Nothing as It Seems

Should in vitro meat replace conventional meat production?   An edited version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Nov-Dec, Vol. 143 (2013) The first public tasting of an in vitro beef burger , made from meat grown in a laboratory, using tissue engineering, was cooked and consumed at a news conference in London yesterday (5th August 2013). The burger, m ade completely from synthetic meat at a cost of €250,000, was developed by Professor Mark Post , a specialist in tissue engineering, at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, using stem cells. It was revealed that Sergey Brin , one of the founders of Google, invested in the project. Post and his team of scientists took cells from a cow and converted them into strips of muscle that they joined to make a patty. The way it’s produced, in a sense, has more in common with how plants grow than sentient beings. One of the tasters at the London event, Hanni Rützler ,   said: "I was expecting...

Should terminally ill patients have a right to die? A version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Sep-Oct, Vol. 142 (2013) Suppose you have just discovered you are suffering from multiple sclerosis, a disease of the nervous system. This condition, you learn, is progressive and, in time, you’ll become fully paralysed; most likely, as a result, you’ll be entirely dependent on the care of others. Worse still, you realise you’ll no longer be able to look after yourself and will not be capable of swallowing the food somebody else placed in your mouth. To avoid dying from hunger, you’ll have to be fed through a tube inserted into your stomach. Fortunately for most, the chances of suffering from multiple sclerosis are rare. This is not the case, however, for 59-year-old Marie Fleming who is terminally ill with the condition. Although it has no impairing on her cognitive facility, she suffers frequently from severe and at times intolerable pain. She has fough...

Hot-Button Issues—looking at more than the facts A version of this article was printed in Humanism Ireland , Vol. 141 (2013) Conservative theorists and right-wing economists often tell us that individual human behaviour is the product of nature, and differences in ability, skills, and intelligence can be understood as those that are rooted in biology. Liberal ideologies, on the other hand, frequently say that differences between individuals are not the product of nature, but are in some way socially constructed due to unfair social and institutional infrastructures; variations on IQ scores between different ethnic groups, they argue, can be explained as a result of one ethnic group having less access to higher education or because of the inherent cultural bias situated within IQ tests. What’s more, humans are not violent by nature. Violent behaviour, they claim, is down to the fact that modern capitalist systems create societies of vast inequality, where luckless people, ...

Not many ethical issues are as vigorously fought over as abortion these days.  Unsurprisingly, the standpoint of the different sides—put simply, those who are in favour of abortion and those that are against it—have not achieved much in shifting the beliefs of their opponents. Abortion was illegal in almost all western states until the late 1960s; in 1967 Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) changed its laws to permit abortion on broad social grounds. In the  Row v Wade  1973 case, the United States Supreme Court held that women have a constitutional right to abortion in the first six months of pregnancy. Many other western nations like France and Italy have subsequently liberated their abortion laws. Ireland and Northern Ireland, however, have held out in opposition to this movement. Abortion in Ireland remains illegal under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act and in 1983 an amendment to Ireland's constitution states that an embryo, from the p...