Better babies?
Speaking at the National Press Club recently, prominent bioethicist Julian Savulescu argued for embryonic research aimed at making genetic enhancements to humans. He made some worthwhile points.
There is a moral continuum running from harming someone through to failing to benefit them. Other things equal, we should make a person's life as good as it can be. Just preventing suffering is not enough.
Plants and non-human animals have been modified to make them more valuable to humanity and it would be desirable to modify humans if this would increase human well-being.
Never-conscious embryos do not have interests to consider and cannot be harmed by being created and then destroyed in research.
One reservation is that difficult scientific work on possible genetic improvements may be a less cost-effective strategy for addressing the problems of disadvantaged people than progressive social reforms and relatively low-tech health care.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere, NSW
Incredible
Reading the letters to the editor in the West Australian, I find it incredible that anyone could be ignorant and backwards enough to rant on about Labor politicians being stooges of the big unions when it has been clearly demonstrated that the Howard government is completely and unapologetically the lackey of big banks, big finance and big transnationals. Compared to these monstrous entities with their insatiable appetite for unearned profit taking at ordinary people's expense, the unions and the people they struggle to represent are mere Davids to the corporate Goliaths in the endless struggle for fair wages and conditions.
Even small- to medium-size business has been relentlessly victimised by the Howard-backed competition commission.
Further, ranting about the comparatively small sum the WA government is spending to resist the utterly undemocratic power play by Howard to further centralise control is amazing, to say the least, especially in view of the $80 million Howard spent selling the hideously regressive GST as "tax reform" and the $15 million spent on the farcically pathetic dob-in-a-terrorist packages with included fridge magnets. Either these people have short and selective memories or they are simply fascist in their mind-set.
Union bashing is right in there with racism, homophobia and religious intolerance. Class prejudice, it would seem, is the preferred flavour of bigotry of the ruling elites and their sadly misguided supporters.
Don Cowan
Westfield, WA
Zimbabwe
Thanks for the very informative article, "Africa needs justice not charity" in GLW #631. Although WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise) members in Zimbabwe are too busy dodging the state bulldozers currently flattening urban dwellings throughout the country to pay much attention to the G8, some of their supporters here in the UK will be in Gleneagles to protest against the greed and neo-colonialism of the G8 nations — we are not taken in by the fine words of the Blair government and are well aware of the dangers of the drive for privatisation.
Sadly, Mugabe has always been best mates with the World Bank and the IMF and very happy to comply with their demands in spite of the needs of his people — 80% unemployment and most of their doctors and nurses now here in the UK because inflation that reached 600% in 2003 means their wages in Zimbabwe aren't enough to get them to and from work.
WOZA members in Zimbabwe have staged many street protests against hunger, lack of education and medical care. Each time they get arrested (it's illegal to demonstrate in Zimbabwe) and often beaten up (which appears to be legal), but they haven't given up.
Lois Davis
WOZA solidarity co-ordinator
London, England
Climate change and refugees
Climate change will plague our ability to grow food, and exacerbate water shortages, extreme weather events and natural disasters. Sea-level rise and desertification are the primary reasons why increasing numbers of researchers are predicting climate refugees numbering between 150 million and 1 billion will be displaced in this century. Families have already started moving to New Zealand from the small island nation of Tuvalu as rising sea-levels affects drinking water, crop gardens and coastal erosion.
Border control and treatment of asylum seekers is an incredibly topical issue and rightly so. How we treat refugees and respond to their need is a reflection of what we value as a society and what we contribute to global humanitarian efforts. Equally, what we do to the environment is a reflection of what we value of the natural world.
Australia has an opportunity to address our legacy of greenhouse gas emissions (we remain the highest per capita emitter in the industrialised world) and to take responsibility for those who are most severely affected by climate change. We must create an environmental refugee intake program to be open to accepting people that are displaced because of our pollution. We must also drastically curb our emissions so that any future damage to the environment is minimised.
Do we really want history to record that Australia didn't consider any obligations to climate refugees because we wanted to protect our growing economy?
Stephanie Long
& Cam Walker
Friends of the Earth Australia
Melbourne [Abridged]
From Green Left Weekly, July 6, 2005.
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