Social Philosophy and Policy Paper Accepted for Publication

My paper entitled "Empirical Ethics and the Duty to Extend the "Biological Warranty Period"" has been accepted for publication in the journal Social Philosophy and Policy.

This paper represents, at least to date, my most substantive (and I hope significant) publication on the duty to retard human aging. Here is the abstract:

The world’s aging populations face novel health challenges never experienced before in human history. The moral landscape thus needs to adapt to reflect this novel empirical reality. In this paper I take for granted one basic moral principle- a principle of preventing bad occurrences (Peter Singer, 1972)- and explore the implications empirical considerations from demography, evolutionary biology and biogerontology have for the way we conceive of fulfilling this principle at the operational level. After bringing to the fore a number of considerations Singer ignores, such as the probability that non-intervention will result in harm and the likelihood that different kinds of extrinsic and intrinsic harms can be prevented, I argue that the aspiration to extend the human biological warranty period (by retarding the rate of aging) is a pressing moral imperative for the 21st century. In the final sections I briefly address some standard objections raised against life extension and conclude that, while there may be some legitimate concerns worth addressing, they are not compelling enough to provide a rational basis for forfeiting the potential health and economic benefits which could be realized by extending the biological warranty period.

In the video presentation above I detail part of the argument advanced in the article. The article itself is over 40 pages in length, so the video is a brief summary of some of the substantive parts of the argument.

Cheers,
Colin

Latest Robinson Ted Talk on Education

Above is another brilliant Ted Talk by Ken Robinson. Enjoy!

Cheers,
Colin

Ottawa Talk on "Bridging the Gap"

Last week I was a guest speaker at this interesting event in Ottawa where I gave a 30 minute talk titled "Bridging the Gap: Political Philosophy Meets Biogerontology".

Below I summarize the basic points covered in that talk:

In 1959 the British scientist and novelist CP Snow gave a lecture in Cambridge titled "Two Cultures". Snow argued that the intellectual life of western societies was polarized between two traditions- that of scientists and that of literary intellectuals who had very little understanding of, and appreciation for, science.

Half a century on and many of Snow's concerns are still with us today. In this talk I will emphasize what I see as the troubling gulf between the humanities/social sciences and the natural sciences. My talk will focus more specifically on the disciplines and issues I have encountered in my own research, but I think these experiences can be usefully made into some generalizations about how to bridge the gap between the humanities/social sciences and natural sciences.

All scholars in the humanities/social sciences and natural sciences share perhaps one common aspiration-- they believe the knowledge they aspire to create and disseminate can make the world a better place. But once one gets down to the details of this aspiration (e.g. what are the world's most pressing problems, how can they be remedied, etc.), there is often a significant degree of disagreement and misunderstanding between scholars in different academic disciplines. Why is this so?

I believe that much of this disagreement and misunderstanding stems from two facts:

(1) the world is an extremely complex place.
and
(2) humans engage in different types of "categorical thinking" to make sense of the complex world we inhabit.

In order to make sense of our surroundings it is common, perhaps even inevitable, that we engage in some sort of "categorical thinking" to make sense of it. Suppose, for example, you see a group of 10 people coming down the street towards you yelling and making loud noises. At first you might try to make sense what you are seeing by categorizing the group by the age of the people you see: are they kids, teenagers, adults? You notice that they are a mix of age groups- some are children, some young adults and some seniors. Some people are tall, some are short. None of these categories helps you make sense of this group's actions. They get closer and you notice they are all wearing the same clothing-- a Toronto Maple Leaf shirt! So you categorize this loud group of people as "Leaf fans". They are yelling and making noise because they are cheering for their favorite hockey team that is trying to advance in the playoffs. This kind of categorical thinking helps us make sense of the world.

Scholars in different academic disciplines also employ various forms of categorical thinking. Within the humanities and social sciences, these categories tend (for many, not all disciplines) to focus on culture and human agency. Here are some common categories we typically divide the world into:

•countries (e.g. Canada, USA, England, etc.)
•religions
•ethnicities
• political systems (e.g. democratic vs non-democratic)
•economic systems (e.g. market society vs communism)
etc.

These categories extend a relatively narrow historical lens-- they help make sense of the world, at best, over the span of only a few centuries or millennia. I teach the history of political thought and we always start with the Ancient Greeks- Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. These thinkers are treated as the origin of western philosophy and political thought. The historical lens does not extend beyond 3000 years.

One distinctive feature of the outlook of (most) scholars in the humanities and social sciences is that we focus only on the proximate history of humanity, and typically the role of human agency within that history. The focus is on the history and legacy of colonialism, the creation and evolution of patriarchy, property, and government.

This stands in sharp contrast to the view offered by the natural sciences. Rather than categorizing the world into distinctive nations, ethnicities, religions or economic or political systems, biology categorizes all of us into the same category-- we are members of the species Homo Sapiens. And far from being the center of the world (and history), our species is only one of a countless number of species that have lived on this planet in the approximately 3.8 billion years since life began on Earth.

The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dozhansky famously remarked that "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". That is a vastly different perspective than the one typically adopted in the humanities and social sciences, where scholars attempt to make sense of the world without much reference to, let alone a basic understanding of, evolution.

The extensive historical lens of evolutionary biology dwarfs the minute scope typically adopted by disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. At its best, the historical lens of the humanities and social sciences is a proximate, human-agency focused lens. No doubt this perspective is important, but it is also very limited. The different kinds of categorical thinking employed by different academic disciplines can impair the integration of the different types of knowledge needed to help improve the opportunities humans have for living flourishing lives.

My field of research is political philosophy. Political philosophers examine political concepts and ideals like equality, freedom and justice. We attempt to bring precision to these contested concepts (e.g. equality of what?) and critically assess the viability of rival accounts of normative aspirations. The goal of such an intellectual exercise is, at least for practical oriented political theorists like myself, to help us develop emancipatory knowledge. Ideals of equality and justice, for example, can help us critically reflect upon, draw attention to and redress or transform patriarchal traditions, non-democratic traditions or the shortcomings of a market society, etc.

The most influential political philosopher of the 20th century was the American philosopher John Rawls. Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness” helped revive the social contract tradition. To make the task of deriving the principles of justice a manageable one for the philosopher, Rawls made a number of “simplifying assumptions” in his theory. One assumption, the one most central to what I want to say today, is that all parties to the social contract are assumed to be healthy, productive members. In other words, Rawls assumes that society consists of adults that have the health prospects of your average 20-year old! No such “ageless” society has ever existed, nor is any such society likely to come into existence (at least not any time soon). Humans age. And the world’s populations are aging. This is a new (and very significant) development in human history. Fertility rates are declining and significant progress has been made with reducing early and mid-life morbidity and mortality. That is a success story. But it is one that also presents a significant challenge for us—how to promote health in late life. The interventions needed to improve health in late life will need to be very different than those employed to tackle infectious disease and poverty.

To help re-orient the categorical thinking employed by contemporary theories of justice, it is worth emphasizing the latest global mortality rates from the Global Burden of Disease Study. This study examined mortality rates over the past 4 decades for 187 countries in the world. In 1970 there were 3.7 billion people in the world, and life expectancy at birth was 59. By 2010, global population was close to 7 billion, and life expectancy at birth surpassed age 70 (67 for males, just over 73 for females). The United Nations estimates that global life expectancy will reach 80 by 2100. There are 784 million persons in the world age ≥60, and that number will rise to 2 billion in 2050. 2050 will mark the first time in human history that the number of persons age ≥ 60 will outnumber the number of children (age 0-14 years) in the world.

These estimates are extremely significant. They indicate that the world has changed in significant ways. In 1970, human deaths were dominated by infectious disease. Small pox still existed. By 2010, the chronic diseases of late life had become the leading causes of death in the world. This reality requires us to exercise the intellectual virtue of adaptability of intellect. We cannot think and act as if we continue to live in a world where the extrinsic threats of the world pose the greatest risks of morbidity and mortality. The intrinsic limitations of our biology are now, for the first time in human history, the major cause of suffering, disease and death.

Once ideas of justice are integrated with insights from demography, evolutionary biology and biogerontology, we realize that many of the modes of categorical thinking employed in the past must be revised. Not only should we aspire to emancipate humanity from patriarchy, colonialism and poverty, we should also aspire to emancipate humanity from the biological priority evolution by natural selection places on reproduction over longevity. This trade-off now results in unprecedented numbers of human beings suffering painful, chronic, and costly diseases. By transcending the limitations of the proximate (human-agency focused) understanding of history, scholars in the humanities and social sciences can begin to take human biology seriously as something that should inform our ideals of equality and justice. Doing so might help us create the emancipatory knowledge needed to meet the demands of justice in the 21st century.
Cheers,
Colin

Genetics of Low Cholesterol

Naturenews has this interesting story about how the next major heart drug might come from research on the genetics of people with extremely low cholesterol. Yet another great example of positive biology.

Cheers,
Colin

POLS 250 Concluding Video (and plans for the future)

Tonight concludes another year of my teaching the undergraduate course POLS 250 here at Queen's (the concluding music video to the course is above).

This was my fourth consecutive year of teaching this full year survey (from Plato to Marx) course to approximately 250 students each year.

I am on sabbatical all of next year, so I will not be teaching the course in 2013/14. I've truly enjoyed sharing this intellectual journey through the works of the great thinkers of the past with my students. And for the coming year I am very excited about the prospect of being able to dedicate most of my time and energy into a project that grapples with the future of humanity. Namely, making the final push to complete the research project I started over 12 years ago on the genetic revolution. I will examine how, and why, insights from the biological sciences (especially genetics, evolution, psychology and biogerontology) require political theorists to critically re-examine what they take the determinates of "distributive justice" to be, as well as how we theorize about ideals like justice and equality.

In my humble opinion, gone are the days of grand armchair normative theorizing! In its place we can advance contextual, provisional normative analyses that take seriously the complex challenges facing, as well as opportunities open to, humanity in the 21st century. Doing this requires interdisciplinary engagement, and a somewhat critical attitude towards the limited (and sometimes misguided) assumptions of contemporary theories of justice.

Cheers,
Colin

Work and Family Balance Survey

This new survey is worth noting as it compares how the activities mothers and fathers undertake have changed over the past four decades (in the US).

Here are two findings from the survey:





Cheers,
Colin

Upcoming Toronto Conference

Later this week I will be giving the talk above at the University of Toronto.

In the 60 minute talk I aim to do two things. The first is to offer some general thoughts on methodological issues in normative theory. And the second is to argue for a substantive conclusion that I hope illustrates the points addressed with respect to the first (methodological) point.

I expand upon these two things here, to help me clarify and prepare my thoughts for the talk.

(1) In the first 15-20 minutes I will consider the question "What constitutes success in normative theory?" I will suggest that this perhaps the most significant and foundational question any moral or political theorist can ask himself or herself. And yet, paradoxically, that question is among the least discussed and debated topic in the field. I was never encouraged to ask, let alone seriously reflect upon or write about, this question as a student. And I did not seriously think about it early in my career as a professor. It was only when five professional developments occurred together over a period of about 10 years that I realized I had neglected a question that I had to address and answer more than any other (for the answer to this foundational question determines other, more specific, issues and questions one should try to answer).

Those developments where:

(1) deciding to write a textbook on contemporary political theory (which requires an author to ask herself "why should students learn this material?" "Why cover some theorists and issues and not others?", etc.).

(2) I switched from teaching in philosophy to political science (which meant new questions and considerations were raised in class that made me look at the material in a fresh, new light).

(3) My growing interest in, and understanding of, biology (especially evolutionary biology) convinced me that armchair normative theorizing was inherently problematic, and it would be much more interesting to see what normative prescriptions could be derived from an account of morality and justice that was predicated upon an accurate understanding of the human species and the health challenges of today's aging world.

(4) My love of teaching the cannon of political theory has grown exponentially over the past decade. When I first started teaching political theory I had the (what I now consider erroneous and rather naive) view that the greatest insights from theory came from more recent contributions to the field, and learning the classics was something that had to be done (jumping through hoops) before one could get down to the real serious business of debating and arguing about 20th century political philosophy. Now I have the opposite view. The professionalization of contemporary moral and political philosophy has (in my humble opinion) impoverished rather than enriched these disciplines. And so I think students will learn much more by engaging with the great thinkers of the past few millennia than they will from the great thinkers of the past few decades. This is not surprising because the former represents a much more diverse and larger pool of thinkers (and I think this epistemic diversity can trump (especially for undergraduates) the benefits of the specialization offered by more contemporary work, though ideally one learns both).

(5) The fifth development that influenced my more critical stance of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that I discovered the beautiful mind of John Dewey. Dewey inspires me as a teacher and scholar. Deweyan education is “the continuous reconstruction of experience”. Rather than emphasizing abstract thought experiments that make my students hyper-sensitive to their innate moral intuitions, I think it is much more important to get them to reflect on how the context of one's situation is important for determining how we should act. And so learning about the past, and thinking about the future, can help them appreciate how some circumstances change and evolve over time, while others may persist. And being attuned to these empirical considerations is an essential element of sound moral reasoning.

Considering Plato's reaction to the experiment of Athenian democracy, Hobbes's speculations about life in the state of nature, Rousseau's diagnosis of the creation of inequality, Wollstonecraft's response to patriarchy, or Marx's critique of capitalism-- these are amongst the best illustrations of how the human mind can open our eyes to new moral insights concerning how we should live our lives. By transcending their geography and time by considering (and engaging with) these great thinkers from the past, students can gain valuable insights into the way different moral values and empirical assumptions and insights can inform (for better or worse) our normative aspirations.

OK, back to the original question: "What constitutes success in normative theory?" No doubt there will be many different answers theorists will advance to answer this question. Here is mine: the success or failure of any normative theoretical framework or distributive or moral principle should be measured by the extent to which it facilitates or stifles the exercise of phronesis (practical wisdom). This vision of ethics and politics is an ancient one (going back Aristotle), a vision that has been lost, due in large part to the professionalization of the disciplines of philosophy and political science.

Phronesis (practical wisdom) is a higher-order virtue. Within the virtue ethics tradition, "A right act, all things considered, is what a person with phronesis might do in like circumstances" (see Virtues of the Mind). Virtue ethics is often criticized because it leaves the details of "what constitutes a virtuous agent?" sketchy and indeterminate. But I believe the emphasis on complex character traits, and the context of particular circumstances, is a distinctive strength of the virtue ethics tradition. Phronesis requires the exercise of many distinct moral and intellectual virtues. I don't plan on detailing a complete list of these virtues here. Instead, it is worth first asking how is it even possible that humans could be moral. Evolutionary psychology suggests there are several innate and universally available psychological systems which provide the foundations of “intuitive ethics”. Three of these are worth noting here: care, justice and liberty.

Some of the most prominent normative theories of the past 4 decades are based on these innate intuitions. Singer's principle of preventing bad occurrences is predicated on care, Rawls's account of "justice as fairness" on fairness (with connections to care and liberty as well) and Nozick's libertarianism on liberty. When Singer asks us to envision the drowning child in his thought experiment he is appealing to our innate concern for care. When Rawls constructs his original position he hopes it activates our intuitions about fairness. And when Nozick constructs his story of initial just acquisition and the Wilt Chamberlain example he turns up the dial on our concern for liberty. But can an appeal to any one of these intuitions help us achieve phronesis? I remain skeptical. These intuitions have evolved from thousands of years of evolution in hunter gatherer societies. Rather than derive principles and theories from abstract scenarios that make us hyper-sensitive to primal moral intuitions, I believe a greater emphasis should be placed on the intellectual virtues and the aspiration to reasonably balance different moral sensibilities in a manner fitting to the circumstances. So rather than minimize context by constructing abstract thought experiments, the normative theorist should bring to the fore the most significant and relevant empirical considerations and examine how and why they are relevant when weighing up the different reasons for different courses of action.

Three particular intellectual virtues will be central to the argument I advance in the second part of my talk. These are (from Virtues of the Mind):

(1) The ability to recognise the salient facts; sensitivity to details
(2) Adaptability of intellect
(3) The detective’s virtues: thinking of coherent explanations of the facts

Idealized discussions of morality and justice that bracket important contextual elements of real life (like the fact that people get sick and are vulnerable to disease, that society is not closed, etc.) stifle the exercise of these intellectual virtues. Because Rawls (at least initially) assumed all members of society are healthy and productive, he gives us a theory of distributive justice that ignores the reality that people age and become susceptible to a host of diseases and disorders. So the importance of "well-ordered" science is neglected, and instead our intuitions about the importance of liberty and fairly distributing money are stimulated by his thought experiment. Some have tried to salvage the Rawlsian project by keeping the principles of justice he defended, but simply adding things like healthcare to his principle of fair equality of opportunity. But something as complex and challenging as healthcare cannot adequately be addressed by a theoretical project that is predicated upon a highly idealized and abstract analysis. Instead, a defensible account of justice ought to emphasize (rather than ignore) the facts of human morbidity and mortality. The considered judgments the theorist advances are thus more likely to be something that can be assessed in terms of whether or not a virtuous agent would come to similar conclusions in those circumstances when the important details of the circumstances are a central part of the normative analysis. That is a very different approach than one which treats the primal intuitions we have regarding the distribution of resources as a reliable moral compass for addressing the complex issues of the 21st century.

Adaptability of intellect means the normative theorist, while they cannot escape make at least some appeal to our and their innate moral sensibilities, must always be cautious and provisional about the weight to place on those sensibilities. Which moral foundation to invoke, and how much weight to place on them, depends on context. We cannot say "liberty always trumps everything else" in the abstract. The intellectual virtues must be central to the normative project.

And finally the detective's virtues compels the normative theorist to adopt an interdisciplinary outlook, they must be attentive to the relevant explanations and insights provided by the natural and social sciences. Again, this is reason for caution and skepticism about armchair idealized normative theorizing. Intellectual humility suggests that many of the grand ambitious of theories of distributive justice are simply untenable. This does not mean that normative theorizing cannot be aspirational. It can and must be. But the reason it has the aspirations it has stems from the fact that the theorist has a solid understanding of (a) why the factors that impede the realization of these aspirations exists and persists, (b) why overcoming these obstacles is important in terms of our potential to flourish and (c) what prescriptions it would be reasonable to pursue to help us realize (b).


In the second, and main part of my presentation, I advance a central aspiration I believe a virtuous agent would endorse pursing today-- age retardation. Some of the relevant facts are:

(1) chronic disease is the leading cause of death in the world.
(2) life expectancy at birth for humans on this planet now exceeds our biological warranty period (70 years).
(3) there will be 2 billion people over age 60 by the middle of this century.
(4) when (3) happens it will be the first time that the number of people age ≥ 60 will outnumber the number of children (0-14) in the world
(5) the rate of aging is not fixed, it can be slowed (for example, by caloric restriction).
(6) slowing aging by just a few years would yield a larger health dividend that eliminating any single disease of aging.

The video presentation below captures the main points I will emphasize in this part of the talk (which I presented in Arizona in January):