lobbyists taking over the world

I think this one is the final straw.  I may just become a cynic forever.

Michael Smerconish was discussing this case on his radio show yesterday.  On the surface, a pre-k teacher confiscated a 4-year old's lunch because it was not well balanced, threw it away, and gave them a lunch from the school cafeteria.  But there are some details that make this more of a conspiracy theory.  I can't verify and of them personally, but I am sure you can Google the story.

First, what right does the school have to overrule the parent's choice?  Obviously a four-year old isn't making his own lunch.  This is the parent's call - good or bad (to a point, perhaps)

Second, the kid's original lunch was a turkey and cheese on whole wheat.  The replacement from the cafeteria was chicken nuggets.  WHAT ?!?!?!!?

Third, Smerconish reported that each class had a quota for how many kids had to buy lunch from the cafeteria (to keep it in business).  So a hidden agenda might have been to make the quota.  But still, tossing a turkey and cheese on wheat?  That's just crazy.

Fourth, the school sent the kid home with a note that if they had to do this again, the parents would be billed for the lunch.

A caller mentioned (again, this is not verified) that this town in N Carolina happens to be the home of one of the largest chicken nugget factories in the country.  The quota system could be the result of this company lobbying the school board.

I am not sure how much of this is true.  But I can't think of any reason a teacher would throw away a parent-made turkey sandwich and replace it with chicken nuggets if there wasn't some kind of politics behind it.  Luckily, they appealed to their local state rep and he intervened in the situation.

But still, this could really be a sign of the apocalypse.

political attention

There was a fascinating study just published by a team from the University of Nebraska.  What they did was flash pictures of politically charged individuals (e.g. Bill Clinton, George Bush) on both sides of the aisle to people with strong political orientations.  Then they measured both galvanic skin response (physiological arousal) and visual attention. 

What they found is really interesting.  The liberal subjects had a stronger physiological response and longer visual attention for the pictures of people they liked (e.g. Clinton).  On the other hand, conservatives had stronger physiological response and longer visual attention for people they don’t like (e.g. Clinton again).  They used a variety of people in the images, so it wasn’t Clinton himself that caused the reaction.

They promote a hypothesis for why this happened that I would like your opinion on.  I am not sure if I buy it, although it sounds reasonable.  The conservative mentality is about protecting us from out-group threats (anti-immigration, strong military) and in-group threats (people with non-traditional values or behaviors).  So their attention is naturally fixated on things they don’t like.  On the other hand, the liberal mentality is about improving the world for out-groups (foreign aid) and in-groups (minority rights).

What do you think?  The actual physical responses are statistically significant, but they are really speculating about the explanation.  Could it be?

Global Business Ethics

I just attended a fantastic seminar on Business Ethics.  It was given by one of the pre-eminent experts in business and professional ethics – Patricia Werhane.

I don’t want to summarize her entire week-long visit at Bentley, you can buy her books if you want that much!!  But she discussed one tradeoff over lunch today that I think is really critical for anyone doing business internationally and which I find personally fascinating.

The tradeoff is what you do when another country/culture has different standards than your home base does.  It could be bribery (Siemens), environmental standards (fracking), worker safety (Foxcon), privacy/censorship (Google in China or Twitter in Syria), discrimination (Apartheid back in 1980s S Africa), etc.  Many NGO groups automatically come to the conclusion that companies should remove themselves from any location that forces them to break their home base ethical standards.  Libertarians reject absolutism and think “when in Rome” is the appropriate standard.  Macro-economists suggest working in the system to try to encourage change by being successful as a business and a role model for gradually improving the ethical situation.

I like Patricia Werhane’s answer better.  She says “You just don’t know.”  Sometimes, you go in and work from the inside to fix the problem (the Sullivan Principles helped to end apartheid in South Africa).  But then she cited cited a group that tried to take down Hitler by infiltrating the concentration camps.  They spent years assisting in heinous activities hoping that they could topple the system from the inside.  They failed.  But was their original decision to try wrong?  Hard to know for sure.  Maybe given a second try they could do it.  Sometimes you make a big statement by refusing to do business at all (Google in China – result yet to be determined).

As a pre-eminent ethicist, I put a lot of weight in her recommendation.  She said you make the best prediction you can and go with it.  All choices have some ethical risk to them.

From a behavioral science point of view (we are on to my thoughts now), we have another challenge to overcome.  Motivated reasoning.  If we are allowed to decide for ourselves which way to go, then our brains can easily play tricks with us.  Our nucleus accumbens is going to prefer the option that makes more profit (for the company or for ourselves personally).  It will unconsciously be convincing the amygdala, hippocampus, and frontal cortex that this is the best way to go ethically too.  Since we can’t access those conversations consciously, we can be easily fooled into the selfish choice and rationalizing it to ourselves (and to our CEOs and stakeholders).  To overcome this, we need our organizations to have both a strong liberal and a strong libertarian as co-directors of ethics.  Have them duke it out in the open.  Whichever one has the more convincing argument wins. At least this way, the two arguments can be documented and slept on.

Mandatory coverage of birth control

I was listening to a debate on mandatory coverage of birth control for religious institutions that employ people of various religions (the Presbyterian science teacher at the Catholic school, the agnostic doctor at the Catholic hospital)

It was my favorite kind of debate.  Every time a new person spoke, they presented a new argument and changed my mind back and forth and back and forth.  I am big on freedom of religion.  I am also a big libertarian.  I also believe in health and choice.  So the arguments really pulled me in all directions.

So here is where I ended up.  It turns out that providing birth control reduces the cost of the insurance because of the high expenses associated with unintended pregnancy.  So the argument that the religious institution has to pay for the birth control turns out not to be the case.  And they don’t provide the birth control, they just have to include it in the insurance.  The women go to a health care provider assigned by the insurer that doesn’t have a problem providing the service.  And of course the employees of the religious institution who do share the belief against birth control have no obligation to use it and since it doesn’t raise costs they aren’t paying for it either.

All it does is require these institutions to add some words to a page that allows their employees who do believe in birth control to have it provided by a medical practitioner who also believes in it paid by an insurance company that also believes in it because it reduces their costs elsewhere.  And an extra benefit is that it reduces the demand for abortion because it reduces unwanted pregnancies.  I think that most religious institution (Catholic, Muslim, Evangelical or whatever) would agree that abortion is “worse” than birth control. So this seems to be a good tradeoff even for the religious institutions.

This combination of arguments is what won me over to support the policy, even though the Libertarian in me doesn’t want to force any private institute to do anything it doesn’t want to do and the freedom of religion advocate in me doesn’t want to force a religious institution to support, even passively, something it doesn’t believe in.

Another ethics question

For comparison, chimps share about 99% of our DNA.  Mice share about 85%.  Pumpkins share about 70%.  There is a lot of junk DNA in our genome that we don’t even need.

So imagine someone is developing a cyborg.  Because of all the electronics, not much human genetic information would be necessary.  They can skip the breathing, circulation, immune system, and more.  But they do include the genes that make the cyborg look, sound, and behave like a real human.  Perhaps it shares 50% of human DNA to achieve this.  Less than a pumpkin.  But by choosing specific genes, it is almost impossible to tell apart the cyborg from a real person. 

Does the cyborg get human rights?  It has less DNA in common with a human than a pumpkin does and we don’t give rights to pumpkins.  But it looks and acts like a human.  What defines a human - actual biology or the perceptual things like appearance and behavior?  What kinds of entities merit individual rights? Responsibilities and obligations?  Do you put the cyborg in jail if it commits a crime?  Or do you put the programmer in jail?  

Just a curiosity for the day.

Is virtual fear torture?

I was reading a book on the future of biotechnology and ethics.  There was a story that brought to mind a slightly different example of my own that I was wondering about.  After 9/11 there was a huge debate about whether waterboarding is torture.  What makes it a serious interrogation technique is that it makes you feel like you are going to drown (die).  If you are confident that the CIA wouldn’t really kill you, I think it loses some of its effectiveness.  Probably still painful (not that I have ever experienced it myself), but not intensely like electroshock or pulling out fingernails.  

So what if instead of waterboarding we invent some kind of electrode insert that makes you think you are going to die?  That's all it does.  It would be totally imaginary and artificial, but the “subject” wouldn’t know that.  Assuming it was really convincing, would that make it as much torture as waterboarding is, even though there is no pain (real or imaginary) – just the fear that you are going to die?