Bioethics Goes Off the Rails with A Proposal to Covertly Infect Us All with A Disease So We Don’t Eat Meat and Save the Planet!
THOMAS J SHEPSTONE
Ever heard of Parker Crutchfield? Well, I hadn’t either, but he just made the news and one suspects that was the point. Who is he? Well, here’s what Grok offers this (emphasis added):
Parker Crutchfield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Arizona State University, with a focus on applied ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
His research interests include bioethics, moral psychology, neuroethics, and the epistemology of bioethics. Crutchfield has published extensively, with works such as Moral Enhancement and the Public Good, where he argues for controversial ideas like compulsory and covert moral bioenhancement to address collective risks like pandemics and climate change…
In this book, Crutchfield argues that compulsory and covert moral bioenhancement could be justified to mitigate existential risks, including climate change. He frames climate change as a collective action problem where individual moral failings contribute to global harm, proposing that enhancing moral capacities (e.g., through pharmacological or neurotechnological means) could promote cooperative behaviors to address it.
Did that get your attention? I hope so, because this is what is specifically proposing via a Bioethics journal article titled “Beneficial Bloodsucking” that argues for infecting the world’s population with a disease to stop meat-eating. Here’s the abstract:
The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS.
Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat.
We then defend what we call the Convergence Argument: If x-ing prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place, doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, and promotes virtuous action or character, then x-ing is strongly pro tanto obligatory; promoting tickborne AGS satisfies each of these conditions.
Therefore, promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory. It is presently feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If this practice can be applied to ticks carrying AGS, then promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.
If that wasn’t enough to make you realize bioethics is anything by ethical these days and downright evil in some cases — yet another example of elites trying to play God — consider the abstract of another article Crutchfield published in PubMed:
Some theorists argue that moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory. I take this argument one step further, arguing that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration ought to be covert rather than overt. This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement.
My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program.
In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program.
Got that? Crutchfield, in the name of bioethics, wants to deliberately infect all of us with a tick-born disease that makes it impossible to eat meat, without telling us, to save a planet most of us think is doing just fine irrespective of us. Some ethics. And, this is the type of thinking going on in our universities today, where elites apparently go to wax poetic about how they hope to become masters of the universe. No wonder Crutchfield was a big believer in compulsory COVID schemes. What wouldn’t he support, in fact, based on the above.
As I said at the beginning of this post, though, one must wonder if Crutchfield is provocative because he suffers from a need for constant attention. No ethicist could possibly argue that covertly poisoning others in the name of a morality he defines, somehow advances liberty, but that’s exactly what he says. Lying for the common good is the recipe for perfect tyranny. Surely, Crutchfield knows this and, therefore, we must conclude he doesn’t care that we know. That is perfect elitism, the disease that heretofore has been eating away at Western Civiization and motivates the climate cult.
This article (Bioethics Goes Off the Rails with A Proposal to Covertly Infect Us All with A Disease So We Don’t Eat Meat and Save the Planet!) was created and published by Energy Security and Freedom and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Thomas J. Shepstone
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