Dissolving the Dilemmas over Stem Cells

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cautioned that we must be on guard against “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” What the most important philosopher of the 20th century was concerned about here are the problems and confusions dualistic terms (i.e., mind & body) can generate when language goes on holiday. More concretely, the use of conceptually separate terms like mind and body force us to think that there must be real ontological entities to which those terms refer. If I say “It is raining,” for instance, I certainly do not mean to suggest there is an entity called “It” that is raining.

Virtually every neuroscientist recognizes that the terms mind and brain are two ways of talking about the same thing. Of course, brains are “things” only in a loose way of speaking. After all, brains give rise to subjectivity, which is a rather awe inspiring phenomenon. As Wittgenstein noted, “It is the “I,” it is the I that is deeply mysterious.” However, Wittgenstein – like most scientists today – was a monist, which is the say he believed the brain/mind was a single substance (or process).

This is a good thing, since dualism, the notion than the mind is a separate entity from the physical brain, has for all practical purposes been discredited as incoherent and unempirical. Unfortunately, dualism lives on for the scientifically and philosophically illiterate. In fact, dualistic thinking permeates pro-life arguments against abortion. Put simply, if dualism is false – and the scientific and philosophical case against dualism is overwhelming – then the central arguments pro-lifers make against abortion and stem cell research rest on unsound assumptions.

Pro-life groups maintain every embryo is an individual from the moment of conception. From this it follows that every embryo is: 1) sacred, 2) part of the human community, and 3) entitled to the rights and protections we afford every member of the human family. Using words like “scared,” “community,” and “family” in association with the embryo, of course, primes audiences to see things a certain way. Science uses similar rhetorical techniques, but the way scientists use language tends to make objects seem more impersonal. Language, in a sense, can create reality, or at least frame our perception of reality.

The way pro-life advocates use language in relationship to embryos is instrumental in creating moral dilemmas that evaporate if one approaches the matter more objectively. To begin with, the notion that the “moment of conception” marks some miraculous, transcendental, or non-physical event is not an idea that holds up to rational scrutiny. First of all, the so-called moment of conception is not a moment at all, it is an entirely biochemical process that lasts several hours at a minimum. Second, individuality is not something present (or created) at the moment of conception. After all, many zygotes split in two several weeks after conception, a phenomenon which leads to twins.

But the most damning argument against assuming there is anything sacred or miraculous about the typical embryo comes from Mother Nature. Simply put, most embryos never develop into human beings because embryos frequently fail to implant or because they spontaneously and naturally abort.

Pro-lifers frequently resort to false choices. Writing in the Washington Post, for instance, Michael Gerson offers the following either/or choice: 1) embryos are sacred or 2) embryos are protoplasmic rubbish.

Thinking in terms of moral absolutes is what gets us in to trouble here. Put simply, context matters. For instance, imagine the following thought experiment: a fertility clinic housing 1,000,000 surplus embryos is on fire. There is a fifty-fifty chance the embryos can be saved, but only at great risk to the firefighters. Should we ask the firefighters to risk their lives to save the embryos? I would argue, the loss of 1,000,000 insentient embryos is not worth the life of even one human being embedded within a family and a community.

Conversely, it is possible to imagine another thought experiment: a plague has broken out which has rendered every woman of childbearing age on the planet infertile. Only a handful of viable embryos remain anywhere on earth. Under such circumstances, shouldn’t the safety and well-being of such embryos be preserved at all costs until some way is found to perpetuate the human race?

The moral value of an embryo is not nil, nor is it absolute. To a large extent, the moral dilemma of using embryos to create stem cell lines exists because of the way pro-life advocate use – and very often misuse – language. Wittgenstein recognized that the mind/body problem was a function of our language games. There is a lesson here for pro-life advocates.

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How the Bush Administration Bankrupted America; How the Obama Administration can Restore America's Prosperity

Conservatives are like the comedian Rodney Dangerfield these days, they can't get no respect. In the public mind, figures like Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Jindal, Joe the Plumber, and Sarah Palin are a source of bemusement, a slightly annoying but nonetheless chuckle-producing diversion from the calamities the conservative movement helped engineer.

The same cannot be said, alas, for conservative commentators like Charles Krauthhammer, Michael Gerson, and Sean Hannity (a trio of humorless blowhards oozing animus from every pore). I suspect their vinegary dispositions stem from the fact that their most cherished beliefs are constantly at variance with reality. As William James recognized, there is nothing more painful than false belief.

The financial pain America is currently facing can be traced to a set of false beliefs that constitute the core of conservatism's economic doctrine. These discredited principles include: the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves, the idea markets are self-correcting, and the belief that deregulation serves the common good.

Tax cuts are to conservatives what crack cocaine is to lab rats. The basic idea behind supply-side economics is that taxes must be lowered on America's most productive (i.e., wealthiest) citizens because they alone possess the wherewithal to put capital to work. Conversely, transferring resources to the poor, so the thinking goes, will only insure that wealth is squandered on unproductive forms of consumption.

The wealthy received their tax breaks under the Bush administration, but the promised investment glut never materialized. Conservatives have peddled the notion that taxes are a form of punishment, or a disincentive to productivity. But a truer view of taxes comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who held that taxes are the price of civilization. If Holmes is right, then it follows that those who benefit the most from society (i.e., the wealthiest) owe the greatest share in return.

The origins of the current financial crisis are complex. Americans had been living beyond their means on borrowed credit for too long. The United States staked its future on financial services and products, as opposed to manufactured goods. To make up for the trade deficit the United States borrowed heavily from countries like China to keep the good times rolling. Debt-ridden consumers, however, found they could no longer afford to products once housing prices were undermined by deadbeat sub-prime borrowers. By this stage, as British historian Niall Ferguson observes, the United States has become a sub-prime superpower.

To reverse America's economic fortunes, the Obama administration must increase the earnings power of the vast majority of ordinary Americans. Doing this will require substantial and sustained investment to upgrade public education, our healthcare system, and our infrastructure. Investments along these lines are necessary to insure that Americans are the brightest, healthiest, and productive workforce on the planet. When we are once again making the products and services the world wants to buy, then incomes will rise. This will revitalize consumer spending, leading to corporate profits, which will translate into rising stock prices.

Tax cuts disproportionally aimed at the wealthy did not lead to broad-based income gains or the kind of investments America needs to ensure sustainable prosperity. Free market fundamentalism has also proved to be a false creed. Put simply, if the last eight years have shown anything it is that free markers do not inexorably allocate resources efficiently or rationally. In fact, free market fundamentalism has proven to be nothing but a cover for crony capitalism, whereby the powerful and well-connected rewarded themselves by feeding at the public trough. The fact that the financial wizards that created the current crisis walked away with billions, while America's healthcare, education, and infrastructure needs were starved, illustrates the total intellectual and moral bankruptcy of free market fundamentalism.

Looting the financial system and cannibalizing companies could not have happened to the extent it did without wholesale deregulation. The invasion of Iraq was another conservative enterprise predicated on false premises that helped bankrupt the United States, and not just economically but morally too. Of course, conservatives are loath to admit they are wrong, which explains why Krauthhammer and others are trying to portray the Iraq War as a victory. A pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but mostly the Iraq War has been a strategic debacle that siphoned America's blood and treasure in a failed bid to leverage our military might to transform the Middle East. As the historian Arnold Toynbee recognized, societies that attempt to remake far off outposts on the periphery of empire are invariably less successful than societies that remake themselves.

Revitalizing America is a herculean task facing Obama. Conservative commentators have generally heaped scorn upon the Obama administration's approach, which will make government a more central partner in shaping the economic landscape of the future. As Michael Gerson ludicrously puts it, "governments don't invest, they spend." Obviously, Gerson is thinking of the Bush administration, not the far-sighted administrations that initiated the GI bill, the interstate highway system, and the Internet.

Krauthammer is even more obtuse than Gerson. The dyspeptic Krauthammer completely fails to see how healthcare has anything to do with the current financial crisis or its cure. Let me enlighten this vapid windbag. The current healthcare system is an inefficient monstrosity with private insurance companies gobbling up resources to feed a vast bureaucratic apparatus collecting premiums from those who don't need healthcare while denying treatment to those who need it.

Ok, that's a bit of a caricature, but it captures an essential truth: private insurers represent a vast layer absorbing our healthcare dollars, but this layer does not deliver healthcare. This system has become an albatross for businesses and individuals. For instance, the cost of health insurance has to be factored into every product, which makes U.S. goods less competitive. Additionally, it stifles individual initiative – i.e., under the current system, employees will be less inclined to leave dead end jobs to pursue more rewarding opportunities if they fear they'll lose their health coverage in the process.

Conservatives like Krauthhammer, Gerson, and Hannity appear congenitally incapable of connecting the dots. These guys are like Rodney Dangerfield – the joke always seems to be on them and they don't get no respect.

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You Can Bank on It

In John Ford's classic western, Stagecoach, a self-righteous bank president browbeats and berates his fellow travelers while he's in the process of absconding his firm's funds. Ford was a filmmaker with a social conscience and the themes explored in his movies seem more timeless than ever.

Once again, life has been caught imitating art. Bank robbers like Jesse James, Willie Sutton, and Bonnie & Clyde, have long been part of American folklore, but the reality is that the biggest and most audacious bank robberies have invariably been inside jobs. The Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s proved one observer right; the best way to rob a bank is to own one.

The current crisis in the financial system dwarfs the S&L debacle. Americans have recently woken up to the fact that the country's most hallowed banks and financial institutions are basically insolvent. Many observers single out subprime mortgage defaulters as the main culprits in the current calamity. However, the true causes of the present economic meltdown are far deeper and more insidious than most Americans realize.

There are vested interests, of course, intent on diverting attention away from the real reasons so much hard-earned savings poured into the financial sector, but vanished down the proverbial drain. Here, Rick Santelli's much-publicized faux-populist rant serves his masters in the predatory class well. Santelli, like many of his fellow carnival barkers at CNBC, have served as avid cheerleaders during the inflation of one of the greatest financial bubbles of all-time. Their shtick, which masquerades as objective analysis, has undoubtedly led innumerable credulous investors astray.

Santelli, of course, would have his audience, many of whom have been burned by bad advice they gleaned from CNBC, direct their fury towards the "losers" that bought subprime mortgages they can no longer afford, a group allegedly at the epicenter of the current crisis.

To be sure, the so-called NINJA loans (loans made to borrowers with no income, no credit, and no job) were a recipe for disaster, but the focus on defaulters ignores the other side of a faulty equation. Thanks to Reagan era deregulation, and Bush administration policies aimed at promoting an "ownership society," irresponsible lenders collected lucrative fees but failed to screen the creditworthiness of their clients. As a result of the way they sliced and diced mortgages, these lenders effectively privatized profits but socialized risk.

Santelli and his ilk have an inherent tendency to attack the economically powerless but fawn over the financially powerful. Thus, taxpayer bailouts for financial titans are pardoned as necessarily evils aimed at saving our financial system, but mortgage restructuring and refinancing that would keep subprime borrowers in their homes is condemned as a socialist blasphemy.

Ironically, America's capitalistic financial bubble was underwritten by the People's Republic of China. In effect, a country where the average worker makes $2,000 a years has used its savings rate to subsidize the consumption rate of the most spendthrift nation in the world. Put simply, Easy credit from lenders like China made it possible for Americans to borrow against their homes -- and against the future -- to pay for tax cuts and consumer goodies.

Those days are over. The easy credit binge fueled the housing bubble, propped up the stock market, kept the good times rolling, and made people feel wealthier than they really were. At the same time, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress spent money like drunken sailors, but "investments" like the Iraq War have proven to be money pits with no return. The IOUs have been piling up, and taxpayers are waking up to the fact that they're on the hook for Bush's imprudent fiscal and foreign policies, a myriad of corporate excesses, and the irresponsibility of greedy lenders and borrowers in the subprime sector.

Santelli's rant is typical of the drivel one finds on cable news, a medium that generates much heat but little light. In truth, America's market system, which is supposed to allocate resources rationally and efficiently, was exploited by a predatory class that rigged the system in its favor. Insiders, paying themselves humongous bonuses, while driving their businesses into the ground, are perfect example of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen termed the "predatory class," a ruling elite that feeds at the public trough while contributing nothing to the social welfare. Don't expect Santelli and his ilk to point fingers in that direction; to do so would be to bite the hand that feeds them.

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