A Visit with Brain & Ethics Expert Dr. Syd Johnson

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A Visit with Brain & Ethics Expert Dr. Syd Johnson

June 17, 2020 by Hope Ferdowsian

In May, I had the opportunity to visit with Dr. L. Syd M Johnson, a philosopher, bioethicist,  neuroethicist, and professor in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University in New York. Dr. Johnson is a former film critic, and today she is a member of the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group and an associate editor for the journal Neuroethics. Dr. Johnson teaches students and colleagues alike about the law, population health, and healthcare ethics.

Her current research in neuroethics focuses on ethical issues related to brain injuries, including sport-related neurotrauma, brain death, and disorders of consciousness. Her work is situated at the intersection of ethics, medicine, and law, and she has published on disorders of consciousness, sport-related concussion and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, reproductive ethics, research ethics, and animal ethics. Her interest in all things with brains/minds includes every kind of critter, zombies, and robots.

We originally visited in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic before the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings following his death. After Mr. Floyd’s death, I circled back to Dr. Johnson to ask her what opportunities she sees in education to advance ethics, including racial justice, within healthcare.

HF: Tell me about your everyday work, including how it’s changed with the coronavirus pandemic.

SJ: It seems like I am busier than ever these days. There are two major differences in my everyday work. One is that I don’t have to commute into the office anymore. That is, honestly, a benefit. That travel time was not very useful. Before this started, I was already trying to cut back on the number of days I drove in to the office. The other change is that my kids are home. My teenager can look after herself, but my fourth grader needs help structuring her days and her online schoolwork. The frequent interruptions and distractions make it difficult to do anything that requires sustained attention. I’m trying to work like a bee—flitting from one flower to the next, but with a destination and an objective to move towards.

I’m working on a few collaborative projects right now, and between those and work-related meetings, it seems I’m spending a lot of time on video conference calls, just like everyone else.

HF: How did you become interested in brains?

SJ: In graduate school, I was interested in philosophy of mind and consciousness, and also bioethics. I had a postdoc in neuroethics immediately after graduating, so that got me to thinking more about brains, and brain-related issues. I got interested in the specific issues I work on—disorders of consciousness and sport-related concussion—because there were a lot of interesting developments happening in those areas at the time.

HF: What do you see as our most significant cognitive strengths and limitations, as human beings? 

SJ: The most significant cognitive strength of humans is our empathy—our capacity to think about what matters to someone else, to imagine ourselves standing in someone else’s shoes, to feel. It’s a basic capacity that drives us to create and consume art and literature and film, to help others, to keep the world going. Unfortunately, limitations in our empathy are our greatest weakness. We try to carve the world and its creatures (including our fellow humans) into manageable, familiar spheres—the things we decide we have the ability, the means, the bandwidth, and the desire to care about. The challenge is doing that—doing what is practically necessary—while remembering that things outside those spheres are still things worth caring about. It’s easier to turn them into things towards which we have apathy or antipathy.

HF: Tell me about how ethics has weaved its way through your life and career, including how you came to include nonhuman beings among your concerns.

SJ: When I was a kid, my family used to go camping and fishing in eastern Washington. When I was about 12, I was out in the rowboat fishing by myself, and I guess I was right above a school of perch. I would drop my fishing line in the water and immediately hook a fish. This went on and on, but after a while, I started to feel bad about it. I felt like it was unfair, that I was taking advantage of the fish because they didn’t know I was dangerous. That was the last time I went fishing. It would still be quite a while before I stopped eating fish or other animals, but when I did, I went vegan overnight. That was 1986, when I was in college, and it was in the middle of a cross-country road trip. I got pretty hungry for the rest of that trip!

Many months later, I read a book called Radical Vegetarianism by Mark Braunstein, and I learned the world “vegan.” Mark lived not far from me in Providence, Rhode Island, and he was nice enough to meet with me. I was introduced to the local animal rights group—the Rhode Island Animal Rights Coalition—and spent several years working with them before I moved to New York. We had two claims to fame—in 1987 we successfully lobbied the Cambridge, MA city council to ban the LD-50 Acute Toxicity Test and the Draize Eye-Irritancy Test in Cambridge, and we were infiltrated by an FBI agent who investigated us for several months. She got to witness us doing things like dress up in dog suits to protest the use of dogs in medical device marketing. We must have been a pretty weird and boring assignment for her. We never, ever did anything illegal. We engaged in activism-by-theatre and activism-by-annoyance. But I suppose that somewhere in the FBI archives there is a file on me, with a photo of me as Dr. Dog, dressed in a dog suit.

My interest in animal advocacy and animal rights was for a long time something I was philosophically interested in, but I didn’t see a clear contribution that I could make. I worked on it a little, at the margins of my scholarship, usually in conference presentations or in blog publications. I always found ways to work it into the ethics courses I was teaching. But people started asking me to write things—papers, book chapters, blogs, some amicus briefs for legal cases, and eventually a book. Now, it’s a pretty significant part of my scholarly work.

HF: What are you working on now?

SJ: I just finished an edited book called Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals, which I’m quite proud of. It’s the first book to explicitly consider how neuroethics and animal ethics should be in conversation, and how the extensive animal ethics literature—which has for a long time been marginalized and siloed even in philosophy—can inform our approach to neuroethical issues related to both humans and nonhumans.

Right now, I’m working on my next book, and it’s a project I’ve been working on for years. It’s on disorders of consciousness, and how medical and scientific uncertainty about those disorders should prompt a change in our ethical thinking about them and our approach to other bioethical and neuroethical concerns. I’ve just been working on a chapter on moral status and personhood, where I can really incorporate animal rights and animal ethics thinking—because it’s the same issue, whether we are talking about humans with disabilities, humans with brain injuries, or nonhuman animals. In particular, I’m thinking about how consciousness is often thought to be a criterion for moral status or personhood. I think consciousness might be enough (or sufficient, in philosopher-speak) but it isn’t necessary for moral status. I suspect there are a lot of sufficient conditions for mattering morally, but none that are necessary.

HF: Commonly, I ask about what gives people hope. It would be interesting to hear from you what gives you hope, and what you think of hope as a neurological construct.

SJ: In the midst of this pandemic, one of the things that gives me hope is that we have shown ourselves to be flexible enough to change. We stopped driving and flying and going out. We found workarounds. Wildlife and other nonhuman animals emerged to fill the spaces we left empty. The air and water got cleaner. This year, I suspect, will buy us just a little bit of time to address climate change. Obviously, all of this has had pretty profound effects on human lives, but I hope that we can come out the other side of this with the recognition that we can respond to great challenges and do the things we must do to have a positive impact on the world.

HF: A follow-up question…since we last spoke, George Floyd was killed by police, sparking nationwide and international protests. His death and the killing of other Black people by police has also raised the level of public consciousness about how to better address structural racism and its effects on education, healthcare, and justice. What opportunities in education do you see now to better advance ethics, including racial justice, within healthcare?

SJ: It feels like we are on the verge of a momentous change in public consciousness. I really hope so. And coming in the midst of the pandemic, when attention was already turning to the devastating effects of structural racism on the health of Black people, Indigenous persons, and other people of color, it’s extraordinary to see a clear picture emerging amidst all the tumult. My experience with my students has been that once you lay out all the pieces, tell them the history, show them the effects, they can connect the dots and understand clearly how structural racism and injustice affect health for Black people, Indigenous persons, and other people of color. In my experience, they are astonished to learn about these things. When I taught my students about Black infant and maternal mortality in the US this past spring, they were aghast. So, future healthcare workers and doctors are ready to lead, and they are ahead of their teachers, but they need the information. The challenge, in my view, is to get health faculty onboard, to get them to recognize their moral and pedagogical responsibility to teach about the effects of racism and injustice.

Photo by Denise Rego Bass.

Filed Under: All Blog Posts, Animal Rights, Ethics, Human Rights, Interviews, Medicine and Public Health

A Conversation with Journalist & Author Brandon Keim

September 10, 2019 by Hope Ferdowsian

Brandon Keim is one of my favorite writers, so it was a joy (if at first a bit intimidating) to interview such an insightful author. Brandon is a freelance journalist specializing in animals, nature, and science, and he is currently working on a book proposal provisionally entitled Meet the Neighbors: Stories of a More Than Human World, about how new insights into animal minds are transforming the way we treat them. His first book, The Eye of the Sandpiper, was published in June 2017 by Cornell University Press. Also in 2017, National Geographic published Inside Animal Minds: What They Think, Feel and Know, an issue-length exploration of animal intelligence. Brandon’s work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, WIRED, National Geographic News, Aeon, Nautilus, Scientific American Mind, The Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, Audubon Magazine, Mother Jones, Conservation, NOVA and Stanford Social Innovation Review. He has made broadcast appearances on NPR’s Science Friday and Here & Now, PRI’s The World and CBC’s As It Happens. Brandon is also a photographer. You can find many of his longform pieces as well as some of his photographs on his website.

HF: As an author and photojournalist, you primarily write about and photograph the natural world, including how nonhuman animals navigate a human dominated world. How did you become interested in the lives of other animals?

BK: I’ve been interested in other animals for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of caterpillars, a neighborhood cat—in recollection I fed the cat a leaf and he never came back, which doesn’t make sense but there it is—and watching prairie dogs on family vacation. Whenever I met an animal, I’d be very curious and affectionate. Which I think is pretty typical for a kid—but fortunately I ended up with a career that let me pursue and share that interest. 

HF: What has studying nonhuman animals taught you about us as human beings?

BK: So much! I don’t know where to start, but one thing that’s been on my mind a lot lately is how so much of what we do is like what they do. 

By that I mean, so much of what we do is cognitively “simple.” It doesn’t require the arguably ultra-sophisticated cognition that’s been said to be uniquely human, or at least unique to a few extra-smart species. 

Take communication: language as we’ve defined it—with syntax and referentiality and recursion and the ability to coin new words and so on—seems to be something that only humans do. Which isn’t to say other animals don’t have some of this complexity; they absolutely do. Domestic chickens, quite wonderfully, were the first birds in whom referentiality—which means referring to some specific entity outside yourself, not just making emotional noises—was scientifically demonstrated. Plenty of other birds use syntax. So do prairie dogs, and cephalopod skin patterns are grammatical, and so on. 

Full-blown language, though, seems to be a human thing. And historically so much baggage has been laid on that. Philosophers have said that language makes us human, that possessing it makes us so different from and superior to other creatures. And when scientific findings on communicative complexity in other species are reported, there’s a tendency to frame it in terms of their now being qualified to cross that gap and join us. 

But so much of our own communication doesn’t involve all that high-level stuff. A gesture, a comforting touch, a hug, a meaningful look: that’s not language at all. But it’s extraordinarily important to us. It makes up a big part of our own interactions. And it’s ubiquitous among other animals. Rather than assigning so much significance to language, I now think of communication as being what’s really significant, and language as just this strange sub-category of communication. A remarkable and special sub-category, but not some kind of pinnacle. 

Which is ironic for a writer to say! But there’s other traits that fit this pattern. Empathy, for example, or self-awareness; I’d argue that much of our empathy and sense of self is so-called animal-like. 

HF: Unlike many journalists writing about animals, you also commonly write about insects—including the ethics of how we treat them. For example, you wrote an article for Aeon about cockroaches who could be electrically shocked and controlled remotely by children. Why are stories such as this one as important to write about as questions about the legal personhood of chimpanzees?

BK: I’d like to say it’s because every insect’s life is just as important and worthy of regard as a chimpanzee’s life. In practice, though, I clearly don’t live that way; I don’t lament the bugs on my windshield like I would a frog or a squirrel, much less a chimpanzee. 

That said, their lives are valuable. I do my best not to kill mosquitoes. And while most people won’t ever meet a chimp, we encounter insects all the time. 

For kids, insects are often the most common animals in their lives. Their experiences with them may be profoundly formative. Habits and perspectives developed with insects might later be applied to other animals. Insects challenge us in some profound ways, too: even a little kid has life-or-death power over a caterpillar or ant or moth, and bugs seem quite alien in comparison to most vertebrates. They challenge us to empathize with creatures, with people, who are very different from us. 

I wish I could say I met those challenges well. I shudder to think about what I did to ants for several childhood summers. But then, I didn’t think of them as having inner lives of any sort; they might as well have been mechanical. Caterpillars, on the other hand, seemed quite personable, perhaps because they’re fuzzy and have big eyes, and I cared for quite a few of them. 

HF: You have also written about the promise and limits of technology in medicine, markets, and science. What have you learned about how we approach technology and how it limits or extends our progress?

BK: I’m ambivalent about technology. On the one hand, tools can help us accomplish remarkable things. They can ease suffering and relieve people from drudgery and reduce our impacts on the rest of life. On the other, tools can be fetishized. They can limit our vision even as they extend our power. 

Take the development of artifically intelligent robots designed to kill crown-of-thorns starfish in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Populations of those starfish have exploded; they just obliterate coral reefs. Something needs to be done—but I read gee-whiz story after gee-whiz story about starfish-hunting robots, and the stories rarely mention the pollution that helps crown-of-thorns proliferate. They rarely mention that crown-of-thorns have natural predators, such as giant snails, who humans have obliterated. The robots are just a stopgap solution that—at least in the way they’re understood and portrayed—normalizes a profoundly [messed-up] state of affairs. 

That dynamic can be found in so many contexts: agricultural biotechnology, human enhancements, and so on. But it’s really important not to let skepticism turn into pessimism. That’s something I’m prone to, I think, and in the last few years I’ve spent more time engaging with ecomodernist thinkers. That’s been good for me. The folks over at the Breakthrough Institute have actually turned me into a fan of nuclear energy. 

HF: How has your writing, and the research involved, changed how you approach ethical questions about how we as human beings interact with each other, other animals, and the greater natural world?

BK: That’s a challenging question. There’s many answers to it. 

To start with, I want to emphasize that so much of my research amounts to just talking to other people and learning from them. They’re the ones who’ve done the really hard work. Then they’re patient and generous in sharing with me. 

Hopefully I’ve become more consistent in my approach to ethical questions. Over the years I’ve realized just how profoundly our ethics for animals change depending on context. In our homes, in a lab, on a farm, in the wild: the frameworks for each setting are totally different. The ways those animals are seen is totally different. I think much more critically about that than I once did. I’m also far more appreciative of just how much the inner lives of animals has in common with our own, which certainly bears upon the ethics. 

I don’t know if this has much impacted my thinking about human interactions. I’ve always been motivated by the belief that people should treat one another fairly, with kindness and respect. Before I started writing about science and then animals, I wrote about politics and was much more of a social justice activist. If anything, my interest in animal ethics was fueled in part by how I thought about human relations. 

As for the greater natural world, I’ve also become more aware of how relationships to nature are socially and historically constructed. And for the most part animals as thinking, feeling, community beings are formally absent from contemporary traditions of nature; from transcendence and beauty and the Land Ethic and conservation and environmentalism and so on. The book proposal that I hope will soon be a book is about the intersection of animals—of animal intelligence research, animal ethics, human-animal studies theorizing—with classical ideas of nature. 

Sometimes I wrestle with how to write about issues I now understand more clearly than before, and about which I have stronger opinions—stronger judgements—than I did. Thinking one knows the answers is a trap, and this is where the journalistic tradition is very important. It obligates me to seek out other perspectives and be open-minded to them. 

HF: Which questions are most at the top of your mind now?

BK: So many! I mentioned the book proposal, which revolves around the question of what it means for “nature” to think of other animals as fellow persons. I’ve also quite a few more nature-y articles that I’d like to write, and at the heart of each article is a question: Can ecosystems and ultimately the biosphere be understood as organisms evolving over time towards certain states of being? What are the lessons of paleoecological research on pre-industrial societies who occupied a peripheral rather than central position in their ecological networks? How does plant cognition differ from animal cognition, and what does an old tree know? Can autonomous vehicles be designed to avoid all animals, not just the big ones? 

And, an animal-specific article I’d like to write: Is it possible to eat and use animals in ways that provide those animals with truly good lives, with lives that we’d accept for ourselves and our loved ones? If that’s possible, how can it become practically feasible? 

HF: In thinking about if it is possible to use animals in ways that provide those animals with truly good lives, with lives that we’d accept for ourselves and our loved ones, how has observing animals—or learning about them in other ways—changed how you think about the desire for life, or the desire to avoid death? For them, for us, and for other nonhuman entities?

BK: I’d put those concepts in a different order: reflecting on how animals desire life has influenced my thinking about whether it’s possible to eat and use animals in an acceptable way. Clearly every animal does desire life, does value life, for themselves and other animals they love. Recognizing that helped me feel the weight and tragedy of how animals are presently used. So does that mean they can’t ever be used? Should the only cows or pigs or sheep or chickens in existence be wild animals or pets? Or are other relationships possible? 

HF: Thank you, Brandon. I have so enjoyed our conversation, and it has filled my mind with more questions. Often, if I need a reminder of the wonders of the world, I go back to many of your articles. I can’t wait to read your new book.

Photo credit: Brandon Keim.

Filed Under: All Blog Posts, Animal Rights, Ethics, Interviews Tagged With: animals, ethics, journalism, nature, nature writing

A New, Objective & Boundless Ethic

April 16, 2019 by Hope Ferdowsian

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the Belmont Report, a groundbreaking document written to protect children and adults from research abuses. Today, through its emphasis on informed consent and special protections for vulnerable individuals, the report’s reach and influence extends around the globe.

Recently, my colleagues and I penned a paper called “A Belmont Report for Animals?” asking the question of how principles that currently guide human research—such as respect for autonomy, obligations to avoid harm and promote justice, and special protections for vulnerable populations—could be applied to decisions about the treatment of animals. Under the current law, almost anything can be done to an animal in the name of research—primarily because they are seen as something rather than someone. Nonhuman animals of all species can still be subjected to the most severe forms of pain and suffering, without relief. This problem deserves particular reflection during the upcoming World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week beginning on April 22nd.

Although it could be easy to assume that the Belmont Report emerged without controversy, that is simply not the case for most achievements throughout history. One abuse after another—from torture to deceit—prompted the drafting of the Belmont Report. Throughout the twentieth century alone, researchers systematically targeted prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, African-American men living with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama, the Havasupai people living with diabetes in a remote part of the Grand Canyon, hospitalized children with cognitive disabilities, and many other individuals and communities. Only when people demanded and fought for change did such atrocities end.

Sadly many similar abuses continue today—and they are one of the many reasons that the time has come for a more honest evaluation of how humans treat other humans as well as how humans treat animals in society.

Our “A Belmont Report for Animals?” paper will be published later this year. But, in the meantime, as so many people and animals suffer around the globe, we are left with a clear mandate: We need a new, objective ethic—one that is principled, consistent, and inclusive. It is no coincidence that next week marks both Animal Cruelty and Human Violence Awareness Week. There are clear links between how we treat people and animals in society—connections that demand our focus and action.

Admittedly, it can be difficult to be mindful of the big picture, particularly when there are so many real and imagined distractions competing for our time and attention. But until we prioritize an objective ethic bound by key principles such as respect, compassion, and justice, we will continue to make ignorant, cruel decisions about the treatment of others. Arbitrary distinctions and values are responsible for the differential treatment of people and animals—whether in research or other areas of society. Bias and arbitrary distinctions also fuel prejudices such as ableism, classism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, racism, and sexism. Unless we address one problem, we will not fully address the other. As Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “[We] must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.”

With gratitude for the achievements that have been made, there is still so much left to be done. While we need to remain diligent about calling out and stopping abuses within research and other areas of society, we must also be forward thinking. We need to continually ask ourselves how we can ensure that such abuses never occur in the first place. Outside of an objective ethic, I can’t see how. Can you?

 

Filed Under: All Blog Posts, Animal Rights, Ethics, Medicine and Public Health Tagged With: animal rights, Belmont Report, human animal bond, human rights, research ethics

Hope in a Changing Spring

March 18, 2019 by Hope Ferdowsian

It’s hard to believe that spring is just around the corner. Only a few days ago, I looked out my window and found three coyotes huddled together and digging in the snow for some food scraps my husband had dropped the prior evening. As one of the coyotes ate, the other two looked up toward their den, where their kin kept watch on the hill. After they made their way back up to their family, a crow swept in to see what the coyotes had left behind. Nearby, other crows perched on a dead tree and vigilantly took turns with the food. Stella, part of our human-dog family, sat stoically beside me while she meditatively followed their movements. Her only distraction was a raven who flew overhead on her way to join her mate.

Watching the coyotes, crows, ravens, and Stella is a form of meditation for me too. A calm reminder of the beauty and harmony that exists in the world. Of what is possible.

Lately, I’ve been working on another book on the connections between people, animals, and the environment. More than once, I’ve turned to my worn, fading copy of Silent Spring for inspiration. In 1962, two years before her death, biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, thoroughly documenting the toxic effects of the insecticide DDT. Within several years, DDT was banned from agricultural use. Through her writing, Carson challenged the idea that humans could master nature through chemicals, bombs, or other forms of destruction. Her work, along with that of environmental justice activists who emerged through the civil rights movement, helped fuel the modern environmental movement.

If you spend any time reading about the environment, you know that there is still so much we need to do to protect the Earth and its earthlings. Human impact has pushed the planet into what scientists now refer to as the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human beings are dramatically affecting the atmosphere, bodies of water, landmass, and other species. Our everyday decisions – including our health choices – wreak havoc on the very planet that we depend on for our health and wellbeing. In turn, climate change and environmental degradation lead to health risks including extreme temperatures and weather patterns, poor air and water quality, food insecurity, and a corresponding rise in instability, violence, and deadly diseases. We are now on the verge of a modern, man-made sixth extinction, in which seventy-five percent of species are expected to go extinct – far worse than what Rachel Carson warned of in Silent Spring.

One might ask if we’re right to have hope. Will time tell, or can we answer now?

It’s been almost one year since my first book, Phoenix Zones, was released. In it, I write about hope as a biological need. Hope can calm us, sooth pain and anxiety, and foster physical and mental wellbeing. It can also lead to incredible social change. But hope is not blind faith immune from reality. Hope builds on knowledge, not only of joy but also of sorrow. It is a brave act in spite of despair.

Although I’m a deeply hopeful person, I prefer to go without rose-colored glasses. Like many activists, I feel compelled to turn toward, rather than away from, vulnerability and suffering, while taking no pleasure from it. Those who fail to acknowledge the struggles and pain of others only further injustice while impeding progress. Turning away is part of the problem, not the solution.

As Carson wrote in Silent Spring,

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less traveled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the Earth.

Hope, it seems, is taking the right road in a changing spring. We need hope, and we can create hope, but only if we acknowledge the problems before us. As the coyotes and crows seem to know, our destiny will be determined by the very path we travel.

 

 

 

Filed Under: All Blog Posts, Animal Rights, Ethics

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