The Academic Merit of "What I Did on my Holidays"

There are no frequent or regular readers of this blog, because it is updated so infrequently and irregularly.  It takes a lot to get me to add anything.  Quite often, a longish thread on Twitter is as close as I get to blogging these days.  But sometimes, things need a bit more working-out.  Things such as this paper, "I am not Alone – We are all Alone: Using Masturbation as an Ethnographic Method in Research on Shota Subculture in Japan" by Karl Andersson, published in the journal Qualitative Research, which has attracted a fair bit of attention on social media in the past few days on the basis of a tweet from the Tory MP and culture warrior Neil O'Brien - a tweet that led a number of equal-but-opposite culture warriors to decide that since he'd condemned it, it must be worth defending (and then, at least sometimes, walking it back, as here and here; others have simply deleted their tweets in defence, presumably in the hope that we'll forget them.)

But Twitter is a notoriously more-heat-than-light sort of place, and so I decided to read the paper for myself, and to put myself in something like the position of a peer-reviewer.  Is the paper actually any good?  Does it have academic merit?

I don't think it does, and I'll explain why in a moment.  But first, a few things should be noted.

He's Done a Course

Back in my days editing the JME blog, we used to get the occasional unsolicited post sent to us.  Almost always, they went unpublished; this was overwhelmingly because they weren't very good.  The one person who did sometimes get his unsolicited work published was the ethicist-turned-barrister Daniel Sokol.  There was a number of reasons why we were a little more forgiving of him: he was someone we knew, and a reasonably well-known person in the field - he had a fairly regular column in the BMJ; his submissions, while sometimes a bit self-congratulatory, were often fairly inconsequential - but they were by the same token pretty harmless, so could tide us over during those periods when we had little to say of our own; and, finally, if we did reject his submissions, we could more or less guaratee that they'd appear on the BMJ's own blog anyway, so there wasn't much point our trying to act as gatekeeper.

A post by him appeared on the JME blog a few days ago, detailing the help he had been able to give a doctor, one Tarek Seda, who had found himself in professional trouble and facing a hearing from the Medical Practitioners' Tribunal Service in 2019.  This post purported to be a brief account by Dr Seda of how Sokol was tremendously helpful, andit was supplemented by an account by Sokol himself of how Sokol was... er... tremendously helpful.

Now, I do not know whose idea the post was - in the comments, Sokol writes that

[a]fter the outcome of the MPTS hearing, Dr Seda selflessly asked how he could help other doctors in a similar situation.   One suggestion was to write an article, giving a dual perspective on the process of ethics remediation: the doctor’s and the ethicist’s.   This blog is the product of that idea.

This tells us little about whose idea the post was, although I do have my suspicions - and I'll come back to that in a moment.  But it will not have escaped anyone's attention that the post as a whole does come across rather as an advertorial.  Evidence for this can be produced from the final sentence of the post proper, and the supplementary text that follows it:

So What Happens Now?

 Gavin Williamson is a sorry excu...  No, wait.  I'll start again.

Gavin Williamson is sorry.  He's been wandering around the various news studios leaving great big apologies right in the middle of the floor where everyone can see them.  He's very sorry for the A-Level debacle.  It's tempting to feel sympathetic for a moment - after all, the coronovirus shutdown is unprecedented, and so there'll've been difficulties.  But the moment of sympathy is very short, because although the hope of running the summer exams as normal might have been on the table back at the beginning of March, it should quickly have become apparent that that was not going to happen.
And even if in April the government had been clinging to that hope, they ought to have realised that there was a good chance that there'd have to be something else up their sleeves as a fallback.
And then after the debacle in Scotland last week...  Oh, you get the idea.
Nobody really minds things being up in the air at the moment.  Nobody really minds plans being undermined by reality.  What we do mind is governments that don't seem to have thought more than two days ahead.  A plan that can't come to fruition is better than no plan at all.
But, anyway.  A-Level students have something approximating a result, and hopefully most of them will get into university, which is all peachy... unless you're a university.
Just off the top of my head, let me try to explain some of the problems we're going to have.

Tracing Apps: Precaution and Paranoia

It's a little over a year since I last blogged anything.  Partly that's because I had other things on my mind, and nothing struck me as being the kind of topic about which I had much to say.  And then Covid-19 came along, and I still didn't have anything to say.

Gratuitous virus image!  Yay!

I think that a lot of people don't have much to say about it; but that doesn't seem to have stopped them saying it anyway.  There's been a lot of nonsense.  And there's also been a lot of stuff that isn't nonsense, but that is nonetheless trivial, as people find an excuse to make their rather quotidian thoughts about consent or resource allocation or whatever relevant by sticking "... in the Time of Coronavirus" at the end of the title and bunging it off to a journal.  Hey-ho.  The REF's coming.  What do you expect?

The upshot is that I've been ignoring most of the CV-19 stuff; but every now and again, something catches my eye - such as this piece by Deena Davis on the Hastings Center blog: "Before We Turn to Digital Contact Tracing for Covid, Remember Surveillance in the Sixties", the conclusion of which is that "for me, digital contact tracing [through phone apps] is a bridge too far".

Why would this be?  The concern articulated has to do with the misuse of data.  Once you're being traced, who knows what'll happen to the data generated?  There are precedents for things happening with it that one might not welcome:

Do you remember when we discovered that Uber’s passenger app not only traced you to your destination, but continued to trace where you went after you exited the car?

And so the worry is that by installing a tracing app, one would potentially be handing over vast amounts of information to the government, which might use it for sinister ends.  For example, it might allow information to be gathered about immigration lawyers having met clients - presumably, not something that one would want to see.  Correspondingly, we might see other instances of governments prying into personal lives.  And this is at the root of the reason not to install the app.

In order to place such an app on my phone I would have to believe at least the following things: that the promised anonymity would be respected, that the government would not get hold of it, and that it would not be used to trace contacts for other reasons, e.g., to discover an immigration lawyer’s clients.
[W]e would need important safeguards against mission creep, whereby the surveillance app did not de-activate just because the pandemic was over. Perhaps the government discovers a new use for it; perhaps we kind of get used to it, the way we are used to the idea that our E-ZPass keeps a record of every toll booth we have gone through and our grocery store loyalty card keeps a record of the foods we buy.  [Ryan] Calo [has] noted that “clear, explicit rules are critical,” but what point are rules if the government clandestinely subverts them?

Well, OK.  But it's one thing to raise concerns about what a government might do nefariously with data gathered through a tracing app - quite another to take those concerns as settling matters.  For one thing, we have to ask ourselves whether governments actually would do that.  Perhaps they would.  Perhaps not.  It's notable that Davis doesn't really go beyond the "But what if..." stage of argument.  But that's a really cheap move.  We need to know more about the likelihood of this or that outcome.  ("But what if my writing this blog inspires a white supremacist murder?"  Well, I suppose there is a non-zero chance that it could, somehow.  But it's not likely.  It's not a reason not to write it.  The example is hyperbolic, but I hope it gets the point across.)

Let's stick with the immigration lawyer example.  It strikes me that there's a number of problems with this.  The first is that people who are concerned about deportation are likely to be among those least likely to download any kind of track-and-trace app to begin with.  And so - assuming I've understood the technology correctly and it'll be required for two phones to have it installed and active for it to work - there won't be a particular concern there.  Even if I've misunderstood the technology, anyone who is particularly worried would be able simply to turn their phone off for a bit, or leave it at home, or something like that.  This does undermine the efficacy of the app, for sure - and I'll come back to that point in a moment.  (The qualifier would have to do with instances in which apps are installed automatically, like U2 albums.  But if that's the case, there's nothing special about CV-19 apps, because presumably governments could install such apps anyway, and much more surreptitiously.)

In the meantime, it's also worth noting that there are rules about legal privilege that militate against the government making use of data gathered from such an app.  And while I'm not sure how powerful this point is - it's not obvious that there'd be a way to distinguish reliably between a lawyer and a client meeting in the office (which would be privileged) and their meeting in Starbuck's half an hour later (which wouldn't), the principle applies; and, of course, it people are bumping into each other in the coffee shop, then this is a "civilian" interaction anyway, so whether people are immigrants or lawyers would be neither here nor there.  They could easily be just people who happened to be close by at a given point.

"Ah, yes," the response might go, "It's true that the government would be in trouble if it subverted the rules on legal privilege; but so what?  By then it's too late.  And as Davis says, what point are rules if the government subverts them?"  And, superficially, this has a certain attraction as an argument - except for two considerations.  First, it militates against having rules on anything: if you've decided that they won't stop nefarious behaviour, you might as well not have them; and if you don't have the rules, then there's nothing about which to complain.  sequitur, second, that though the rules might not stop people determined to be bastards, their being there does give you a way to resist that bastardy.  That's an important point of principle.  So, for example, if you're an immigrant who's facing deportation because of the rule-breaking way an app was used, you'd have grounds for that deportation decision to be overturned or suspended, because there was (in effect) a due process violation.  Now, admittedly, it might be that when push comes to shove, this makes no practical difference.  But, as indicated, the point of principle would stand, and at the very least it would improve the prospects of other immigrants in a similar situation.

But a point that's more important than any of that is, I think, this: that the reason for having the app is important.  Davis doesn't say much about that, concentrating instead on the reasons to be suspicious of it.  But the examples she offers are examples of institutions using data for what we can take to be bad reasons.  It is prima facie undesirable for Uber to scrape data for commercial reasons.  It is prima facie undesirable for governments to try to sidestep legal norms when it comes to things like immigration (or anything else).  There does not seem to be a particularly compelling, or even good - by which I mean morally defensible - reason for either of those things to happen.

An app for exposure to CV-19 is different.  The underlying reason for that seems to be prima facie decent.  So even if there are reasons con as well, matters are different from how they appear in the examples offered.  We can't make sense of the desirability or otherwise of installing the app unless we give a full account of the reasons pro and con.  It might even be that we find the reasons for a CV-19 app unconvincing all told.  Nevertheless, there is a qualitative difference between it and the other examples Davis offers, precisely because there is a weighty moral reason for a CV-19 app that there isn't in other cases.

And this is where I go back to the point about lawyers switching off their phones for a while.  There is a reason not to.  But maybe, if the government is untrustworthy enough, there is a reason to do that.

If there are no particularly good reasons to install the app, then don't install it.  If the positive reasons not to are great, then don't install it.  But slightly vague appeals to the risk of state surveillance don't seem to me to carry much weight.

Feeling my Age

My last post here was a reply to a paper by Joona Räsänen in the Journal of Medical Ethics that had argued that there was a case for allowing people to change their legal ages.  I... wasn't convinced.  And, encouraged by people on Facebook, I submitted a slightly tweaked version of the reply to the JME; it's now published, and available here.  I was not the only critic - and it's notable that the criticisms that have been published raise very similar points.  For his part, Räsänen has provided a reply to some of the criticisms.

Readers: it's not convincing.  I'll be brief.

"Iain Brassington and William Simkulet both raise the following objection against legal age change," he says, paraphrasing us thus:

Ageism is not a reason to allow age change but a reason to require that age is not asked while recruiting employees.  Age change should not, therefore, be allowed because there is an easier way to solve the problem of discrimination: restricting access to one’s birthdate.

OK.  That seems like a reasonable précis, and it attracts a twofold response from him.  First, if recruiters are allowed to ask but applicants allowed to withhold age, that is a sign that there is something to hide, and so it would not solve the problem.  This is possibly correct, as far as it goes - but that's a symptom of ageism, and so it's not quite clear where we should go next.

The second option, Räsänen continues,

is to prohibit everyone from revealing their ages in job applications to ensure that no-one can be discriminated against because of age.

(This is the position towards which I lean, by the way.)  But, he objects,

[t]his option might reduce discrimination but the cost is too high. Age is an important part of people’s identities. If we do not allow people to reveal their ages to others, we are committing a serious moral wrong because we are restricting their freedom on something that matters to them greatly.

I have real problems with this.  Bluntly, I don't know what it means, and I can't even speculate about what it's supposed to mean.  What are we supposed to make about a claim that "age is an important part of people's identities"?  What work is being done by "identity"?  Indeed, is any work being done by it at all?  In what sense is age important to whatever it is that "identity" is supposed to mean?

What a Drag it is Getting Old

There is an ongoing argument across social media and some areas of academia that sometimes gets very, very nasty indeed, and I'm not going to dip my toes into it here, or even name it.  If you know what it is, you know, and if you don't, it won't matter much to what I'm about to consider.  One of the areas of dispute has to do with the intersection between "identity" and - for want of a better phrase - material reality (or facticity, if you're so inclined).  A lot of people take it as clear that the two are very different; hence one cannot identify or stipulate certain facts about the world into being other than they are.  Age is a paradigmatic example of that.  Having been on this planet a shade over 42 years, I can't be anything other than 42, for the simple reason that that's what I am.

Not so fast, says Joona Räsänen in the JME, in what appears not actually to be meant as a reductio ad absurdum.  There is, he thinks, a case to be made for legally changing one's age.

Unfortunately, as we'll see, it's not a very strong case.  (If I'm so sure of my position, why not write it up as a paper in its own right?  Well, because I don't think it takes long enough to dismiss the argument to generate a paper, even for a journal with as low a word limit as the JME.)

Academics Anonymous

The launch of a new academic journal doesn't normally attract much attention; but the launch of a journal that promises anonymity to authors who need protection, who who feel that they need it, because of the nature of their ideas has caused a bit of a stir.

I don't know most of the people involved; but I know some, and others are friends of friends.  No particular alarm bells are ringing.  (Francesca Minerva's name has been mentioned.  I'm not bessie mates with her, but I do know her professionally; she's whip-smart, as well as being a nice person.  On the other hand, she does have form when it comes to pressing for anonymity, and I articulated my concerns about her position at the other place... crikey.  Five years ago.)

I also know, and know of, a fair number of people who have faced appalling treatment for holding certain intellectual positions or advancing particular arguments.  Sometimes, those are positions and arguments that appear in peer-reviewed journals; I would be curious to know how much of the treatment comes from people who've read carefully the peer-reviewed papers about which they're protesting, as opposed to people who are outraged by proxy.  (Francesca wrote what I jokingly call The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak and faced all kinds of abuse for it - much of it, I think, by proxy, after the Daily Mail and then Glenn Beck got hold of it.)  Sometimes they aren't positions articulated in journals; several academics that I know and respect have found themselves attacked for what seems to me to be the crime of being insufficiently woke on questions of gender and the law.

Either way, more often than not, as far as I can see, this treatment has come not from universities, but from civil - no: uncivil - society.  Universities have, at least sometimes, done the right thing in sticking up for academics.  This matters, because people receiving abuse for their positions are obviously people who have not been silenced and who - presumably - count as evidence against the case for anonymity.  Still, I can see how people might think that anonymity would be desirable, at least sometimes.  And there are anecdotes about people's academic careers suffering because of their intellectual commitments.

And yet I'm unconvinced by this journal, and for a number of reasons.

In it for the Money

Something I'd never realised about my job was that I've been missing out on the chance to turn into a cash-machine.

In the grand scheme of things, academic pay isn't bad... once you get established.  The problem is that getting established isn't easy: I was 30 before I'd ever earned enough to pay income tax, and it's got harder since then to get a foot on the career ladder.  Taking into account the level of student debt that new entrants'll've accrued, which are far higher than people of my cohort would have had, and the way that they're expected to have a portfolio of publications even before getting a job, I'm glad I'm not looking for a first job now.  Still, the point stands that, once you've got a foot on the ladder, the average academic salary is comfortably more than the average salary.  All the same: a bit more income on the side would never be a bad thing, would it?

Considerablay richer than yeow.

Daniel Sokol, writing on the JME blog, thinks that it should be possible to monetise medical ethics, and offers advice on how to do so.  Well, he might be offering advice.  He might simply be looking to tell the world that he's doing nicely, and tacking an advert for his book on at the end.  It's hard to know.  Anyway: he's got some suggestions.

I'm not going to rehearse what they are point by point, because that'd be tedious.  The gist is that there're thousands of pounds to be made if you happen to make the right moves.  But one wonders quite what planet he's on with the figures he quotes, and about the character that'd be required to make the moves that he recommends.

Edwards, Fuller and the Rule of Law

Phil Edwards posted a short essay on The Conversation a few days ago in which he articulates his concerns with the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill, the latest piece of counter-terrorism legislation to be brought before Parliament.  This Bill, says Phil, was "justified" by Sajid Javid "as a way of ensuring that 'the police have the powers they need to protect us'".  Now, my hackles are already raised here because of the use of the word "justified" - Javid didn't justify the legislation thus, though he may well have attempted to do so.  To say that he justified it is to concede that his attempt was successful, and since Phil goes on to imply that the thinks that the Bill is open to serious criticism, Javid can't have justified it.  I know that a lot of lawyers use "justify" to mean "attempt to justify", or "defend", as well as... well "justify", but I do think that the distinction is important and worth maintaining.  I think that the lawyer's use of the word opens the door to a whole load of trouble.  After all, if you can't distinguish attempt from success in any enterprise, you're probably screwed.

But I digress... already.  Despite being less than a thousand words long, there's a lot crammed into Phil's piece.  Distilling the essence of the essay, I think that we'd end up with something like this:

1. There are certain "precursor" activities that, though not terroristic in themselves, might nevertheless be subject to prosecution on the basis that they are precursors to terrorist activity.
2. Laws that criminalise precursor activities may be worthy of our disapprobation in their own right.
3. Such laws may be worthy of "second order" disapprobation, on the basis that they are (likely to be) inconsistently applied.
4. This is because inconsistent application of a law is a violation of the Rule of Law.
5. An appeal to Lon Fuller can help us understand the move from (3) to (4).

I want to concentrate here on one aspect - the final one - though there'll be the original shoutout to others.  But, in the spirit of being as candid as possible about my commitments, I suppose it's worth laying out a couple of responses to the parts Phil's argument that I'm going to bracket for now.  Thus, for example, I don't have any problem in principle with the idea of precursor crimes.  There're times when it seems to me perfectly proper to intervene to prevent a risk being realised.  While it's true that there's always a chance that a person planning to commit a crime might stop short of doing so even though fully prepared, it seems reasonable for the law to be concerned about that preparation.  Now, quite how prepared one would have to be in order to be the proper object of legal concern is a further question, and I'm not sure how the law ought to draw the line here.  I'm also not sure that it necessarily has to; setting out too rigid a list of criteria might force juries to convict the plain fantasist, and to acquit the genuine danger, simply because of the way the law has been drafted.

With that said, it is likely that we ought to worry about inconsistent application.  Whether that worry can be soothed, granted the idea that it's desirable to avoid rigid criteria for prosecution and conviction is uncertain.  It might be that the price we pay for desirable flexibility is the risk of inconsistency.  Whether or not that's a price we should pay is not immediately obvious; it needs more in-depth consideration than I can give it here.  Maybe we have to pay attention to the distinction between apparent and actual inconsistency, on the understanding that instances of the former may not be instances of the latter.

One thing that would seem to make the price too high would be an erosion of the Rule of Law tout court.  A world in which nobody can be certain whether and how the law will respond to their actions is a world in which the Rule of Law seems not to obtain: rather, we'd have the Rule of Agents of Law, or Rule of Prosecutors, or Rule of Judges, or something like that.  And this is where Fuller comes in.

A Limited Defence of Toby Young

(Originally posted as a two-parter at the other place, here and here.  Admittedly, events have moved on a bit since yesterday, but the point about eugenics stands.)

The response to Toby Young's appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from "He's not the best person for the job" to "He's the worst person for the job".  Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his general lack of qualification.  Writing in The Times, Janice Turner is - I think - balanced in her assessment of his qualities, but still finds him to be (to say the least) wanting.  But the thing that's of interest to me here, on what is a bioethics-related blog, is one of the other sources of controversy: his public support for (a kind of) eugenics.  The mere fact that he could be associated with eugenics has had some people in paroxysms.  Taken more or less at random here's a tweet from Vince Cable:

Theresa May stood by Toby Young when she should be firing him. This is a man who has a record of misogyny and backs eugenics. His appointment shows poor judgement and, as May admitted, a lack of due diligence. It seems all you need to survive is be a friend of Boris Johnson #Marr

— Vince Cable (@vincecable) January 7, 2018

Note that "backs eugenics" is offered as being a reason in itself to object to Young's appointment.  Cable is not, by a long way, the only person to make this sort of comment.

Is it justified, though?  Well, the article that's generated the ire is this one, called "The Fall of the Meritocracy", published in 2015 in Quadrant.  It's a long piece, and the eugenics bit only comes about 80% of the way through, and for that reason I'll only home in on a few details.  But it is worth looking in a bit more depth at some of those details.  I think that what he's arguing is, in many ways, fairly unremarkable.  It's mistaken in important ways, too; I'll come to those in the next post.  But whatever problems there are with the piece do not flow from the use of the "E-word".  And so, to the greatest extent possible, I'll try to talk about it without mentioning eugenics.

Charlie Gard: An Ethical Analysis of a Legal non-Problem

(This is an extended version of a post that originally appeared at EJIL: Talk!)

For those with an internet connection and an interest in current affairs, the story of Charlie Gard been hard to avoid recently. A decent précis is available here; but it’s worth rehearsing.

Shortly after his birth, Charlie’s health began to deteriorate, and he was diagnosed with a terminal and incurable mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome. By March 2017, Charlie needed artificial ventilation, and doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH) applied to the High Court for confirmation that removing that ventilation would be lawful, having judged that it was not in his best interests. This was contested by his parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates; the High Court ruled in favour of GOSH. This was confirmed by the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. During all this time, Charlie remained ventilated.

In the High Court, Mr Justice Francis said that his decision was subject to revision should new evidence emerge favouring continued treatment; in July, Charlie’s parents returned to the High Court, claiming that Charlie might benefit from an experimental treatment being offered by Professor Michio Hirano of Columbia University. However, as proceedings advanced, it became clear that Hirano’s proposed treatment had never been used on patients like Charlie, that he had neither seen Charlie nor read his notes when he offered the treatment, and that he had a financial interest in that treatment. The position statement issued by GOSH on the 24th July barely hides the hospital’s legal team’s exasperation. On the 24th July, Charlie’s parents dropped their request for continued treatment. The details of Charlie’s palliative care were still disputed; his parents wanted it to be provided at home, with ventilation maintained for a few days. The High Court ruled against this on the 27th July. Charlie was moved to a hospice; his ventilator was removed, and he died on the 28th July, a few days before his first birthday.

The way this case has played out has not been pretty. Elements of the American media (this piece is one among many) and the political right wing used it to launch attacks on single-payer healthcare systems:

Our hearts weep for #CharlieGard Our prayers are w/ him. Pls read & ask WHY govt should have power to decide who lives & dies. It's wrong. https://t.co/MsvoJBqJyO

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 24, 2017

Nigel Farage weighed in, complaining about the state taking away parental rights:

UK medical establishment closed ranks on #CharlieGard's parents & the state took away their rights. Change required. What a total disgrace. pic.twitter.com/TRBWWYTwJb

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 24, 2017

From the left, Giles Fraser wrote that the case was being dealt with too rationally. None of these claims is justified, and many left-leaning people have been surprised to find themselves in agreement with Melanie Phillips on this matter.

Legally, the case was very straightforward.

Law Changes and Slippery Slopes

(Cross-posted from the other place)

Apparently, there was a TV programme in Australia the other day in which a there was a discussion of assisted dying.  It got reported in The Guardian, largely on the basis that an 81-year-old audience member kept calling Margaret Somerville "darling" and then got mildly sweary.  I've only seen those clips from the programme that are linked in the Graun's report, so I'm not going to comment on the tone of the debate in particular.  Rather, I'm interested in one of the responses to the programme, from Xavier Symons, writing in The Conversation.

Symons takes the opportunity to unpick the idea of a slippery slope argument - in this case, the claim that allowing some forms of assisted dying will commit us to allowing... well, that's open-ended, but it's sufficient to say that it'd be terrible.  We'd want to avoid terrible things; therefore, the argument goes, we shouldn't allow any of it.  This is well-worn stuff in the seminar room, but it's a mode of argument that refuses to die.  Quite correctly, Symons points out that

there is a need for empirical evidence or sound inferential reasoning to support the claim that event B will necessarily (or probably) follow on from event A.  Without this evidence, the argument is invalid. I can’t just claim, for example, that the legalisation of medicinal marijuana leads to the legalisation of ice - I need to show some empirical or logical connection between the two.

So far, so standard.  (I'd say "unsound" rather than "invalid", because the validity of an argument doesn't depend on its evidence - or, at least, not in the same way; but that's a small matter.)  He then makes another move, which is a bit more interesting:

But (and it’s a big but) there is such a thing as a good and valid slippery slope argument.  A good slippery slope argument demonstrates a causal or probable relationship between event A and B, such that event B can legitimately be expected to occur if event A is allowed to occur. [...] There are, nevertheless, compelling empirical and logical slippery slope arguments available to defend more modest claims about the “normalisation” of assisted dying.

Is this correct?

In which I Learn Persian

Back at the start of the academic year, I signed up for a course of beginners' Persian.  I've been a bit of a Persephile for as long as I can remember, and meaning to take lessons in the language for ages.  Then I learned that the University offers language classes to the public, and that Persian is on the menu.

So I signed up.

It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch.  All had their advantages.  But I chose Persian.

Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since.  But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit.  I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later.  Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion.  We shall see.

So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do.  Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.

In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004.  (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve.  I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)

This was taken in Yazd, where I ended up with sunstroke.  Annoyingly, I can't remember the names of most of the other people who were in the group.  I think the guy with the moustache that you can half-see was Paul.  But I do remember the name of the guy in the foregroud.  He was a German teacher from Aberdeen called Kenny.  Kenny had a very low tolerance for bullshit - in Esfahan, for example, he noticed that there was someone who was following us around during a bit of free time when he, I, and one or two others went for a wander around the city.  He was suspicious that our shadow might have been a policeman of some sort, so went to engage him in conversation.

In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years.  Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German.  The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."

Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.

Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam.  While the jokes were in English, they were also in public.  I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.

Anyway.

Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.  There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is.  However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons.  First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good.  Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right.  There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is.  Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it.  I think my picture is better.

So there we are.  The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present.  Maybe one or two people will be interested.

Free Labour and Quiet Doubts

(Originally posted on 1.viii.16 at the other place.)

Those of us on the academic side of things will almost certainly recognise the situation: you're sitting in your school's Teaching & Learning committee, or a staff/student committee meeting, or something like that, and you hear the complaint from students that they should get more contact time.  Academics should spend more time teaching rather than simply doing their own research.  After all, they're paying however-many thousand pounds for their education.

And you'll've heard the standard rebuttals - and maybe even trotted them out yourself: that course fees cover not just teaching costs, but libraries, labs, buildings and so on; that university learning isn't about hours in a classroom; that teaching and research are intertwined; that students benefit from being taught by the people who're writing the papers they're reading.  But I wonder if these standard responses miss something important.

Back in April, I was getting companionably smashed with some of my final-year students, and we were talking about what they were going to do when they'd graduated, and about possible careers.   One or two were interested in academia, and so a part of the conversation concerned what life's like from my side of the fence.  Predictably, pay was one thing that interested them.  I mentioned that I'd made about £80 in total from the books I've written, spread over 10 years.
"And what do you get paid for a paper?"
I held back my bitter laughter, and explained how much you get paid for papers, and how much you get for peer-reviewing, and all the rest of it.  The students had had no idea that this stuff was expected of us, but not remunerated.  Why would they?  Indeed, isn't it insane that we're not paid?

I think that one gets an insight here into students' complaints about academics' priorities being wrong.   If they think that we get paid for publishing papers, then of course they're going to think that we have an incentive to resist extra contact hours - and everything we tell them about extra contact hours being at best academically unnecessary, and likely as not counterproductive, will sound like so much bad faith.  After all, of course we'd tell them that a course only needs 30 hours of lectures rather than 60 if we could be earning extra money with those spare 30 hours.

What prompts all this is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   It's from 2012, but it's started popping up in my social media timelines this morning, and Carl posted it on Fear and Loathing in Bioethics last night.  It makes a proposal:

An Addendum on the Strike

Having written at length about why I'm not persuaded that a strike is a good idea when it comes to university pay disputes, I've just learned that Goldsmiths, and maybe a couple of other places, are diverting the money that would have been paid to striking staff to the student hardship fund.

Now that's the sort of thing that might win me over.  Staff would still lose out in the short term - that's part of the nature of a strike - but students would get some kind of benefit that'd begin to offset any inconvenience; and employers wouldn't be rewarded for making staff angry.  (Not all inconvenienced students would benefit, but some would; and a benefit to the student body in abstracto doesn't mean that every student in concreto would have to feel it.  That's probably all that matters.)

If I hear from my employer that there's a comparable scheme at our place, then I think I'd be persuaded.  I'd still probably work, but that's because I've got nothing better to do with my time; but I'd be much more likely to register as being on strike.

To Strike or Not To Strike?

Officially, the UCU is on strike today; the headline is that the dispute comes down to being about pay.  According to the UCU website, the real value of academic salaries has fallen 14.5% since 2009; the latest pay offer is 1.1%.  I'm not sure how the 14.5% figure is calculated, but I'll take the Union at its word.  (I don't doubt that Universities UK would dispute the figure; but even if it's mistaken, there's no reason to suppose that the UCU is speaking in bad faith.)

To be honest, when it comes to pay levels, I'm personally not all that fussed.  Larger pay rises are nicer than small ones, but academics at my level are not poorly paid by any stretch of the imagination.  But it's not about what I get personally.  What's much more worrying is the dual trend of the demands placed on us in return for that pay, and the casualisation of HE.  Everyone I know works evenings and weekends; I've had five days' annual leave in the past two years, and I worked during that; I'm not taking any holiday this year.  The idea that one might take a couple of days away from the keyboard to read and get to grips with a new book, or longer to get up to speed with a new but important topic or sub-field on work time is risible, even though doing so would obviously contribute to teaching and research.  There's no time or incentive to step back and look at how courses work and how the might be done differently.  If you're casual, you can flit between sessional gigs for years - and increasing numbers are casual.  Pay at my end of the scale may not be bad in absolute terms; but if you're starting out, it can be awful.  It isn't always; but it can be.

In many ways, the UK system is beginning to look like the US system, with all the grotesqueness that that entails... except that here (with a very few exceptions), we don't have the Prince-Bishop professoriate.  Senior academics are in pretty much the same boat as a newly-appointed junior lecturer.

We do have our Prince-Bishops, though: Vice-Chancellors' pay has gone up by quite a bit more than academics' - in one case, by about 25%.  (Falmouth has a university.  Who knew?)  The Wolverhampton VC's pay went up by 19.6%, apparently as a reward for exceptional leadership - whatever that may mean - and reflecting the "size, complexity and performance of [the] university" - as though academic staff have nothing to do with that performance.  On that basis, the hypocrisy of the 1.1% offer is stunning.

Rhodes to Palmyra

There are many things that look to be superficially alike, but that careful examination shows to be very different.  Sharks and dolphins are both grey-ish aquatic predators with a prominent dorsal fin.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone unfamiliar with them to suppose that they are closely related: a child, or - less plausibly - a marine biologist visiting from another planet might make that mistake.  But closer inspection would reveal significant differences; and one would hope that the child or alien biologist would move away from thinking them the same sort of thing.  One would hope that a tolerably well-informed adult would have stopped making that kind of mistake a long time before, and would not get a newspaper column asserting that dolphins and sharks are very similar indeed.

This serves as a sort of preamble to a rumination on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago: that Oriel, Oxford, was considering removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes after coming under pressure from student protestors.  These protests echo similar protests in South Africa.

The rationale for getting shot of the guy is straightforward enough: that he was racist, imperialist, and not the sort of person whom modern academia should be honouring if it's ever going to stand a chance of becoming the post-racist, post-imperial community to which it aspires.  I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view - particularly in respect of the South African protests; after all, the colonial and post-colonial history of that country has been particularly bitter for the majority of the population.  Having a monument to him at Oriel strikes me as being slightly morally different, though I can't put my finger on why - so maybe it isn't that different after all.

On the other hand, there are counterarguments.  Rhodes was a man of his time; it is naive to pretend that we can, or should, whitewash history; if we want to understand where we are and to control where we're going, it pays to remember whence we came; and, anyway, Rhodes' personal legacy has enabled students from all around the world, of all races, to study at Oxford.  His reputation may be tarnished, but it is not without burnished bits as well.

The point is that the arguments about whether Rhodes must fall are complex, and worth hearing from both sides.

Not everyone seems to think this.

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bias

In a little while, I’m going to be giving a couple of lectures to my undergrads on a person with whose views I disagree; indeed, I would count myself as an opponent of the whole tradition from which he comes.  It’s quite a fun lecture to give, because the subject is quite straightforward.  It also lends itself to some fun digressions, and the occasional half-decent joke.  So in that sense, I’m quite looking forward to it.  (In the sense that it’s at 9am, I’m not.  But that’s a different matter.)

But there is a niggling doubt about whether I’ll be doing justice to the topic.  Granted that it’s desirable to be disinterested when giving a lecture, will it be possible to present the arguments in a dispassionate way?  I’m not sure it will; and this generates a problem about whether the lecture will be as disinterested as we’d intuitively want it to be.

Yet one other thing occurs to me: that it might be no bad thing to drop the aspiration to disinterest altogether.  If we do that, the problem vanishes.

The thought goes something like this.  A person who spends time thinking about a topic will, likely as not, come to hold a position.  We’d like to think that that position would be reached by means of a dispassionate examination of the evidence; but that’s unlikely always to be the case, not least because what counts as evidence, and how powerful that evidence is, will depend on the intellectual and theoretical commitments that one has.  At the same time, the sources and arguments being scrutinised may well impact on one’s general commitments over time.  This means that it’s often hard to tell whether one holds the positions one does because the arguments are powerful, or whether the arguments are perceived to be powerful because of the commitments that one has.

Lest we think that this is a problem confined to the humanities, it probably isn’t. 

Review: Carl Schneider and Censorship

The Censor’s Hand: The Misregulation of Human-Subject Research

Carl E Schneider

The MIT Press

(NB: I was commissioned to review this book for Pacific Standard in September; what's published here is the first draft, from early October.  After some suggestions from the editor, I submitted a revised second draft a couple of days later.  Neither draft has been published there yet, and I've no idea if and when that will change.  If anything does appear there, I'll provide a link.)

Not so long ago, Stephen Pinker provoked the ire of many bioethicists by appearing to launch an attack on institutional ethical review boards (IRBs).  Accusing them of hindering important work in science, he wrote that they should “get out of the way”.  Bioethicists responded by pointing out that there is a history of researchers behaving abominably – the go-to example in recent years being the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which black men were deliberately left untreated so that the natural course of the disease could be studied.  Ethical review, the bioethicists’ response goes, will not guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen; but it does reduce the chance.

Yet Pinker’s broad claim is not without support from within the bioethics community.  Thoughtful commentators have been looking at the institutional review board system for some while now, and arguing that it needs significant reform.  Could it be, some have wondered, that “bioethics” has become an end in itself, claiming an authority with which even many bioethicists are uncomfortable?  And if, then, there is a decent case for reform, how far should it go?  Some think that the system needs re-tuning; some think that it needs something approaching a rebuild.  And some think that a rebuild is too conservative: that the system is, and cannot but be, so broken that the only option is to get rid of it all together.  In this camp, we find Carl Schneider.  The Censor’s Hand aims to present the case not against IRBs as they are, but against IRBs tout court.

Book Release: Pioneering Healthcare Law

Pioneering Healthcare Law, a festschrift for Margot Brazier, was published last week.  Yes, it costs £95, but we already knew that academic publishing is deeply dysfunctional.

And this volume does have all kinds of insightful contributions to important debates in medical law, from all kinds of insightful and important people.

It's also got a chapter by me and Imogen Jones, which is much more of a jeu d'esprit (or at least aspires to be).  So that's nice.

Buy it here.