad (is moving to Seattle and suffering from depression deserving of criticism?) doesn't it make sense to buy time by treating the major life threatening symptoms, i.e. trying to kill yourself?
What are the majority of suicides caused by? (I am actually curious.)
I'm merely saying that living a healthy, active and happy life would produce good results and help to avoid needing to take drugs. Is that wrong? Naive?
We should all strive for it, but the reality is that most people who don't have an 'active healthy lifestyle' arrived at that condition before they were adults. People who learn unhealthy habits in their childhood or adolescence have a tremendously hard time breaking those habits or even recognizing that they are unhealthy.
I speak as someone who, despite my parents best intentions, was not raised to approach life in a 'healthy active' manner, and have only arrived at that point after leaving my parents' well-meaning clutches.
So, the people who this would most help are generally not that way by choice or even responsibility, so to talk of their right to not drink lithium water seems off the mark. I'd love to give people the right not to have incapable parents, because that would do a whole lot more for this cause than anything else.
The bullshit is strong in this one.
Look, I have 4 data points, 2 each in some very psychotic societies. We are going to extrapolate to the entire world and then try and add some psychoactive substances to their water. Seriously, I've been near a couple of politicians - we can totally pull this off.
This seems likely to bring a bunch of people to being almost but not quite miserable and hopeless enough to commit suicide, without any plans to ever rescue them from that state. To me that sounds more sadistic than helpful.
will the decline in suicide represent people who are no longer depressed, or people who are slightly less depressed but constantly at the edge of committing suicide?
A prescription is an intervention, and uses higher levels to achieve dramatic change over a short period of time. This is proposing small doses because the target range is lifetime
Still, on the offchance they do start doing it, I'll be first in line for rainwater tanks, so I can protect the purity of my precious bodily fluids.