It's Always More Complicated

Should we sell our kidneys?

My feeling, on finding somebody who is apparently a reader in political theory at a well-respected institution of Teh Highah Learninz positing this, is that he may have read a lot of political theory, poor lamb, but maybe he should spend some time with dystopian science fiction if he's going to contemplate these sort of questions.

I suppose, with the Organ Donation register, there is an issue that a) it is Opt-In and b) presumably by the time many people reach that state when their organs come up for donation, those organs are probably past their Best Before date.

(I just now, in connection with an entirely unrelated transaction with a government body, was solicited to sign up with the Organ Donation Register. Already have, thanks, if anyone will want my tired old organs when the time comes.)

And on the intrusion of Commerce into this matter, has this person considered the sorts of things that have been happening - only, one admits, affecting the bodies of wymmynz? - over selling their eggs, or being surrogates, and the stories one hears are Not Pretty.

He might also consider Richard Titmuss' famous 1970 work The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy on blood donation:

[T]he author compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient.

In the 18th century, for example, some viewed being paid to sing as akin to prostitution, and professional opera singers, particularly women, could be deemed morally suspect. At that time, therefore, it might have seemed appropriate to subject professional singing to legal strictures, just like prostitution.

(I'm also thinking - has this one cropped up on agonyaunt or have I seen it elsewhere - of that scenario in which member of a family - even an estranged member of family - is being heavyed into being a donor for a relative because they are A Match. Was it even child adopted but later traced?)

Is it ethical to buy used books and music instead of new copies that will financially reward the author or artist?

Okay, perhaps the writer of the query means, books that are currently available new but you are able to score a used copy in the local Oxfam shop or whatever - maybe.

(Which of course raises another effikle q that in that case it is For A Good Cause....)

And as someone who has spent years hunting down works which were not in print, or were only reprinted by Virago or the British Library or whatever after I had acquired my collection after arduous searches and considerable expense, or, finally, can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg or the Faded Page -

Hollo larfter.

True, I have also bought copies of works which I probably could have acquired shiny new, but was not entirely sure whether they were for me, taking a punt on something I had heard of, etc etc. And sometimes this led to me buying up everything the author ever wrote, their backlist, preordering their forthcoming, and so on. In hardback.

Plus, while I was appalled at those people who were buying books on Amazon and then returning them and getting their money back, and also at book piracy, on the whole I don't think it is the end-user, the actual reader, who is the greatest villain facing authors, rather than the publishing industry.

***

In other book-related news, yesterday I was still feeling the effects of a couple of bad nights with lower-back flare-up and did that thing of doing some small tedious task which has been lingering about for, lo, a very long time.

Transferring my FREE PDFs of Open Access academic books to my tablet (and also sorting out the file titles to be something a bit more helpful than a truncated ISBN) so I can, should I be moved to do so, actually read them. Some of them are things that yes, I should read, and others are more, er, aspirational.

I also, whilst faffing around with my tablet, finally got the issue with Princeton UP's annoying walled-garden app sorted. So maybe I can finally get to the books I bought in their sale nearly a year ago.

(I think I may have posted something before about this whole thing of 'posture photos' at US colleges.)

The power of creating archival silences:

From the 1910s to the early 1970s, many American universities and colleges had its students stand fully or nearly unclothed for an annual posture photo. University physical educators and physicians used these photos to assess student health, to develop college classes in posture training, and to motivate students to comply with physical education instruction. Regarding the latter, the hope was to shame students with poor posture by showing them objective, photographic proof of their unappealing, slouching features, while also prizing improvement and propping up students who exhibited “A” grade form.
....
Not able to control the security and circulation of these photos—not to mention the feeling of degradation that they caused—most universities ceased the practice of assessing posture altogether by the early 1970s. Despite this, the photographic record of the practice lived on, or at least until 1995 when a New York Times Magazine exposé titled “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Picture Scandal,” led to the wholesale destruction of archival records. Within a matter of months of this piece hitting the newsstands, decades of recorded history were incinerated or shredded beyond recognition.

[P]osture photos of female students often went missing, purportedly stolen by their male peers. Yale men would raid Vassar’s gym for female posture photos, and then create cards that would be graded, traded, and sold.

Apparently not.

Historians who wish to portray and write a more balanced account of the past often lament that the stories of white, elite men are so much easier to find than that of historically marginalized peoples. And yet, in the case of posture photography, I see the opposite happening. In the history I tell, the white, elite, educated class had the power to erase themselves from the historical record.

(Has there been a time-jump and is it now 1st April?)

‘Moral duty’ to allow family and friends to make big life choices, says Cambridge philosopher:

Trying to stop friends and relations from making certain life choices such as whether to take a new job or start a family could “violate a crucial moral right”, according to a new paper by a Cambridge philosopher. Dr Farbod Akhlaghi, a moral philosopher at Christ’s College, argues that everyone has a right to “self authorship”, so must make decisions about transformative experiences for themselves. In a new paper for the philosophy journal Analysis, he argues that this right to “revelatory autonomy” is violated even by well-meaning advice from friends and family about crucial life decisions. Akhlaghi argues that it is impossible to know if a friend’s life will benefit from a transformative experience – such as new job, the birth of a child, or a university course – until after the event. It is for them to find out, he says. Crucially, he argues, it is only by making these choices independently that we can know ourselves.

Surely there is a value in getting input from other people who have had the experience or can shed useful light on it, even if you don't take their specific advice??? Otherwise this reads rather too much like chucking out centuries of accumulated human wisdom and working out everything from first principles.

(A bit like diving into the archives without having read any of the existing literature on the subject, mutters in historian.)

People observe others, even if they don't take advice. People aren't autonomous units. They are Part Of The Main, not islands (h/tip J Donne).

(Somehow this reminds me a bit of the further excesses of Ethical Altruism which somehow want to detach it from anything like the kind of human feeling invoked in the conclusion to Middlemarch.)

I'm not sure my own thoughts on these come to much more than this, that I posted a couple of weeks ago, problematising Effective Altruism.

But I lately came across a couple of articles about it (and there are aspects of it that suggests that parts of it are getting cult-like, what? even before we see the crypto involvement thing):

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force: Effective altruism has gone mainstream. Where does that leave it?

I am:

a) okay, I have my own criticism of what Dickens did with Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House from the angle of attitudes to gender, but the idea of 'Telescopic Philanthropy', and being obsessed about Doing Good at a great distance while neglecting the near at hand, did rather spring to mind here. Are there really no problems closer to home, I wonder? It all gets a bit into the realm of Statistics, even before the futurological lot come along.

b) The whole sense of the Othering of Objects of Philanthropy as an entirely different order of being.

c) I am wrinkling my nose at the Reluctant Prophet who is being somehow Effical by sneaking in cheap booze when he goes out drinking with his mates in the pub

d) And the whole, it is more Effical to put your Elite Mind to Making Lotsa Dosh, then giving it away, and while I concede that it is certainly on the whole more useful to give money than amateur volunteer 'help', if somebody has that Amazing An Intelligence:
i) just possibly, they could be deploying it on research towards solving these long-term problems?
ii) Wottabaht the Effics of the financial and industrial enterprises they are exhorted to go and make money in? (this strikes particularly after the Recent Discourse in which someone in particular straits was monstered for having a low-level job at Evil Corp, which, however Evil, provided employee benefits that many employers do not.)

e) I am not persuaded that it is entirely that much of an improvement to sacrifice feelings of warm fuzziness just to replace them with a sense of your effective and moral superiority in altruism.

Okay, I admit it, I want them to go away and read Middlemarch and embroider samplers with the closing passage about 'the growing goodness of the world' and 'incalculably diffusive... unhistoric acts'.

Also, stop thinking that making yourself uncomfortable has any moral value in itself.

Everyone my age dabbles in different milks.

I probably can't hear the mermaids singing because they're stunned into silence.

Her sister says:

[S]he’s obsessed with having milk for every occasion. Almond, soya, coconut, oat and some flavoured and barista ones, too. But she’s not lactose-intolerant and also keeps normal milk in our fridge to cook with. It’s absolutely nuts. It takes up too much space in our fridge, because they are all open at the same time.... I’m a few years older than Beatrice, who is in her early 20s, and just missed the obsession with shunning dairy products. It just seems to be a trend, something that makes you sound cool and ethical.

On another paw, I disagree with Annalisa here, and would consider sister is very much NTA in being concerning about Younger Bro sitting about doing nowt all day: My younger brother isn’t doing anything with his life. Is he depressed?: 'Consider why your brother taking it easy for a change bothers you. Be curious and don’t expect him to be more motivated'.

He's not paying rent; he doesn't appear to be making any contribution to household upkeep (or possibly even his own laundry etc). Having seen too much of That Sort of Thing on crowd-sourced and other online advice places, it looks as though he's just waiting around until he can find some woman with her own place and a decent salary to move in on and behave similarly, no?

*Yes, there are: but one wonders how far the rarity aspect is the appeal./cynicism.

But, honestly, I sometimes think the Dutch get a pass as being much more progressive and cooler than they are, because 'coffeeshops', enlightened sex ed, etc?

Quite apart from the ongoing annual mutterings over Zwarte Piet (which is not even 'tradition since time immemorial', but mid-C19th in origin), today I came across this charming thing in a tweet by author of the book in question:

Dutch review of *The Slave Ship*: "Rediker seems to have put together the most extreme examples in his book. With a more moderate stance and less emphasis on the psychopaths among the captains and crew members, The Slave Ship would be more balanced."

We note that in his satirical poem 'Pity for Poor Africans', Cowper's 'reasonable' Englishman, 'shock'd at the purchase of slaves', who 'fear[s] those who buy them and sell them are knaves' is concerned that if they give up the trade, quite apart from the deprivation of 'sugar and rum'

Besides, if we do, the French, Dutch, and Danes,
Will heartily thank us, no doubt, for our pains;
If we do not buy the poor creatures, they will,
And tortures and groans will be multiplied still.

And while I hold no brief at all for the unethical stuff that British docs can get up to and away with for absolute yonks before it either comes to light or the GMC takes action - I refer dr rdrz to Liver-branding transplant surgeon and this charmer being yay dodgy in the realm of AID (a realm in which such stories occasionally surface in other countries - was there not some fairly recent instance in US?), here is Netherlands fertility doctor [who] used own sperm to father 21 children. Not even the only one:

Beek is the third fertility doctor in the Netherlands found to have used their own sperm during fertility treatment. In October 2020, DNA tests revealed that gynaecologist Jan Wildschut, who died in 2009, was the biological father of 17 children. The previous year it was discovered that doctor Jan Karbaat had used his own sperm in the conception of 49 children with unknowing patients. Jue said the protocols of the 1970s and 80s, when fertility treatment was in its infancy, did not bear any relation to those of today.

Museum of creepy curiosities opens in London. Hmmmmm. Has he ever been to the Horniman, which far from being a higgledy-piggedly Cabinet of Curiosities, always strikes me as being about Educating The Masses About the Glories of Scientific Understanding of the Natural World, with added benefit of the really manky stuffed walrus, taxidermied by someone who had never actually seen a walrus. The Victorians were pretty into notions of cleanliness and classification and order.

Also, I suspect that some of those things in that collection are things that curators these days have ethical issues with, and indeed over which there may even now be legal constraints, such as human remains... (I have heretofore mentioned the Saga of the Bones in my office).

On respect for the dead and traditional practice, I was struck by this: I had to stop someone photographing my mother at the morgue – social media mourning has gone too far. This seems to me an entirely different matter to that practice, considered creepy by people who later came across it and even by some at the time, of Victorians having their dead infants photographed. Julie-Marie Strange addressed this in her wonderful Death, Grief and Poverty, 1870-1914 - it might be the only record working-class families would have of the lost little one.

Somebody on FaceBook was getting somewhat ethically aerated over this, London's 'tart cards' reveal history of sex work, design and printing, on the grounds that people were going and taking away working women's job adverts - my recollections of phone boxes at the period was that they were constantly being resupplied when police etc were removing cards and that there were a multiplicity in continual circulation. But it's an interesting perspective.

This, however, is a fully collaborative growing collection of over 250 objects chosen by more than 120 trans people to reflect their gender experiences.

Okay, I've ranted a bit about the whole egg-freezing thing before:

But this: Egg freezing is the tempting option if you’re desperate for a child: but can women be sure it’s the right choice? seemed to me to be full of unasked questions.

Surely there is something a bit dodgy about those clinics which are letting women in their late 30s/40s pony up vast sums for the invasive procedure involved when we are always hearing that women of that age are pretty much barren stocks anyway?

(Okay, I know that they aren't and that a significant % of unexpected pregnancies occur in that age group, presumably because they think they are Past It due to all the Ticking Biological Clock woezery in the media.)

But there seems to be a certain amount of double-think going on. If you are going to freeze eggs, presumably they should be nice fresh eggs? I'm not sure whether it was here or somewhere else or in conversation that I remarked that the criteria for sperm donors would actually rule out the candidates being pursued by the quondam Nobel Prizewinners Sperm Bank: too old, too many years of exposure to environmental toxins, etc.

I was very intrigued by wychwood's long and chewy post about Paul du Gay's In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organisation, Ethics but but my mind has been snagging on the following all day and I am trying to get the thoughts out of my head and into semi-coherent (still jetlagged) words.

wychwood summarises part of the argument thus:

According to the book, Weber argued that people lived their lives in entirely separate spheres - the work self and the family self and the self out shopping have no overlap or contact between them, they are independent.... [W]hen du Gay looks at it in more detail later on, it seems like some of the argument is actually about ideals - people should be different at work, or, rather, bureaucrats shouldn't allow their personal opinions and ideas to affect the way they discharge their duties. Weber says you can protest policies to your superiors; you can push for change and disagree with how things are. But once your bosses confirm that the rules are the rules, it's your job to enforce them as though you believed in them implicitly. I'm not sure where that leaves whistleblowers - they're going against that ethos, but I think they're often right to do so. On the other hand, I find it hard to generate a rational morality which allows for whistleblowers without also allowing the kind of intrusion of personal morality that I do disagree with, such as pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraception or KKK members in the police force pushing a racist agenda.

For me, there is a huge chasm here between openness and hypocrisy. The whistleblower may already have raised concerns with their line management and got an unsatisfactory response (and in cases of whistleblowing, what is going on may not merely be ethically dubious but actually illegal). The person who is supposed to be acting in a neutral and evenhanded manner but is inflicting their own agenda is probably not taking up their objections to the higher levels in the organisation and may, in fact, be doing this entirely covertly or in collusion with a group of like-minded individuals within the institution.

This recalled to me that somewhere in one of volumes of Doris Lessing's Children of Violence sequence, she contrasts two women active in the affairs of the capital of 'Zambesia', the fictional counterpart of Rhodesia: Mrs van der Meerwe, the progressive activist, and Mrs Maynard, married to one of the most influential men in the local establishment. Lessing points out that the dangerous subversive perceived as aiming at the destruction of all the white colonial settlers hold dear operates transparently and in the open; she makes no secret of what she is up to. Mrs Maynard, however, operates by gossip and backstairs influence and indirect moves.

The whistleblower is making a public statement and potentially facing adverse consequences. The other side of the equation is being sneaky and underhanded. If you see public morality as being about society, the whistleblower is accepting a responsibility to the wider public sphere beyond their institution.

There are also ways of balancing private and public morality: I think of Gerald Gardiner (who became Lord Chancellor under the Wilson government) who refused elevation to the bench until after the abolition of the death penalty, as he had strong views against this. (I concede that this is not the sort of option open to everybody.)

As an archivist, I am obliged (within the limits of e.g. the law on data protection) to make the archives in my care available to all researchers; I cannot refuse access on the grounds that a particular researcher is a frothing sensationalist conspiracy theorist.

However, what I can do when the frothing conspiracy theorist publishes their sensationalist theory is point out their tearing of material from its context and embedding it in a morass of unexamined assumptions (the dangerous procession from 'could have' via 'would have' 'must have' to 'did').