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Technology and Moral Hazard
Thinking on the confluence of technology tends to run either very hot or very cold: either we stand at the precipice of a new golden age in which sin, suffering, and ugliness are to be banished to the past, or we are about to flush away millennia of hard-won gains to secure some fickle gain or fad.
History shows that both of these visions are flawed, in that our choices are rarely (if ever) as stark as that; it’s always a bit of a mixed bag and more complicated than we expect. However, there are real, and significant trends out there that are worth our notice and attention. One of them is that technology can make the world a better place, not so much by improving ourselves — as the utopians think it will — but by simply changing incentives in such a way that better decisions are clearer and easier to take.
Consider the moral problem posed by peanut allergies. For decades, American parents and school officials have sought a balance between the preferences of the overwhelming majority of people who like peanuts (and find them one of the few reliable ways of getting protein into their kids) and a tiny minority who are deathly allergic to small amounts of the stuff. The time and energy spent on the matter is depressing great and the harms are real to both sides, even if they’re more dramatic for one than the other. So long as something the majority enjoys causes extreme harm — and by accident — to a handful of others, there are no good solutions, only a spectrum of unsatisfactory compromises.
But what if peanuts didn’t contain those potentially fatal allergens? Problem solved, of course, but we can’t go about rewriting the rules of Nature, can we? As it turns out, we may well be better able to in the very near future, thanks to a new genetic modification technique called CRISPR. The details are complicated, but, essentially, it repurposes an immuno-defense system found in some bacteria into into an efficient, targeted gene editor. By The Economist’s telling, it’s the genetic equivalent of “the find-and-replace function on a word processor,” which is sort of like saying that it’s most useful thing ever.
If the research pans out as hoped, kids may soon be able to eat peanut butter with impunity again, without risking the health or safety of their peers. The world will soon forget that the moral quandary ever existed and we can, with a little luck, go on to solving other (bigger) problems that will slip into the past.
Of course, CRISPR will likely pose some quandaries of its own, especially if it is applied to humans. And while I’d suggest that the ability to snip-and-clip Nature’s deficiencies and horrors out of our genome strikes me a good kind of problem to have, that doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. We’ll have to figure out how to use this power carefully and with moral consideration, but that should be doable as it has been for every previous breakthrough.
The utopians may have a perfect record of getting things wrong, but the dystopians are only slightly behind them.
Published in Religion & Philosophy, Science & Technology
The real clash over this will be whether or not it’s ok to sacrifice a few kids to prevent the use of GMO peanuts.
Assuming the hygiene hypothesis is correct, I am looking forward to the day when infants can be inoculated with a relatively safe cocktail of “dirty” things (the microbes and parasites found in the dirt and decay of our ancestral environment) so as to reduce the risk of all sorts of maladaptive immune responses. Not just allergies to peanuts specifically, but allergic and asthmatic responses to any number of triggers, as well as other autoimmune disorders, including diabetes and perhaps even depression.
As it stands now, raising children in an unhygienic environment may lead to healthier adults – if the hygiene hypothesis is correct. But it also increases the likelihood of exposure to tetanus, toxoplasmosis, and a host of other nasties that could outright kill or maim a child. And most people aren’t quite cynical enough to argue that more dead or maimed babies, if it means the ones who survive intact will eventually be healthier, is an acceptable trade-off.
Baby Boomers have told me that they never heard of a peanut allergy when they were young. Are they misremembering or was there really an explosion of peanut allergies starting with Generation X?
Designer babies will be a major controversy, if that research advances. As I said in Stad’s thread, the supposed ability to genetically predict homosexuality (though the reported accuracy is closer to 50% than 100%) combined with an ability to alter that gene would result in an interesting twist to the debate. If it’s acceptable for a parent to select a baby’s sex, why not the child’s attractions as well? The latter aspect is much less significant, but would probably receive stronger legal protection.
It’s a mistake to think of a technology’s moral ramifications as moving society either forward or backward. In actuality, the movement is often in both directions simultaneously. Most of the time, new knowledge and inventions complicate moral situations rather than resolve them one way or the other.
Not misremembering. True.
I know a boomer who had childhood peanut allergy. At the time, he was simply labeled as “mentally retarded” for wheezing through his mouth all the time and “child who spends a lot of time almost dying for no reason”. An underweight infant, he had been fed copious amounts of peanut butter to bulk him up, as per doctor’s orders, and it wasn’t until he neared middle-school age that they finally figured out the real problem.
I believe Thomas Sowell also has a peanut allergy.
Children have probably always died of anaphylaxis, and for most of human history, it has probably not been recognized as such. Now that they die a lot less often (and especially if the hygiene hypothesis is correct) they hang around through adulthood causing inconvenience to the vast majority of regular people. It sucks.
Aaron, I don’t remember peanut allergies, uh, from kidhood. In fact, as an adult I was surprised to learn that peanuts were the catalyst for severe allergies.
On the whole, technology has been positive. I’ll take modern, first world problems, over not getting enough to eat.
Slavery ended in the West because of the industrial revolution.
I was actually going to hit that note, but I thought people might be sick of it. But yes: turns out it’s a lot less expensive to use powered machines than to treat other men as livestock (or worse). Moral suasion is important, but it’s hardly our own tool.
Hmm, my understanding was that cotton was too time consuming even for slave labor until the invention of the cotton gin made it worthwhile.
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Seriously, just because the cotton gin gave slavery a shot in the arm in one area, it does not disprove my statement, though people using it is a counter is as predictable as getting wet in the rain.
With power other than muscles, we don’t need human or animals to do the work.
I think this might fall into the category of survivorship bias.
X pattern is not seen because X candidates die. Mistakenly think X does not exist.
On the other hand, I’ve seen statists argue against liberty for similar reasons.
e.g. regarding safety regulations, ridding playgrounds of monkey bars, requiring seatbelts, disallowing passengers in pickup truck flatbed, etc.
The “free range kids” ideal of letting kids take risks and grow from experience seems to me on its face to have merit, but opponents would probably argue that we don’t see the kids that fail.
They may be right, but I would like more information about how humankind survived until now without “safety first” policies everywhere. Maybe we survived with a lot more mortality.
That’s also, true, but the American South was the major exception to the general rule. It was unusual in being fairly autonomous, large, and having such a large slave population. The culture largely overrode the economics.
I think those who argue for the hygiene hypothesis believe it is a factor in addition to survivorship bias. That is, survivorship bias is obviously a huge influence, but it alone is unlikely to explain the even huger increase in immune diseases. Or so they claim.
My current suspicion is that some combination of both survivorship bias and the hygiene hypothesis are at work.
In fairness, it depends on the muscles.
We don’t want to see kids fail either. We want to see them fail, learn, and then succeed with better data and experience. It’s those other folks who want to deprive them of a fuller life.
I’d add you don’t die of something else as you mentioned before.
Really, we just don’t realize how great it is with the big three pillars of public health:
We mostly die of Heart Disease and then Cancer. If we could cure all types of Cardiovascular illnesses, Cancer deaths (and I bet rates) would go up. Cure all cancer, and the next thing in line will kill us.
Something will kill us. Even if you don’t age, something will kill you eventually.
Quite possibly. And trading a little mortality in childhood for better-function lives in adulthood is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe children really do grow into better people if their risk of dying in childhood is marginally increased in some ways.
I think most conservatives believe this, actually, although many may not be comfortable putting it quite so baldly.
This boomer can attest to never hearing about peanut allergies when he was young.
It seems you were personally offended by my remark about the cotton gin. I did not realize it was a trite bit of reasoning.
Since you appear to be quite familiar with this line of argument (and counterargument), I would appreciate it if you would respond to it with a bit more charity.
I am certainly willing to be educated.
Alas, writing is hard to convey mood. I am not offended. Let me use all 250 below if I need it.
At its base, wealth is a function of the resources one commands and the energy to exploit them. Before the advent of the steam engine, the power used was muscle in both animals and humans. The ability to exploit resources was limited. (There was some wind and water power, but, like today, it was not a big percentage of the energy).
The best way to think about this is to see energy as the basis of the economy. If we had Tony Stark’s chest piece in mass production, all the world would be richer. The more energy you have, the less physical labor is needed.
The cotton gin allowed for the mass production of cotton by taking industrial energy and applying it getting the clean cotton. It is true that before that time, slavery was looking less advantageous economically and it gave it a boost. However, this was a temporary effect. Further, slavery was not needed, but since it was in place, it continued until stopped by force. It would not have continued forever as technology improved how we generated and used energy.
Slavery in the South had a moral dimension, where people wanted to own someone. Most did not, but being at the bottom of free men, you still had slaves below you. That was clearly wrong. But, it was not until the advances in technology made slavery optional that people started to really make headway in the fight against it.
Do you have a reference for that? Or is this some random thing that you hope conservatives will believe because you mention a conservative economist?
It was something Sowell said in one of his books, about peanuts being one of the most nutritious foods on earth, yet deadly for a few of us. It sounded like he was describing a firsthand experience with a peanut allergy in passing.
You can be assured that it is not merely some random thing that I hope conservatives will believe just because I mention a conservative economist. That’s not how I roll, nor would I be kept on here as a moderator if I did. If I am mistaken in this matter, it is an honest mistake.
Yeah, life expectancy is one of those relatively clear metrics. Deaths due to motor accidents another. I agree with you that there are liberty concerns with seat belt mandates (New Hampshire rocks!), but they have saved a lot of lives.
fair enough. google shows the top hit for “thomas sowell peanut allergy” to be your post, and nothing else that might indicate this. Just FYI!
CRISPR, ZFN, and TALENS all do gene editing, and each has advantages and disadvantages. ZFN are the most “primitive”. CRISPR and TALENS each have advantages and disadvantages (I do a fair amount of work with all of the companies, and one of these quoted scientists is one I support) – it almost looks like the story was planted to get some investors for the spin-off companies.
The biggest problem is patents- in exchange for commercial rights, the parties that patent these kinds of research tools should be required to permit non-profit research, period, with any payoff set as a predictable and reasonable share of royalties. Right now the system is not set up that way, except for a happy accident regarding music performance.
Our patent system right now reflects “crony capitalists” more than Art. 1, Sect. 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution.