The Santa Monica Ethics Meetup Group

We're voting now for this Sunday’s meeting's topic – message me, email me (angelonapinhead@gmail.com), or post a comment with the topic(s) you most want to talk about! I’ll post an update with the winning topic in a couple of days.

The monthly Meetup is this Sunday, Sept 21 at 5 PM; we’ll meet on Zoom this month.

Here are the topics to choose from:

1) WHO OWNS THE BONES? What do you do when you find ancient, buried bones that are claimed as sacred by some people and as objects of scientific interest by others? Are the bones rightly owned by their descendants? Should the bones remain buried, to show respect for the ancestors and descendants? Or, should the bones be studied for their scientific value?

2) VAGUENESS, AMBIGUITY AND GENERALITY. What is "vagueness" and what are the different kinds of vagueness? What's the difference between a vague idea and an ambiguous idea? What's the difference between a vague idea and a general or broad idea? Is all vagueness linguistic/conceptual or do some kinds of vagueness exist in the world? Can objects or events be vague? Can experiences be vague?

3) WHAT IS HEALTH AND WHAT IS DISEASE? Can we objectively define health, disease, and related terms, like “normal functioning” and disability? Are explanations about the purpose of the body, or the purpose of its organs and tissues, necessary to make sense of the concepts of health, disease, normality, or disability? Can (and should) such definitions be value-neutral, or are they unavoidably laden with value judgments and cultural biases, and incapable of being defined solely in objective terms?

4) IS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY BAD IN ITSELF, OR IS IT SIMPLY THE LACK OF RESOURCES THAT'S BAD? Is the sole problem with economic inequality the fact that those at the lower (and perhaps middle) end of the spectrum suffer material deprivations and hardships? If those deprivations and hardships were remedied, what reasons, if any, would we have to reduce inequality?

Most agree that economic inequality is objectionable if it comes about through unjust means. But, if inequality comes about fairly and morally, are there principled reasons to oppose it?

5) HUMAN/NON-HUMAN CHIMERAS: should society limit scientific research on human-animal hybrids? What would justify these limitations? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on "Human/Non-Human Chimeras" goes over the five main arguments against human-animal mixtures, as well as objections to those arguments. The following is from the opening of the article:

"The Unnaturalness Argument explores the ethics of violating natural species boundaries. The Moral Confusion Argument alleges that the existence of entities that cannot be definitively classified as either human or non-human will cause moral confusion that will undermine valuable social and cultural practices. The Borderline-Personhood Argument focuses on great apes and concludes that their borderline-personhood confers a high enough degree of moral status to make most, if not all, chimeric research on them impermissible. The Human Dignity Argument claims that it is an affront to human dignity to give an individual “trapped” in the body of a non-human animal the capacities associated with human dignity. Finally, the Moral Status Framework maintains that research in which a non-human animal's moral status is enhanced to that of a normal adult human is impermissible unless reasonable assurances are in place that its new moral status will be respected, which is unlikely given the motivations for chimeric research and the oversight likely to be provided."
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