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Editorial
Challenging Times & Moral Issues
by Rick Lewis
“For the times they are a-changing.” Bob Dylan, 1963
Well, ain’t they always? Right now they are a changing in a whole collection of challenging ways all at once.
For decades, tech nerds hunched over their glowing screens in their foetid basement mancaves have talked of “The Singularity”. It is one of their chief myths. The theory goes thusly. Technological progress will continue to progress (that’s why it is called that) and also to accelerate. At some point, though, artificial intelligence will be developed to the point where it is able not only to push forward other technologies but also to design ever-better versions of itself in a reiterative fashion. At this point the rate of scientific discovery and technological advance will suddenly spike, climbing too fast to comprehend. This is the Singularity, and beyond it lies a world – good or bad – that cannot be predicted even in principle. (For more, see the works of I.J. Good, Ray Kurzweil and others.)
Sceptics long saw this as just an amusing theory, an intriguing piece of sci-fi speculation. Yet science generally and AI specifically are now advancing at such a breakneck pace that some people are speculating that the Singularity is real and is almost upon us. Be that as it may, galloping technological change is throwing up new ethical problems almost faster than we can write them down, let alone solve them.
The lead article of this issue is about one such. Gene editing technology has opened up the serious prospect of recreating some species long extinct, such as the dire wolf, the woolly mammoth and the dodo. Though as our contributor John Kennedy Philip points out, it would be not so much a rebirth of these species, but the creation of new strains of their modern cousins, lightly genetically tweaked to give them some of the characteristics of the long-lost breeds. Why do scientists wish to do this? Is it a desire to be like gods? Is it from the insatiable curiosity that drives our species upwards, upwards through the swirling smoke of the destruction we cause on the way? Is it out of guilt for the many species driven to oblivion by our own ancestors? Is it related somehow to the urge to achieve immortality? Maybe once we’ve thoroughly wiped ourselves out, our AIs will open a sealed envelope containing instructions on how to “bring back homo sapiens” by CRISPR-editing the DNA of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees?
As well as de-extinction, our ‘moral issues’ theme includes articles on four other issues with a strong ethical dimension: vaccination; job searches; disabled rights and climate change.
Vaccination has become a culture wars flashpoint, with views ranging across an entire spectrum from amazingly colourful conspiracy theories through to scepticism, caution and then every conceivable degree of positive support. On top of this, pressuring people to be vaccinated raises fundamental concerns around civil liberties. Our themed article on this topic, a little controversially perhaps, argues – on the basis of three different influential ethical approaches – for a duty to make vaccination mandatory during a pandemic.
Another themed article discusses the ethics of seeking and accepting a job – or of keeping a job, if you already have one. What if the job is appealing and offers you generous remuneration and glowing prospects, but for one reason or another you find it ethically worrisome? Should you walk away? Perhaps it is possible to develop some general guidelines, which is what our contributor attempts to do here. The ethical job question reminds me of a joke advert I once saw: “Looking for a safe job? We’re doing one on Friday. Contact Buster, Nobby and Big Fred.”
Disabled rights are an important moral issue themselves, but as the article by Lee Clarke points out, are intertwined with one of the most profound and central questions in the whole of philosophy, namely, what is the nature of our common humanity?
A recurrent theme throughout human history has been our willingness to pass the buck for our misdeeds. “I was only following orders”; “He told me to do it”; “My mate said nobody would notice”; and now “There are millions of people doing the same thing, so my contribution is irrelevant.” If everyone else is doing the same bad thing we do, that usually makes us feel better about it. Even more so in cases such as climate change, where the consequences of our own individual action or actions are so tiny compared with the overall scale of the problem. This article discusses climate change – an existential problem anyway, glug glug, but one that may also have implications for any situation in which the individually inoffensive actions of a large number of people collectively have some calamitous effect.
The moral issues in this issue are a fair spread of those currently wrinkling the brows of the world. Each article in our themed section concerns some core philosophical conundrum which we hope will interest all of our readers. However, it’s pretty likely that the specific views of at least some of our authors on the moral topics under discussion will clash with your own. Still, to quote what Voltaire allegedly once said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
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