Writing for The American Prospect, Arlie Hochschild tenderly unpacks a burgeoning field of medical tourism: international surrogacy. The practice has blown up in recent years—since India made surrogacy legal in 2002, for example, over 350 clinics have opened to serve domestic and foreign clients—and with it comes a host of perplexing legal and ethical questions.

Global inconsistencies in regulation currently make surrogacy a “highly complex legal patchwork,” Hochschild writes. “Observers fear that a lack of regulation could spark a price war . . . with countries slowly undercutting fees and legal protections for surrogates along the way.”

Legal issues in mind, however, it’s the trend toward “increasingly personal” global service work—and its ramifications—that Hochschild throws into the starkest relief. “Person to person, family to family, the First World is linked to the Third World through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the care we receive,” she writes.

“That Filipina nanny who cares for an American child leaves her own children in the care of her mother and another nanny. In turn, that nanny leaves her younger children in the care of an eldest daughter. First World genetic parents pay a Third World woman to carry their embryo. The surrogate’s husband cares for their older children. The worlds of rich and poor are invisibly bound through chains of care.”

Source: The American Prospect

Eight years of scientific repression under the Bush administration gave progressives an overly idealized view of science. President Obama was hailed after issuing an order promising that his administration would “base our public policies on the soundest science.” Taken to an extreme, Marcy Darnovsky writes for Democracy Journal, that the subjugation of policy to science threatens progressive ethics. Biomedical advancements from cloning to sex selection, racially targeted drugs to commercial surrogacy, demand ethical and political discussion and consideration.

Progressives were right to fight against the Bush administration’s suppression of environmental research and the undue influence that fundamentalist Christians had over the public policy, Darnovsky writes. The problem is that eight years of fighting against those policies has left progressives with a kind of dangerous reflexive libertarianism that, according to Darnovsky, has the tendency to “discount the importance of regulation and oversight of scientific practice and application.”

The idealization of science, and the discounting of moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in biomedical advances, also gives fodder to progressivism’s opponents. According to the conservative journal The New Atlantis, “Obama never articulates any moral principle other than the absolute sovereignty of scientific activity.” The journal attacks Obama’s politics as “a kind of techno-aristocracy—hypereducated elites with specialized politico-scientific expertise are singled out to manage the benighted rest of us.”

The United States, in fact, remains an outlier for its lack of oversight for genetic modification, assisted reproduction, and other biomedical technologies, according to Darnovsky. Such medical advances could yield benefits, but ethical considerations should come into play. Instead of insulating science from politics, Darnovsky writes that progressives should seek out an ideology that “welcomes the benefits of human biotechnologies while opposing their harmful, excessive, and unprogressive uses.”

Sources:  Democracy Journal  (article not available online), The New Atlantis

You can—but should you? In 2007 the global ecotourism industry ferried 55 million U.S. vacationers around the world on better, greener holidays. And every one of them should have been asking themselves that question. The editor in chief of Women’s Adventure, Michelle Theall, eloquently broaches ecotourism’s ethical dilemma in a candid, even haunting editorial.

“The polar bear alongside the boat makes a low chuffing sound,” Theall writes. “He dives to escape us. Each time he surfaces, he moves farther into open water, farther from land. A few passengers ask our guide, Wally, if we’re stressing the bear. I don’t hear his answer. I’m too busy kneeling low on the deck with my Canon. I stretch out one hand. The bear swims just beneath it, and he’s magnificent. . . .Only after I’ve clicked off about 100 images does it occur to me that Wally might be chasing this bear because of me. I’m with a travel magazine. I’m worse than global warming. I’m a journalist.”

 “Guilt’s a heavy souvenir,” writes Theall, who last saw the polar bear, confused and agitated, swimming out toward open water. Although Wally later reassures her that the bear most likely made it back to land, she finds a sobering ecotourism parable in the experience—what is legal is not always what is right.

Source: Women’s Adventure

Image by suneko, licensed under Creative Commons.

Let’s go out on a limb, but not too far, and assume that most people want to behave ethically. Bringing those ethical intentions to fruition is more difficult than you might anticipate, reports The Chronicle Review (subscription required). “To do good, individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of those steps are completed, people are not likely to behave ethically, regardless of the ethics training or moral education they have received,” writes psychologist and educator Robert J. Sternberg.

Sternberg’s steps include stages such as recognizing that there is an event to react to, defining the event as having an ethical dimension, and then deciding that the ethical dimension is significant. From there, it’s a matter of taking responsibility, seeking an ethical solution, and, of course, acting on it. There are pitfalls at every phase: finding a way, for example, to avoid taking responsibility (it’s not really my business), or rationalizing away the significance of unethical conduct (it was only a few dollars).

In other news: The Chronicle Review is part of the splendid Chronicle of Higher Education, a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for best writing.

Source: The Chronicle Review

I am forever in awe of William T. Vollmann's ability to drill to the dark centers of humanity and emerge clear-thinking despite the "slimy, filthy grief" he experiences there. He's done it again in the latest issue of Book Forum, where he manages to articulate the most fundamental horror of the holocaust while writing his way through a sharp essay on the ethics of photography. I could feed you an excerpt here but I'm going to resist the temptation. You ought to read and wrestle with the entire piece. Snack if you must, but don't say I encouraged you in that wrongheaded endeavor.

Forget Oktoberfest, here comes Octoberfish: a month-long celebration of sustainable seafood from the consumer group Food & Water Watch. The international nonprofit has put together a calendar of events, including simple direct actions (such as sending an e-mail against fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico) and sustainable seafood menus.

To read about why eating seafood ethically is environmentally essential, visit our Sustainable Seafood Special Online Project, which includes an illuminating excerpt from Taras Grescoe’s book Bottomfeeder. Stay tuned, too. Next week, we’ll post an exclusive sustainable seafood recipe from chef Phil Werst, general manager at Minneapolis’ locavore haunt, Common Roots Café.

Image by tarotastic, licensed under Creative Commons.

Philosophers. Sort of.

Why? Because they haven’t equipped us with the kind of thinking that would help us wrap our minds around the problem and devise a way to stop it. That is to say, they haven't taught us how to change the way we live in the world.

To do that, we’d need a wholly different kind of academic inquiry, writes Nicholas Maxwell, author of the recently revised From Knowledge to Wisdom, in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (subscription required):

Global warming is the outcome of the way we live, and in order to arrest it we need to change the way we live... Having a kind of academic inquiry that gave intellectual priority to articulating, and working out how to tackle, problems of living, would have helped enormously with alerting the public to the problem of global warming, and to what needs to be done in response to it.

But we have not had, and still do not have, academic inquiry of this type—devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle its problems in increasingly rationally cooperative ways. Instead we have science—this long tradition of inquiry devoted to improving knowledge and technological know-how.

Take that, science.

In fact, Maxwell isn’t railing against science per se, but rather “science without wisdom.” And this wisdom comes from a sense of purpose: Knowledge should not be an end in itself, but rather a means toward resolving a problem.

So what would this living-oriented academic inquiry look like? Maxwell elaborates in a short piece for the New Statesman:

Academic inquiry as a whole would become a kind of people’s civil service, doing openly for the public what actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments. Academia would actively seek to educate, rather than simply study, the public.

—Hannah Lobel