Within Reason

So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, all the taste and texture of real meat (and maybe fewer health problems) without any of the animal suffering. Chris MacDonald, over at the Bioetech Ethics Blog asked if anyone had any good ethical concerns about it. Just about three days ago, I thought the biggest problem with synthetic meat was that it might be disgusting. But I may have changed my mind.

It occurred to me that if someone could synthetically produce animal meat, there really isn’t a whole lot preventing anyone from synthetically producing human muscle tissue and human meat. And, of course, there would be no human suffering involved in harvesting this meat. (For the moment, ignore any problems with the ethics of the research you’d need to do to get this far.) Would there be anything wrong with eating synthetically produced human meat? Continue Reading »

I meet people all the time who a) have progressive views about public policy and b) fondly remember reading Ayn Rand’s books. I’ve always thought this tension could be explained by people forming preferences about books before they form preferences about political positions. But there is something interesting going on in the comments to this post over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog at Think Progress.

While Yglesias is a great, bafflingly prolific blogger and Think Progress is a useful site, the comments are kind of the Mos Eisley of the progressive blog world. So I tend to ignore them. But looking at the comments here and subtracting those that believe Rand is actually right, it looks like progressive people who read Rand have two very different reactions to the basic tenets of Rand’s thought:

1) They believe that the individually self-sufficient John Galt is an excellent ideal, but practically unachievable by human beings because of our imperfect human nature. Call this view Unattainable.

2) They believe that the individually self-sufficient John Galt is a bad ideal full stop because human dependency on others is an important and valuable feature of human nature. Call this view Undesirable.

Both reactions lead to progressive policy preferences, but for very different reasons. It’s hard to see that tension not coming home to roost in the long term.

I thought: something uncontroversial for my first post back in a while. With GOP Chairman Michael Steele’s “outrageous” remark that abortion might be a woman’s individual choice and Palin’s gladness during the campaign that her daughter had made a decision to keep her new baby, I’ve begun to wonder how many pro-life politicians really understand their position anymore. (Which is that women do not have decisions: they have babies or they commit crimes in seeking out illegal medical care.)

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Following the experience cited by a recent New York Times article, one of my friends posed the following question on her Facebook status: “Status updates: expressions of narcissism or vehicles for enhanced social intimacy?” I don’t think the dichotomy is quite right here, but that notwithstanding, I find myself defending Facebook and Facebook-like services more often lately. I concentrate on Facebook because of my familiarity with it. (I won’t defend MySpace mostly because of the nauseating web design, but I’m sure my arguments apply there as well.)

So I thought I’d take a few lines to describe why I’m inclined to defend these services. This won’t be an actual defense, even though I think one could be made. Rather, it’s the motivation behind the defense.

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WordPress has gotten pretty nice behind the scenes.

I have no idea if this post signifies a return to regular blogging or not. I just have that awkward 10 minutes before a class across campus. The first day of classes used to make me nervous. I didn’t think that would ever go away.

It’s one of those semesters that really matters in the getting-tenure grand scheme of things and everything looks like an obstacle to getting real work done, including blogging. That said, if you don’t let yourself do some things other than work, you won’t get any work done either.

It’s a pickle.