Semio- or Semi-ethics: Semioethics for Animals?

By Matthew Cuffaro 

Semiotics (the study of signification) has a deep tradition for universalism. A deeper tradition in thought is the concession that humans hold a special place among lifeforms as “conscious,” and semiotics is no different. In Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective, the authors Petrilli and Ponzio argue that if humans are conscious of the significance of things, then they are responsible for their signification, curtailing polluting or destructive cultures and practices in favor of “planetary semiosis [process of signification]” (the analogue of the “Spaceship Earth” idea you might have heard about). Petrilli and Ponzio define semioethics for us:

“…1) invent a plurality of possible worlds; 2) to reflect upon signs; 3) to be responsible for one’s actions; 4) to gain conscious awareness of our inevitable involvement, of each and every one of us, in the sign network of life over the entire planet; and 5) to be responsibly involved in the destiny of planetary semiosis.” (3-4, Petrilli and Ponzio).

How does semioethics look in our day? For example, if I say “forest”, I denote the complex of trees that scaffold a rich ecosystem, but I can also expect to connote something in the listener that is met with a response. There might be stress: the listener that is familiar with the films Silent Running, Medicine Man, and Avatar is familiar with the disappearing forest—something invaluable, yet mercilessly exploited, yet something distant. There might be interest: the listener may be a logger who equates the forest with their income, or an ecologist who sees the forest as a complex of interdependent lifeforms. There may be religious or existential feelings to the listener that knows the forest to possess supernal power or sagacity, healing benefits, or the basis of their livelihood. Further still, the Puritan coming to the New World sees the endless forests as ripe with resource to be drawn from systematically through their labors. Through cultural and scientific influence, our example paints the forest as something once a symbol of innumerable economic plenty to something of indispensable ecological value. If we follow these trends, we imagine the forest as a “life support system;” something of personal and functional value, Thus, the forest is represented in a way that alters its significance to the people.

Now I believe Petrilli & Ponzio’s project is bioethical because they are both critical and imperative towards environmental practice, but their focus on the human is uncharacteristic of the contemporary trends in semiotics to extend its essentially pre-linguistic domain to lifeforms. If biosemiotics wishes to construct a basis for extending signification to (all) lifeforms, then can we depart from Petrilli and Ponzio to say that animals are in some way semioethical? Prima facie, this is absurd, because the hare does not have the logging companies, the socioreligious campaigns, NIMBY sieges on civic projects, etc.; what the hare has is grassy flatlands, abundant cellulose, and other “critters” that are supposedly significant to it.

The example I like is the “fable” of the Fox and the Hare. In the introduction to Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics (of which I paraphrase): A hare in a field becomes aware of a fox stalking close by. The hare stands up on its hind legs and the fox, seeing this, aborts its foxing and trots away. An ethologist reporting on this claims that the hare stood as a gesture to the fox that chasing it would be a waste of everyone’s time and energy. The meat behind this claim is that it does not argue that the behavior is instinctual. After all, brains are calorically very expensive so the ethologist believes that the hare’s act is an example of signification, or that standing up is a gesture invented by the hare to communicate.

What is possibly semioethical in this account of the fox and the hare is that the creative status of the hare’s gesture leads us to ask the status of consciousness of the hare, which leaves us with open questions. If the hare is communicating something to the fox, then does it recognize the fox as something that can respond or react to the gesture? Do animals of supposed creativity understand their intercommunicants as “animated threats” (how the heck does the fox appear to the hare)? If so, then can we attribute a variant of the semioethical capacity we attribute ourselves to an animal that is cognizant of the capacities of other animals?

Why is this semioethical account useful to us?

If we adopt a biosemiotic strategy of extending semiotics “globally,” then the ideal common system for describing things semiotically allow us to ‘approximate’ ourselves beyond scientific prejudice of an unchecked human exceptionalism—the notion that all “human” qualities are exclusively “human.” If we form through our inquiries the grounds for suspecting the rudiments of consciousness in other lifeforms, then we not only invite scientific interest to explore and validate these suspicions but confirm the deep intuitions of those who advocate for ecocentric (more like un-anthropocentric) thought.

Notwithstanding, it is problematic already for us in the political arena to attribute animal rights in the very least, but if we can extend an ethical basis to animals first, then we have the philosophical freight to carry these arguments further. We may look at the vegetarian pamphlets thobbing the horrors of factory farms through the animal anecdotes and praising soy diets, perhaps with Ryan Gosling’s testament in there for good measure (I’m looking at you, Vegan Outreach.). In these pamphlets chickens named Kevin, pigs named Emily, and fishes named Calvin are celebrated for their ability to solve puzzles, count, communicate and especially escape, yet the semioethical project underlying this is that these animals are worth something by their apparent human attributes. We should treat these arguments by not evaluating the animals by their humanness, but by the attributes that allows us to understand the intentions of the animal (or plant), at the threat that we continue to think “humanness” is superior to “animalness” and is a standard beyond the niche of our circumstances. In a more fundamental way, the semioethical problem I try to convey would, if realized, mark a step in the scholarly imagination: those who could peer into the eyes of the rabbit peering into the fox, or to surject themselves onto the mind of the plant.

Matthew Cuffaro is a philosophy student at the University of South Florida with a concentration in the philosophies of mathematics and religious studies. 

The Daniel Callahan Young Writer's Prize

Prize Summary 
This post is pleased to announce a new award, The Daniel Callahan Young Writer's Prize, sponsored by Daniel Callahan. Submissions will take the form of essays on a bioethics topic that are written as blog posts, designed for this blog, Bioethx Under 25. From all submissions, a group of finalists will be chosen and then an expert panel of bioethicists, including Daniel Callahan, will read the finalists' essays and award one prize amounting to $500. 

All submissions will be considered for publication on the blog and eligibility to be a finalist or receive the prize is dependent on willingness to edit and revise the essay for publication. Submissions will be judged anonymously. Please see guidelines below for further information. 

Prize Submission Guidelines

- Essays must be 500-1000 words and original submissions to Bioethx Under 25 i.e. never posted before on the blog. 

- Essays must conform to all other submission guidelines for the Bioethx Under 25 blog and thus, be clearly related to bioethics and be written in an accessible manner. Please refer to the blog's About Page for more information. 

- Essays will be accepted from September 10th, 2014 to November 15th, 2014. 

- Any writer who is also a student in high school, college, or a graduate program is eligible to submit. Any writer who is not a student is eligible so long as he/she has not completed a PhD and/or worked more than 5 years in the bioethics field with a terminal degree (e.g. JD or MD). So long as the other guidelines have been met there is no age limitation or requirement for submission. 

- Writers are not eligible if they currently or have previously worked full time for The Hastings Center or Daniel Callahan. Anyone affiliated with Bioethx Under 25 in an editing capacity is also ineligible. 

- To submit, please email bioethicsunder25@gmail.com with your essay attached in word format. In the body of the email please indicate that you are submitting for The Daniel Callahan Young Writers Prize and include your name, phone number, email address, current occupation and place of occupation (if a student, then your school, potential degree, and expected graduation year), and your highest degree attained with the school and year. 

- For any questions please email bioethicsunder25@gmail.com or comment below. 

About Daniel Callahan

Daniel Callahan is Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus of The Hastings Center. He was its cofounder in 1969 and served as Director and President between 1969 and 1996.  Over the years his research and writing have covered a wide range of issues, from the beginning until the end of life. In recent years, he has focused his attention on ethics and health policy.

He has served as a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Medical School and is now a Senior Scholar at Yale. He received his B.A. from Yale and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. He has honorary degrees from the Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic, the University of Colorado, Williams College, Oregon State University, the State University of New York and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Callahan is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences; a former member of the Director’s Advisory Committee, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and of the Advisory Council, Office of Scientific Responsibility, Department of Health and Human Services. He won the 1996 Freedom and Scientific Responsibility Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the editor or author of 47 books. 

The Home in Nursing Homes

By: Rebecca Kaebnick

The sitting room, living area, and community space of the skilled nursing facility in my grandparents’ staged living community was often the hallway. There was a harshly-lit room with tables and a TV around the corner, and a cafeteria-like dining room down the hall. However, the aides tended to gather residents in the hallway, lined up in their wheelchairs in front of the nurses’ and aides’ station. The forbidding front of this station, a pedestal for charts and computers, was an impossible height for many of the wheelchair or walker-bound residents. Strung along this main hall and around some corners were the residents’ spaces, not quite oriented to watch the activity outside the windows, but not quite arranged to focus inward, on each other, either.

On paper, this wing had it all: compliance to health codes, caring nurses and aides, physical therapy. In fact, the facility was top-of-the line. But there was also an unsettled feeling that upset any possibility for a homey feel. Time moved bizarrely: residents sat silently in their rooms or in their wheelchairs in the hallway while the aides swept around and shifts turned over; the clock by the aides’ desk seemed to be counting down to many things and to nothing. When my family visited, we perched in odd places around my grandmother’s room, or gathered near the doorway. When we passed residents, we did not feel as if we were supposed to smile and greet them; one does not greet patients she passes in a hospital, and that’s what it felt like. This was a place where people were on their way to somewhere else; like a hospital, nurses and visitors and patients moved in and out, but these spaces were not a home.

Why are such facilities like this? If they were designed differently, could they feel different? While many of the residents living in this area need careful medical attention, this phase of life is not just about medical and physical care, and doesn’t always have to feel like a hospital.

There are some successful efforts to break the mold, mainly sprung from the culture change movement in the nineties to “deinstitutionalize” nursing homes. The Green House project, developed in the early 2000s, is a key example of an accessible and efficient elder care home that still manages to create a more hospitable environment. Green Homes look more like houses than institutions. They are set up like family residences too, with a living room containing a hearth, a dining table seating all 7-10 of the residents, and the appearance of few medical instruments and technology. Green Homes redesign personal and communal space to make residents feel they are living in a home, rather than a glorified hospital, and give nursing assistants the role of “universal workers” who do everything from dispensing medications to cooking dinner. They have more interaction with residents than do aides in traditional nursing homes, and reportedly increased job satisfaction. The new physical characteristics of the homes and different roles of the aides reconfigure interactions between residents and staff, between residents, and even between residents and their family, during visits.

Another inspiring nursing home is Beatitudes Campus in Phoenix, Arizona. In a New Yorker article published last May, “The Sense of an Ending,” Rebecca Mead describes efforts made to replicate the comfortable, residential feel like that of the Green Homes in a more traditional facility. Tena Alonzo, the Beatitudes director of education and research, adjusts details of a resident’s lifestyle in unconventional ways that can make the resident much more comfortable. For example, a resident’s bed is lowered when there is a higher risk of falling out during the night. The “neighborhood,” as the staff call the facility, is not run on strict schedules; individuals create their own timetables based on what works for them. Food is available around the clock. The layout of the space and interactions between residents and staff are influenced by the characteristics of dementia, not by what is the cheapest or easiest. Instead of a heavy metal door at the entrance of the facility, residents are more subtly reminded not to wander by a velvet rope, like that of a classy restaurant, and a large black carpet, which dementia patients don’t like to walk on because they might interpret it as a hole. Alonzo develops strategies like these to make residents comfortable in more respectful and logical ways than those of traditional nursing homes. She also wishes for the staff to be more understanding of the lifestyle and needs of their residents; she encourages the staff members to try acting as residents for a day, in situations that can be embarrassing or uncomfortable, such as wearing a diaper.  This is another take on the Green House “universal worker” idea, to create more equal and warm relationships between residents and their caretakers. Mead mentions several other establishments that apply concepts similar to Alonzo’s. Like Beatitudes, the Pioneer Network in Chicago attempts to satisfy residents without the heavy use of psychotropic medications. The Isabella Geriatric Center and the Cobble Hill Health Center, both in New York City, are working to integrate Alonzo’s ideas into their practices.

In a study  published in The American Geriatrics Society Rosalie A. Kane et al. assess the success of Green Houses, finding that “GH residents reported significantly higher satisfaction with the nursing home as a place to live than residents of the [comparison facilities].” These feelings of comfort and happiness go hand-in-hand with particular trends in emotional and physical health, such as depression and the loss of independence in a set of activities called Activities of Daily Living, which include eating and using the bathroom. Alonzo and her co-director, Long, found strong trends in weight-maintenance and even healthy weight gain among their residents, due to their adaptive, flexible eating and daily schedules. Pam Belluck, in her New York Times article “Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate,” cites various studies showing that space, activities, and medication can be adapted to make a dementia patient more comfortable. Making the lights brighter can have a big effect. Prescribing medication specifically for pain instead of an antipsychotic for dementia can keep side effects under control. Alonzo’s tendency to allow residents comforting rituals, such as sucking on chocolate and playing with dolls, has scientific basis: habitual pleasurable activities have been proven to correlate to depression and decreased cognitive activity. Belluck mentions a University of Iowa study that found that although many dementia patients no longer have the strongest memories, a happy mood can persist hours after the activity ends.  Living in an environment that makes them happier has significant effects on many dimensions of the residents’ health, interpersonal relations, and can help them see themselves as people fit to live in a real home, even if it requires some new accommodations.

If my grandparents’ experience is typical, then it is difficult for the average elder care consumer to ascertain just how homelike the nursing facility is when looking at retirement communities.  Many attempt to channel cheerfulness and hospitality into their built environments by adding special features to their more independent-living wings— fire-lit libraries, easy-access greenhouses, and welcoming dining rooms. Yet it is just as important for the visitor to learn about the functional wings. Maybe consumers do not expect areas designated for increased medical attention to have the same atmosphere, or maybe these areas are just not fully presented to them. Do companies tend to push some aspects of the independent living options and downplay some of the dependent ones? When potential customers visit, they may be more focused on the near future, when they will be living in the apartments and visiting the dining rooms. It is hard to fully picture a time when one’s health may have changed enough to need around-the-clock care, but many will arrive at that point.

Welcoming and peaceful environments seem even more important in the wings where residents deal with more advanced conditions and illnesses. Many residents, like my grandmother, juggle health-related anxieties with the pressure of moving somewhere entirely unfamiliar. Much of the stress my grandmother experienced seemed to be derived from a feeling of displacement. She was always someone who took great pains to make her living space feel like hers, and in this wing she lost this capability. Green Houses and Beatitudes illustrate that it is possible to unite medical care to homeliness, even though a straightforward set-up following the lines of a hospital wing might seem more efficient. Green Houses are certifiedskilled nursing facilities, run by a dependable team of certified nursing assistants, and a “clinical support team” made up of professionals who supervise the medical experience of the residents. Half of the residents in the studied Green House were certified dementia patients, and InformeDesign, a research tool for design professionals, asserts in a short piece about Green Homes that this model could be applied to “even the most heavy-care facility.” Quality of care is not compromised in this environment; reports on the quality of care by the Green House residents overall were either at the same level or better at the Green Houses than at the comparison nursing facilities. At Beatitudes, the directors found that patients were happier months after their arrival, and sometimes were able to make health gains: one resident was able to stop taking insulin because she began eating so well. Beatitudes won an award from the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. These models have found ways to successfully integrate medical technology and accessibility into a warm environment.

The basic premise of the Green House project is to find a way to make living areas cohesive units in which the medical structure isn’t the dominant aesthetic factor, detracting from the quality of life of the residents. While it is unclear how affordable Green Houses are, and it is true that the movement is not big enough to be an option for everybody, the success of Beatitudes proves that the goals of the project can be successfully applied to traditional models that still make up the most common elder care options. Beatitudes’s innovations go farther than the built environment, to making the schedules and activities of the patients, and the responses of the staff to residents’ distress, more adaptive to the individual patients themselves. Learning this makes me optimistic and hopeful that this trend will grow. Thinking back to my grandparents’ situation, I can see that my grandmother would have been well suited to be cared for by a collection of staff who are not afraid to make unconventional changes to make a resident more comfortable. Green Homes and homes like Beatitudes take the time to organize themselves according to what they see helps their patients, not according to tradition. They create environments in which conversation between residents, and between residents and staff, is encouraged. Visitors can join the residents in these spaces, bringing in pieces of the outside world but at the same time integrating themselves into this life, at least for a day. The residents can feel like they belong there; they aren’t stored in their rooms or lined neatly in the hall. Instead they can congregate around a puzzle, meet with a friend, pick out a book for themselves. They don’t just stay here until the end—they live here, enjoying each moment with vigor.

Rebecca is a junior at Ithaca College where she is majoring in Sociology and minoring in Spanish, art, and honors. She is interested in issues relating to globalization and vulnerable populations.

Inflicting Harm to Prevent Harm: Creating Policy for Vulnerable Populations Seeking Asylum in Australia

By Amy Louise Constable 

Australian asylum seeker policy is currently riddled with a series of ethical conundrums. Being party to the 1951 United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Australia is obligated to accept those claiming asylum from persecution, violence or fear either who enter into Australian territory and respect the principle of non-refoulment and not send refugees to an environment from which they are fleeing. Detention of asylum seekers has been a bipartisan policy in Australia since 1992 when Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating introduced off-shore detention, with bipartisan support. The zealous implementation of increasingly cruel offshore detention policies has been described as a ‘race to the bottom’.

The 2013 Australian federal government was characterized by the promise of increasingly ‘tough’ and cruel policies seeking to deter asylum seekers entering Australia by boat and protect Australian sovereignty by both major parties. The conservative Government initiated Operation Sovereign Borders, an extension of existing asylum seeker policy. Operation Sovereign Borders is an extension of pre-existing off-shore processing policy which instructs that all asylum seekers arriving by boat, ‘illegal maritime arrivals’, are to be processed off-shore at Manus Island, a northern territory of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and at Nauru with “no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees”. This policy has been justified by both major Australia political parties as preventing further deaths at sea. Between 2008-2013 approximately 1200 people died at sea trying to come to Australia by boat. This begs the question, what is the ethically acceptable cost of preventing death at sea?

The ‘tough’ new stance on asylum seekers has recently inflamed debate surrounding exactly what the ethical, medical and legal responsibility of the Australian Government to the asylum seekers on Australian territory and on international territory in Australian Government funded detention centers is. The logic for this policy is justified by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection as stopping deaths at sea and protecting national security. Consequently, this policy sees the compulsory detention of thousands of adults, minors and children, of whom 91% are declared to be refugees, with higher protection visa rates for specific ethnic groups (i.e., the Afghani’s receiving a protection visa being approximately 99.7%)

Operation Sovereign Borders dictates that all asylum seekers be transferred from Australian sovereign territory within 48 hours, as instructed by Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison. This rapid process involves all medicines, prostheses, and medical equipment being confiscated, and often not returned, and does not provide sufficient time for a comprehensive diagnosis of potential diseases. Consequently the process has seen several healthcare horrors:

--Potential exposure of asylum seekers to tuberculosis following a non-diagnosis while being processed on Christmas Island (remote north-western Australian territory).

--A 23 year old Iranian-Kurdish man dragged from a computer room and beaten to death by a G4S security employee.

--Detainees attacked with machetes and throats slashed during attacks by locally-hired security guards.

--A Rohingyan asylum seeker who was identified as having a ‘very high risk’ pregnancy was transferred to Nauru for the purpose of ‘setting an example’.

--a woman being told she should not ‘expect a lot’ of healthcare after miscarrying.

--An Iranian man lapsing into severe epilepsy following a refusal of access to confiscated epilepsy medication.

A 92 page letter from fifteen doctors working at the Christmas Island and Manus Island detention center has highlighted the inadequate resourcing of centers and the degradation of those seeking treatment. They have stated that they are being paid to compromise medical ethics and have explicitly stated that doctors are expected to participate in ‘unethical conduct and in gross departures from clinical standards’.

Issues of reciprocity have further confounded exactly what Australia’s obligations are to people fleeing their home countries. A particularly stark example of this is the employment of Afghan Hazāra, a persecuted ethnic minority in Afghanistan, as interpreters by the Australian Defense Forces during the NATO led military invasion in Afghanistan, many of whom have applied for asylum in Australia. Reports have surfaced that Afghani-Hazāra interpreters who have had their asylum application rejected have been killed by the Pashtun led Taliban due to their ethnic and religious difference to the Taliban and their assistance to the allied NATO forces. While this itself is an issue largely outside the scope of this short essay (what responsibility do we have to those who have offered us assistance?), it highlights the incredible complexity of ethical, moral and legal issues associated with formulating policy that may harm incredibly vulnerable or precarious populations.

These few specific issues among a sea of thousands of complaints and detailed reports by security contractors Serco of self-harm, sexual assault, hunger strikes and the transferal of unaccompanied minors to detention centers for indefinite prolonged periods. Transferal of minors into detention has been criticized for exposing children to distressing situations, children referring to themselves by their client number as opposed to their name (see 46.18-59.12 of attached video) report, confronting developmental delays due to lack of access to education and exposure to environments riddled with self-harm, sexual and physical assault. The ‘tough stance’ taken by the Government highlights the ethical fallacy of invoking a policy causing medical and psychological harm in the name of trying to deter people from taking a dangerous journey.

The ethical mess of Australian detention center medical administration is highlighted by a co-author of the 92 page letter to the Guardian and Minister Morrison says; “there will one day be a royal commission [the highest level of government-sanctioned inquiry in Australia] into what is taking place on Christmas Island. He suggested we document well.” Creation of policy for vulnerable populations is fraught with ethical difficulty and complexity, and is further confounded when the democratic processes, such as the 2013 Australian federal elections, indicate a seeming majority of the population support increased cruelty to vulnerable persons. Perhaps the easiest way to condense this ethically compromised ‘humanitarian’ policy is to ask: what is the cost of this policy? Is it justifiable to inflict harm onto those individuals in the aim of preventing harm to others?

Amy Constable is an Honours degree candidate at the Australian National University, and was a 2013 summer fellow of the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

Thinking Ahead, Preventing Tragedy

By: Mohini Banerjee

When natural disasters become central to bioethics discussions, it usually invokes a public health lens. Furthermore, the ethics involved concern disaster response, otherwise known as the aftermath. As detailed in Sheri Fink’s Five Days At Memorial, ethical quandaries arose when they were unable to evacuate certain patients from a flooded hospital. Health care professionals faced the demand to both create and execute a moral equation determining who could survive if moved and who would most likely survive. In the midst of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, some doctors euthanized patients that could not be evacuated, saving them from languishing in agony as their machines failed. These physicians had some ethics training, but nothing that could have prepared them for that situation.

If we had to make difficult decisions in the midst of a disaster, what would we choose? During Hurricane Katrina many also took to the streets to find food and services when no help came. This led to horrific police and civilian violence. The racial and socio-economic implications of the fallout in the Gulf states only add to the tragedy. Although there are immense problems with the response to Katrina, we must also consider disaster preparedness. Foresight and energy could preempt and thus mitigate many of the worst disaster outcomes.

One difficulty in the ethics of disasters, as opposed to issues that arise in clinical settings, is that one cannot assume a controlled environment. There is no time to consult an ethics board, family members, or the courts. Disaster situations involve technological and communication failure on massive scales, such as falling telephone lines and power outages. Health care professionals also grapple with their own safety in ways foreign to most instances of medical care. For example, as Fink outlines in her book, many of the doctors at Memorial struggled with dehydration and injuries themselves from the hospital conditions. Lastly, national and state-based plans often cannot be implemented on the local level, lacking a detailed understanding of the community’s needs. For all these reasons, work done ahead of time could insure fairer outcomes in the aftermath.

Disaster preparedness is not a new phenomenon, and it would be foolhardy to dismiss the long efforts to mitigate ensuing chaos. Yet, in the world of ethics, how we prepare is less discussed than what happens when the chaos is in full force. What I suggest is a closer look at the methods for protecting ourselves and our communities when the unimaginable hits. The principles that govern disaster response, such as the responsibility to provide each person with life-saving care and protection, will only go so far. Since disasters often undermine the infrastructure facilitating medical care, evacuation, or housing, it is especially important to implement community-based initiatives to meet these needs.

The San Francisco partnership, established by Mayor Edwin M. Lee this past summer, epitomizes a community ethic in disaster preparation. It is a coalition between the Department of Emergency Management and Bayshare, a collection of sharing economy organizations. The partnership insures that during disasters people could use sharing economy mechanisms for free. Services include Lyft, a ride-share service that would transport emergency medical care and basic supplies. Another is the room rental scheme, Airbnb, which provides housing for people with nowhere to go. Providing these services in a disaster’s fallout would use the community’s resources to help itself. The San Francisco model demonstrates how members of the local community could use their resources to aid one another.

Although internationally recognized ethics standards for disaster response exist, preparedness is seldom discussed considering equality or fairness. Oftentimes preparing for disasters is left to the government or to the individual, such that those with less lose out. Further, the obligations of individual families extend beyond themselves and complying with the government’s safety measures. Strategies, such as San Francisco’s, which distribute much needed and underutilized resources facilitate a community’s ability to help itself.

It is not only preferable, but ethically necessary, to have a system in place that ensures sharing resources. Governmental bodies should not be the sole providers of resource planning. Community members understand best what is available locally and are situated to help first responders prevent harms within a chaotic situation. While each person will first provide for her own family’s safety, the next considerations should extend to those in one’s proximity. Preparing as a community will help foster social cohesion, which again feeds back to those difficult decisions. Gaining more responsibility for ourselves and for those around us can avert the desperation that so many have already suffered.  

Mohini graduated from Smith College in May 2013 and is a research assistant at The Hastings Center, an independent non-profit research institute in bioethics. She founded Bioethx Under 25 in January and acts as Editor in Chief. For interest in the blog please email her at bioethicsunder25@gmail.com.

Sustainability: an Ethical and Cosmological Perspective

 By: Laura Ballantyne-Brodie  

Introduction 

Among the doomsday predictions and naysaying climate skeptics have you stopped to appreciate that you are the result of around 3.8 billions years of evolution?  It strikes me sometimes that in the midst of doom and gloom scenarios we forget to rejoice the fact that despite the odds human life has evolved in a truly remarkable way.  We are alive to experience the world wide wake-up call challenging us to shift our paradigm and start to take care of the Earth. 

Despite the turmoil that surrounds us (disruptive technology, economic woes and environmental degradation), we live at a fascinating time.  We are witnessing the evolution of human consciousness before our eyes.  The news has been delivered telling us that the way we are living is at odds with the physical systems of the planet and we are fast approaching crisis point. [1]  We are at a fork in the road and it is up to us to choose the path to a safe, clean and free society for current generations and for future generations after us.

A changing paradigm - ethics and cosmology

We’re moving from a worldview that prioritizes nations to one that prioritizes planet. Peter Ellyard a renowned futurist and intellectual, coined the term planetism to describe the worldview where our first allegiance is to the planet.  As a concept planetism recognizes that humanity exists as part of a whole in an interconnected system. 

The shift that we're experiencing is a shift in paradigm from a worldview in which:

• individual is king to community being paramount;
• autocracy and hierarchy rule to democracy taking a deeper hold;
• humanity working against nature (or from above) to one where humanity sees itself as inextricably linked to nature.

Consciously or unconsciously the predominant worldview stresses that life (you, me and all the creatures of the biosphere) is insignificant because we are so tiny in comparison to the infinite universe.  This is recognized by the expression 'in the scheme of things, I'm insignificant' or 'one person won't change a thing'.  We must challenge this view.  While the Earth may be 'insignificant' in space (i.e. we are tiny in comparison to the rest of space) we are significant in time. [2]  Earth has been around such a long time that it has allowed complex human life and everything in the biosphere to flourish.  This fact alone means there is no justification for us to continue approaching our relationship with the Earth and life itself with indifference.  Our fundamental relationship with the Earth needs some counselling so that collectively we recognize we're flying in the face of 3.8 billion years of miraculous design, destroying the planet for the benefit of a relative few.

The rise of civil society: citizens and entrepreneurs

With the rise of the civil sector, we're witnessing an extraordinary shift in the way in which people are grappling with and responding to the global challenge of sustainability.  The organisation I founded, Rent to the World started because we recognized the need to catalyze the paradigm shift and get on with the task of looking after the commons.

The metaphor of paying ‘rent’ to the world is unmistakable because it challenges our worldview and encourages us to recognize there's a corresponding duty (or fee!) for our place on the planet.  As a noun, rent is defined as "a fee for use, service or privilege".  The concept encourages us to recognize the symbiotic nature of our existence and that we each have a role (or duty depending on your point of view) to give something back.  As everyone has a concept of money it is a powerful tool to remind us that we all have an impact, and therefore a responsibility to give back to the Earth - our home - for the gift of life and the use of its resources - valuable, beautiful and quite often finite.

Conclusion

For the moment we are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole but the message is resoundingly clear: we cannot continue on our current course.  Once we make the mental shift placing cooperation, collaboration and responsibility as the central principles of our worldview, we can harness our energy and ingenuity to begin the task of looking after the commons.  Our hope at Rent to the World is that many more people are ready to join with us to turn things around.  Wendell Berry, the remarkable American poet, farmer and activist has said "the world and life it holds are conditional gifts.  We have the world to live in on condition that we take good care of it".  Humanity is receiving a wake-up call, after many years of taking our place on Earth for granted.  It is our responsibility to take care of the planet, so that in return, it will look after us.


Laura is an climate change lawyer, social entrepreneur and budding bio-ethicist, based in Sydney Australia. She is interested in the intersection between law, policy and ethics and in particular the application of ethical and sustainability principles to some of the big environmental challenges.

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[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2013 The Physical Science Basis (October 2013) <http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/>

[2] Sasselov, D. (July, 2010). Dimitar Sasselov: How we found hundreds of potential Earth-like planets retrieved from <http://www.ted.com/talks/dimitar_sasselov_how_we_found_hundreds_of_potential_earth_like_planets.html>