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A New Humanist article, looking at the ethics of the death penalty, and drawing on philosophy, logic, history, and religion to try to arrive at a rational position on it.  

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A New Humanist article, looking at the ethics of the death penalty, and drawing on philosophy, logic, history, and religion to try to arrive at a rational position on it.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What steps should we go through to arrive at a conclusion on an ethical issue?

KEY TERMS Immortality of the soul, Evidence, Expiation, Logical vs. emotional, Morally justifiable, Utilitarianism and deontology, Structural implications, Sovereignty

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"Winter's Gibbet" in Northumberland marks the site of a murder and execution in the late 18th century. Credit: Alamy

On 9 February last year, the then-deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, called for the return of capital punishment to the UK. "Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed," he said. "You know that, don't you? 100 per cent success rate." Six months later, the former nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of seven counts of murder and six of attempted murder for babies in her care. A poll taken soon after suggested that two thirds of the British public supported the return of the death penalty in cases such as Letby's. Not for the first time, the idea of capital punishment was back on the agenda. But in some sense it has always been there.

Although the last execution in Britain took place in 1964, it was not until 1998 that capital punishment was finally abolished, with the remaining two instances - for treason and piracy with violence - replaced by life imprisonment. (Astonishingly beheading, from where we get the phrase "capital punishment", the removal of the head, was still the punishment for treason as late as 1973.)

In truth, Anderson was on safe electoral ground in refloating the idea. UK polls have consistently shown majority support for capital punishment when it comes to certain crimes. These crimes have changed over time depending on particular social issues - having fallen below 50 per cent overall support in 2015, fear of terrorism seems to have pushed the figures back up, as the Yorkshire Ripper did in the 1980s, and child murders in the 2000s. The perceived merits of the most severe form of retributive justice seem to be a reaction to social events, at least for what we might sardonically call "swing voters" on the issue.

Capital punishment has, as a legal practice, been with us for millennia. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, composed between 1755 and 1750 BCE, calls for any man who burgles a home to be hung in front of the place he burgled. Later, the Old Testament lists a series of crimes requiring the death penalty, including murder, violating the Sabbath, sorcery and blasphemy, while in Ancient Greece the first recorded lawmaker Draco - from whom we get the word "draconian" - produced a written code setting out a number of crimes for which death was the punishment.

Famously, one of those who would be executed under Ancient Greek law was Socrates. Convicted in 399 BCE of "impiety" and "corrupting the young", he carried out his own execution by drinking hemlock. If we grant that western philosophy as we have come to know it is born with Socrates, then we can see that its relationship to capital punishment is more than merely intellectual. The two are enmeshed just as surely as the death penalty is with western religion, via its other most famous victim, Jesus Christ.

In fact, the final Socratic dialogue by his student, Plato, is not far removed in tone from the Scriptures as they describe the last days of Jesus. Both, in their own ways, explore questions around the immortality of the soul. Both supply moving accounts of the victim's last moments, their final words. And both argue that it is a corrupt and corrupting society which has led to this outcome, and that the "soul" of humans needs this purification.

More dramatically, in each case the "victim" in some sense offers themselves up to their fate. Jesus knows Judas will betray him, and accepts the kiss. In the case of Socrates there may even have been an option to name his own punishment, as the classicist Paul Cartledge argues in Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice. At first Socrates joked he should be rewarded instead of punished. Not seeing the funny side, the jurors - 501 citizens of good standing - voted for the death penalty, which Socrates accepted immediately. He said, as Cartledge puts it, that "he owed it to the city under whose laws he had been raised to honour those laws to the letter."

In this, Socrates was not simply invoking the law, but also the religious strictures of his society. He was not against the state's right to kill. By taking this position he established support for the death penalty as part of the western philosophical tradition.

Arguing for abolition

In a series of seminars given between 1999 and 2001, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was startled to find support for capital punishment running through western thought, held by some of its leading lights - from Plato to Kant, Hegel to Nietzsche. That a discipline which for the most part believes itself humane could show constant support for what many would regard as the least humane of acts is remarkable. But it must also mean something, Derrida argued. Perhaps only about philosophy, but more likely about all of society and life.

Derrida himself thought the death penalty was wrong. He talks with genuine anger about George W. Bush's use of it as governor of Texas. But merely to say it is wrong, Derrida argued, is unhelpful. If one is to argue for abolition, one must do so as effectively as those who argue for its use.

Leaving aside Anderson's argument about the death penalty's "100 per cent success rate", the traditional contemporary argument for the death penalty tends to be that it acts as a deterrent. To kill is to be killed. But there is little solid evidence to support the idea that an individual who has reached a point where they wish to kill, due to passion or dispassion, will reconsider in light of the possible consequences. While some philosophers have proposed this as a sound argument, for most this has not been the central concern.

For Socrates and Plato, for instance, one argument for the death penalty was that it provided society with a form of expiation. Here we have the idea of the scapegoat, not unfamiliar to Christian or Jewish scholars, its antecedents in some societies predating written law. In English, the term "scapegoat" is derived from the Book of Exodus, describing an ancient Jewish practice on Yom Kippur where a goat was literally driven away to die, taking the sins of society with it. We can see that the way a society designates its current threats, real or imagined, brings out the desire to scapegoat. The only way to avoid "all against all" is to make "all against one". We hide our animus towards everyone by aiming it at someone in particular. Thus we bond. It is easy to see how this can be used for political power.

More often, however, philosophers have seen the central question as logical rather than emotional. Does the state have the right to take the life of one of its citizens? Is it ever morally justifiable to do so? And if so, what grants the state this right?

These questions tend to be considered in two different ways, broadly aligned with the philosophical schools of utilitarianism and deontology. The former argues that we must aim for the "greatest good for the greatest number". So if the death penalty is good for the most people, for instance as a deterrent that reduces crime, it is arguably a moral good. The latter argues there are moral rules or absolutes, applicable in all situations ("deon" means "duty").

Deontology tends to focus on the idea of retribution - an eye for an eye. Immanuel Kant, who is often seen as the philosophical father of deontology, argued that there are moral absolutes, which he called "categorical imperatives". It was on a principle of equality that the law of retribution was upheld. "If ... he has committed a murder, he must die," Kant argued. "In this case, there is no substitute that will satisfy the requirements of legal justice."

Note that Kant here only calls for capital punishment for murder. Philosophical discussion around the death penalty has increasingly coalesced around the idea that only crimes in which others are killed deserve death, and that the method of execution be as humane as possible. (No horrific tortures such as that suffered by the attempted regicide Robert-François Damiens in 1757, whose dismemberment was described in the opening chapter of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.) Perhaps disingenuously, capital punishment in philosophy texts often seems a bloodless affair. The one time that capital punishment was suspended in the US, it was over questions of cruelty of method rather than absolute right.

So absolute is Kant's moral imperative that "even if a civil society were to dissolve ... the last murderer in prison would first have to be executed" so that nobody could be "regarded as accomplices in the public violation of justice". The act of murder demands the death of the murderer - not for practical reasons, but for moral reasons only. It is hard to think of a position further from utilitarianism than this. The death penalty is not a means to an end; it is an end in itself, caused by the committing of the crime.

But Kant's notion that there is equality between crime and punishment here is a difficult one to sustain. To believe it "categorically" is to believe that anyone who robs should be robbed, or anyone committing arson should have their house burned down. As Derrida has noted, no two killings can ever be the same, whether by an individual or by the state as punishment for the first, since neither the circumstances, nor the reasons, nor the consequences can be replicated. But Kant remains, at least in philosophy, the strongest and most unequivocal advocate of the death penalty. So it is against Kant that we must argue.

Of course, all the usual arguments against moral absolutism apply. Kant's argument does not take into account the circumstances of the killer in question. It could be that the act was committed in self-defence or in ignorance. There are also cases of diminished responsibility - such as the mental capacity of the murderer at the time of the killing, or factors such as previous abuse suffered by the perpetrator. There are cases which we would now class as "manslaughter", where the perpetrator is ruled to have acted without malice aforethought.

A question of sovereignty

But the question Derrida wants to ask is not necessarily about moral right or wrong (although he asks that too). Nor is it about whether mistakes might be made - the argument that one innocent death invalidates any number of "correct" executions. What is vital here is the structural implications of the death penalty. Not so much "does the state have the right to take a life?" as: "what does it mean if we grant the state that right?"

This is a question of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the state, and the sovereignty of our selves. In consenting to the death penalty, we have decided that our society should have the right to set the time and date of our death. But more than this, for Derrida, the death penalty is in fact the foundation of law. By establishing whether the sovereign can kill us, we build the laws and our idea of justice. The sovereign in a state with the death penalty has not only the power to kill, but the power to absolve. This means they are able to stand outside the law.

We see this in the US in the concept of the pardon - the president has the right to intervene. So the body which makes the law (the king, or the parliament, or the president) can also go beyond it. Thus the death penalty is not simply about punishment. It is also about death - all death - since we are offering the state the right to decide the limits of our mortality.

In some cases, such as the UK - our titular head of state aside - sovereignty rests with a government to which we allow certain powers, and which we limit through democratic institutions (voting, the courts and so on). The British government in the 21st century has so far resisted re-introducing the death penalty, despite widespread support from the public. Yet our laws can seem increasingly oppressive, and while the fury over the Letby murders may have died down (and Lee Anderson has departed from his role as Conservative deputy chair) there are sure to be future periods of political pressure.

It's a decision of great importance, even if the punishment would apply to a tiny minority of cases - for the "absolute worst crimes", as is often proposed. The death penalty is not simply another expansion of state power, but a fundamental change in the relationship between the state and each individual. It is to consent to an absolute power of the state. This in turn changes all of our relationships to death. It is no surprise that US states with capital punishment have the highest rates of homicide. Mortality becomes a plaything.

Whether to reintroduce capital punishment is not only a policy question. It is an existential one. From the time of Socrates until now, it has not only been a question about death, but about the very nature of life.
This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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The majority of British people are in favour of the death penalty in extreme cases. But its use would fundamentally alter our society

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A New Humanist article, looking at why lie detector tests are being used more often in the UK, despite being based on unscientific and unjust principles. 

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A New Humanist article, looking at why lie detector tests are being used more often in the UK, despite being based on unscientific and unjust principles. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What fallacy is the lie detector test based on, and why can that be a dangerous assumption? Given the lack of scientific evidence for the accuracy of lie detectors, why did they become used so widely in the US from the 1920s onwards? Why is it significant that courts have never allowed lie detector results to be regarded as admissible evidence? Which members of society does Amit Katwala say are most vulnerable to abuse at the hands of lie detectors? In what way has the use of lie detectors in the UK become politicized? To wrap up: How can political and commercial agendas prevent us from producing knowledge about the world in an objective way?

KEY TERMS Unjust, Debunked, False positives, Scientific validity, Truth, Subjective observation vs. objective measurement, Dangerous fallacy, Collecting evidence

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A scene from "Arrested Development" (2004). Despite their flaws, lie detectors have seeped into popular culture

You'll be familiar with the scene. A hard-nosed cop, a nervous suspect, the slow scratching of needles. In the hundred years since it was invented, the polygraph machine - or lie detector - has oozed into every crevice of America's justice system and popular culture, appearing in true crime documentaries, blockbuster movies and daytime TV shows, as well as interrogation rooms.

What you might not know, however, is that lie detectors are increasingly being used in the UK too. A lack of transparency from police forces means it's difficult to know exactly how the polygraph is being used, and to what extent. What's certain is that convicted terrorists and sex offenders are now being tested on the polygraph after parole to make sure they're complying with the terms of their probation. In October 2023, a Ministry of Justice report revealed that a total of 88 lie detector tests had been carried out on 39 people since June 2021, leading to four paroled terrorism offenders being sent back to prison - one for failing to comply with the polygraph test, three for revealing "risk-related information" during one of their tests.

Good news, on the surface. The system works! But there's a problem. Ever since it was invented, the polygraph test has been repeatedly debunked. It's inaccurate, unscientific and biased. Results vary wildly depending on who's conducting the test, and who's taking it. It has a tendency to produce false positives or coerce innocent people into admitting things they didn't do. It has helped put criminals behind bars, but it's also been used to perpetrate gross miscarriages of justice.

"The scientific validity of the polygraph test is highly questionable," Marion Oswald and Kyriakos Kotsoglou, who research the use of lie detectors in the English penal system at the University of Northumbria's law school, tell me. "Even the UK Government focuses on the utility of the polygraph (the increased number of confessions), not on its validity." It puts pressure on people to tell you things, but it can't tell you whether those things are actually true.

As far back as 1965, a US committee on government operations concluded that "people have been deceived by a myth that a metal box in the hands of an investigator can detect truth or falsehood". The UK government claims it's 80 to 90 per cent accurate, but rigorous scientific research puts that figure as low as 65 per cent.

So why are governments and police forces in the UK increasing their use of the lie detector?

A more human method of solving crime?

To answer that question, we have to go back to the 1920s and to John Larson, a rookie police officer in Berkeley, California. Larson was by all accounts a terrible cop. He missed burglaries while getting milkshakes, got into fistfights with his colleagues and managed to crash two patrol cars in one day while learning to drive. He wanted to be a criminologist and saw his time in the police as a way to get hands-on knowledge of crime before moving into academia. And he happened to land at one of the most forward-thinking police forces in the country.

The Berkeley Police Department was run by August Vollmer, now considered the "father of modern policing". He was one of the first police chiefs in America to give his officers radios and vehicles to cover more ground, and he pioneered the use of crime scene photography and finger-printing. In an attempt to make policing more efficient and humane, he hired college graduates like Larson instead of the more thuggish types who populated forces at the turn of the century.

In the spring of 1921, Vollmer was flicking through a criminology journal looking for a paper he'd submitted when he chanced on an article by William Moulton Marston, a Harvard psychologist who'd noticed that people's blood pressure seemed to rise when they told untrue stories. (Marston would go on to create the comic book character Wonder Woman and her "lasso of truth" which compelled all who touched it to honesty.)

Vollmer wondered, as he often did, whether this insight could be used to solve crimes, and he summoned John Larson into his office. Together, they came up with a plan to systematise Marston's insight about lying and blood pressure, and turn it from a subjective observation into an objective measurement that could be used in criminal investigations.

Larson went away and a few weeks later came back with an ugly-looking device that combined a blood pressure cuff with rubber tubes that wrap around a subject's chest to measure breathing, two moving styluses and a rolling drum of charcoal-blacked paper. The first lie detector machine.

Here's how it's meant to work. A polygraph exam begins with a series of "yes or no" control questions with known answers: is your name John? Are you sitting in a chair? These are to set a baseline for how a person's body will react when they're speaking the truth. That's followed by target questions: did you steal the car? Did you kill him? By comparing the record of a person's pulse and blood pressure between the baseline questions and the target questions, a skilled polygraph examiner is meant to be able to tell when they're lying.

It relies on liars being nervous. But that's a dangerous fallacy. Honest people can be nervous about being wrongly accused, which is one of the reasons the polygraph has coerced hundreds of innocent people into confessing to crimes they didn't commit, as logged by the attorney-led NGO the Innocence Project. Some people can control their emotions well enough to beat a polygraph test. Others simply don't feel those emotions in the first place. With a bit of training, anyone can learn to beat a polygraph test, for instance by exaggerating their responses to the baseline questions so their lies don't stand out. There's no tell-tale sign of lying that's true of everyone all the time - no
Pinocchio's nose.

John Larson figured all that out pretty quickly as he began to use the polygraph on real-world crimes, starting with petty thefts in the women's dorms at the University of Berkeley. Already, the problematic dynamics that the machine introduced were becoming apparent - the first real-world polygraph test Larson ever conducted was on Margaret Taylor, a college student 10 years his junior who'd had some jewellery stolen from her room. A year later, Larson married her.

He had begun the experiment with noble intentions. Larson wanted his lie detector to create a more humane method of solving crimes - to replace the cruel beatings and the third-degree interrogations that his police peers would dole out. But in that first year, as word of the polygraph spread and it began to be used in murder investigations and tabloid scandals, it grew too fast for him to control. He started to have doubts about the machine, particularly when Henry Wilkens - a San Francisco mechanic accused of plotting his wife's death - passed a polygraph test despite clear evidence that he was involved. But by then it was too late. The device became, in Larson's view, "a Frankenstein's monster". And in his mind, it was pretty clear who was to blame for that.

He'd first crossed paths with Leonarde Keeler when the latter was a sickly but precocious high school student - a family friend of Larson's boss, Vollmer. The young Keeler was an amateur magician adept at sleight of hand. But from the moment Vollmer invited him to watch Larson interrogating a suspect in the basement of Berkeley's City Hall, Keeler was hooked on the lie detector. It became his new obsession, and as Larson tried to firm up the science of the machine, Keeler began streamlining the machinery, with a view to making something he could sell.

It drove a wedge between the two men. Keeler was soon running his own investigations, despite a lack of scientific or police training, and making headlines with sensationalist claims. He commercialised the machine, selling units to police forces and businesses all over America. He was probably responsible for the first uses of the lie detector in the UK, too. Although the machine never really caught on in the same way here, we know that Keeler sold one device to the department store Selfridges.

A potent and popular weapon

The polygraph has never been admissible in federal court in the US, but thanks to Keeler it infiltrated (Larson would say infected) every other part of American society. Police forces loved it because it was a way of extracting a confession from a suspect, rather than having to go to the expense of collecting evidence and preparing for a trial. You couldn't force someone to take a polygraph test, but refusing would look very incriminating.

Employers loved it because they could use it to strike fear into the hearts of any employees considering sneaking money from the till. Until the practice was banned in the 1980s, large companies in the US ran regular screening tests on employees at all levels. At one point, McDonald's was running lie detector tests on its cashiers.

Governments learned to love it, too. During the "red scare" of the 1950s, when US Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped America into a frenzied anti-communist witch hunt, the polygraph became a potent tool: you could use it to collect compromising material on government employees to keep them loyal, or as a potent weapon against your political enemies. And if you're looking for the reason why their use is growing in the UK, that may be part of the answer.

Leonarde Keeler was the first enterprising soul to see the commercial potential of the lie detector, but he was far from the last. The last hundred years have seen waves of investment and research into different types of deception detection: polygraphs in the 1920s, infrared lasers to measure body temperature in the 1970s, voice stress analysis in the 1990s, micro-expressions and brain scans in the 2000s and pupil dilation in the 2010s, along with the use of artificial intelligence to combine data from multiple sources in order to produce "honesty scores".

But no matter what their creators claim, these technologies all suffer from the same fatal flaw as the polygraph. There is no such thing as a reliable lie detector. They are often just an elaborate piece of theatre - a sleight of hand like the ones Keeler used to perform to impress his classmates. A confidence trick. Sometimes, the mere mention of a lie detector can be enough to cause someone to confess: in the 1980s, police officers in Detroit managed to get a suspect to confess using a photocopier. They put his hand on it, and then got it to print out sheets of paper with "He's Lying" written on them.

I spent two years researching the past, present and future of deception detection for my book Tremors in the Blood, and I quickly noticed a pattern. Investment in lie detectors rises at times of political and social tension: the biggest spike in interest came in the years after 9/11. There were also surges in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, correlating with Republican governments and foreign military campaigns.

They also tend to be targeted at the most vulnerable in society, or convenient scapegoats. In Larson and Keeler's time that was largely young women and the mentally ill, in the 1950s it was suspected communists and homosexuals, and in the 2000s it was suspected terrorists. Today, it's asylum seekers and migrants. The latest lie detector technologies are being designed for use at borders in Europe and the US.

Infiltrating the UK

Governments like to use lie detectors as a propaganda tool, to show they're being tough on whatever group is the scapegoat of the moment. Between 2007 and 2010, for instance, a pilot scheme saw UK councils using voice stress analysis to try and identify benefits cheats over the phone. After 9/11, the US government invested millions in training border guards in how to read "microexpressions" - almost imperceptible facial movements that, according to researcher Paul Ekman, could be used to tell when someone was lying. In the six years after the scheme was launched in 2006, it stopped approximately 30,000 people a year, none of whom were terrorists. Meanwhile, at least 16 terrorists managed to enter the country undetected.

Right now, the UK has a government that wants to show it's being tough on crime. It wants positive tabloid headlines about how it's clamping down on terrorists and sex offenders. The headline-grabbing nature of the lie detector - our fascination with it - makes it an easy way of getting that coverage. The problems come when institutions like government and the police start to believe their own lies.

We don't really know how the polygraph is being used in the UK today. In 2020, Northumbria law researchers Oswald and Kotsoglou sent Freedom of Information requests to every UK police force to try and find out. There was a worrying lack of transparency: 37 out of 46 would neither confirm nor deny if they were using the machine.

Perhaps because the polygraph hasn't caught on here until recently, there's not really a legal framework for how, when and if it should be used. The National Police Chiefs Council strongly discourages its use, but there's currently nothing to stop police forces from trying it during interrogations as their US colleagues do. And because the lie detector has been positioned as protecting the British public from sex offenders and terrorists, it's hard for politicians to urge caution or restraint. When the Scottish National Party blocked the use of polygraphs on terror suspects in Scotland because of concerns about their merits, the party was attacked by the Sun and by Conservative MPs: "weak on terrorism, weak on security".

The problem isn't the use of polygraphs per se. "Polygraph testing is an interrogation tool, not a lie detector, as demonstrated by the emphasis on disclosures made during the interview process," Oswald and Kotsoglou explain. "Questions remain about whether those disclosures would have been made in any event through normal offender management processes, and whether the process relies on convincing offenders that the machine can detect lying." Defenders of the use of lie detector screening tests will tell you they're just part of a suite of different tools used to assess whether someone is suitable for parole.

But Kotsoglou calls it "zombie forensics". Like the security theatre that pervaded airports after 9/11, it risks giving investigators a false sense of security - that if the machine says someone's telling the truth, then they must be. "We are already on the slippery slope with regards to the polygraph," Kotsoglou told me in 2020. "This becomes a threat in terrorism. A false sense of security could have literally fatal consequences." The same could be said of sex offences.

When you bring flawed technology into a previously human process, there's a natural instinct to give it more weight than it deserves, or to use it as psychological prop or a propaganda weapon. That's the painful lesson John Larson and Leonarde Keeler learned after they unleashed the polygraph on the world. We'd do well to learn it too.
This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

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Lie detector tests are bogus. Why are we increasing their use in Britain?

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An Al Jazeera article, reporting on the latest situation in the Julian Assange case.

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An Al Jazeera article, reporting on the latest situation in the Julian Assange case.

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Julian Assange US extradition ruling updates: Assange wins brief reprieve

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Judges say US authorities have three weeks to provide assurances, with a final decision to be made in late May.

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A Big Think video, in which Kelly Richmond Pope explores the parameters of people’s ethical behaviour. 

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A Big Think video, in which Kelly Richmond Pope explores the parameters of people’s ethical behaviour. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  What does Kelly Richmond Pope do for a living, and how might that impact on her approach to ethics? What does she mean when she says, “We need to own the unethical aspects of our decisions” - and what examples does she give to support this? To what extent is your own moral code based on the extent to which you can get away with things? To wrap up: Should we assess the morality of a decision via its impact on the world (consequentialism), or based on its inherent rightness and wrongness (deontology)?

KEY TERMS Rationalize, Honest, Internal controls, Opportunistic

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What would you be willing to do if you thought you'd get away with it? Kelly Richmond Pope, a forensic accountant, delves into how we often unintentionally ignore our moral compasses and veer into unethical behavior when possible consequences are intangible. Kelly says we do this mainly by convincing ourselves that everyone else behaves similarly. But is that true?

She shares the results of an ethics survey she uses in her class, where her students found themselves divided about whether a social lunch with a colleague, discussing personal and work matters, should be expensed as a work-related activity. She also shares her experience of accidentally receiving an extra handbag and how different people advised her to proceed.

Maybe we're all a little unethical. But Kelly assures us that there's no need to panic. She believes that acknowledging these vulnerabilities and implementing internal controls can help us prevent unethical behavior. Fostering an environment of self-awareness and accountability can help us all make better decisions in the future.

KELLY RICHMOND POPE: I think we are not always as honest with ourselves as we may need to be. Because if we think that we're not gonna get caught, a lot of us rationalize what we do. "Everybody's ethical!" Right, everybody's ethical. You're not as ethical as you think. For example, a lot of us plan parties during work hours. A lot of us take work supplies home. A lot of us use our work computers for personal. So it's interesting how we rationalize what we do.

But if we really are honest and ask ourselves, "If I had to report this, would it be a problem?" When we're honest about that, that will prevent us from making future mistakes. Something I do in my class is at the very beginning, they have to do an ethics survey- this is the one that gets people. I ask them, "You and a colleague in the same industry go to a work lunch. You spend five minutes talking about work stuff, and an hour talking about personal stuff. Is this a work lunch that you would expense out?" I have never gotten 100% agreement. About 50% say that it is a work lunch, 50% say it's personal. The 50% that say it's a work lunch say, "Oh, this is networking, and your intention was to talk about work." The other 50% say, "It's totally personal because you already knew the person and this was strategic."

We need to own the unethical aspects of our decisions, because if we can own it and be honest about what we would get away with, then I think that can protect us.

I'll tell you something that happened to me. I got a handbag that I had ordered, and I was so excited to get it, in a big box at my door, unwrapped it, there was a handbag. And then the next day, another handbag came and I didn't order two handbags, I ordered one handbag. What shocked me was what my village said to me about it. "Guess what happened? I got two bags, but I only purchased one. I'm gonna send the bag back." They were like, "Are you crazy? You could sell that bag on eBay. Who's gonna find out?" So I started asking people: No one told me to send the bag back.

What if I sell the bag on eBay, and then the company contacts me? Now, I'm in a tough position. What am I gonna say? Am I gonna say I sold the bag? Am I gonna say, "Oh, I didn't get a bag delivered to me, you must have a mistake." What if the girl lost her job? Do you have to think about how your decisions impact a larger issue? So I sent the bag back. I went back to everybody I talked to and told them I called the store, they didn't even know that they sent the bag and you know what they all told me. You're crazy, Kelly, you could have gotten away with it.

So it just goes to show you when no one's looking, that we think that we're not gonna get caught, we're not as ethical as we think. I think the path forward is to recognize that no one is ethical, and we all need internal controls around us to protect us, because that's the only way we're going to really own up to our opportunistic selves. We are so ethical that we would never do anything wrong- until we're caught.

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How do you rationalize your unethical behaviors?

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Kelly Richmond Pope, a forensic accountant, shares a simple test that puts your ethics under the spotlight.

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AN ABC article, looking at the decision to make a Danish artist pay back a gallery $100,000 for an exhibition of blank canvases. 

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AN ABC article, looking at the decision to make a Danish artist pay back a gallery $100,000 for an exhibition of blank canvases. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  What was Jens Haaning meant to do with the 500,000 Danish Kroner given to him by the Kunsten Museum? What did he actually do with it? How did he justify this, artistically and financially? Do you consider his action to have been ‘real’ art? To wrap up: Is there a line between artistic expression and social protest?

KEY TERMS Statement, Power and inequality, Conceptual artist, Humoristic

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A Danish artist has been forced to repay almost 110 thousand dollars to a museum after submitting two blank canvasses for an exhibition.

The piece entitled 'Take the Money and Run' is meant to be a commentary on poor wages.

It's caused quite a stir in the arts community but now a court has determined the move amounts to a breach of contract, and has ordered him to give the money back.

More Information

Featured:
Lasse Anderson, director, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art
Jens Haaning, artist
Joanna Mendelssohn, honarary fellow in art history, University of Melbourne
John McDonald, art critic, The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Danish artist forced to repay $110,000 after submitting blank canvases - ABC listen

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A Danish artist has been forced to repay almost 110 thousand dollars to a museum after submitting two blank canvasses for an exhibition.

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An Arts Newspaper article, investigating the story of a Russian artist who faces prison after she made a protest in a grocery story. 

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An Arts Newspaper article, investigating the story of a Russian artist who faces prison after she made a protest in a grocery story. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do you agree with Ai Weiwei that “An artist must also be an activist?” What was the nature of Sasha Skochilenko’s protest, and why did she feel obliged to make it? Do artists have an obligation to tackle moral themes in their work? Does the best art make us change our ideas and perceptions about the world? Overall, how does this article help us to understand the relationship between the arts and ethics?

KEY TERMS Protest, False information

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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An artist in St Petersburg faces up to ten years in prison for an anti-war protest in which she replaced supermarket shelf price labels with short news texts about the bombing of an art school and drama theatre in Mariupol, the besieged Ukrainian port city.

Judge Yelena Leonova, ruled that Sasha Skochilenko, 32, must be held in pre-trial detention until 31 May. She was arrested after a supermarket customer reported the labels to the police. Perekryostok was caught on security camera footage and questioned late into the night of 11 April according to her lawyer, who was quoted by independent news sources.

According to PaperPaper, a St Petersburg news site for which Skochilenko used to work and which has, like most independent news sources, been blocked in Russia, the judge said that Skochilenko is "accused of carrying out serious actions against public safety", and that "acting deliberately, she installed fragments of paper containing knowingly false information." The fact that she "has friends in Ukraine" and "a sister in France" are grounds to keep her in prison rather than under house arrest.

It is a crime to describe Russia's 24 February invasion of Ukraine as a war, according to a new law that took effect on 4 March.

Sasha Skochilenko replaced price tags with information on the war in Ukraine Image: Sever.Realii

In a social media post that has since been locked, Skochilenko wrote on 2 March that "peace postcards" left on store shelves are a way of reaching the public. The post and postcards that she created are published on Sever.Realii, a news site of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

"After all, there are still a lot of people who do not know (do not remember?) about what a miracle human life is, how beautiful and precious it is, and that violence is not a solution to problems," she wrote.

Yesterday in Moscow, in a further sign of how far authorities will go to block positive mentions of Ukraine, a concert which featured music by Valentin Silvestrov-Ukraine's most famous living composer-was raided by police. Silvestrov, 84, had to flee Kyiv in March and is now a refugee in Berlin.

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St Petersburg artist faces prison after anti-war protest in grocery store

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An artist in St Petersburg faces up to ten years in prison for an anti-war protest in which she replaced supermarket shelf price labels with short news texts about the bombing of an art school and drama theatre in Mariupol, the besieged Ukrainian port city.

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This BBC article reports on how cleaners on a London Underground train erased a new work off art by Banksy. 

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This BBC article reports on how cleaners on a London Underground train erased a new work off art by Banksy. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What’s the difference between graffiti and art? Was the act of cleaning it part of the piece? How should we judge what is, and what isn’t, art?

Key terms Graffiti, Art

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Banksy Tube graffiti: Cleaners 'unaware it was by artist'

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The artist's piece on a Circle Line train was removed before anyone knew he was responsible for it.

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A Forbes article, looking at a US family’s decision to sue Google following the death of a motorist who was following their maps.

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A Forbes article, looking at a US family’s decision to sue Google following the death of a motorist who was following their maps.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  What happened to Philip Paxson in 2022, and why has his family decided that Google is responsible? Should digital map providers be more accountable for problems associated with their platforms than other tech companies - particularly when they have sought to monetize them? Why is it significant that Google is being investigated for illegally bundling its products, and allowing them to be used by third-party apps? In general, should more be done to control the influence of social media platforms (students could tie this into recent media reports about TikTok encouraging social ‘frenzies’)? To wrap up: How important is it to understand the purpose behind social media platforms when using them to provide us with objective knowledge about the world?

KEY TERMS Negligence, Illegally bundled, Control

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Topline

A family is suing Google and several others after a husband and father of two drove his Jeep over a collapsed bridge in North Carolina while allegedly following Google Maps, causing him to drive into a creek and drown.

Key Facts

Philip Paxson died last September while driving home from his daughter's birthday party in an unfamiliar Hickory, North Carolina, neighborhood and-according to the lawsuit-following Google's directions over a bridge that had been collapsed for nine years.

The lawsuit, which lists Paxson's wife Alicia Paxson as the plaintiff, says the Snow Creek Bridge was "unmarked" and "unbarricaded" on a dark and rainy night when Paxson drove off the edge and crashed 20 feet below-photos submitted with the complaint show his car upside down and half submerged in water.

Several people told Google about the collapse in the years leading up to the death and the company failed to update its route information, the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court in North Carolina says, and one local resident said she even received an email confirmation that the report was received, but nothing was ever changed.

In addition to Google, the lawsuit targets two businesses and one individual-Tarde LLC, Hinckley Gauvain LLC and James Tarlton-as those who owned or controlled the bridge and "had a duty and responsibility to maintain the Snow Creek Bridge" but allowed it to sit in a "dangerous, hazardous and defective condition" for years.

The North Carolina State Patrol said the bridge was originally the property of a development company that has since dissolved, the Associated Press reported, and no local or state agency had taken over the upkeep despite years of calls from nearby residents who anticipated such a crash.

The lawsuit says the collapsed bridge was still depicted as a passable road on Google Maps as of April, but as of Wednesday Google suggests a different route between the two addresses in question.

The complaint, which accuses Google of gross negligence and willful and wanton conduct, asks for an unspecified amount of compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney's fees for Paxson's family, which includes his wife and two children, ages 7 and 9.

José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said the company has "the deepest sympathies for the Paxson family" and will be reviewing the case.

The car of Philip Paxson after driving off the edge of Snow Creek Bridge in North Carolina.
Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky

Crucial Quote

"Our girls ask how and why their daddy died, and I'm at a loss for words," Philip Paxson's widow said in a statement.

Key Background

Examples of drivers running into peril by following GPS and digital map providers have made the news since such apps became commonplace in the late 2000s. A group of tourists in Australia drove 50 yards offshore before their car got stuck in the mud after their GPS told them to drive across 9 miles of water to reach North Stradbroke Island, and a group visiting Washington state followed their GPS onto a "road" that turned out to be a boat launch before driving straight into water. A handful of lawsuits have been filed against map providers, including one brought by Lauren Rosenberg, a pedestrian in her mid-20s who was hit by a car while crossing the street following Google Maps' walking directions in Park City, Utah. Her lawsuit-filed in 2010-accused Google of being "careless, reckless, and negligent" in providing its directions, but it was dismissed after a judge later concluded it was not Google's responsibility to ensure walkers look for cars before crossing the road. Some have claimed the prevalence of such apps puts people in danger as they distract drivers and send them down roads that weren't built for such an influx of traffic. In 2018, a New Jersey town banned non-residents from driving on 60 of its streets during rush hours in attempts to crack down on users of apps like Waze, Google Maps or Apple.

Tangent

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting an investigation into Google Maps to determine if the company has illegally bundled its map and search products amid an already-sprawling antitrust investigation. The DOJ probe is focused on Google's control of digital maps and location data, Politico reported, and how it is used by third-party apps that provide delivery services and ride-shares.

Further Reading

As Google Turns 25, It Faces The Biggest Tech Antitrust Trial Of A Generation ( Forbes)

Google Sued For Information In $6 Billion NFL Sunday Ticket Lawsuit ( Forbes)

Lawsuits Against Google And Meta Allege Websites Are Spying On Taxpayers ( Forbes)

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Family Sues Google After Father Drowned By Following Google Maps Off Collapsed Bridge

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The family of Philip Paxson says he died after following Google Maps over a long-collapsed bridge in the dark.

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A Big Think video, in which the philosopher Peter Singer explains how we could all use ‘ethical altruism’.  

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A Big Think video, in which the philosopher Peter Singer explains how we could all use ‘ethical altruism’.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does Peter Singer extend the drowning child scenario? What is the effective altruism movement, and why do you think it became a global phenomenon? What real and hypothetical examples does Peter Singer give of effective altruism, and do these make you question the extent to which you apply an altruistic approach to life? Why do you think there is a dissonance between the care we take when making ordinary purchases, and the care we take when donating to charity? To wrap up: Could you do more to become an ‘effective altruist’? What is stopping you from doing so?

KEY TERMS  Effective altruism, Inequality, Happiness

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Peter Singer, author of "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," discusses the benefits of effective altruism and our moral obligation to help others.

Effective altruism focuses on raising the minimum living standards and encourages everyone, not just the wealthy, to give and find happiness in contributing to a better world. Singer breaks down the history of the effective altruism movement and shares the example of Zell Kravinsky, who donated most of his wealth and a kidney to a stranger, exemplifying the practice.

Singer also emphasizes the need to do thorough research before donating to any cause to ensure the greatest good.

PETER SINGER: Back in the 1970s, I wrote an article called "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which was encouraging us to be altruistic and suggested that if we were affluent then morality required that, we help people to some degree. Which I used the story of rescuing a drowning child in a shallow pond, and I said that, "If you saw such a child and you were the only person there to stop the child drowning but you didn't do it because you were wearing expensive clothes you didn't want to ruin, that would be a horrible thing to do. But if you agree that that's a horrible thing to do when the child is in front of you, then what about when the child isn't in front of you but is in a different country, but you can still be very confident that your donation will help them?"

That article got widely reprinted in a lot of philosophy anthologies, so it got used in a lot of classrooms, and among those philosophy students were two, Toby Ord and William MacAskill. They both read the article and they were interested in altruism. From very small beginnings, they built up this Effective Altruism Movement, which is now a global movement. It has followers in many, many countries, has been responsible for moving billions of dollars into more effective causes.

Effective altruism suggests that, "If you are gonna be altruistic, then you should try to be as effective as you can with what you're doing." Our species evolved in circumstances when hard times were unpredictable: there might be droughts and famines, so it was good to increase our hoard of food if we wanted to survive. And somehow, the genes for doing that remain in us. I'm not against people putting things away in case things get economically tougher, but we can do that with some of our wealth and we can be quite confident that we'll have enough and we may still have more, even beyond what we need to prepare for the future.

Zell Kravinsky was an interesting man who had an ability to make money from real estate investments. But he didn't really want the money. He was quite comfortable living with his family in a suburban home near Philadelphia. So he decided that he would give almost all of it away. Zell decided to start looking at the possibility of donating a kidney. He went to a hospital in Philadelphia and told them that he wanted to donate a kidney to a stranger- and they looked at him as if he was a bit crazy. Eventually, he did persuade them that he would like to donate a kidney to just the next person in line who was compatible. On his estimate, there was only a 1 in 4,000 chance that donating a kidney would lead to his premature death. His kidney saved a life, and he thinks that if he hadn't done that he would've been valuing his own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger.

The term 'effective altruism' actually is something that developed after Zell Kravinsky had donated both his money and his kidney; although he certainly is way out there as an outlier, it does describe what he did. So whatever your resources are- they might be money, they might be time, they might even be one of your kidneys- but if you are going to donate something like that, make sure it does the most good that it can.

We all have this attitude to everyday purchases. If your phone has died and you need a new phone, you're gonna ask around or go online. And if you came home and showed your phone to a friend and your friend said, "How much did you pay for that?" And you tell them, they say, "What? I could have got that for you for half the price." You'd feel pretty stupid. But strangely, that attitude doesn't apply to charities. So if you go and give your money to a charity, let's say it's a charity that's raising guide dogs for blind people, and you don't do research before you do that, you don't ask, "Is there some other way I could help blind people that would help more people for less money?" If you did ask that, you would find that giving money for guide dogs is not the best value for your money because it costs a lot of money to raise a guide dog. It's costs about $40,000 in the U.S. It's a good thing to do, but you can restore sight in someone who has cataracts and you can prevent people from going blind from trachoma which is a preventable cause of blindness. So what that suggests is if you wanna do good, do some research, go online find the most effective charities and give to them.

Effective altruists have been encouraging of high-net worth individuals when they give and for obvious reasons. People like Bill and Melinda Gates have done a huge amount of good in the world. For example, funding the extension of vaccination and immunization against various diseases, preventing deaths from diarrhea. There are a lot of things that they've done that have saved a very large number of lives, and that's true of some other high-net worth individuals as well. But some people are troubled by the connection between effective altruists and high-net worth individuals because they see effective altruism as not tackling the inequality in the world which they see as the basic cause or a cause of extreme poverty. I don't myself really accept that objection. For one thing, what to me is important is that, we raise the minimum level at the bottom; that we try to make everybody moderately well-off so that nobody is starving, nobody is dying from lack of basic healthcare. Everybody can educate their children. There's a whole lot of things like that. You might still say, "Well, we could make those who are worse off, better off by redistributing the wealth of those who are very wealthy." But probably wouldn't make much difference anymore. Once you've got people above those levels of serious poverty, and it might well stifle innovation because private foundations can be more innovative and more daring than governments generally are. Governments tend to be more risk-averse.

Effective altruism is not only for the rich. I'm certainly interested in encouraging everyone who has something to spare. Let's say that you buy a bottled water when there's safe water coming out of the tap. Or let's say you go and sit in a cafe to drink some coffee when you could have made coffee at home for less money. You can think about, "Is there something else I could be doing with this?" There's a strong correlation between people who give and people who are happy; that you're able to make that contribution to the world and to others who are less fortunate than you is a really rich source of happiness. In addition to that, they'll be developing a good habit, should you then start to earn more money and become more prosperous and be able to give more- so that eventually we have both the ability and the will to make sure that nobody is in extreme poverty, nobody is suffering unnecessarily and we are providing well, not only for our own generation but for future generations too.

NARRATOR: Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only community. Watch videos early and unlock full interviews.

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What is effective altruism? Philosopher Peter Singer explains

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Effective altruism isn't just for the rich. Philosopher Peter Singer shares how we can all be better at doing "good."

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A Big Think article, considering when it is, and when it isn’t, acceptable to break moral rules. 

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A Big Think article, considering when it is, and when it isn’t, acceptable to break moral rules. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why does the writer, Jonny Thompson argue humans are morally inconsistent? How does he align our moral decision-making with Daniel Kahnman’s concept of ‘thinking fast’ and ‘thinking slow’? As a final question, What does this statement about ethics mean, and do you agree: “we must live in dissonance, our beliefs wrestling one another. We must assume laws are unbreakable, yet accept that they need breaking from time to time”?

Key terms Inconsistent, Golden rule, Thinking fast & thinking slow, Deontological, Consequentialist, Absolutist rules, Dissonance

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If there's one thing that human history teaches us, it's that's we're an inconsistent lot. Humans are capricious, unreliable, and wayward. Whimsy governs life more than rigid rules. As George Bernard Shaw put it, when it comes to human nature, "the Golden Rule is that there is no golden rule."

As such, our attitudes toward following rules are not uniform. We generally accept that most rules will have their exception, or that most laws need to be at least a bit flexible. But how do our views on rule-breaking differ? And which rules should bend more than others? Our willingness or reluctance to break rules is determined by our upbringing, culture, and personality. And as a new study reveals, it even depends on the kind of reasoning we use.

No cutting!

In early 2022, a study published by Awad et al. collected data on how humans judge the acceptability of breaking well-established norms. The team was motivated, in part, by the increasing need to program ethics into AI - to make "morally competent machines." Since it's obvious that humans will break rules under certain circumstances, we have to resolve when and why that happens if we are to have AI mimic human behavior. In other words, we need to identify what second-order rules determine when to break to the first-order ones.

The team took a real-world example of rule-breaking: cutting in line. On the face of it, waiting in line is governed by a simple maxim: Everyone gets helped in the order they arrive. And yet, there are all kinds of exceptions. One example the paper gives is someone who forgets their cutlery after they placed a food order. In this case, most people would allow you to quickly pop in front to get the item.

The team presented participants with a range of scenarios in different contexts of waiting in line: at a deli, airport, or bathroom. Participants were then asked to judge whether an excuse or reason given from a list justified someone cutting in line. The participants were further invited to "tap into the underlying cognitive mechanisms" by considering what determined their decision, for example the length of delay, the benefit to the cutter, and so on.

Systems of ethical reasoning

In 2011, Daniel Kahneman introduced the non-psychology world to the idea of Thinking, Fast and Slow. In his book, Kahneman argued that human reasoning operates on two models. The "thinking fast" (System 1) approach uses predefined rules, or shortcut mental heuristics. "Thinking slow" (System 2) reasoning requires deliberation, thought, and a decision process.

Kahneman's distinction maps well onto the existing moral literature. In deontological (rule-based) ethics, we are expected to follow the rules, or satisfy some duty. This falls under System 1. In consequentialist (outcome-based) ethics, we should perform actions that maximize the best kind of outcomes, which resembles System 2 deliberation much more closely.

What the 2022 study argues is that rule-breaking considerations are governed overwhelmingly by System 2 reasoning. The team subdivided System 2 reasoning into two kinds: outcome-based thinking (e.g. "the cutting in line will help someone a lot") and agreement-based thinking (e.g. "it's socially accepted that cutting in to get tap water is okay"). People who break rules will most often exploit one or another of these System 2 models.

So, people who use their quick-fix System 1 reasoning will often consider rules to be inviolable. Inversely, whenever we consider a rule worthy of breaking, we use our deliberative System 2 reasoning: calculating consequences and social acceptability.

Living with dissonance

Awad et al. show that humans do not sit well with absolutist rules. It seems that we even reach different moral outcomes depending on whether we're using our System 1 or System 2 reasoning.

The psychological concepts found in Thinking, Fast and Slow serve as an analogue to the wider world. Our brains will sometimes need to operate instinctively from System 1-type rules, and so, too, does society. Civilization needs laws to operate. For instance, no one would ever leave the house if you thought someone would steal everything the moment you did. We need to know that we won't be killed, exploited, or betrayed the moment we let our guard down. Following rules is what allow us to get about and do things.

Yet, unreflective and inflexible laws can sometimes be just as bad. In a world of nearly 8 billion people, making around 35,000 decisions every day, it's ridiculous to assume a single rule can determine every situation. As the British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, wrote: "the complicated nature of human affairs [mean] that rules of conduct cannot be so framed as to require no exceptions, and that hardly any kind of action can safely be laid down as either always obligatory or always condemnable." We need System 2-type reasoning to make sure our rules actually work.

So, we must live in dissonance, our beliefs wrestling one another. We must assume laws are unbreakable, yet accept that they need breaking from time to time. In other words, we sometimes need to think fast about ethics, and sometimes, think slow.
Jonny Thomson runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

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Thinking fast and slow about ethics: When is it okay to cut in line?

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If there's one thing that human history teaches us, it's that's we're an inconsistent lot. Humans are capricious, unreliable, and wayward. Whimsy governs life more than rigid rules. As George Bernard Shaw put it, when it comes to human nature, "the Golden Rule is that there is no golden rule."

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This BBC article ask a very simple question, that has a complex answer: why are same-sex relationships supported within some countries, and opposed in others? 

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This BBC article ask a very simple question, that has a complex answer: why are same-sex relationships supported within some countries, and opposed in others? 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Use it to explore the impact of ethical thinking on the ‘real world’, and explore how different societies have evolved different perspectives in relation to this moral question. What are the three factors that the article identifies as determining a society’s outlook towards same-sex marriage? How do they shape the production of our ethical knowledge? Should we think in terms of ‘progress’ in terms of ethical understanding?

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When Taiwan became the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex unions, hundreds of gay people marked the occasion by registering to marry.

In many other places there has also been a shift - often a rapid one - towards more liberal attitudes.

Attitudes among the public also appear to have softened in other places including Argentina, Chile, the US, Australia, India and many in Western Europe.

But these changes do not always mean full equality. In Taiwan, for example, the government stopped short of granting full adoption rights.

Elsewhere, some nations are bringing in stricter anti-gay laws and same-sex relationships remain illegal in about 69 countries. On Friday, Kenya's High Court upheld a law banning gay sex.

Pockets of opposition

In some countries, opposition towards gay relationships is deeply entrenched and may be growing.

Elsewhere, official punishments for gay sex may provide insights into how residents, or at least their leaders, view homosexuality.

So, why does support for gay and lesbian people vary so much around the world?

One theory is that a nation's economy shapes the attitudes of its people - including how they feel about LGBT rights.

When people are concerned about things like clean water, food, shelter and safety, they can become more reliant on others.

People living in richer nations, by contrast, tend to have a lot more security.

As a result, they are more likely to have freedom to make the decisions that suit them, and to believe in self-expression.

Democracy is also thought to play a role.

In democracies, principles like equality, fairness, and the right to protest are more likely to form part of the actions of government and residents.

But people can need time to adapt to democracy.

Another factor is the role of religion.

Western Europe, with its relatively low levels of religious belief, has been at the forefront of legalising same-sex marriage. Denmark, Belgium, Norway, Spain and Sweden were among the first countries to do so.

Some Middle Eastern and African nations, where Islam or conservative Protestant religious faiths are most commonly practised, have some of the least tolerant attitudes.

But while richer, more democratic and less religious nations tend to be more tolerant, there are many exceptions.

China, for example, has low levels of religious beliefs, but polls suggest its people are a lot less supportive of gay rights than their Taiwanese neighbours.

Shift in attitudes

Nations have always differed in terms of economic development, democracy and religion. So, why have attitudes and policies changed so much over the last 20 years?

Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that all countries will, sooner or later, introduce laws that are more gay-friendly.

For example, in 2009 Uganda considered a bill which would have made gay sex punishable with death in some circumstances. In response, several nations threatened to cut their funding, and the World Bank postponed a $90m (£70.7m) loan.

Elsewhere, political candidates may back harsh laws as a way to generate publicity and gain public support.

Attitudes and policies in many nations have clearly been shifting.

But the suggestion that more will follow in their footsteps is not a foregone conclusion.

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Why are some places gay-friendly and not others?

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Attitudes towards gay people are more tolerant in some countries, but others buck the trend.

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A Conversation article, which considers the paradox of Norway and Finland having similar levels of gun ownership to the US, but far less gun crime. 

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A Conversation article, which considers the paradox of Norway and Finland having similar levels of gun ownership to the US, but far less gun crime. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do you distinguish between causation and correlation in the human sciences?

Key terms Lobbying group, ​​Evidence, Underlying factors

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In the wake of the most recent US mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 pupils and two teachers were killed by an 18-year-old armed with an assault rifle, a comparison considering how the US compares with other countries on children's deaths caused by guns is compelling.

As the independent non-profit US organisation the Children's Defense Fund has pointed out, gun violence is now the leading cause of US children's deaths. It reported that there are nine fatal shootings of children per day, that's one killing every two hours and thirty six minutes. A minority of these killings involve school or mass shootings, the majority are killings of individual children and link to routine crime and gang violence, and overwhelmingly result in the deaths of African-American and minority children.

The US stands as an extreme outlier among high income countries. The number of children killed by guns is 36.5 times higher in the US, compared to many other high income countries including Austria, Australia, Sweden, England and Wales, according to analysis recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine. In recent years international research has also proven conclusively that greater levels of gun ownership are closely associated with higher rates of gun violence.

An audit by the Democrat-leaning policy and research organisation the Center for American Progress of all 50 US states found a close correlation between the states with the toughest gun laws and states with the lowest gun crime rates. Meanwhile, international research has compared national gun laws, rates of firearm ownership and gun violence rates. The results are striking as the graph, below, suggests:

International levels of gun crime

Interestingly, European societies that come close to US rates of gun ownership, in terms of gun owners per 100 people, (but with hunting rifles and shotguns rather than handguns), such as Finland and Norway, are among the safest societies internationally with regards to gun violence.

Researchers talk about "civilised" and "de-civilising" gun cultures, cultures where gun ownership is associated with traditional values of respect and responsibility, and others where gun availability largely empowers the criminally minded and unstable, adding to the violence and chaos. High levels of social cohesion, low crime rates and internationally high levels of trust and confidence in police and social institutions do appear to reduce levels of gun homicide.

The flipside to this finding, however, is that high gun ownership in countries including Finland, Sweden and Switzerland do have significantly higher rates of suicide using guns. The UK and Japan, with some of the toughest gun laws in the world, always record the lowest rates of gun homicide, chiefly by virtue of their virtual prohibition of handguns, the criminal weapon of choice. By contrast, the death tolls in recent US mass shootings have been very much exacerbated by perpetrators using assault rifles, with their larger magazines and rapid fire capabilities.

Society as a factor

As a result of the new international focus in gun control research (there was a time when the only academic research on firearms took place in the US, and a large part of it funded, directly and indirectly, by the influential US lobbying group National Rifle Association) wider questions came under the spotlight. Researchers started to focus less upon the gun as an independent variable and instead began to address contexts and the different cultures of gun use. They also began to acknowledge, as criminologists have always known, that introducing new laws seldom changes anything on its own - offenders break laws.

Gun researchers now focus increasingly upon wider "gun control regimes" which have a big part to play in increasing or reducing levels of gun violence. These regimes include policing and criminal justice systems, systems of political accountability, welfare safety nets, comprehensive education provision and cultures of trust and confidence. And as the diagram above suggests, although the US is seen as the most exceptional gun culture among affluent democratic nations, in terms of death rates it is dwarfed by many other poorer and more conflicted societies, such as South Africa, Jamaica and Honduras.

Attempts in the US to confront shootings, but without restricting gun ownership in recent years include scaling up surveillance - especially in schools where pupils, parents and teachers form part of a network keeping a watching eye on colleagues and pupils. They look for signs of trouble and are able to sound the alarm. More ambitiously, the Violence Project has sought to compile evidence profiles, learning from what we already know about rampage killers and trying to predict where their behaviour, social media engagements and utterances might ring alarm bells.

However, the evidence is now indisputable that more guns in a given country translates directly into more gun violence.

It is significant that the immediate reaction to the Ulvade school massacre has tended to focus on narrow questions of school security and an apparent delay in police intervention, rather than the many underlying factors which make the US such a comparatively dangerous place for children.

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US shootings: Norway and Finland have similar levels of gun ownership, but far less gun crime

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Gun ownership is not the only factor that needs considering to tackle gun crime, an expert says.

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Two Vox articles that look at the issue of mass shootings in the US, and the evidence that gun control could help to reduce it. 

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Two Vox articles that look at the issue of mass shootings in the US, and the evidence that gun control could help to reduce it. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE (See other article here) Why is it so difficult to explain the reasons for mass shootings occurring in the USA? How do our political (and other) perspectives influence the way we view and understand this issue? Should we approach the issue in a comparative way - or view it solely via factors found within the USA? Why is it so difficult to establish consensus on mass shootings and gun control? How is the issue complicated by media sources having their own biases?

Key terms Correlation, Causal, Comparisons, Passionate, Evidence

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Americans are broadly in favor of regulations on assault weapons and background checks for gun purchases, a new poll from Data for Progress and Vox finds. However, these measures are likely to only have a moderate impact on the country'sskyhigh rates of gun violence.

The poll, conducted March 19-21 (after the shootings in Atlanta but before the shooting in Boulder, Colorado), surveyed 1291 likely voters and has a 3 percentage point sampling margin of error. A third of respondents said they have a gun in the home. (Other surveys not restricted to likely voters have shown gun ownership rates of around 40 percent, indicating this sample may have fewer gun owners than is representative or that the average voter is less likely to own guns than the average American.)

Following the recent shootings, calls for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban have rebounded through the Democratic Party, including from President Joe Biden.

The poll finds both of these policies are widely popular. When asked if they would support "a bill that would require a background check for all gun purchases," 65 percent of respondents said yes, with just 27 percent opposed - including 48 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of independents.

When asked about "banning the manufacture, possession, and sale of semi-automatic guns, known as assault rifles," 61 percent were in favor - including 45 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of independents. These findings are consistent with other surveys showing majority support for these measures.

Democrats have been calling for gun control measures for years in response to mass shootings, but the efficacy of these proposals is less often discussed. The fundamental reality about the US gun problem is that it's a function of how many guns Americans have. Heavily reducing that stockpile may be the only way to significantly reduce America's out of control gun deaths, as Vox's German Lopez has highlighted in his reporting on the issue:

Gun control policies that don't confront the core issue - that America simply has too many guns - are doomed to merely nibble around the edges. Everywhere in the world, people get into arguments. Every country has residents who are dangerous to themselves or others because of mental illness. Every country has bigots and extremists. But here, it's uniquely easy for a person to obtain a gun, letting otherwise tense but nonlethal conflicts escalate into deadly violence.

Universal background checks don't directly influence the number of guns owned by Americans. As Lopez explained, they "can screen out some people from getting a gun ... recent studies suggest even universal background checks, on their own, don't have a big impact on gun deaths." Another policy in the DFP/Vox poll drawing support is the creation of a database to track gun sales. While these efforts could help investigators and make it harder for certain people to access guns, neither of them get at the root of the problem.

An assault weapons ban would be a bigger first step.

Banning the manufacture, ownership, and sale of these types of guns does reduce the number of guns in circulation by definition. Lopez reports that an assault weapons ban could reduce the deadliness of some mass shootings "but wouldn't address the 70-plus percent of firearm homicides that involve a handgun."

A mandatory buyback program, similar to what Australia implemented after a mass shooting killed 35 people, is a clear avenue for success. The Vox/DFP poll asked respondents about a mandatory buyback program for semi-automatic weapons and found majority support (54 percent), with a voluntary program receiving even more support (62 percent).

Another idea, championed by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) on the 2020 presidential campaign trail, would be requiring a license to buy and own a gun. This issue doesn't directly reduce the number of guns in circulation, but can make it more onerous to obtain a gun, thereby reducing the population of gun owners, as Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research told Lopez:

"The end impact is you decrease gun ownership overall," Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher (and gun owner) at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told me. "Lots of folks think, 'Well, it's probably not worth going through all these hoops to buy firearms, so I'm not going to buy one.' And then you have fewer firearms around, and less exposure."

Massachusetts, which has a similar program, has the lowest rate of gun deaths in the country.

Democrats aren't pushing for a national licensing program right now, but the Vox/DFP poll suggests that 70 percent of voters would be in favor of one, including a majority of Republicans(53 percent).

Roughly 39,000 Americans die from guns every year. Mass shootings draw attention to this problem, but everyday suicides and violent confrontations that unnecessarily escalate to homicide due to the easy availability of guns are the norm in the United States. If policymakers are serious about changing this, dramatically reducing the number of guns is the path forward.

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Voters back Joe Biden's gun control plan. It's not clear if the evidence does.

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Americans are broadly in favor of regulations on assault weapons and background checks for gun purchases, a new poll from Data for Progress and Vox finds. However, these measures are likely to only have a moderate impact on the country'sskyhigh rates of gun violence.

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A Vox article looking at the effect mass shootings have on the arguments of the pro- and anti-gun lobbies. 

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A Vox article looking at the effect mass shootings have on the arguments of the pro- and anti-gun lobbies. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE It considers how our defence mechanisms kick in when our ‘cherished beliefs’ are threatened. In this case, it is the much debated issue of gun control. How and why do both sides incorporate evidence in such different ways in order to support their position? And how valid is it to take a scientific approach (as outlined in the article) to assess the validity of each side’s reasoning?

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Note: This piece was first published in December 2015, in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting.
One thing I often hear in the wake of these endless mass shootings is, "Surely this will convince those gun people. Surely the carnage and suffering are bad enough now that they'll feel compelled to support some gun control."

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the cognitive and emotional dynamics at work. It presumes that mass shootings constitute an argument against guns, to be weighed against arguments in their favor. But to gun enthusiasts, mass shootings are not arguments against guns but for them. The rise in mass shootings is only convincing both sides that they're right, causing them to dig in further.

It's not even clear that opinions on guns and gun violence remain amenable to argument. Over the past few decades, gun ownership in the US has evolved from a practical issue for rural homeowners and hunters to a kind of gesture of tribal solidarity, an act of defiance toward Obama, the left, and all the changes they represent. The gun lobby has become more hardened and uncompromising, pushing guns into schools, churches, and universities.

This has taken place in the context of a broader and deeper polarization of the country, as Red America and Blue America have become more ideologically homogeneous and distant from one another. The two sides are now composed of people who quite literally think and feel differently - and are less and less able to communicate. The gun issue is a salient example, but far from the only one.

This suggests that if the status quo on guns in the US is to change, it will be through overwhelming political force, not through evidence and argument. Guns have now ascended to the level of worldview and identity, areas largely beyond the reach of persuasion.

Conservatives are from Mars, liberals are from Venus

For years, an accumulating body of psychological and social scientific research has shown that, as Chris Mooney summarized in a 2014 article, "liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics." (Mooney later gathered that research in his somewhat unfortunately titled book The Republican Brain.)

Mooney quotes psychologist John Jost and colleagues, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences:

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different.

So, different how?

Jost and colleagues were responding positively to this paper by the University of Nebraska's John Hibbing, which argues, based on a series of experiments, that conservatives display a strong "negativity bias":

In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them.

Other research has traced this effect in part to the physiological level, finding that conservatives have larger right amygdalae. (The amygdala is a cluster of neurons in the brain's medial temporal lobe thought to regulate basic pleasure and fear responses; many psychological conditions, including anxiety and PTSD, have been traced to abnormal functioning of the amygdala.)

Heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli can mean a propensity for anxiety, fear, and occasionally alarm. If fear threatens loss of control, many traits common to conservatives can be seen as efforts to reassert control. As Jost and colleagues summarize: "Research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety."

Another way of framing the differences is in terms of the five-factor model, a set of five core personality traits many psychologists use for assessment: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

As Mark Mellman wrote in 2015, liberals and conservatives consistently differ on a few of these traits. Liberals are more open to new experiences, novelty and disruption; conservatives prefer stability and the status quo. Liberals are more tolerant of mess, ambiguity, and uncertainty; conservatives prefer tidiness, clarity, and certainty.

Yet another way to frame the difference: Yale psychologist Dan Kahan, whose cultural cognition work Ezra has written about before, divides worldviews along two dimensions, hierarchical vs. egalitarian and individualist vs. communitarian. This creates a four-quadrant space; conservatives are hierarchical-individualists.

These differences can help inform our understanding of current US politics, but first we should head off a few misunderstandings.

Caveats about personality research

Talking about deep personality differences is a sensitive business and inevitably draws some anger. So it's worth clarifying a few things.

1) Everything is a spectrum and everyone is a unique snowflake

All these conservative tendencies put together and pushed to the extreme amount to authoritarianism. The liberal inverse amounts to a kind of drifting libertinism. In practice, very few people lie at the far ends of the bell-curve distribution. Most people are somewhere closer to the middle, an idiosyncratic mix.

What's more, different aspects of personality can be elicited by different circumstances, at different times, around different people. In times of peace and growth, there's a drift toward liberalism. Fear and crisis tend to push everyone the other direction, to shrink boundaries of concern and heighten in-group/out-group sensitivity. So liberal and conservative traits are not static, at the group level or within an individual.

Everyone is unique. No individual is predicted or explained by this research. These are general tendencies, heuristics, fluid and context-sensitive.

2) The research draws no value judgments

Whichever of these personality traits, or clusters of traits, you might prefer, the research itself does not characterize any as better or worse. It's easy to imagine circumstances in which sensitivity to threat and commitment to stability are valuable and others in which risk-taking and innovation are valuable. And it's likely valuable to have a mix, a balance, no matter the circumstances.

3) Liberal and conservative do not always map to political left and right

As Mooney is at pains to emphasize in his book, personality does not dictate ideology. There's no law of nature that conservatives are confined to the political right. The 20th century offers no shortage of authoritarian leftists. When the political left dominates the political order, those prone to defending the status quo will tend to be leftists.

There was a period in the mid-20th century US when liberals and conservatives were somewhat more evenly distributed across the parties - there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. But the past four or five decades have seen a slow (lately accelerating) process of polarization. Americans have sorted themselves: Almost all liberals are now Democrats; almost all conservatives are now Republicans. In Congress, the leftmost Republican is to the right of the rightmost Democrat.

Guns have become a last-ditch effort to impose control on a world slipping away

Let us imagine, then, a conservative gun owner - an older white gentleman, let's say, in his 50s, living in the Rust Belt somewhere. When he was growing up, there was living memory of a familiar order: men working in honorable trade or manufacturing jobs, women tending home and children, Sundays at church, hard work yielding a steady rise up the ladder to a well-earned house, yard, and car.

That order was crumbling just as our gun owner inherited it. The honorable jobs are gone, or going. It's hell to find work, benefits are for shit, and there isn't much put aside for retirement. The kids are struggling with debt and low-paying jobs. They know, and our gun owner knows, that they probably aren't going to have a better life than he did - that the very core of the American promise has proven false for them, for the first time in generations.

It's a bitter, helpless feeling. And for someone naturally attuned to "order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity," it's scary. The role he thought he was meant to play in the world, the privileges and respect that came along with it, have been thrown into doubt. Everything is shifting under his feet.

Over the last few years, our gun owner has found a whole network of TV channels, radio shows, books, blogs, and Facebook groups that speak directly to his unease. They understand the world he heard about from his father and grandfather, the world that's being lost; they understand the urgency of saving what's left of it.

Most of all, with his already heightened sensitivity to threat further aggravated by economic uncertainty, they finally help him see who's to blame. They show him the immigrants crowding in, using up jobs and benefits that were promised to American workers. They show him minorities demanding handouts that are paid for with his taxes, even as they riot, even as they kill each other and the police. They show him terrorists making a mockery of weak American leadership. They show him elitist liberals, professors and entertainers, disdaining his values and mocking his religion.

And it is such a relief, to finally put a face to all the ambient dread, to have some clarity again, to know who the good guys and bad guys are. Our gun owner is a good guy, thankfully, from the kind of self-reliant stock that settled this country.

It seems like America's decline is a done deal, that the tide of liberal rot is unstoppable. But the one place he knows he can draw the line is at his door, on his private property, because he has a gun. He can defend his own. If the minorities riot again, or immigrant criminals move in nearby, or terrorists attack, or some wackjob goes on a shooting spree, or Obama comes for his guns ... well, that's what the guns are for. He's given up a lot, but he won't give up his autonomy or the safety of his family. He'll defend that to the end.

To our gun owner, another mass shooting is not an argument for getting rid of guns. It's a confirmation of his every instinct, another sign of moral and societal decay, another reason to arm himself and defend what he's got left.

You can tell him about Canada and Australia until you're blue in the face - the lower rate of gun deaths, the hunting exemptions, the seemingly intact freedoms. You can cite high popular support for restrictions on gun and ammunition sales. You can tell him that not every incremental tightening of standards is a slippery slope, that no one wants to confiscate his guns.

But you're just another self-righteous liberal on another self-righteous crusade, too blind or stupid to see how governments always use people like you to disarm their citizenry. You've taken enough - of his taxes, his freedoms, his culture. He won't give you any more.

A cherished myth of American politics (indeed, of democracy generally) is that it's fundamentally about persuasion, the contest of ideas. But in a political system already biased against action, in which members of both parties are becoming more ideologically and even psychologically distant, persuasion on issues that activate tribal identities is all but impossible. Our gun owner is not going to change his mind; everything gun control proponents consider evidence for their side, he considers evidence for his. The differences run deeper than evidence.

If there are ever to be gun laws passed in the US, any kind of policy response to the rising tide of mass shootings, it will be because the people who want it amass the political power to overwhelm the power of the gun lobby. It will be because they organize and deploy more intensity, money, and votes than their opponents. More mass shootings are not going to do the job for them.

VIDEO: America's gun problem explained in 90 seconds

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Why mass shootings don't convince gun owners to support gun control

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Note: This piece was first published in December 2015, in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting . One thing I often hear in the wake of these endless mass shootings is, "Surely this will convince those gun people. Surely the carnage and suffering are bad enough now that they'll feel compelled to support some gun control."

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An FT article, looking at (depending on your political perspective) the ‘banning’ or the ‘curating’ of school books in certain US states. 

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An FT article, looking at (depending on your political perspective) the ‘banning’ or the ‘curating’ of school books in certain US states. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is currently happening in many states in the USA in terms of limiting the circulation of certain publications? In what way did the Covid pandemic influence this movement? Whose opinion on this issue carries more authority: artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman, who or those pushing for the removal of publications? Overall, do you think the removal of books from libraries and schools is ‘aggressive censorship’ or ‘responsible curation’, and how might your answer depend on your political perspective?

Key terms Culture wars, Inappropriate, Harmful, Political wedge issue, Censorship, Banning vs. curating, Responsible

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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Growing list of books targeted in America's school culture wars

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Politicians and parent groups step up hunt for publications they claim are inappropriate for children

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A Project Syndicate article by Peter Singer, analysing Elon Musk’s claims to be a ‘free speech absolutist’.

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A Project Syndicate article by Peter Singer, analysing Elon Musk’s claims to be a ‘free speech absolutist’.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What cases does Peter Singer discuss where limits to freedom of expression may be desirable? How does he suggest that beliefs should (and shouldn’t) be debated in a “healthy manner”? What key issue will Musk need to get to grips with, in order to achieve his goal of creating a healthy ‘common digital town square’? Overall, should we approach freedom of expression (and other moral debates) via ‘absolutist’ principles, or should we be more ethically flexible?

Key terms Free speech, Reason and evidence, Common digital town square, Echo chambers, Interpretations, Well-reasoned arguments vs. polemics, Power, Responsibility

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A Big Think article, examining the efforts of scientists who are seeking to add ‘neuro-rights’ to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

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A Big Think article, examining the efforts of scientists who are seeking to add ‘neuro-rights’ to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A lot of questions centre around this quote from the article: “If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.” How can we legislate within an industry that deals with knowledge and ideas that are constantly changing? What is the relationship between the development of new knowledge, and the moral constraints on that knowledge (ie do they impede or support each other)?

Key terms Cognitive liberty, Agency

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Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays. Other means for inducing OBEs include electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain.

If a well-placed magnet causes you to "leave" your body, what else is possible with a little transcranial stimulation?

This question is of growing concern as wearable scanners become increasingly common. Last week, Columbia University neuroscience professor Rafael Yuste advocated for the United Nations to adopt "neuro-rights" into its Universal Declaration of Human Rights thanks to a burgeoning industry promising to alter-some would say manipulate -consciousness.

As Yuste phrased it during an online conference,

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people. This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

Neurotechnology is a growing field that includes a range of technologies that influence higher brain activities. Therapeutics designed to repair and improve brain function are included in this discipline-interventions for sleep problems, overstimulation, motor coordination, epilepsy, even depression.

So are more insidious intentions, however. You can imagine such devices in the hands of a cult leader, for example. Or perhaps a political leader steeling up their base. If the human imagination can create an idea, it can be transformed into reality, and not all humans are benevolent.

The ethical question is not new. For example, the debate over embryonic stem cells raged for years. Promises of trait enhancement concerned people who thought scientists would play the role of a god. While that debate has mostly died down, the use of neurotechnology by militaries and tech companies-particularly concerning privacy-will be contentious for decades.

Cognitive liberty is a term assigned to those who believe every individual must be allowed to maintain their own agency. An extension of the concept of freedom of thought, cognitive liberty is defined as "the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full power of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought," as written by neuroethicist Dr. Wrye Sententia and legal theorist Richard Glen Boire.

The challenges to cognitive liberty include privacy, which they argue must encompass the domain of inner thought; autonomy, so that thought processes remain the province of the individual; and choice, provided that the individual is not harming others.

Yuste believes the U.N.'s declaration, which was created in the wake of World War II in 1948, needs immediate revision. Deep brain stimulation is already an FDA-approved procedure. Whereas social media creates its own addiction and mental health problems, a sense of agency still exists. When tech has the capability to get " under the skull and get at our neurons," as Johns Hopkins professor of neurology and neuroscience, John Krakauer, says, a sense of urgency exists.

For Yuste it's completely a matter of agency-and liberty.

"This is the first time in history that humans can have access to the contents of people's minds. We have to think very carefully about how we are going to bring this into society."

-

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His new book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."

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Scientists urge UN to add 'neuro-rights' to Universal Declaration of Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Out-of-body experiences recur throughout spiritual literature. Thought to signify a spiritual "essence" co-existing alongside biology, OBEs began to be viewed in a different light when they were replicated in a laboratory in 2007. University College London researchers induced OBEs in volunteers through the use of head-mounted video displays.

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An Artnet article about Art Spiegelman’s award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust ‘Maus’ being banned by a school board in Tennessee. 

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An Artnet article about Art Spiegelman’s award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust ‘Maus’ being banned by a school board in Tennessee. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do societal sensibilities shape the way we explore the past?

KEY TERMS Inappropriate, Censoring, Divisive concepts

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Art Speigelman Denounces Tennessee School District’s Ban of His Graphic Novel ‘Maus’: ‘It Has a Breath of Autocracy and Fascism’ | Artnet News

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A Tennessee school board has voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, about his family’s experience in the Holocaust.

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A USA Today article, exploring how we use language to explain and make sense of the protests against the killing of George Floyd, and the racism that exists in society. 

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A USA Today article, exploring how we use language to explain and make sense of the protests against the killing of George Floyd, and the racism that exists in society. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Does society suffer from racism, or structural racism? Are people protesting, or rioting? Is there looting going on, or the venting of frustration caused by subjugation? Check out a couple of related articles as well - for example, what did MLK mean when he said that “riot is the language of the unheard”? And does this Minnpost article get it right when it argues that the protests are the ‘language of grief rather than a  ‘primal scream’?

KEY TERMS Definitions, Loaded term, Political implications, Symbols.

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‘Riots,’ ‘violence,’ ‘looting’: Words matter when talking about race and unrest, experts say

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When “violence” is defined as attacks against property, rather than against people, experts take issue with the term’s use in George Floyd coverage.

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A Guardian article, looking at the destruction of a statue of a slave trader during the Black Lives Matter protests. 

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A Guardian article, looking at the destruction of a statue of a slave trader during the Black Lives Matter protests. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE For some people, the tearing down of a statue is an ‘attack on history’ - on an entity that is unchanging and real. However, if you view history as a constantly developing view of the past then what happened is, in itself, a historical moment, which will be debated and studied (perhaps) for future historians. Do you agree with Olusoga about the correct way to view this event? Does our very conception of what history is depend on our perspectives?

KEY TERMS Attack on history vs. history, Moral stance

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The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue is not an attack on history. It is history | David Olusoga

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The slave trader’s figure loomed over Bristol for 125 years. Now a multiracial protest has achieved what past campaigns couldn’t, says historian and broadcaster David Olusoga

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This New York Times article looks at the introduction of sweeping new laws to outlaw abortion in Alabama, including cases of conception via rape and incest.  

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This New York Times article looks at the introduction of sweeping new laws to outlaw abortion in Alabama, including cases of conception via rape and incest.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Should ethical knowledge be based on what the majority of the people want? Should it be based on religious principles? Should it be based on what’s practically applicable? Should it be designed with the mother in mind? Should such an issue be decided purely by mean - as it was - or should men be restricted from offering an opinion? Think about consequentialism and deontologicalism - does this enable any kind of route towards consensus? Finally, can we debate this issue in a rational way, or will our emotional involvement always get the better of us?

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Back

transcript

Alabama Senate Votes to Effectively Ban Abortion

Protesters gathered outside the Alabama state house as senators approved a measure on Tuesday that would ban almost all abortions in the state. The measure, later signed by the governor, was created in hopes of challenging the precedent set by Roe v. Wade.

"What this bill is designed to do is to go to the Supreme Court and challenge that particular precedence that said in 1973 that abortion is legal on demand essentially anytime, anywhere, for any reason." "I say that you better be very careful about what you want to overturn. While you think that you have a president that's ready to give you Roe v. Wade, and hand it to you based on the court that he's giving you, believe me that there are precedents, there are constitutional statutes that those men and women adhere to first before they adhere to political parties." "Whose house?" "Our house." "What do we do?" "Stand up, fight back." "Our house." "Whose house?" "Our house." "What do we do?" "Stand up, fight back." "What do we do?" "Stand up, fight back."

Protesters gathered outside the Alabama state house as senators approved a measure on Tuesday that would ban almost all abortions in the state. The measure, later signed by the governor, was created in hopes of challenging the precedent set by Roe v. Wade. Credit Credit... Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - The Alabama Senate approved a measure on Tuesday that would outlaw almost all abortions in the state, setting up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the case that recognized a woman's constitutional right to end a pregnancy.

The legislation bans abortions at every stage of pregnancy and criminalizes the procedure for doctors, who could be charged with felonies and face up to 99 years in prison. It includes an exception for cases when the mother's life is at serious risk, but not for cases of rape or incest - a subject of fierce debate among lawmakers in recent days.

The House approved the measure - the most far-reaching effort in the nation this year to curb abortion rights - last month. It now moves to the desk of Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican. Although the governor has not publicly committed to signing the legislation, many Republican lawmakers expect her support.

In an email on Tuesday night, a spokeswoman for the governor, Lori Davis Jhons, said Ms. Ivey would "withhold comment until she has had a chance to thoroughly review the final version of the bill that passed."

[ It is far from clear when, or if, the measure will take effect. Read about the next steps. ]
Opponents have vowed to challenge the measure in federal court if it becomes law. Even the legislation's supporters expect that a lower court will block the measure. But it was drafted with exactly that in mind. The ban's architects, reflecting the rising confidence of abortion critics nationwide after the appointment of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, hope that the justices will use the case to reconsider the central holding in Roe and allow the Alabama measure to take effect.

"Until now, there was no prospect of reversing Roe," said Eric Johnston, who founded the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition and serves as its president, and has spent more than 30 years trying to ban abortion.

[Several states have moved to curtail abortion but Alabama's measure goes further.]

Mr. Johnston, who drafted the Alabama bill and sees himself as a purist on the abortion issue, said he did not support the spate of restrictive legislation that other states have enacted in recent months, including so-called fetal heartbeat bills. These bills essentially ban abortions after a heartbeat is detected, usually about six weeks into pregnancy, a time when many women do not yet know they are pregnant.

Given the current leanings of the Supreme Court, Mr. Johnston said, making such a measure, which does not directly challenge Roe, the subject of the court's next major abortion case would be a wasted opportunity.

"Why not go all the way?" he asked.

The Senate gallery was full before the debate started on Tuesday afternoon. A long line of people waited to take seats when people left. Many in the audience were abortion rights activists, and at times they laughed when male lawmakers spoke about pregnancy and other female health issues.

Senator Rodger Smitherman, a Democrat, told colleagues that during his wife's pregnancy with their son, doctors had told him it was unlikely that the child would be born alive. Mr. Smitherman said that he and his wife had decided to have the child anyway, and that his son had been born with significant health problems. "The significance," he said, "is I had the choice."
[The Democratic presidential candidates vowed to challenge the Alabama law, calling it an outrageous and unconstitutional attack on women.]
Democrats and abortion-rights advocates say that the Alabama measure would drive the procedure underground, endangering the lives of women and girls and disproportionately affecting poor and minority Alabamians.

"We want abortions to be safe, and we want them to be few, but it should be legal, because there will be abortions," said Senator Linda Coleman-Madison, a Democrat and one of the four women in the 35-member Senate.

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Eric Johnston, the president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition, is one of the architects of a measure that would outlaw most abortions in the state. Credit... Bob Miller for The New York Times

"The people who have the wherewithal will fly out of state," she added. "Not everyone can afford to do that."

The Senate took the bill up again on Tuesday after an earlier attempt to debate the measure last week descended into shouting and chaos. Tensions erupted, including some within the dominant Republican Party, over whether to include exceptions to the ban in cases of rape or incest. A Senate committee had amended the bill to include those exceptions, prompting a bitter dispute that postponed consideration of the bill for days.

Even so, the fate of the bill was never in much doubt, and it did not take long for the proposal to return to the Senate floor. It passed after lawmakers rejected the amendment adding rape and incest exceptions.

Senator Clyde Chambliss, a Republican and sponsor of the bill in the Senate, defended the omission of those exceptions.

The State of Roe v. Wade

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"When God creates the miracle of life inside a woman's womb," he said, "it is not our place as human beings to extinguish that life."

Other state measures to restrict abortion rights have advanced in the South and the Midwest this year and invited legal fights. Already, the governors of Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio have signed fetal heartbeat bills. And Arkansas moved up the cutoff point for legal abortions to 18 weeks of pregnancy, from 20 weeks.

[Banning abortion in the early weeks of pregnancy has gone mainstream.]

The Alabama measure, though, goes further. In addition to the potential 99-year sentence for performing abortions, doctors face the threat of a 10-year term for attempting to perform one. Women who receive abortions would not be prosecuted.

The timing of any litigation over the bill is uncertain. Opponents of the measure intend to argue that Alabama will have unlawfully restricted a right that the courts have repeatedly reaffirmed since Roe.

Alabama, a conservative state where Republicans control the Legislature, has repeatedly sought to enact limits on abortion. In 2018, voters overwhelmingly endorsed an amendment to the Alabama Constitution declaring that the "public policy of this state is to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life."

In the past, state lawmakers imposed a 48-hour waiting period for abortions; mandated that women receive counseling before undergoing the procedure; and required minors to receive consent from a parent or legal guardian to have an abortion.

Emboldened by the passage of the state constitutional amendment, lawmakers set out this year with a far more aggressive strategy in mind.

Senator Greg Reed, a Republican who is the State Senate majority leader, said in a statement after Tuesday night's vote that the measure "simply recognizes that an unborn baby is a child who deserves protection - and despite the best efforts of abortion proponents, this bill will become law because Alabamians stand firmly on the side of life."

Supporters of abortion rights took a grimmer view.

"Today is a dark day for women in Alabama and across this country," said Staci Fox, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates. "Banning abortion is bad enough. Imprisoning doctors for providing care goes beyond the brink. Alabama politicians will forever live in infamy for this vote and we will make sure that every woman knows who to hold accountable."

Even as some states have moved to limit abortions, other states with Democratic-leaning governments have rushed this year to fortify legal protections for the procedure. Vermont recently took steps toward a state constitutional amendment enshrining a "right to personal reproductive autonomy." And in January, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York signed a measure that guaranteed a "fundamental right" to abortion in the state.

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Lawmakers Vote to Effectively Ban Abortion in Alabama (Published 2019)

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MONTGOMERY, Ala. - The Alabama Senate approved a measure on Tuesday that would outlaw almost all abortions in the state, setting up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the case that recognized a woman's constitutional right to end a pregnancy.