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Interview with Peter Singer, Australian philosopher, world-famous animal ethicist

The current pandemic could give several ape species the final push into extinction. Besides the direct harm the virus may cause to species that are very susceptible to human respiratory pathogens, the pandemic has also brought an economic crisis with lockdowns and absence from usual workplaces, resulting in increased poaching and habitat encroachment. The countries where the remaining apes live cannot shoulder alone the cost of conservation. Other countries with more resources have also contributed to ape extinction and are also implicated in the current pandemic. Moreover, international cooperation is essential for the conservation efforts needed to avoid depriving other hominids of their habitats, their cultures, and their future.

The ethics of artificial intelligence, or AI ethics, is a rapidly growing field, and rightly so. While the range of issues and groups of stakeholders concerned by the field of AI ethics is expanding, with speculation about whether it extends even to the machines themselves, there is a group of sentient beings who are also affected by AI, but are rarely mentioned within the field of AI ethics—the nonhuman animals. This paper seeks to explore the kinds of impact AI has on nonhuman animals, the severity of these impacts, and their moral implications. We hope that this paper will facilitate the development of a new field of philosophical and technical research regarding the impacts of AI on animals, namely, the ethics of AI as it affects nonhuman animals.

Massive efforts are made to reduce biases in both data and algorithms to render AI applications fair. These efforts are propelled by various high-profile cases where biased algorithmic decision-making caused harm to women, people of color, minorities, etc. However, the AI fairness field still succumbs to a blind spot, namely its insensitivity to discrimination against animals. This paper is a critical comment on current fairness research in AI. It is the first to describe the ‘speciesist bias’ and investigate it in several different AI systems by reflecting on the problem via a normative analysis and by probing, in several case studies, image recognition, word embedding, and language models with established methods for bias detection. We claim that animals matter morally and that discriminating against them is unethical. Furthermore, we provide evidence for speciesist biases in all the mentioned areas of AI. We find that speciesist biases are solidified by many mainstream AI applications, especially in the fields of computer vision as well as natural language processing. In both cases, this occurs because the models are trained on datasets in which speciesist patterns prevail. Therefore, AI technologies currently play a significant role in perpetuating and normalizing violence against animals. To change this, AI fairness frameworks must widen their scope and include mitigation measures for speciesist biases. This paper addresses the AI community in this regard and stresses the influence AI systems can have on either increasing or reducing the violence that is inflicted on animals, especially on farmed animals.

In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group discussions. Half also viewed a vegetarianism advocacy video containing factory farm footage. A few days after instruction, 54% of students agreed that “eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical”, compared to 37% before instruction, with no difference between the film and non-film conditions. Also, 39% of students anonymously pledged to avoid eating factory farmed meat for 24 h, again with no statistically detectable difference between conditions. Finally, we obtained 2828 campus food purchase receipts for 113 of the enrolled students who used their Student ID cards for purchases on campus, which we compared with 5033 purchases from a group of 226 students who did not receive the instruction. Meat purchases remained constant in the comparison group and declined among the students exposed to the material, falling from 30% to 23% of purchases overall and from 51% to 42% of purchases of $4.99 or more, with the effect possibly larger in the film condition. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13164-021-00583-0.

In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancement should engage with each other.

My recent article, “The challenge of brain death for the sanctity of life ethic” (Ethics & Bioethics (in Central Europe), 2018, 8 (3–4), pp. 153–165) elicited five commentaries. In this brief response, I clarify my own position in the light of some misunderstandings, and discuss whether the definition of death is best thought of as an ethical question, or as a matter of fact. I also comment on the suggestion that we should allow people to choose the criteria by which they wish their own death to be determined, or their organs removed to be donated to others.

For more than thirty years, in most of the world, the irreversible cessation of all brain function, more commonly known as brain death, has been accepted as a criterion of death. Yet the philosophical basis on which this understanding of death was originally grounded has been undermined by the long-term maintenance of bodily functions in brain dead patients. More recently, the American case of Jahi McMath has cast doubt on whether the standard tests for diagnosing brain death exclude a condition in which the patient is not dead, but in a minimally conscious state. I argue that the evidence now clearly shows that brain death is not equivalent to the death of the human organism. We therefore face a choice: either we stop removing vital organs from brain dead patients, or we accept that it is not wrong to kill an innocent human who has irreversibly lost consciousness.

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research. Contributions to mitigate climate change should be equitable under the Paris Agreement, yet researchers take sharply diverging approaches to assessing national effort. This Perspective evaluates the literature and presents guidelines for policy-relevant—and ethically explicit—research on equity.

The purpose of this article is to propose a tax on meat consumption. The idea draws inspiration from the taxation of cigarettes for reasons of public health. Eating meat increases the risk of suffering from serious illnesses, and taxes would serve both as a deterrent and as a means to offset the associated healthcare costs imposed on society. There are further costs imposed by meat consumption: it sustains a major part of the demand of the world's production of crops, which elevates their prices while much of the nutritional value of the crops used to produce meat is wasted. The production of meat is also highly polluting and it contributes very significantly to global warming. Finally, meat-eaters are in effect supporting the cruel practices commonly inflicted on the animals themselves. By applying a tax on meat it is hoped that patterns of consumption would change, thereby reducing the mentioned costs. En el presente artículo se propone gravar con impuestos el consumo de carne. La idea está inspirada en los impuestos sobre el tabaco, que se justifican por motivos de salud pública. Comer carne aumenta el riesgo de padecer enfermedades graves, y un impuesto podría servir como factor disuasorio y además como un medio para compensar los costes médicos que dicho consumo impone sobre la sociedad. Pero el consumo de carne tiene también otros costes: sostiene gran parte de la demanda de la producción mundial de cultivos, elevando el precio de éstos. Sin embargo, se desperdicia gran parte de su valor nutricional cuando se emplean para producir carne. La producción de carne es también muy contaminante y contribuye significativamente al calentamiento global. Por último, los consumidores de carne sustentan las prácticas crueles que comúnmente se aplican sobre los propios animales. La introducción de un impuesto sobre la carne podría contribuir a un cambio en los hábitos de consumo, con la consiguiente reducción de los costes mencionados.

Fund and study these priorities for natural and social sciences to meet a gaping need, urge Abdallah S. Daar, Trillium Chang, Angela Salomon and Peter A. Singer. Fund and study these priorities for natural and social sciences to meet a gaping need.

The Global Kidney Exchange (GKE) programme seeks to facilitate kidney transplants by matching donor–recipient pairs across high-income, medium-income, and low-income countries. The GKE programme pays the medical expenses of people in medium-income and low-income countries, thus enabling them to receive a kidney transplantation they otherwise could not afford. In doing so, the programme increases the global donor pool, and so benefits people in high-income countries by improving their chances of finding a donor match. Nevertheless, the GKE has been accused of being a form of organ trafficking, exploiting the poor, and involving coercion and commodification of donors. We refute these claims, arguing that the GKE promotes global justice and reduces the potential for people in need of kidneys in low-income and medium-income countries to be exploited. Misguided objections should not be allowed to prevent the GKE from realising its potential to reduce suffering and save the lives of rich and poor patients alike.

Do university ethics classes influence students' real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least $4.99 contained meat before the intervention, compared to 45% after) but remained the same in the control group (52% both before and after). Ethical opinion also differed, with 43% of students in the experimental group agreeing that eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical compared to 29% in the control group. We also attempted to measure food choice using vouchers, but voucher redemption rates were low and no effect was statistically detectable. It remains unclear what aspect of instruction influenced behavior.

Establishing the preoperative diagnosis and long-term prognosis of differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) remain challenging in some patients. Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSC) are tumor-induced cells mediating immune tolerance that are detectable in the peripheral blood of cancer patients. The authors previously developed a novel clinical assay to detect the phenotypes of two human MDSC subsets in peripheral blood, and hypothesize that higher MDSC levels measured by this assay correlate positively with both malignancy and worse patient outcomes.A prospective observational pilot study was performed of patients undergoing thyroidectomy for a solitary thyroid nodule. The presence of a thyroid nodule1 cm was confirmed sonographically, and fine-needle aspiration biopsy performed prior to surgery in all cases. Peripheral blood collected preoperatively was analyzed using a novel flow cytometry-based immunoassay to detect and quantify two subsets of human MDSC. Circulating MDSC levels were compared by histopathologic diagnosis, stage, and presence of persistent disease after treatment.Of 50 patients included in this study, MDSC measurement was successful in 47 (94%). One patient was found to have a concurrent cancer, leaving 46 patients for primary analysis. The cytologic diagnoses were benign in five (10.8%), atypia or follicular lesion of undetermined significance in five (10.8%), suspicious for follicular neoplasm in five (10.8%), suspicious for malignant in three (6.5%), and malignant in 28 (60.1%) of the 46 nodules. Final histopathology was benign in 11 (24%) and DTC in 35 (76%), encompassing 34 PTC cases and one follicular thyroid carcinoma. Mean percentages of CD11b(+)HLA-DR(low)HIF1a(+) MDSC (CD11b(+)MDSC) were 14.0 ± 6.2% and 7.9 ± 3.6% in DTC versus benign nodules, respectively (p 0.005). A cutoff of 12% yielded a specificity of 0.91, a sensitivity of 0.72, and a likelihood ratio of 7.9. Mean CD11b(+)MDSC levels increased linearly with higher TNM stage (p 0.01), and were 19.4 ± 5.4 in patients with persistent cancer after surgery compared with 13.2 ± 6.8 in those without evidence of disease (p 0.05).MDSC measurement using this flow cytometry-based assay represents a novel approach for preoperatively assessing malignancy risk and cancer extent in patients with thyroid nodules. While further validation is needed, these data suggest that MDSC assessment may serve as a useful adjunct when cytology is indeterminate, and predict tumor stage and recurrence risk in cases of thyroid cancer.

Erythropoiesis is controlled principally through erythropoietin (Epo) receptor signaling, which involves Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) and Lyn tyrosine kinase, both of which are important for regulating red blood cell (RBC) development. Negative regulation of Lyn involves C-Src kinase (Csk)-mediated phosphorylation of its C-terminal tyrosine, which is facilitated by the transmembrane adaptor Csk-binding protein (Cbp). Although Cbp has significant functions in controlling Lyn levels and activity in erythroid cells in vitro, its importance to primary erythroid cell development and signaling has remained unclear. To address this, we assessed the consequence of loss of Cbp on the erythroid compartment in vivo and whether Epo-responsive cells isolated from Cbp-knockout mice exhibited altered signaling. Our data show that male Cbp−/− mice display a modest but significant alteration to late erythroid development in bone marrow with evidence of increased erythrocytes in the spleen, whereas female Cbp−/− mice exhibit a moderate elevation in early erythroid progenitors (not seen in male mice) that does not influence the later steps in RBC development. In isolated primary erythroid cells and cell lines generated from Cbp−/− mice, survival signaling through Lyn/Akt/FoxO3 was elevated, resulting in sustained viability during differentiation. The high Akt activity disrupted GAB2/SHP-2 feedback inhibition of Lyn; however, the elevated Lyn activity also increased inhibitory signaling via SHP-1 to restrict the Erk1/2 pathway. Interestingly, whereas loss of Cbp led to mild changes to late RBC development in male mice, this was not apparent in female Cbp−/− mice, possibly due to their elevated estrogen, which is known to facilitate early progenitor self-renewal.

Evolutionary accounts of the origins of human morality may lead us to doubt the truth of our moral judgments. Sidgwick tried to vindicate ethics from this kind of external attack. However, he ended The Methods in despair over another problem—an apparent conflict between rational egoism and universal benevolence, which he called the “dualism of practical reason.” Drawing on Sidgwick, we show that one way of defending objectivity in ethics against Sharon Street’s recent evolutionary critique also puts us in a position to support a bold claim: the dualism of practical reason can be resolved in favor of impartiality.

Aims: Although Brazil has received attention for conducting one of the world’s largest stem cell clinical trials for heart disease, little has been published regarding Brazil’s regenerative medicine (RM) sector. Here we present a comprehensive case study of RM in Brazil, including analysis of the current activity, the main motivations for engaging in RM and the remaining challenges to development in this field. Methods: Our case study is primarily based on semi-structured interviews with experts on RM in Brazil, including researchers, policymakers, clinicians, representatives of firms and regulators. Results: Driven by domestic health needs and strategic government support, Brazil is producing innovative RM research, particularly for clinical research in cardiology, orthopedics, diabetes and neurology. We describe the main RM research currently taking place in Brazil, as well as some of the economic, regulatory and policy events that have created a favorable environment for RM development. Brazilian RM researchers need to overcome several formidable challenges to research: research funding is inconsistent, importation of materials is costly and slow, and weak linkages between universities, hospitals and industry impede translational research. Conclusions: Although Brazil’s contribution to the RM sector is small, its niche emphasis on clinical applications may become of global importance, particularly if Brazil manages to address the challenges currently impinging on RM innovation.

Up to now the visual inspection of mobility of isolated anisakid larvae serves as a measure of viability and possible risk of infection. This paper presents a new method to rule out unreliability – caused by the temporary immobility of the larvae and by the human uncertainty factor of visual observation. By means of a Near infrared (NIR) imaging method, elastic curvature energies and geometric shape parameters were determined from contours, and used as a measure of viability. It was based on the modelling of larvae as a cylindrical membrane system. The interaction between curvatures, contraction of the longitudinal muscles, and inner pressure enabled the derivation of viability from stationary form data. From series of spectrally signed images within a narrow wavelength range, curvature data of the larvae were determined. Possible mobility of larvae was taken into account in statistical error variables. Experiments on individual living larvae, long-term observations of Anisakis larvae, and comparative studies of the staining method and the VTD measurements of larvae from the tissue of products confirmed the effectiveness of this method. The VTD differentiated clearly between live and dead nematode larvae isolated from marinated, deep-frozen and salted products. The VTD has been proven as excellent method to detect living anisakid nematode larvae in fishery products and is seen as useful tool for fish processing industry and control authorities.

This note exposes the mathematical setting of initial value problems for causal time-invariant linear systems, given by ordinary differential equations within the framework of generalized functions. We show the structure of the unique solutions for such equations, and apply it to problems with causal or persistent inputs using time-domain methods and generalized Laplace and Fourier transforms. In particular, we correct a widespread inconsistency in the use of the Laplace transform.

Despite a challenging business environment, entrepreneurial health biotech companies in South Africa are finding ways to succeed.

The authors explore large-scale population genotyping projects in Mexico, India and Thailand to demonstrate that developing countries can harness human genetic variation to benefit their populations — by adopting these resources to improve public health and create knowledge-based economies., The notion that developing countries must wait for the developed world to make advances in science and technology that they later import at great cost is being challenged. We have previously argued that developing countries can harness human genetic variation to benefit their populations and economies. Based on our empirical studies of large-scale population genotyping projects in Mexico, India and Thailand, we describe how these resources are being adopted to improve public health and create knowledge-based economies. A significant additional benefit is building the capacity for scientific research and internalizing advances in technology, whatever their source.

Brazil boasts world-class biomedical science, but tension between the public and private sectors hinders progress in health biotech innovation.