The Stem Cell Veto

History is filled with examples of people who have used religion to justify horrendous atrocities against their fellow human. However, history may record that the religious act responsible for the most suffering and death is that which would result if we were actually to accept the argument behind the Bush Administration's decision to veto funding for embryonic stem cell research and the failure to override that veto.

The only people among us who would not be harmed by this action are those who die an early death without ever having suffered an organ failure, injury, or disease which embryonic stem cell research may be able to treat or cure. The young, healthy soldier instantly killed by an improvised explosive device or the Iraqi infant killed by an American bomb aimed at a suspected terrorist have not been harmed by this lack of legislation.

The rest of us are not so lucky.

The Temple Priest

Imagine a community in which the priests have gone around and collected all of the antibiotics and inoculations against diseases such as small pox, whooping cough, and polio and locked them in a temple safe. Your child gets an infection or a disease and the doctor says, "If I had some antibiotics, I could treat your child. However, they are all locked in the temple, and we may not go there."

You go to the Temple priest. He says, "We answer to a higher moral calling. Our religion teaches us that only God gets to decide who lives and who dies. Every time a doctor provides a patient with an antibiotic or inoculates him against disease, he is playing God. He is evil. We must answer to a higher calling and let God do His will. We will not let you use these medicines."

It is one thing for the people of some church to say that they have these beliefs and to ban the use of antibiotics and inoculations among its members. We can allow that the voluntary members of a church can decide for themselves, “I accept its restrictions."

It is quite another for the leaders of this church to use the state as an instrument for forcing everybody in society, including those who belong to other religions or who have other views, to follow the practices of this church instead of their own – particularly to the extent of forcing those others to suffer the ravages of disease and injury or even death.

The church who takes it upon itself to force disease, injury, and death on others even harm those who do not become sick, injured, or dead themselves. They will suffer the loss of friends and family. Plus, they must suffer the costs of avoiding illness and injury where the church has banned them from obtaining medical treatment.

The objection that we get from the priests at the temple is that taking the embryo and using it for research is no different than taking a perfectly healthy person and cutting him up against his will and using his tissue to save other lives.

Their claim that no difference exists is false. All value exists as relationships between states of affairs and desires. A rock has no desires. As a result, I can pulverize it if I choose without doing any morally significant harm. Because the rock desires nothing, I cannot thwart its desires. Because I cannot thwart its desires, I cannot do it any morally relevant harm. If other people have desires regarding that rock (e.g., it is a diamond that belongs to somebody), I can do THEM morally relevant harm by pulverizing the rock. However, the morally relevant harm is done to owner, not to the rock.

Transfusions, Antibiotics, Inoculations, and Stem Cells

No doubt the priest at the temple will disagree with me. The priest at the temple says that we can do morally relevant harm to a blob of cells that lacks desires and interests.

There are other priests who say that we do morally relevant harm when we use blood transfusions. There are still other priests who say that we do morally relevant harm when we try to cure disease with inoculations and fight infections with antibiotics. This latter type of priest says that sickness comes from denying God and the proper treatment must be prayer, not medicine.

Those who wish to deny us the benefits of embryonic stem cell research because their religion frowns on the practice are no different than those who would deny to us the use of blood transfusions, antibiotics, and inoculations because their religion does not accept these practices.

Allow those who voluntarily belong to the church to live by its rules. If they do not wish to undergo blood transfusions, then allow them the right to refuse blood transfusions. If they wish to try to cure disease with prayer then let them refuse medical care and see how well they do with prayer. If their religion prohibits them from using embryonic stem cells then let them state to their doctors, "I refuse any treatment that involves the use of embryonic stem cells." Tell the doctors that they must respect those choices even if, to the doctor, they are based on superstitious nonsense.

However, at the same time, no religion has the right to use the state as an instrument for prohibiting others from using blood transfusions, antibiotics, inoculations, or the benefits obtained from blobs of cells that have no desires or interests of their own. No religion has the right to force sickness, injury, and death on people who belong to some other religion, or to deny them the medical care that could treat or cure their condition.

This specific piece of legislation regarded the use of government money to finance research and the use of embryonic stem cell technologies.

Yet, we do NOT allow the existence of religious objections to prohibit the government from paying for blood transfusions.

We do NOT allow a politician to argue, "Because there are people who have religious objections to the use of inoculations and antibiotics we must ban the use of government money to fund inoculations or the use of antibiotics.”

Exactly this same standard is applicable to those who object to the use of whatever medical advances may come from the use of embryonic stem cells. It is wrong for these people to use the government to prohibit people from obtaining a benefit from clumps of cells that have no desires and no interest purely because the prohibitionist’s religion gives these clumps of cells religious significance.

Supporting the Troops

Perhaps we can see this case a little clearer by putting it into the context of soldiers wounded in battle in a fight to defend this country from a foreign aggressor.

Imagine a Commander in Chief standing before an auditorium full of soldiers telling them, “If you should be wounded in battle, we will not use blood transfusions to save your life. We have people in this country who find it morally objectionable, and we think it is wrong to offend them by allowing you to obtain life-sustaining blood transfusions.”

Imagine this Commander in Chief saying, “We will not inoculate you against disease or use antibiotics to fight any infection you may have because there are people in this country who find it morally objectionable, and they refuse to allow you to have the benefit of these medicines.”

Imagine this Commander in Chief standing before a room full of wounded soldiers – missing limbs and organs or laying paralyzed in their beds – and telling them, “We are not going to allow a dime of government money to go into regrowing your limbs or replacing your organs or repairing your broken spines because some religions in our country do not approve of this practice.”

Spare Parts

Finally, when President Bush announced and attempted to justify his veto he surrounded himself with children – the results of embryos that had been adopted – and said, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.”

Bush’s statement is such a gross misrepresentation of the case against him that it is difficult not to classify it as a lie. At best he “bore false witness” against his critics by falsely attributing to them a position none of them hold.

These boys and girls are in the world today, with their own desires and interests. Consequently, any harm done to them counts as morally relevant harm. Claiming that his opponents wish to use these children as body parts is as gross a lie as a President can make.

On this account, we must realize that this President has never shown the slightest moral qualms against bearing false witness. Clearly, though he thinks that morally significant harm can be done to blobs of cells without desires, he does not think that morally significant harm can be done to those against which he bears false witness.

More to the point, Bush could not have made less sense than if he had held up a packet of blood or a vial of penicillin and said, “I have prohibited federal use of these medicines because these boys and girls are not spare parts.” Since nobody is talking about using those boys and girls as spare parts, the fact that they are not spare parts is irrelevant to any argument.

What is relevant is whether those with particular religious beliefs may use the State as an instrument to force sickness and death on others because they have the unfounded belief that their God is offended by the use of, for example, blood transfusions, inoculations, antibiotics, or clumps of cells that have no desires or interests of any kind.

Rational Choice in Medical Treatment: Part II

Martin pointed out, accurately, that a couple of days ago I did not actually address the question of whether a 16-year-old be allowed to choose his own medical treatment. Instead, I went off on a tangent. I wanted to bring a different question to people's attention. "Is it okay that a 16-year-old lacks the fundamental tools for making an intelligent decision?"

Why do we think that there is an important moral question to be answered regarding whether a 16-year-old be allowed to make choices regarding medical treatment, yet we assume that it is okay to raise a 16-year-old who lacks the ability to think rationally about making such choices?

If I were to address the question of whether this 16-year-old be allowed to choose his own medical treatment, my answer is, "I do not know." I do not have all of the facts available. I would consider my ability to answer that question in this case to be like proclaiming an accused man guilty or innocent of a crime based on a single newspaper article.

The minor, in this case, provided hours of closed-door testimony as to why he does not want to go through another round of chemotherapy. I can imagine cases where medical treatment is so harsh that I would choose to die rather than undergo such a treatment. Though I know that there are others who value survival at all costs, I am not one of them. I would expect others to respect my wishes. Accordingly, I cannot say that this minor is "wrong" to assert that the discomforts of chemotherapy simply are not worth it.

At the same time, this minor is seeking a quack medical procedure with as much of a chance of success as "no treatment." This suggests that he is not being entirely rational. He is acting like a person who has come to believe that 10% (chance of survival for those who use this quack treatment) is greater than 10% (chance of survival for those who obtain no treatment) which is greater than 85% (chance of survival for those who get treatment).

Is his choice actually based on placing a higher value on avoiding the ill effects of chemotherapy over life? Or is he being irrational in his choice of means for realizing his actual values?

I do not know.

In this case, I think that it is important to note that the parents are backing up the child's decision. This is not a case where a minor is having a choice forced on him by his parents. This seems to be a case where a 16-year-old child went to his parents (after having gone through chemotherapy once) and said, "I don't want to go through that again." I am making an assumption that the parents, having seen their child's determination, said, "Okay, we won't force you to do that again. We will support your decision, whatever it may be."

It is also relevant that this is not an uninformed decision. The minor has gone through chemotherapy once before and is basing his current choice, in part, on that experience.

Yet, even here, the mere fact that a minor makes a particular decision and the parents are willing to support it does not make the decision inviolable. A child may make a decision to spend every day watching cartoons, and a parent may support it, and yet that parent may still be charged with neglect. The parent’s duty is to do that which is in the child’s interest, which is often not what the child wants.

The First Principle: Burden of Proof

In principle, I tend to prefer using the same standards that one uses in a criminal trial. In a criminal trial, we (or, at least, those of us who are not Bush Supporters who have abandoned any sense of justice) work on the assumption that a person is presumed guilty unless proven innocent. The burden of proof is on those who assert guilt.

In matters such as this, I would argue that we assume competence unless incompetence is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Indeed, I would argue for a stronger presumption in these cases then I would argue for in criminal law.

There are organizations in this country devoting a great deal of effort to filling the courts with judges who have abandoned reason for faith. I think it is quite likely that, some time in the future, an atheist parent with a sick child might have their decisions question. The child says that he wants chemotherapy for his cancer. The parents back the child's decision. However, a faith-based social worker takes the case before a faith-based judge who says, "The problem in this home is their lack of religion. God is punishing them for their lack of faith. What this child needs is not chemotherapy, but prayer. We should remove the child from this obviously unhealthy family arrangement, put him in a good Christian family, built up his faith, and let God take care of the disease."

In order to prevent this from happening, I would argue for a set of general principles that put the right to choose medical care on the same level as the rights to freedom of the press or freedom of religion.

These standards have never been absolute. The right to freedom of press has never allowed one to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The right to freedom of religion does not give a parent the right to kill a child who misbehaves regardless of his ability to quote scripture in defense of that action.

What these standards do is to define a strong presumption in favor of liberty – one that requires a compelling state interest to outweigh.

So, this minor and his parents begin with a strong presumption in their favor – a presumption that requires those who would take away their freedom to come up with proof beyond a reasonable doubt against the decision that the boy has made and the parents support.

The Second Principle: Harm to Others

This part is important. It is easily proved to be true, and everybody accepts it as true in passing, yet many people act as if it is false, and sometimes assert that it is false when it is convenient to do so.

The principle is this: The state has no obligation to accept all belief systems as equally valid. It may . . . indeed, it must . . . identify some belief and value systems as unacceptable and punish those who act according to those belief/value systems.

The prime example is a belief/value system that makes a person a danger to others. A person who believes that he has a duty from God to kill all the Jews or blacks, for example, cannot legitimately appeal to the First Amendment and say, “Congress shall pass no law prohibiting the free exercise of my religion.”

This is wrong.

Congress not only has a right, bit has a duty, to prohibit the free exercise of those religions that command their followers to kill, burn at the stake, crucify, maim, mutilate, imprison, pillage, destroy or take the property of others or to deny them the means of providing for their own well-being and that of their family.

Similarly, no person (and no majority of persons) has the right to make Congress the instrument through which they practice religious commandments to kill, burn at the stake, crucify, maim, mutilate, imprison, pillage, destroy or take the property of others or to deny those others the means of providing for their own well-being and that of their family.

Relevant to this case, just as the state may command that individual treat their neighbors in certain ways and not permit freedom of belief to be used as a license to do harm to their neighbors, the state may command that individuals care for their minor children and not permit freedom of belief to be used as a license to do harm to their children or fail to protect them from harm.

It counts as a great absurdity for a person to do harm to his neighbor and to

Consistent with (1) above, the state should begin with a strong presumption that a person is not doing harm to their neighbors, or their children, or failing to protect their children from harm. However, if evidence can be provided beyond a reasonable doubt that individuals are doing harm to their neighbors or their children, then the state may interfere with those practices.

Once again, I wish to repeat, the standard of proof here is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” A “preponderance of evidence” or a “reasonable to believe” case is not sufficient. The case must be so strong that no reasonable person can deny its merit – the same standard that we use to prove guilt in a court of law.

Conclusion

In applying these two standards to the case at hand, I cannot say for certain what my decision will be.

As far as using this phony cure from Mexico, I hold that there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this is snake-oil and no responsible parent would serve snake-oil to their child. The freedom of belief does not include a freedom to poison one’s child, or the freedom to feed a child snake-oil instead of medicine, which has the same effect.

However, I cannot say beyond a reasonable doubt that it is unreasonable for a person to say, “I am not willing to pay the costs (not only in terms of money, but in terms of undesirable effects) of chemotherapy in order to purchase a greater chance of survival.” I, for one, recognize a limit to the pain and suffering I am willing to endure even if it were necessary to purchase my survival.

Because of this, I cannot render a private judgment one way or the other in this case. I do not have enough information. However, I can – as I have done – describe the principles to be used in finding an answer.

Some Dishonest Advice

The immoralities that I have condemned in the past two days showed up in the headlines again this morning, this time relating to the issue of abortion. Apparently, a number of pregnancy counseling centers that receive federal funding have been giving out false information about the risks of abortion. In this way, they have sought to prevent people from making fully informed decisions regarding their own health choices – attempting instead to manipulate them into doing what these counselors wanted them to do.

Two days ago I illustrated my point with a story about of a group of people caught in a fire. In this story I had a priest give those trapped in the building misleading information in order to manipulate them into taking a more dangerous route out of the building so they would not tread on sacred ground.

The people who work in these pregnancy resource centers are doing the same thing as that priest – giving people false and misleading information to manipulate them into choosing a more dangerous route that does not tread on their sacred ground. In this case, they give false and misleading information about the dangers of abortion.

For some reason these people are not willing to respect their clients enough to tell them the truth. These people have decided to lie to and manipulate those who come to them for help.

This form of deception can be described as a form of tyranny.

If I wanted to deprive you of the freedom to make your own choices – to bend your choices to my will rather than leave you free to exercise your own will – I could do so by using threats of violence. I could say, "Do as I will you to do, or I will have Bubba here do things to you that you will surely not like.” I might have my thugs visit you at your homes some night and break both of your legs, or haul you off to prison to face some very unpleasant 'questioning', or I may take away your livelihood so that you cannot find work, pay your bills, and feed your family.

However, if I wanted to bend your choices to my will, I do not have to break your legs. Indeed, I do not even want to break your legs. I want you to obey my commands. So, what I am seeking is to make you believe that your legs will be broken if you do not obey me. If I can cause you to believe this, even if it is not true, then I have chained you to my will just as effectively.

Note that these two situations are entirely different from the situation that exists if I warn you about a true cause and effect. If I tell you, "You will likely break your legs if you complete that action (e.g., jump out of a third-floor window onto concrete),” I am not attempting to bend your will to my own. I might not even care if you break your legs in this circumstance. I am simply giving you information that you can use to make a fully informed choice. I will leave it up to you to decide if your action is worth the possibility of breaking your legs. It may well be if, for example, the building were on fire and you would burn alive if you did not jump.

I am not morally responsible for the interaction between your legs and the concrete – that interaction will be what it is regardless of my actions. I am, however, responsible for your broken legs if I send Bubba out with a baseball bat to break them. I am also responsible for your false belief that displeasing me will result in your legs being broken if I feed you that false belief as a way of controlling your actions. In both of these cases, I act so as to manipulate your actions. When I do that, I am denying you your freedom and making you a servant of my will.

In the case of the pregnancy resource centers, they are doing exactly the same thing when they threaten that their clients will suffer an increased risk of breast cancer or emotional problems if they have an abortion. Instead of saying, “If you do not obey me then your legs will be broken,” these deceitful individuals are saying, “If you do not obey me then you will get breast cancer and suffer emotional trauma.” If these claims are true, then their statements are like those of the person warning another of the hazards of jumping. If their statements are false, then their statements are like those of the thug threatening harm in order to bend another person to their will.

This news article specifically concerns people who get government funds to use in an operation that operates on the same moral level as a family of gangsters. The operation that they are funding threatens harm to those who disobey the wishes of those who run the pregnancy resource center – harms in the form of breast cancer and emotional trauma that research says does not exist.

These pregnancy resource center workers are acting like the priest in my story of two days ago, using false claims to manipulate those caught in a hazardous situation into taking a more dangerous route so that they will not walk across the priest’s holy ground.

Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that we do not teach people how to make intelligent decisions.

One of the things that caught my attention in this article was a statement about Molly Ford from Care Net, one of the organizations receiving federal funds and passing out false information. The article reports:

But Ford said that pregnancy center counselors don't need statistics to tell them that many women undergoing an abortion experience severe emotional trauma.

Recall that yesterday I wrote about a person considering several types of treatment for an illness. Treatment options included “No treatment” where 90% of the people died, and “Treatment E” where 97% of the people died.

Now, somebody in Molly Ford’s position who has the job of trying to sell Treatment E could honestly say, “We don’t need statistics to tell us that many people who use Treatment E are cured.” Indeed, if their treatment center treats 1000 people, then they will know of 30 people who are cured. However, they are still morally reprehensible for their decision to sell Treatment E – since, if those same 1000 people would have done nothing, 100 of them would have likely survived, instead of 30. In spite of the fact that this agency knows of 30 survivors, statistics show us that, in fact, they killed 70 people.

Ford’s moral culpability is made much worse by the fact that these people offer a consulting service. People are supposed to come to them for advice. People are coming to them to get help in making an intelligent decision. Molly Ford’s comments above show that the people at Care Net are professionally incompetent when it comes to making intelligent decision. Any organization that uses decision-making procedures that could have them recommending Treatment E over no treatment at all does not have the professional competence to advise others on how to make intelligent decisions.

For the government to be paying these people to help others make decisions is as bad as the government paying engineers who could not pass a basic math class.

The principles that I have used so far lead to one more conclusion that I would like to mention.

I have spoken about how it is fundamentally immoral to say to people, “Do what I tell you to do or Bubba here with the baseball bat will have to break your legs.” This is a gangster mentality, and gangsters are very far from the paradigms of virtue.

But, let’s just pretend that we have a person with a gangster mentality. This gangster, however, is a bit dissatisfied with Bubba’s limits. Some of the people he wants to control think that they can take Bubba out. Bubba has its limits. So, instead of using Bubba as an enforcer, our gangster decides to tell the people that he has an omniscient, omnipotent, invisible Bubba who does not simply break legs. This super-Bubba has the power to make anybody who disobeys this gangster suffer forever in an afterlife.

This would make a sweet situation that anybody with a gangster mentality would drool over.

If only it were possible to convince people that an omniscient, omnipotent, invisible Bubba with the power to make people suffer forever in an afterlife actually exists.

Rational Choice in Medical Treatment

Last week, while I was in the middle of wish week, I read a story about a 16-year-old cancer patient suing for the right to choose his own medical care.

Last year, the teen acquired Hodgkin's Disease. He went through three months of chemotherapy that he found unpleasant. This year, his cancer became active again and he was advised to undergo another round of chemotherapy. The patient instead decided that he would prefer a less harsh treatment from a Mexican clinic that involved a sugar-free organic diet and herbs called the Hoxsey’s Method. His parents are supporting him in his decision. However, social workers are arguing that the minor be forced back into conventional treatment.

Encountering this issue caused me to think back to when I was 16 years old. One of the things that struck me is that I do not recall anybody ever . . . ever . . . explaining to me how medical research works, or how to use medical research to make rational decisions.

Nobody ever said to me as a child growing up, "Here's how the science of medicine works.

"Let's assume that you have come down with the dread disease known as Mung. You want to get better. In order to get better, you have three options available to you.

"Option 1 is to do nothing. Research shows that 90% of those who do nothing will die of the disease. The other 10% will recover.

"Option 2 is to use Treatment A. In our studies of those who use Treatment A, we discover that 90% of them will die as well. The other 10% will recover.

"Option 3 is to use Treatment B. Treatment B has a mortality rate of 15%. However, Treatment B comes with a bunch of unpleasant side effects -- vomiting, hair loss, weight loss, muscle cramps, fatigue, and hiccups.

"Option 4 is to use Treatment C. Treatment C has a 55% mortality rate without all of the side effects."

“Option 5 involves using Treatment D, which has never been tested.”

“Option 6 is to use Treatment E. Those who use Treatment E actually have a 97% mortality rate.”

Please note, with the introduction of Option 5, that anecdotal evidence is worthless. This is the type of evidence that one finds on television commercials where those who made the commercial find a small number of people willing to claim that they have used a product successfully. Even Option 5, in this example, gives a 3% success rate. If 100 people try Option 5, the people creating the commercials will be able to find three people willing to swear by the product on camera to tell you how essential it was to their success.

The other 97 are dead.

Given these options, which do you choose?

The problem with this situation is that scientists speak in a language that many people do not understand. Because people are not taught the language, they find it difficult to use scientific findings to make rational decisions.

Specifically, when it comes to Treatment A, scientists do not say, "We have proved that it does not work." Scientists cannot say that; it would be dishonest. The scientists say, "We have no evidence that it works."

Now, to the average person on the street, there is a whole lot of different between, "We know that it does not work," and "We have no knowledge that it does work." The latter option is consistent with the claim that it does work in ways that we do not know about. Indeed, that is true. The scientists are keeping open the possibility that there are things going on in the universe that they do not know.

In short, scientists have this bad habit of being both honest and humble. So, they say, "We have no evidence that this works."

Way too many people hear this and think, "You don't know whether it works or not. It's a coin toss. This is my life I am talking about. I am willing to gamble for my life. Heck, a coin toss is better than no toss at all, right? Maybe I'll lose; but, at least I will have a chance."

Actually, in Scienceese, "No evidence that Treatment A is effective" means that you have no reason to choose Treatment A. This whole reaction assumes that Treatment A improves the odds of survival. In fact, Treatment A, ex hypothesi, leaves those odds exactly what they were. Objectively, scientifically, no reason exists for choosing Treatment A. If the agent chooses Treatment A, and he claims to have a reason to do so (to increase his chance of survival), then he is mistaken.

To this, the desperate individual might respond, "There is no reason to believe that Treatment A will help, but there is no reason to believe that Treatment A hurts either. You say that I have no reason to take Treatment A. I have no reason NOT to take Treatment A either."

Well, if Treatment A is completely free (if you are not paying somebody $150 for a bottle of pills), and completely easy (you are not spending an hour each day preparing special foods or performing special rituals), and Treatment A does not prevent you from looking for treatments that are actually effective, then this is true. There is no reason NOT to take Treatment A.

Yet, this is almost never true.

In most circumstances, the reason NOT to take Treatment A can be found in the waste of money and time that goes into that which one has no reason to do. If money is involved, there are other possible uses for that money. Even if the agent has no options available to him, a contribution to research so that future generations have more options than those who live at present counts as a reason NOT to take Treatment A.

Another reason NOT to pursue Treatment A is that it promotes a snake-oil industry that draws countless individuals each day down a road that will bring them to an avoidable death or suffering. If these industries were not profitable – as they would not be if individuals paid attention to evidence of usefulness and sound reason – people would make less of an investment in them, and less harm would be done. For a person of good moral character, these would be important considerations.

Now, I have assumed so far that we are talking about an option that has been studied and found no more useful than no treatment at all. What about an option that has not been subject to medical studies?

For any and all afflictions, there are an infinite number of untried cures available. Here are a few:

(1) Holding your breath for one minute 10 times between noon and 1:00 pm may cure your affliction.

(2) Eat 12 raw eggs, one at the top of each hour, throughout the day.

(3) Hang upside down for 15 minutes per day.

(4) Wrap copper wire completely around your body and run through the house with all of the lights on.

If a person is truly desperate for a cure for his illness, and has taken the position that, “If nobody has proved that it does not work, then it is worth trying,” then that is going to be one very busy person. There are always an infinite number of options that have not yet been proved ineffective. Sitting at this computer, I could come up with thousands before the evening is done.

One thing that I can say about all of these untested options is that, if you pick any one, it will tend to have a 10% chance of success – the same odds that you have if you do not treat the illness at all.

Somehow, an individual has to make a choice among the infinite number of options available. A prudent person will look for options that there is actually some reason to accept. The best some reason available is empirical evidence showing that those who use a particular option actually do have a better chance of survival.

Why is it that in this society we do not spend an important part of time in school teaching children these very simple rules for making rational decisions? It is almost as if we do not care whether they live or die; whether they live well or in misery.

The Sacred Archway: Embryonic Stem Cell Research

There are more than 60 people trapped in a large burning building, and there are two possible exits. One exit requires walking through The Sacred Archway. The archway has been built on sacred ground and, according to The Sacred Text of the church; no person may go through the archway.

Those who walk through The Sacred Archway are showing affront to God and are to be executed. This is what it says in The Sacred Text. Actually, the Sacred Text does not say that all who walk through The Sacred Archway are to be executed. It does not mention The Sacred Archway one way or the other. However, those who interpret The Sacred Text have been saying for years now that those who walk through The Sacred Archway must die.

There is a second way out of the burning building.

The Priest stands outside the building will a cell phone that he is using to talk to the people inside the building. They will soon burn up. The Priest has two options. He can direct those inside through The Sacred Archway, or he can direct them to the second exit.

Only, the Priest knows that, to get to the exist, the people inside will need to fit into an elevator that can only hold nine people. This is not certain. More might be able to fit. However, the best information that the Priest has available says that nine can fit.

Many of those who are in the building do not belong to his church. They belong to other religions that do not accept the idea of a “Sacred Archway” or a God that commands the execution of those who walk through it. Some even think that if the way to The Sacred Archway is open, that this is a gift from God providing them with a way out – a sign of God’s goodness. They seek to go to the Sacred Archway to get out.

However, the Priest gets on the cell phone and tells the group that they can all use the second exit. Even though there is no reason to believe that no more than nine can survive going that route, he assures them that it is safe. “There is no need to try for The Sacred Archway. Go this way instead. You will be alright.”

They listen to the Priest.

Nine people make it out of the fire unharmed. The rest die or suffer such horrible and painful burns. The Priest, however, is a charitable person. He collects donations. The members of his church raise money that they donate to the victims, or the survivors of the victims. They look around at the burned people being cared for their hospitals and the families of those who died being given clothing and shelter to help them get by. The Priest congratulates himself for being such a good person.

The Priest conveniently ignores the fact that if they had gone for The Sacred Archway all of them might have left the building alive and healthy. The evidence suggests that this would have been the outcome. However, the Priest does not like that evidence, and does not care whether it is true anyway. Nothing is more important than preventing people from using The Sacred Archway. Besides, this option gives the Church an ability to practice its charity and show the world how moral and superior they are.

The Priest in my story has a name. Actually, the Priest represents three people. One is David Prentice from the Family Research Council. Another is is Senator Sam Brownback from Kansas. The third is Representative Dave Weldon of Florida.

All three of these people have lied to those who are trapped in a moral equivalent of a burning building, directing them to an exit that few can use -- lying to them – potentially costing them their lives and their health -- so that those who are trapped would not be tempted to use The Sacred Archway.

The “Sacred Archway” in this story represents the medical breakthroughs that we might obtain through embryonic stem cell research. The lie is represented by a list of disorders that some opponents of pending legislation has given as disorders that adult stem cell research can be used to treat or cure.

The Priests in this case thinks that there is more at stake than simply walking through a sacred archway. They hold that this act will destroy an innocent life. It is as if the Priest in this story believes that if anybody walks through The Sacred Archway that an angel will die and be forever lost. The case against stem cell research is no better than this. There is no substantive argument that a clump of cells that makes up an embryo that will die anyway represents an “innocent life.” The argument comes entirely from a religious interpretation – one that has no more merit than the belief that if anybody walks through their Sacred Archway an angel will be forever destroyed.

Yet, my case here is more immediate than the question of whether an embryo represents an innocent person. My case here is that David Prentice, Senator Sam Browback, and Representative Dave Weldon lied to people who have over sixty medical conditions, telling them that they can find a way out of their situation if they go for the second exit – adult stem cell research.

These people were not content to tell those who are trapped with these medical disorders – and those who love and care for them – “we do not want you to use The Sacred Archway because our religion tells us that an angel will be forever lost.” Perhaps they were afraid that those who are trapped and their families would not find this a good enough reason to choose to suffer death or the other ill effects of their condition.

So, they decided to lie.

An article that appears in Science Express, three scientists show that adult stem cell research has only shown success in nine of these cases. These are the nine represented by those who make it out of the burning building alive. The remaining 56 people who die or suffer burns represent the victims of the lies that Prentice, Browback, and Weldon have decided to tell.

In the realm of medical ethics – and in the realm of personal ethics – there is a principle whereby people with a tough decision to make are given the facts so that they can make a fully informed decision. Prentice, Browback, and Weldon have decided to ignore this standard. They have decided to fill peoples’ heads with medical lies in order to manipulate them into making misinformed decisions desired by those who are doing the manipulating.

We can debate whether embryos that will otherwise be destroyed represent an entity that cannot morally be used to bring health and life to others. We can debate whether walking through The Sacred Archway to escape a fire will result in the permanent destruction of an angel.

However, there is not much room to debate the immorality of lying to people about the possibility of hope where none has been found. These people do not even have the moral decency to discuss the topic honestly. Instead, they decide to engage in a cruel deception. They give the victims of disease, injuries, and disorders a false hope so that they can take away real hope.

Israel vs. Hezbollah

I wish to let it be known that, in this current conflict, if one had to make a choice between Israel and its enemies, a person of good moral conscience would have to side with Israel. Those who would daily fire rockets at civilians are not civilized. I do not address a letter to them because I think that their religion and their culture has carried them beyond reason and no letter could do any good. Nor do I think that any appeal to reason would be effective against the supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, because “supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah” and “appeal to reason” are such mutually exclusive concepts.

However, it is my hope that those who may support Israel have not abandoned all reason, and a letter such as this may have some affect on them.

Because even if the choice can be easily made between Israel on one side and Hamas and Hezbollah on the other, would it not be nice to be able to side with good over evil, than to side with the lesser of two evils?

So far, I am hearing that there have been over 100 people killed in Lebanon The death total is only a small fraction of the total harm. We must count the wounded and the orphaned, those who have lost their livelihood, the disruption to education, damage to an infrastructure that must be replaced by money raised in an economy that has been blown to bits along with the bridges and airports, and the psychological harms done.

Some analysts say that the motivation behind Israel’s attacks is to put pressure on the government of Lebanon to take action against Hezbollah. If this is accurate, then there is a problem here. “We are going to hold the well-being of your people hostage until the government of Lebanon gives in to our demands.” This appears to be the moral message that Israel is giving to the world, that this type of stand is somehow morally legitimate. Yet, if it is morally legitimate, then on what basis to they criticize an enemy who captures two Israeli soldiers hostage and says to the Israeli government, “We will hold the well-being of these people hostage until the government of Israel gives in to our demands.”

It does appear at times that the whole of the Middle East subscribes to the same moral code – a code that is the foundation for the death, mutilation, destruction, and suffering that dominates the region. These evils will continue until the people of the region prescribe a new moral code. I would suggest one that begins with the principle, “Punish the guilty; leave the innocent alone.” Or, in other words, “Protect the innocent from those who would do them harm.”

On this standard, the deaths, injuries, and economic and psychological harm inflicted on many of the people in Lebanon are moral failures. Many of those being made to suffer are innocent. Under the principle, “Protect the innocent from those who would do them harm,” every bit of harm suffered by the innocent is a moral failing. It can never be defended as truly good. It can only be defended as a lesser evil.

In supporting Israel, would it not be better to be able to defend a force of good, rather than a lesser evil?

“Israel has the right to defend itself.”

This is true.

However, the moral principle of self-defense is not to be taken so narrowly. My right to defend myself from those who will do me harm extends to my right to defend my wife and my children as well. If I should see some thug assailing a complete stranger, the “right to self-defense” applies to defending that neighbor from that thug. It is not actually a right to self defense – this is simply a slogan. It is a right (and perhaps a duty) specifically to defend the innocent from those who do harm to the innocent. Doing harm to the innocent is not an exercise of this “right to self-defense”, it is a violation of this right.

If we agree that many innocent people in Lebanon are suffering harm – and only a fool who falls victim to the most tortured logic and overgeneralization could doubt this. If we assert that there is a moral right to self-defense. Then we must assert that the innocent in Lebanon also have the right to self-defense. They may not have the power. However, unless we embrace the proposition “might makes right” the lack of power to defend oneself does not imply the lack of a right to do so. If they have a right to defend themselves, then who, may I ask, do they have the moral permission to exercise that right against?

These are the tortured and twisted conclusions when we define the “right to self-defense” as Israel is seeking to define it. We have a state of perpetual war with competing sides both claiming the the right to kill the other in the name of defending their own.

We get something entirely different if we define the right of self-defense as “the right to protect the innocent from those who would do them harm.”

Not, “the innocent Israelis from those who would do them harm.” Not, “the innocent Americans from those who would do them harm.” But, “The innocent.” Period. Full stop. From those who would do them harm.

Those who would protect the innocent from those who would do them harm – they are the good guys. Those who harm the innocent – they are the bad guys.

President Bush has asked Israel to try to minimize civilian casualties.

Asked?

This is not the type of thing to be asked. This is the type of thing to be demanded. However, the Bush Administration has bought into the same twisted and tortured version of the “right to self-defense” that is perpetuating the violence and conflict in and around Israel. Only, Bush is using it to perpetuate the violence and conflict in and around Iraq.

We must remember that Bush himself has adopted this twisted version of the “right to self defense” that sees nothing wrong with blowing up a house where families are gathered for a holiday dinner if there is evidence that a suspected terrorist might, perhaps, be on the guest list.

In Iraq, we are the ones showing such disregard for innocent life that we perform actions that – if they were done to Americans by others – would generate such hostility and anger that the perpetrators would know no security. Yet, the Bush Administration continues to wonder why the Iraqis respond to our actions in ways that make it so difficult for his administration to establish any type of security.

Morality dictates universal principles. If we act on principles that cannot be made universal, then the actions we perform are evil and we should be ashamed. On this ground, Israel should be as willing to bomb Beruit on the same principles it would use to bomb Tel Aviv. And America should use the same principles to decide the merits of putting a bomb on a building in Baghdad as it would use to put a bomb on a building in Boston.

Or they should be ashamed.

“But, Alonzo, you idiot! We are in a state of war! Only a moron would advocate such niceties in a state of war!”

Perhaps we should not be in a state of war. Perhaps being in a state of war is doing us more harm than good.

Yes, it is true that the use of civil courts and civil procedures to find and punish the guilty give the guilty certain advantages. There can be no doubt that the Bill of Rights in America has sometimes been used to the advantage of those who had no good intentions. And there are some who say that we need to do away with these civil liberties – that they are nothing but curtains behind which evil people may hide.

However, it has another effect. It gives the innocent a clear indication of where their interests lie.

Assume that you are an innocent person, and you wish to remain an innocent person, and you wish to entice your neighbors to be innocent persons – innocent in the sense that they, like you, follow the principle of “defend the innocent from those who would do them harm.”

In this country, we live in peace. We live in peace because we have civil liberties. The guilty can certainly hide behind these civil liberties. However, the innocent know on which side their bread is buttered. The innocent are wise enough that in this conflict we have a choice between siding those who do harm to the innocent, and those who respect the principle, “defend the innocent from those who would do them harm.”

These “civil liberties” that some treat with such contempt are a set of rules that say, “make sure that the people you harm are guilty, and that you do not end up doing harm to the innocent.” In such a system – in a system that respects “civil liberties” – such a huge portion of the population see the wisdom in being innocent that the nation can be at peace.

A society that does not care for civil liberties says, “We do not care whether you are guilty or innocent. We will make no effort to sort one from the other. We will not seek warrants based on probable cause. We will not hold trials. We will simply take who we please and do with them as we please and hope that some of them are actually guilty.”

Where there are no civil liberties, people have no particularly compelling reason to be innocent. In a region where the innocent are blown up along side the guilty, rounded up with the guilty, imprisoned with the guilty, and tortured with the guilty (only more so, because the innocent have nothing to bargain with), why not be guilty?

“But, Alonzo, there is still a clear moral difference between us and them. They target the innocent for death. We only target the guilty.”

A sniper takes a position on the roof of an apartment building. He takes deliberate aim at an innocent person and shoots. That is evil. In retaliation, “we”, who call ourselves the good guys, drop a bomb on the building, “targeting the sniper”, but killing 100 people living in the building and wounding another 200.

Could somebody please explain to me, in this case, the great moral merit to be found in “targeting the innocent” and “targeting the guilty, but harming the innocent to such great affect?”

Do you want peace? Try this. Adopt the principle that one is to protect the innocent – all innocent – from those who will do them harm. Adopt a system of civil liberties (warrants and trials) that say that you will take pains to separate the innocent from the guilty. Give the innocent people of the world a reason to take sides. There will still be criminals. Those criminals will sometimes do harm. However, innocent people will, for once, be given a clear choice.

Unchecked Power = Tyranny

A while ago I learned that if you want to see what evil lurks in the heart of any administration, wait for a major news story to dominate Page 1 of the news -- then turn to Page 2. Administrations use these opportunities to say things that they fear the people will not like at a time when the people are distracted by other events.

Hurricane season is a perfect time to practice this sport. The approaching storm gives the Administration time to plan what it needs to report but what it hopes nobody will notice. That information goes out the day the hurricane hits shore. With the news media filled with scenes of destruction, few people notice this story.

With the news these days filled with explosions and other exciting images out of Lebanon, this is a perfect time for the Administration to slip items into the news that might generate some expressions of concern, if people had not been so conveniently distracted by other events.

One story recently reported is that Senator Specter, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Bush Administration announced a deal regarding oversight of NSA's warrantless wiretaps. Justice Committee chairman Arlen Specter announced the results of "negotiations" with the administration that has been going on since mid June. These negotiations resulted in Specter amending his own proposed legislation dealing with the warrantless wiretap issue.

Some of the major terms of this compromise are that Bush agrees to voluntarily submit the NSA wiretap program to the FISA court for review, all lawsuits against the program will be combined into one lawsuit that will be presented to the FISA court, and no future program needs to be submitted to the FISA court.

For all practical purposes, it is possible to imagine the results of these negotiations in terms of a parent negotiating with a child about eating his vegetables. The parent in this case, being played by Senator Specter, has offered the child (the Bush Administration) a deal. "I promise that from now on I will agree that you do not have to eat your vegetables if you do not want to. You don't even need to eat your vegetables tonight if you don't want to. However, in exchange, you promise to eat your vegetables tonight even though you don't have to do it."

This is certainly a deal that any vegetable-hating child would love. Its legal analogue is a deal that any Constitution-hating President would love, for the same reasons.

One of the key components of this political bargain is that the Senate bill states that neither this nor any future President needs to submit any program to the Courts for review if they do not want to. According to Media Matters, "Specter's revisions would make it optional for the White House to submit such intelligence programs to FISA review and to reject FISA as the exclusive means by which domestic surveillance for foreign-intelligence purposes could be legally approved."

This, it makes eating one's vegetables voluntary. It gives the President the sole authority to determine if he is obeying the Constitution or not, with the power to seek a second opinion only if he wants to do so.

This causes me to ask, "What about the other secret programs that the Bush Administration is running -- the ones we have not learned about yet?" This wording suggests that Specter is willing to give a free pass to any intelligence-gathering program we do not yet know about, for the sake of a non-binding promise to submit one we do know about to review.

I want to remind the reader that the purpose of judicial review is not to prevent the President from seeking information on the enemies of the United States and protecting its people. It is there to make sure that the President of the United States is using these powers to seek information on the true enemies of the United States and protecting its people – as opposed to collecting information on personal and political enemies for the purpose of hoarding political power.

History tells us that political leaders too often confuse their political well-being with that of the state, adopting the attitude, "I am the state!" Far too often they simply cannot tell the difference between political criticism and sedition, or between political opposition and treason.

So, who is going to make sure that the procedures that the nations' spies are following are actually targeting terrorists and other threats to the country? Who is to prevent somebody like Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney from slipping the names of people like Joe Wilson and other critics into the list of "suspected terrorists" just to see what comes out?

This is what we need judicial review to do for us -- to make sure that things like this do not happen.

The Secret Constitution

In addition, the Specter compromise says that FISA will determine the constitutionality of the program and could announce its decision in a secret opinion.

What does this give us?

It gives us a secret Constitution.

It means that teachers in the nation's law schools, when it comes to teaching constitutional law, will have to throw up their hands and say, "I can't teach you any of this. Constitutional interpretations are secret, so we cannot discuss them in the classroom."

"No, son. You are not permitted to know what the courts think the Constitution actually says. The specific iterpretation of the Constitution is a state secret. Revealing the meaning of the words in the Constitution is treason.

The effect of this procedure will be to give us secret laws. It means that the people will have no ability to know what their rights are, because their rights are determined in secret court and kept in sealed documents. No citizen will be given the right to read that, "The court has a right to do X," and figure that right into his plans, because the document finding such a right in the Constitution is sealed.

What happens if the FISA court should issue an opinion that is in contrast to the Supreme Court? One option is that the Supreme Court will have the right to review these decisions and to overturn them as it overturns other statutes. If it has the power to do this, then why not recognize that the Supreme Court has the authority to review these proceedings to start with, and cut out the middle man. If the Supreme Court has no power to review these decisions, then we have two separate Supreme Courts with what will eventually become two separate Constitutions.

The Simple Formula

The basic formula upon which this and similar proposals can be judged is this: "Unchecked power = Tyranny." There may have been benevolent dictators who have used their total and unchecked power in an attempt to do good. However, they inevitably fall victim to the idea that anything and everything they think is a good idea is ‘good’ and anybody who disagrees with them or gets in their way is ‘evil.’

Specter is conspiring with the President of the United States to create an executive branch of unchecked power. It has no judicial review. It has no legislative review. Inevitably we will get another Andrew Jackson or Richard Nixon who thinks that the powers of the President Office are for empowering themselves, enriching their friends, executing personal vendettas, and for sweeping aside any opposition to plans that their ego tells them cannot fail. Eventually, another would-be tyrant will sit in the Executive Office. We need to be asking ourselves questions about the powers that he will find waiting for him when he does so.

Sooner or later, in this generation or the next, there will be people who will have reason to condemn us in the harshest terms for destroying the system of checks and balances that previous generations were wise enough to establish, and which we threw away.

Wish Week Day 6: Atheist Entertainment Network

I wrote this list of wish a while back with the expectation that I could use them and take a week off from the daily obligation of coming up with something to say.

One thing I worried about is that world events would come up with important topics while I was going through this series. It is a worry that seems to have come true.

In the last few days we have had terrorists blow up a number of trains in India, the beginnings of a new war with Israel, a high school student who wants to refuse chemo therapy because he does not like the effects, stem cell legislation, legislation allowing offshore drilling, a voting rights act, and, today, a negotiated settlement between Senate Republicans and the Bush Administration to get the FISA court to review Bush’s warrantless spying program.

So, today I will do another one of the “Wish Week” entries. Then, I must get back to doing real posts.

Wish Week Day 6: Atheist Entertainment Network

This is now Day 6 of “Wish Week” – a week of ideas that I would wish for if I had the power to make wishes (or the money to make such a wish come true).

I have already discussed:

Day 1: Logic Circles

Day 2: Truer Legislative Representation

Day 3: The University of Earth

Day 4: Fresh Start Campus

Day 5: Restructure NASA

Today’s wish is to see something like an Atheist Media Network.

First, I wish to distinguish this from the services provided by such operations as the Infidel Guy, the Freethought Radio Network, and Freethought Media in one very significant way. The network that I have in mind would spend no time at all on the issue of whether a God exists or whether the claims made in the Christian Bible (or any religious text) are true or false.

For me, the proposition that there is no God has the same status as the proposition that there are no leprechauns, the earth goes around the sun, and material things are made up of atoms. If I turned to a science network to learn about the current status of scientific thought, I would expect them to assume that things are made up of atoms and not spend half of each day trying to prove it. Listening to proofs of atomic theory every day would quickly get a bit old.

I recognize that these issues are important to some people, and I would certainly object to the argument that, “What I do not find useful, others should not find useful either.” So, this is not a wish that applies to everybody . . . just me.

I think that the difference here stems from the fact that I never went through any type of deconversion experience. I remember my first days of grade school thinking of Christianity the same way I thought of ancient Greek mythology – as a bunch of made-up stories from a bunch of primitive people who did not really have a scientific understanding of the world around them. I never took any of it seriously. Somebody who had to actually wrestle with belief in God would have reason to be interested in the arguments for or against. However, that is not me.

So, I find myself with two types of media outlets. There is the standard “public media” that does not want to do anything that might offend its Christian audience, and the “atheist sites” that spend the bulk of their time proving that God does not exist, that the Bible cannot be literally true, and that some theists are not the models of moral perfection they claim to be.

I keep thinking that it would be nice to tune to a station somewhere that is going to assume that God does not exist, that does not dwell on this subject, but reports on everything else going on in the world in a manner that does not care whether Christians tune in or not.

Entertainment

I would like, from time to time, to see (read, listen to) entertainment that takes a godless perspective for granted. Even Firefly took steps to make sure that Christian viewers could find their views well represented in the show, even though it contained an atheist character. If the program is not trying to pander to religion, then it tends to go far off in the other direction where its primary focus is to ridicule and mock religion. Really, I do not need this either.

What would a society of atheists be like? Certainly, it would not be a society obsessed with the existence of God. Indeed, the only reason for this focus on God among atheists is because atheists are looking in the direction of potential danger. If a prowler comes into your house, you are going to focus your attention on the prowler. Still, it might be nice, in a moment of calm entertainment, to imagine a world where there are no prowlers in the house and people can focus their attention on other things that are important to them.

(Note: Over at my web site, I have a story called The Cult of Justice and Will that was written with no respect for religious belief. It was also not written to ridicule religion. It is simply written in a context where religious beliefs are clearly false.)

News

Five children die at a family reunion, and no atheist sites mention it. Five children die at a church outing, and atheist sites are eager to report this. Here we have a group of people devoted to this kind and benevolent “God” who allows these children to die.

The “Atheist Media Network” that I have in mind would treat both of these stories the same. It is a tragedy. It is not an opportunity to once again repeat age-old arguments that, “Doesn’t this seem incompatible with believe in an all-powerful, benevolent God?” That case has been made over and over again such that, if they don’t yet understand it, one more repetition is not going to accomplish anything.

It would be a different matter if the Church members killed the children themselves because they believed that their God told them to do so. In this case, the news would be as relevant as news that there was a serial killer on the loose – which, in fact, would be literally true. It may also be newsworthy to discuss the implications of a Church that demanded actions which would result in the children dying (e.g., by refusing medical treatment).

However, this specific tragedy does not fall in either of these cases. The only reason to discuss the case is to point out, once again, that their claim that God or guardian angels are watching over them seems suspect.

Second Thoughts

One day, while I was thinking about this wish, I had some second thoughts.

I got to thinking, “You know, I just bet that there were people in the Nazi movement in Germany who longed for a situation where they did not face any critics. I bet they loked to imagine a situation where people took the Nazi view for granted and its defenders did not have to defend it from anybody else. Also, I bet that the slave owners in the Pre Civil War southern states longed for a civilization where everybody simply accepted the status of blacks as slaves.”

If it is possible for Nazis and slave owners to wish for something analogous to what I have asked for, I certainly cannot say that there is any moral merit in granting this particular wish.

One thing that I can say about the Nazis and the slave owners is that I hope that they never find their comfortable world.

Perhaps it is not such a good idea for this type of wish to be granted. I could see myself being far too comfortable in this type of world – a world where everybody accepted the same assumptions that I do and nobody questioned them. The problem with being far too comfortable with this type of situation is that one does not get confronted with the possibility of error. Even the mistakes are embraced in this fantasy world.

Perhaps we can use a good challenge every now and then.

Not every wishes should come true.

Wish Week Day 5: Restructure NASA

Wish Week Day 5: Restructure NASA

We are on Day 5 of “Wish Week” – a week of ideas that I would wish for if I had the power to make wishes (or the money to make such a wish come true).

So far, I have discussed:

Day 1: Logic Circles

Day 2: Truer Legislative Representation

Day 3: The University of Earth

Day 4: Fresh Start Campus

Today’s wish almost coincidentally comes on the cusp of a news headline. Today, Bigelow Aerospace launched a private, inflatable space station module into space.

Robert Bigelow is the owner of the Budget Suites of America Hotel Chain who has devoted $500 million of his own money to develop the technology for constructing a hotel in space. The start of his plan involved purchasing technology that NASA had started to develop and cancelled for sending inflatable habitats into space. The benefit of an inflatable habitat is that they are far less expensive to launch (because they are smaller), but give people in space far more room to move around.

Ultimately, Bigelow is reported to be trying to build his own private space station by 2015.

This brings me to my wish for Day 5.

I wish that NASA would end its practice of building and operating its own space missions and, instead, offer its money as “prizes” to private companies who are trying to accomplish the things that NASA would otherwise try to accomplish.

This is somewhat unique in my list of dreams so far. The last two years have seen significant movement in this direction, and I am very pleased with the results.

Centennial Challenges

NASA’s Centennial Challenges is a program that allows NASA to offer small (in space development standards) prizes to individuals who can come up with solutions for a number of space problems.

This branch of NASA is already running a number of competitions including a $250,000 prize to develop a better form of glove, a $250,000 competition to come up with a way of separating oxygen from the lunar soil (so astronauts will not need to take their own oxygen), and a $2.5 million prize to the winner of a competition to create a lunar module that can take off, move, and land using rocket power.

In 2005, the NASA budget for the Centennial Prizes program was increased to $20 million. It is a start.

NASA’s Space Cargo Contract

NASA has another contest that it is now running. This one is worth $500 million, which could be split between multiple winners. With the Space Shuttle on its way out, NASA needs a new way to send people and supplies to the International Space Station. The winner of this contest will get money from NASA to develop rockets that will meet these needs.

This will be the first time that the ability to send people into space will be in the hands of one or more private companies. A company that can send people to the International Space Station as a part of a NASA contract can send people into space for other reasons, including visits to Bigelow’s space station.

The Wish

My wish, then, would be to see NASA expand these programs significantly to the point that the bulk of our space program are private, commercial launches rather than government launches.

Twenty years ago, the Regan Administration announced a plan to spend $8 billion to build a space station in Earth orbit. They were scheduled to be done by the early 1990s. NASA has now spent 20 years and over $100 billion on that project, and it is still not done. By the time it is done, Bigelow may well be putting a larger space station into orbit for approximately $1 billion.

I often imagine what would have happened if, 20 years ago, the Reagan Administration had said, “We are willing to purchase $8 billion worth of time on private, American- owned space stations.” I do not think that it is beyond the realm of possibility to have expected that, today, we would have 2 or 3 space stations in orbit, at significantly less cost to the taxpayer, who were also making additional money through space tourism from people who were visiting the station for far less than the $20 million it now costs.

Currently, the Bush Administration is working on a $104 billion project to build a research station on the moon by the year 2020.

If we extrapolate from previous NASA programs, I do not expect that this will actually happen. If it does, it will cost closer to $300 billion and will not be completed until sometime between 2030 and 2040.

I wish that the Bush Administration would simply say, “We are willing to spend $100 billion for research time on a lunar research station,” and then let private enterprise go through the pains of building a lunar base that could supply NASA’s needs.

One of the best parts about this type of program – it is guaranteed not to run into government overruns. The government offers to purchase $100 billion in research time, and that is exactly what it spends. If private enterprise wants more money, then private enterprise can try to find other ways to raise money. Maybe they can find ways to ship tourists to the moon for $1 billion each. Perhaps they could make a few dollars mining oxygen from the lunar surface and to ship it into earth orbit to be used by the space stations – both as air to breath and as oxygen for rocket fuel. If there is water on the moon – this would be worth a few dollars as well.

I am not talking about making this a lump-sum contribution to the winning organization. Rather, the money could be spent the same way that NASA would spend the money if it was going to the moon itself. It can offer a few billion for the development and testing of certain technologies in space. It could offer a few billion to companies that build heavy-lift vehicles by paying to put simple compounds in earth orbit. We can open up a lot of possibilities in near earth space simply by getting some basic resources up there, such as hydrogen (which can be mixed with lunar oxygen to produce water), carbon, and nitrogen. So, a few billion for the simple accomplishment of putting large block of ammonia and carbohydrates in space would be useful.

Ultimately, we need a space development industry more than we need a lunar research base. This program will develop and promote private companies that can accomplish certain tasks and, from there, they can find other ways to make money. I wonder what the effects of these programs would be on Bigelow’s space stations.

Arguments

In Wish #3: The University of Earth, I provided my two main reasons for this program. There are two “public goods” associated with space development where it is particularly difficult to set up a system where the free market can work to its full potential.

One “public good” is environmental. Along with these prizes, I wish the government would recognize that there are certain social benefits to harvesting needed resources from the dead of space compared to ripping them out of the living earth. To recognize this, I wish that the government would either provide tax incentives for those who harvest resources from the dead of space, or impose certain financial burdens on those who rip their resources from the living earth to recognize the social costs of these activities.

The other “public good” is the survival of the human species. As long as humans are confined to one place there is a greater risk of total destruction. Financial planners tell their customers that they can reduce risk by diversifying their investments. The human race can reduce its risks if we diversity into space.

Another argument that people give for going into space is to acquire scientific knowledge. I happen to be a significant fan of scientific knowledge. However, I have trouble defending the thesis that this particular good can justify billions of dollars worth of space development. We can buy a great deal of scientific knowledge in other areas of science with that money. There is no particularly compelling reason to hold that, of all of the “pure science” we can gather, space science is so much more valuable than other types that we are justified in spending so much more money.

This, then, is my wish for Day 5.

Wish Week Day 4: Fresh Start Campus

This is now Day 4 of “Wish Week” – a week of ideas that I would wish for if I had the power to make wishes (or the money to make such a wish come true).

So far, I have discussed:

Day 1: Logic Circles

Day 2: Proportional Representation

Day 3: The University of Earth

For Day 4, my wish of the day is to see an experiment in what I call Fresh Start Campuses.

This wish comes first from thinking about the minimum wage issue.

For reasons that I have mentioned in the past, I am do not think that raising the minimum wage is a good idea. It helps people who do not need it, and the hurts the people it is most intended to help.

A higher minimum wage pulls people into the job market who do not really need the money – elderly looking for something to do, college students seeking extra income, household members looking to supplement the family income. With a higher minimum wage, it is more worthwhile for these people to enter the job market. Their greater working skills means that they can out compete workers who do not have these other options. These less-skilled workers get pushed out. This is on top of the jobs that are simply lost because employers cannot afford to pay the higher wage. There are also inflation costs as businesses raise prices to cover their costs, which lowers everybody’s standard of living, and does more harm to the budgets of those with less money than to those with more money.

Now, liberal hate-mongers like to paint people such as me as corporate stooges blindly supporting a society in which the rich get richer by exploiting the poor, and gleefully cackle each time an opponent of a higher minimum wage suffers some setback or embarrassment. These are individuals who prefer to (verbally) attack people when they should be discussing ideas.

However, it does raise the question, “What are we going to do about those people at the lower end of the economic ladder?”

Well, I hold that direct subsidies for food, clothing, health care, and education are far better than raising the minimum wage. However, in this context, I think that the construction of “Fresh Start Campuses” would be the best program for workers.

The Fresh Start Campus

As I mentioned earlier, because I am scientifically minded, I like the idea of experimenting with a new project just to see if it would work. So, what I am going to describe here is the Fresh Start Campus Experiment.

I imagine the first campus being able to support about 20,000 people. People apply to the Fresh Start Campus as if they were applying for a job. They fill out an application listing their skills and training. The Fresh Start Campus accepts those individuals that it thinks can be trained to do work that is worth significantly more pay then they would be able to get on the open market. So, an individual who cannot hope for more than a minimum-wage job at a fast-food place, but who shows some measure of dedication and a good work ethic, would be accepted onto the campus.

I keep imagining this as a campus that applicants actually move on to. We are dealing with people at the bottom of the economic ladder that need food, shelter, and medical care. Consequently, those who are accepted into the program move on-campus. They get their meals from a campus cafeteria, live in a campus dorm (or married-student housing, as appropriate), and get their medical care at the corporate clinic. They would live on campus for two years, after the campus works to find jobs for them that use their new skills.

I have no strong arguments for or against the imposition of a curfew, mandatory drug testing, or restrictions on the ownership of weapons or the possession of tobacco or alcohol. To minimize the costs to the taxpayer, and to better develop the skills and the work ethic of the attendees, they may be organized into work details to help operate the campus. They would prepare and serve the food, clean the dishes, manage the dorms, clean the buildings, maintain the yards, and perform many of the clerical and administrative tasks that such a campus would require.

Payment

As I have argued in the past, I have no problem with taxing the rich. The argument that I commonly use suggests imagining a case in which an airplane crash lands in the desert, far from any known town, except a lone mansion that a reclusive billionaire has built for himself in the middle of nowhere. This billionaire is has imported all of the water that now fills his fountains and swimming pools and waters his lush gardens. He has no concern for others, and is quite content to sit on the balcony of his house and peer out into the desert, where he watches these “intruders” who crash-landed outside his gate die of thirst.

Free-market purists would have us believe that the airplane survivors have a duty to sit outside the gate and die of thirst. They may try to buy water from the recluse. However, if the recluse is unwilling to sell any, the survivors have a duty to curl up into little balls and die. Redistributing the water wealth from the haves to the have-nots is totally unacceptable.

In order to make the case for an obligation to curl up and die, we have to believe in some sort of intrinsic values. Specifically, we must think that it is intrinsically wrong to redistribute the water wealth. Desire utilitarianism denies the existence of intrinsic value. It argues for an aversion to using force to take property that belongs to other – because of the value of keeping the benefits of trade over coercion. However, it would also argue in favor of a charitable desire to share the water and spare the lives of the survivors. The property owner, showing he has no such aversion, shows himself to be evil. The crash survivors, I would argue, are within their moral rights to redistribute the water wealth from the evil recluse to those who are dying of thirst.

Accordingly, if a billionaire decides to share his wealth with those in need, as Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett have done, then there is no reason for the government to step in and order any redistribution of wealth. However, the billionaire who sits in his mansion and watches from his balcony while the crash survivors outside die of thirst may be subject to a forced redistribution of wealth.

Note that this is quite consistent with the view that Buffett presented when he announced his donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett is in favor of the Estate Tax (what Republicans call the Death Tax). However, his argument for the tax is that it provides wealthy people with an incentive to contribute their money to private foundations. He does not like having the government engage in charitable acts – because the government is grossly inefficient at such things. However, he is willing to allow the government to redistribute the wealth if the billionaire does not take steps to establish or support a more-efficient, government-free alternative use of the money for charitable purposes.

Why the Fresh Start Campus

Part of the argument for the Fresh-Start Campus comes from wisdom of the cliché, “Give a person a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” The purpose of the campus is to give these people the skills that would allow them to teach them to fish. That is to say, education is the most efficient use of resources, even when we are concerned only with the benefit we can provide to an individual person.

Also, education is a “public good” that is subject to the problem of “free riders.” This has been a common theme in these posts. Whenever there is a product that produces goods for people who do not have to pay any money to collect the benefit, that good would be under funded. The free market would solve this problem by eliminating public goods – making it impossible for an individual to obtain a benefit without paying the price. However, with some goods, such as military defense or education, there is no easy way to do it. The more efficient option is for the government to arrange for an industry to get the funding it would have gotten if its “public good” problem could have been fixed. That is to say, the government subsidizes public goods such as national defense, the police and court system, the survival of the human race, environmental goods, and education.

In addition, the government gets a return on its investment. The graduate’s higher pay will not only mean that the government has to worry less about providing him and his family with social benefits, but it will also be getting more tax revenue. The government would obtain a great many benefits from turning a bunch of $5.00 per hour workers into a bunch of $20.00 per hour workers – both in terms of fewer payments out of the budget and more money coming into the budget.

Not For Everybody

Of course, there will be those who cannot benefit from such a program. This is not meant to be the only government program to aid the poor. It is meant to focus specifically on those people that advocates of a higher minimum wage claim to want to help – those who have jobs but who are not making a living wage. It is an alternative to a plan that will benefit some and harm others; providing its greatest benefit to those who do not need it and doing its most harm to those who are already the worst off.

Maybe it will not work. However, I would wish to see it tried.

Wish Week Day 3: The University of Earth

This is the third in a series of posts for “Wish Week” – a week devoted to perhaps fanciful ideas on how to make the world a better place. So far I have discussed:

Day 1: Logic Circles

Day 2: Representative Democracy

Today’s proposal is for the ultimate land-grant university – The University of Earth.

This university’s mission is to take children in some of the least healthy environments – in terms of economic poverty, political upheaval, and disease – and give them a chance to move into a boarding school where they would be provided with food, shelter, medical care, and a good education in a truly international university.

Funding

The main issue with any project is, “How are you going to pay for this?”

In this case, the form of payment that I have in mind is what makes the University of Earth the ultimate land-grant university. This university would raise money by selling land. The land that would be granted to this university is all of the land that exists in the solar system other than Earth. This includes the Moon, Mars, asteroids, comets, the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the Kupyer Belt Objects and items in the Oort cloud. All totaled, there are currently over 120,000 known bodies in our solar system, and huge numbers not yet discovered.

Not long ago, I used this idea as a premise for a book, so I worked out the issues in some detail. In the book, the United Nations chartered the University of Earth and passed a resolution governing the sale of property in space to help to fund this University. As a United Nations resolution, people who purchased the land could be confident that their title would carry weight anywhere in the world. This gave potential buyers the confidence of knowing that they would, in fact, actually own the land they purchased.

The book began at the end of the first auction, January 1, 2017. The University of Earth had put 1 million hectares of the lunar surface for sale. This first auction involved a square 100km wide and 100km long centered on the Apollo 11 landing site. The central 2km by 2km region had been donated to the Smithsonian. The University of Earth had reserved a small strip of land around the Smithsonian contribution for its own use. The remaining 984,000 hectares were divided out into a grid and sold in 1-hectare (about 2.5 acres) plots.

This auction, by the way, amounted to less than 1/3000th of the lunar surface.

There were restrictions. Plots could not be sold or transferred to countries, businesses, or organizations, but only to individuals. In addition, no individual could bit for more than 25 hectares.

The second auction in my story was for a number of small asteroids where the winning bid purchased the entire asteroid. The third auction aimed to sell off land near the Lunar south pole, while a fourth would sell off a section of the surface of Mars. The University planned on holding one auction per year, at lest for the foreseeable future.

The Kennedy Square Land Owners’ Association

I called the area involved in this first auction Kennedy Square, and with the auction I created the Kennedy Square Land Owners’ Association with the power to collect dues (equal to $10 per month for each hectare owned) and to repossess and resell any property whose owners neglected to pay their dues. The Landowner’s Association had the responsibility of maintaining a registry of all deeds as well as establishing and maintaining those rules that the property owners agreed upon. Property owners were able to cast one vote for members of the Board of Directors for each hectare of land that they owned. (Note: In the book, I also used the model of proportional representation that I discussed yesterday, where each member of the Board had 1 vote received in the election.)

The Land Owners’ Association used any extra money it received in dues to fund projects for the property owners. For example, its first project was to fund a mission to the moon to get some better pictures of this part of the lunar surface – so the land owners could see more precisely what they owned. In the mean time, the Association also had to manage some private missions – wealthy individual land owners were eager to send their own missions to those parts of the lunar surface that they had purchased land. Some of them were immediately talking about the possibility of developing their property.

Issues

There are individuals who have “claimed” the moon and have been selling off tracts of land themselves. I hold that these are merely novelty items, like selling of the right to name stars that provide no actual title to the land.

At the same time, there are those who argue that it is not possible to claim any land unless you go there and actually make use of it. Against this, I hold that property rights are a matter of convention – there is no natural law of property that dictates the manner by which individuals may acquire ownership. If the United Nations passes a resolution stating that such an auction will take place and its members will respect the results of that auction, then we have enough of a convention to make the auction valid.

If the United Nations were to pass a resolution verifying the claims of these organizations that have been selling off pieces of the Moon for years, then this would give them title. However, I see no need to do that. No natural law compels it. No man-made law made the land available for such a claim.

Prospects of Success

One thing that these organizations currently selling lunar property are telling us is that there is at least some money to be made in this type of venture. There would be more money to be made if people could actually trust that their title would be respected. There is even more money to be made if the money would go to a good cause, such as providing food, shelter, medical care, and education to children who have had such a poor start in life.

I do not know how much money would be made, but every dollar would help.

Moral Underpinnings

As the space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union was heating up, the United Nations passed a series of resolutions governing the use of outer space all effectively built on the idea that it be used for the benefit of all mankind and all nations regardless of their economic and scientific status. The concern was with the idea that the wealthy and technologically advanced countries would take space and any benefits space may provide for themselves, and leave the poor countries with nothing.

It is a fair concern, except to the degree that it ends up leaving everybody with nothing. The true goal should be to spread the wealth that space resources can provide, not to create rules that have the effect of keeping all potential users away.

To efficiently use space for the benefit of all mankind, there must be a system of property rights that allows those who invest money to keep the profits of their investment. Otherwise, there will be significant underinvestment in space, and few benefits for mankind.

We live in a universe that is indifferent as to whether the human race continues to exist. Those who care that the human race continue to exist (as I certainly do) recognize a certain value in taking steps to make sure that we protect humanity from an indifferent universe. It is extremely likely that there will be countless civilizations that will reach our state of development, but fail to take the steps necessary to protect themselves from an impact from a long-period comet or asteroid, from the possibility of a nearby gamma ray burst, the variability of their own sun.

In addition, there is reason to be concerned that we may destroy ourselves if we remain in such close proximity to each other. We need to be concerned with the environmental destruction of the planet leaving it uninhabitable. This is more likely the case if we do not harvest the resources of space. The alternative is to cut deeper and deeper scars into the living earth. We must also live with the possibility of self-destruction through nuclear war or the engineering of a biological weapon that may destroy all life. When it comes to our survival as a species, we have more to fear from hostile (and not-quite-rational) neighbors than we do from an indifferent universe.

If we survive as a species, we will some day discover the archaeological ruins of these dead civilizations. I hold that this is much more preferable to a future in which some of those other race discovering the ruins and relics left in our solar system.

Establishing the University of Earth as a land-grant university meets all of these objectives. The poorer nations of the earth get the benefit of acquiring a better education for their citizens. In the mean time, a system of private property rights is established that will better secure the private investment in the use and development of space resources. The ultimate payoff may be the survival of the human species.

Space will, in this way, actually benefit of all mankind, rather than remain unused.