Nothing as It Seems

Humanists generally agree that we ought to apply reason, free enquiry, and self-reflection when trying to figure out what is right or wrong. Most of us also think that it is unjustifiable to discriminate against someone solely on the basis of their race, sex, age, or whatever other grouping you can think of. Humanists rightly criticise religions when they defend discrimination against certain groups or individuals by means of scripture, revelation, authority, or, in some cases, tradition. Despite the fact that humanists have over time questioned and, indeed, freed themselves from many of these prejudices, is it possible, nevertheless, that many may still latch onto at least one dogmatic relic of an earlier age? Namely, the prejudice of speciesism. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations  estimates that around around 60 billion land animals are killed annually in food production— a large proportion of these come from intensive factory farms....

In a recent article for the Sunday Business Post (14th Dec 2014), the science writer David Robert Grimes advises us not to be taken in by simple answers to cancer. In particular, he argues we should be highly sceptical of those who claim there’s evidence a plant based diet cures patients from the disease.  “Simplistic narratives may be alluring,” he says, “but when we seek simple answers to complex conditions like cancer, we run a serious risk of detrimental self-delusion.”  Grimes’ piece was largely in response to a new book— Stop Feeding Your Cancer —by Dr John Kelly, a Dublin based GP, who claims that the consumption of animal protein exacerbates cancer. Kelly’s evidence, according to a book review that appeared in the Irish Independent, was derived from the testimonies of over half a dozen cases—nothing, to be sure, that resembles a clinical trial. Also in response, Grimes, rightly, said that “a physician may attribute patient recovery to a special diet while u...

With Ireland set to have a referendum next year, where citizens will eventually make the decision whether or not to introduce same-sex marriage, it is likely we can expect further heated debate to take place. Earlier this year, to be sure, we got a flavour of how forceful things can get: RTÉ, the national broadcaster, paid out €85,000 to writer and journalist John Waters and five others over a claim on the Saturday Night Show that they were homophobic.   In a detailed article for Village magazine last month, Waters subsequently declared he isn't against same-sex marriage for any theological reason or because he considers it socially destructive, but for it potentially breaking “the maintenance of blood link between parent and child.” Granted, his response to some of the controversial remarks he made about gay marriage and adoption in an interview with a college newspaper a few years ago, however, were rather limited. Waters says he resigned from the Irish Times ...

Some thoughts on Ronan McGreevy’s Irish Times article After reading Ronan McGreevy’s article in the Irish Times (22nd November 2013) I imagine he was deliberately making an effort to be provocative. If it was not for the immeasurable level of non-human animal cruelty and suffering that occurs every day as a result of Ireland’s meat consumption, McGreevy’s feature might have been more amusing.   It is surprising, and indeed disappointing, that the Irish Times would consider printing a piece as uninformed, misleading and compassionless as this.    A meat-free diet is practiced for a number of reasons—ethical, health, religious and cultural—and contrary to McGreevy’s depiction of vegetarians simply having a “misplaced sentiment towards farm animals,” many have reflected on the problem of eating animal flesh on the basis of moral reasoning. Writers such as Montaigne and Erasmus criticised the abuse of animals in butchery and Leonardo da Vinci himself was ...

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...

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...