Online grief and the digital dead
For many of us, social media is not just a way to communicate. It’s part of the fabric of everyday life and the primary way we stay up to date in the lives of some of our friends and family.
When people die, their profiles continue to present their ‘face’ as part of our social world.
Such continued presence makes a difference to the moral world we continue to inhabit as living people. It forces us to make a decision about how to deal with the digital dead. We have to treat them in some way – but how?
What should be done with these ‘digital remains’? Who gets to make that decision? What happens when survivors (those still alive who will be affected by these decisions) disagree?
“Death obliterates a person’s consciousness but we have some power to ensure it doesn’t destroy everything about them.”
So far, tech companies have worked out their norms of ‘digital disposal’ on the fly. On Facebook, for instance, some profiles are actively deleted, others are simply abandoned, while others have been put into a memorialised state which lets existing ‘friends’ post on the deceased’s timeline.
Facebook allows you to report a deceased person and memorialise their account – Want to decide what happens to your own account if you pass away? You can let Facebook know in advance what you’d like to happen in the event of your death.
Given the digital dead could soon outnumber the digital living, it might be time to look more closely at the problem. This will require asking some fundamental questions: what is the relationship between an online profile and its creator and how might that matter in ethical terms?
I’ve said social media is one of the ways our friends stay present in our lives and in our ‘moral worlds’. The dead have in fact always been part of our moral world: we keep promises to them, speak well of them and go out of our way to preserve their memory and legacy as best we can.
Jeffrey Blustein gives us one reason why we might be obliged to remember the dead this way: memory is one way to “rescue the dead from insignificance”. Death obliterates a person’s consciousness but we have some power to ensure it doesn’t destroy everything about them.
As Goethe said, we die twice. First, when our hearts stop beating. And second, when the last person who loves us dies and we disappear from memory.
This gives digital artefacts ethical significance. We can’t stop that first death, but we can take steps to delay the second through a kind of ‘memory prosthetic’. A memorialised social media profile seems like exactly this kind of prosthetic. It allows something of the real, tangible presence of the dead to persist in the world of the living and makes the task of preserving them easier.
This gives us at least one reason not to delete dead peoples’ profiles: their deletion removes something of the dead from the world, thereby making them harder to remember.
The right of a deceased person not to have their profile deleted might still be trumped by the rights of the living. For instance, if a bereaved family find the ongoing existence of a Facebook profile distressing, that might be a good reason to delete it. But even reasons that are easily overridden still need to be taken into account.
“By recreating the dead instead of remembering them as they were, we risk reducing them to what they did for us.”
There might, however, be cause for concern about other kinds of memory that go beyond preservation and try to recreate the dead in the world of the living. For example, various (often ironically short-lived) startups like Lifenaut, Virtual Eternity and LivesOn aim to create a posthumous, interactive existence for the dead.
They hope to create an algorithm that can ‘learn’, either by analysing your online activity or through a script you fill in while you’re alive, how to post or speak in a way that sounds like you. This may be as simple as tweeting in your name, or as complex as an animated avatar speaking as you would have spoken, chatting, joking and flirting with your survivors.
Nobody has had much success with this to date. But as the technology improves and AI becomes increasingly competent, the likelihood of such a platform becoming viable increases. Should that happen, what might this do to our relationship to the dead?
This episode of Black Mirror is a moving and unsettling depiction of real avatars of the dead walking and talking among us.
Online avatars of this kind might seem like a simple extension of other memorialisation practices – a neat way of keeping the distinctive presence and style of the dead with us. But some, like philosopher Adam Buben, argue these online avatars are less about remembering the dead and more about replacing them. By recreating the dead instead of remembering them as they were, we risk reducing them to what they did for us and replacing them with something that can perform the same role. It makes those we love interchangeable with others.
If I can replace you with an avatar then I don’t love you for you but merely for what you can do for me, which an avatar could do just as well. To use a crass analogy: if memorialising an online profile is like getting your cat taxidermied, posthumous avatars are like buying a new, identical cat and giving it the same name as the old one.
Despite the danger, technology has a habit of outrunning our ethical responses to it, so it’s quite possible fully-functioning avatars will get here whether we want them or not. So here’s a modest proposal: if this technology becomes a reality, we should at least demand that it come with in-built glitches.
…if memorialising an online profile is like getting your cat taxidermied, posthumous avatars are like buying a new, identical cat and giving it the same name as the old one.
The reason we need glitches is because when technology works perfectly, we don’t notice it. We feel like we’re directly connected to someone through a phone line or a Skype connection because when these technologies work properly they don’t call attention to themselves. You hear the voice or see the face, and not the speaker or the screen. But glitches call our attention back to the underlying reality that our encounter is being mediated by a limited piece of technology.
If we’re going to have interactive avatars of the dead, let’s make them fail every so often, make them sputter or drop out – to remind us of who we’ve lost and the fact they are genuinely gone, no matter how realistic our memory devices are.
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BY Pat Stokes
Dr Patrick Stokes is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. Follow him on Twitter – @patstokes.
Twitter made me do it!
In a recent panel discussion, academic and former journalist Emma Jane described what happened when she first included her email address at the end of her newspaper column in the late nineties.
Previously, she’d received ‘hate mail’ in the form of relatively polite and well-written letters but once her email address was public, there was a dramatic escalation in its frequency and severity. Jane coined the term ‘Rapeglish’ to describe the visceral rhetoric of threats, misogyny and sexual violence that characterises much of the online communication directed at women and girls.
Online misogyny and abuse has emerged as a major threat to the free and equal public participation of women in public debate – not just online, but in the media generally. Amanda Collinge, producer of the influential ABC panel show Q&A, revealed earlier this year that high profile women have declined to appear in the program due to “the well-founded fear that the online abuse and harassment they already suffer will increase”.
Twitter’s mechanics mean users have no control over who replies to their tweets and cannot remove abusive or defamatory responses.
Most explanations for online misogyny and prejudice tend to be cultural. We are told that the internet gives expression to or amplifies existing prejudice – showing us the way we always were. But this doesn’t explain why some online platforms have a greater problem with online abuse than others. If the internet were simply a mirror for the woes of society, we could expect to see similar levels of abuse across all online platforms.
The ‘honeypot for assholes’
This isn’t the case. Though it isn’t perfect, Facebook has a relatively low rate of online abuse compared to Twitter, which was recently described as a “honeypot for assholes”. One study found 88 percent of all discriminatory or hateful social media content originates on Twitter.
Twitter’s abuse problem illustrates how culture and technology are inextricably linked. In 2012, Tony Wang, then UK general manager of Twitter, described the organisation as “the free speech wing of the free speech party”. This reflects a libertarian commitment to uncensored information and rampant individualism, which has been a long-standing feature of computing and engineering culture – as revealed in the design and administration of Twitter.
Twitter’s mechanics mean users have no control over who replies to their tweets and cannot remove abusive or defamatory responses, which makes it an inherently combative medium. Users complaining of abuse have found that Twitter’s safety team does not view explicit threats of rape, death or blackmail as a violation of their terms of service.
The naïve notion that Twitter users should battle one another within a ‘marketplace of ideas’ . . . ignores the way sexism, racism and other forms of prejudice force diverse users to withdraw from the public sphere.
Twitter’s design and administration all reinforce the ‘if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen’ machismo of Silicon Valley culture. Social media platforms were designed within a male dominated industry and replicate the assumptions and attitudes typical of men in the industry. Twitter provides users with few options to protect themselves from abuse and there are no effective bystander mechanisms to enable users to protect each other.
Over the years, the now banned Milo Yiannopoulos and now imprisoned ‘revenge porn king’ Hunter Moore have accumulated hundreds of thousands of admiring Twitter followers by orchestrating abuse and hate campaigns. The number of followers, likes and retweets can act like a scoreboard in the ‘game’ of abuse.
Suggesting Twitter should be a land of free speech where users should battle one another within a ‘marketplace of ideas’ might make sense to the white, male, heterosexual tech bro, but it ignores the way sexism, racism and other forms of prejudice force diverse users to withdraw from the public sphere.
Dealing with online abuse
Over the last few years, Twitter has acknowledged its problem with harassment and sought to implement a range of strategies. As Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stated to employees in a leaked internal memo, ‘We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years’. However, steps have been incremental at best and are yet to make any noticeable difference to users.
How do we challenge the most toxic aspects of internet culture when its norms and values are built into online platforms themselves?
Researchers and academics are calling for the enforcement of existing laws and the enactment of new laws in order to deter online abuse and sanction offenders. ‘Respectful relationships’ education programs are incorporating messages on online abuse in the hope of reducing and preventing it.
These necessary steps to combat sexism, racism and other forms of prejudice in offline society might struggle to reduce online abuse though. The internet is host to specific cultures and sub-cultured in which harassment is normal or even encouraged.
Libertarian machismo was entrenched online by the 1990s when the internet was dominated by young, white, tech-savvy men – some of whom disseminated an often deliberately vulgar and sexist communicative style that discouraged female participation. While social media has bought an influx of women and other users online it has not displaced these older, male-dominated subcultures.
The fact that harassment is so easy on social media is no coincidence. The various dot-com start-ups that produced social media have emerged out of computing cultures that have normalised online abuse for a long time. Indeed, it seems incitements to abuse have been technologically encoded into some platforms.
Designing a more equitable internet
So how do we challenge the most toxic aspects of internet culture when its norms and values are built into online platforms themselves? How can a fairer and more prosocial ethos be built into online infrastructure?
Changing the norms and values common online will require a cultural shift in computing industries and companies.
Earlier this year, software developer and commentator Randi Lee Harper drew up an influential list of design suggestions to ‘put out the Twitter trashfire’ and reduce the prevalence of abuse on the platform. Her list emphasises the need to give users greater control over their content and Twitter experience.
One solution might appear in the form of social media app Yik Yak – basically a local, anonymous version of Twitter but with a number of important built-in safety features. When users post content to Yik Yak, other users can ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ the content depending on how they feel about it. Comments that receive more than five ‘down’ votes are automatically deleted, enabling a swift bystander response to abusive content. Yik Yak also employs automatic filters and algorithms as a barrier against the posting of full names and other potentially inappropriate content.
Yik Yak’s platform design is underpinned by a social understanding of online communication. It recognises the potential for harm and attempts to foster healthy bystander practices and cultures. This is a far cry from the unfettered pursuit of individual free speech at all costs, which has allowed abuse and harassment to go unaddressed in the past.
It seems like it will require more than a behavioural shift from users. Changing the norms and values common online will require a cultural shift in computing industries and companies so the development of technology is underpinned by a more diverse and inclusive understanding of communication and users.
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BY Michael Salter
Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor of Criminology UNSW. Board of Directors ISSTD. Specialises in complex trauma & organisedabuse.com
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The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
LGBT...Z? The limits of ‘inclusiveness’ in the alphabet rainbow
A few years ago on Twitter, I found myself mindlessly clicking on a breadcrumb trail of ‘likes’ linked to a random post. It was under these banal circumstances that I came across a user profile with a brief but purposeful bio, one featuring the mysterious acronym ‘LGBTZ’.
The first four letters were obvious enough to me. LGBT, that bite-sized abbreviation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, has become a nearly ubiquitous rallying call for members of these historically marginalised groups and their allies. Even Donald Trump spoke this family friendly shorthand in his convention speech (although his oddly staggered enunciation sounded like he was a nervous pre-schooler tip-toeing through an especially tricky part of the alphabet). Trump also tacked on a “Q” for all those ill-defined “Queers” in the Republican audience. (A far less common iteration of this initialism includes an “I” for “Intersex” and an “A” for “Asexual.”)
But Z? The Twitter user’s profile image was a horse, and other language alluding to the fact he (or she) was an animal lover – and not of the platonic kind – brought that curious Z into sharp, squirm-worthy focus: “Zoophile”.
Perhaps we should take a hard look in the mirror and ask whether excluding Zs and Ps and others from the current tolerance roster isn’t doing to them precisely what was once done to us.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a zoophile is a person who is primarily sexually attracted to animals. The primarily part of that sentence is key. These aren’t just lascivious farmhands shagging goats because they can’t find willing human partners. That’s just plain bestiality.
Rather, these are people who genuinely prefer animals over members of their own species. If you hook a male zoophile’s genitals up to a plethysmograph (an extremely sensitive measure of sexual arousal), these men display stronger erectile responses to, say, images of stallions or Golden Retrievers than they do to naked human models.
I’d written about scientific research into zoophilia, along with other unusual sexualities, in my book Perv, so it wasn’t shocking to learn zoophiles have a social media presence. What’s surprising is this maligned demographic is apparently becoming emboldened enough to pull its Z up to the acronym table.
Paedophiles have started inching their much-loathed “P” in this direction as well, albeit in veiled form with the contemporary label “MAP” (“Minor-Attracted Person”). This is especially true for the so-called virtuous paedophiles, who are seriously committed to refraining from acting on their sexual desires because they realise the harm they’d cause to children. Similarly, many zoophiles consider themselves gentle animal welfare advocates, denouncing “zoosadists” who sexually abuse animals.
In any event, it’s easy to shun the Zs and Ps and all the other unwanted sexual minorities clawing their way up the acceptance ladder, refusing them entry into our embattled LGBT territory, because we don’t want to be associated with “perverts”. We’ve overcome tremendous obstacles to be where we are today. As an American growing up during the homophobic Reagan era, never in a million years did I imagine I’d legally marry another man one day. Yet I did. At this stage, perhaps we should take a hard look in the mirror and ask whether excluding Zs and Ps and others from the current tolerance roster isn’t doing to them precisely what was once done to us.
I know what you’re thinking. There’s a huge difference, since in these sad cases we’re dealing with the most innocent, most vulnerable members of society, who also can’t give their consent. That’s very much true.
When you actually try to justify our elbowing the Zs and Ps and others of their ilk out from under the rainbow umbrella though, it’s not so straightforward. Any seemingly ironclad rationale for their exclusion is stuffed more with blind emotion than clear-sighted reason.
To begin with, one doesn’t have to be sexually active to be a member of a sexual community. After all, I identified as gay before I had gay sex, just as I imagine most heterosexual people identify as straight before losing their virginity. In principle, at least, the same would apply to morally celibate zoophiles and paedophiles, neither of which are criminals and child molesters. Desires and behaviours are two different things.
Secondly, there’s now strong evidence paraphilias (lust outside of the norm) emerge in early childhood or, in the case of paedophilia, may even be innate. One zoophile, a successful attorney, told researchers that while his friends in middle school were all trying to get their hands on their fathers’ Playboys, he was secretly coveting the latest issue of Equus magazine.
Whether Zs or Ps are “born that way” or become that way early in life, it’s certainly not a choice they’ve made. This isn’t difficult to grasp but it tends to elude popular wisdom. I don’t know about you but I couldn’t become aroused by a Clydesdale or a prepubescent child if my life depended on it. That doesn’t make me morally superior to those unlucky enough to have brains that through no fault of their own respond this way to animals and children.
It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have, but there’s no science or logic to why “LGBT” contains the particular letters it does.
Not so long ago, remember, the majority of society saw gay men like me as immoral – even evil. Not for anything they’d done but for the simple fact that, neurologically, they fancied other men rather than women. The courts would have declared me mentally ill, not happily married. Just like conversion therapy has failed miserably to turn gay people straight, paraphilias are also immutable. Every clinical attempt to turn paedophiles into “teleiophiles” (attracted to reproductive-aged adults) has been a major flop.
Who knows what tortuous inner lives all those closeted Zs and Ps – and other unmentionables bearing today’s cross of scorn – experience, despite being celibate. Clinical psychologists report many of their clients are suicidal because of unwanted sexual desires – and this includes teenagers with a dawning awareness they are attracted to younger people.
I think it’s patently hypocritical for the LGBT community – which has worked so hard to overcome negative stereotypes, ostracism, and unjust laws – to shut out these people, fearing they would tarnish us more acceptable deviants. We’re only paying lip service to the concept of inclusiveness when we so publicly distance ourselves from those who need this communal protection the most.
In fact, LGB people arguably share more in common with the Zs and Ps than they do the Ts, since being transgender isn’t about who (or what) you’re sexually attracted to, but the gender you identify with. Unlike those representing the other letters in this character soup, trans people say their sexuality plays no role at all. Why then are Ts included while other, more unspeakable, sexual minorities aren’t?
Here’s my point then. It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have but there’s no science or logic to why “LGBT” contains the particular letters it does. Instead, it’s an evolving social code. So, is the filter that shapes this code just another moralistic lens that casts some human beings as inherently inferior and worthier of shame than others? And if this is so, who gets to control this filter and why?
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BY Jesse Bering
Jesse Bering is a research psychologist and Director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. An award-winning science writer specializing in human behaviour, his first book, The Belief Instinct (2011), was included on the American Library Association’s Top 25 Books of the Year.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
5 dangerous ideas: Talking dirty politics, disruptive behaviour and death
The Ethics Centre was the founding partner of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas back in 2009. We’re thrilled that the festival continues with a program full of world-leading thinkers.
Here are five ideas that were pondered, dissected and debated over the big weekend in 2016. We talked dirty politics, disruptive behaviour, disappearing countries and death.
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Dirty politics
In 2016, the festival put dirty old politics in the spotlight. Australia’s federal parliament had just resumed session with a bunch of independent and minority party representatives, the United States was still trying to make sense of Donald Trump and across the globe nations were trying to unpack exactly what ‘extremism’ was and how to deal with it.
“If our goal is to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our lack of moral diversity is going to make it harder.”
American psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s TED talk explores the moral values underpinning liberals and conservatives. Instead of looking at politics as a battleground of ‘right vs wrong’, Haidt encourages us to see political differences as being based in different moral values.
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Disruptive behaviour
You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right? For the disruptors of the world, improvement comes at a price – we need to break eggs, challenge convention, and occasionally hurt people’s feelings.
On the other side of the Pacific, the #BlackLivesMatter movement was upsetting middle-class, white Americans in 2016 by calling attention to continued racial disparities in the US.
Check out philosopher George Yancy’s open letter, ‘Dear White America’ to learn about the intellectual basis for the movement. In the letter, Yancy makes a simple but confronting point to his white American fellows – if you’re white, no matter how well intentioned you are, you’re probably racist. He wrote:
“If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism. Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable. Being neither a ‘good’ white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook.”
Yancy’s essay prompted exactly the response he expected – anger. So much so the American Philosophical Association issued a letter of support. You can read Yancy’s thoughts on the backlash he copped here.
Australians reading or hearing about the Black Lives Matter movement might also want to read into the history of Aboriginal deaths in custody.
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Disappearing conflicts
Conflict, politics and geography drive some nations and communities to the brink while others flourish. What are the unseen consequences of major global trends?
The Right to be Cold asks whether the world’s failure to address climate change is a human rights violation against Inuit peoples whose way of life is being eradicated along with the melting ice.
To get a sense of what’s going on for these remote communities, check out photographer Ciril Jazbec’s series documenting climate change and its impact on Greenlanders.
“It was April and the ice was starting to melt, which was highly unusual. Usually the ice would stay out until June.”
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Dealing in death
If evolution hardwires in us the drive to survive, how is it humans are able to overcome their biological imperative and take their own lives? There’s still a stigma that suicide is a ‘selfish choice’, but evolutionary biologist Jesse Bering explores the science behind suicide.
“Human suicide is an adaptive behavioural strategy that becomes increasingly likely to occur whenever there is a perfect storm of social, ecological, developmental and biological variables factoring into the evolutionary equation.”
For the scientifically minded, Bering’s essay in Scientific American is a must-read. If you’ve never donned a white lab coat, you might be more inclined to listen to the Freakonomics podcast ‘The Suicide Paradox’.
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Dangerous ideas
While every Festival of Dangerous Ideas has specific themes, the main goal has always been to create a safe space for open discussion of ideas some people would consider dangerous.
It’s a skill that seems to be in growing demand, so before you listen, read, think or tweet, check out what festival co-founder Simon Longstaff writes on why conversations matter.
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Why hard conversations matter
There are times in the history of a nation when its character is tested and defined. Too often it happens with war, natural disasters or economic collapse. Then the shouting gets our attention.
But there are also our quieter moments – the ones that reveal solid truths about who we are and what we stand for.
How should we recognise Indigenous Australians? Can our economy be repaired in a manner that is even-handed? How will we choose if forced to decide between China and the United States? How do we create safe ways for people seeking asylum? Can we grow our economy and protect our people and environments? These are just some of the questions we face.
Too often, I see conversations shut down before they have even begun. People with a contrary point of view are faced with outrage, shouted down or silenced by others driven by the certainty of righteous indignation.
And here’s another question. Do we have the capacity to talk about these things without tearing ourselves and each other apart?
There are some safe places for open conversation about difficult questions. Thirty years ago I began work at a not-for-profit, The Ethics Centre dedicated to creating them. The Festival of Dangerous Ideas now enters its 11th year with a new digital format to cater to our current times, bringing leading thinkers from around the world together to discuss important issues.
Sadly, there is a growing fragility across Australian society. The demand for ideological purity (you’re completely ‘with us’ or ‘against us’) puts us at risk of a fractured and stuffy world of absolutes.
Too often, I see conversations shut down before they have even begun. People with a contrary point of view are faced with outrage, shouted down or silenced by others driven by the certainty of righteous indignation. In such a world, there is no nuance, no seeking to understand the grey areas or subtleties of argument.
Attempts to prove to people that they are wrong just leads to stalemate. Barricades go up and each side lobs verbal grenades. There is another way.
This phenomenon crosses the political spectrum – embracing conservatives and progressives alike. In my opinion, it is the product of a self-fulfilling fear that our society’s ethical skin is too thin to survive the prick of controversy and debate. This is a poisonous belief that drains the life from a liberal democracy.
Fortunately, the antidote is easily at hand. In essence we need to spend less time trying to change other people’s minds and more time trying to understand their point of view. We do that by taking them entirely seriously.
Why make this change? Because attempts to prove to people that they are wrong just leads to stalemate. Barricades go up and each side lobs verbal grenades. There is another way. We could allow people to work out what the boundaries are for their own beliefs.
Working out the lines we cannot cross is often the first step towards others, but it can only happen when people feel safe. Giving people the space to fall on just the right side of such lines can make a world of difference.
So I wonder, might we pause for a moment, climb down from our battle stations and call a ceasefire in the wars of ideas? Might we recognise the person on the other side of an issue may not be unprincipled? Perhaps they’re just differently principled.
Can we see in the face of our ideological opponent another person of goodwill? What then might we discover about each other; what unites and, yes, what divides? What then might we understand about the issues that will define us as a people?
Let’s rediscover the art of difficult discussions in which success is measured in the combination of passion and respect. Let’s banish the bullies – even those who claim to be well-intentioned. They, alone, have no place in the conversations we now need to have.
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Don’t throw the birth plan out with the birth water!
Just try mentioning ‘birth plans’ at a party and see what happens. Hannah Dahlen – a midwife’s perspective
Mia Freedman once wrote about a woman who asked what her plan was for her placenta. Freedman felt birth plans were “most useful when you set them on fire and use them to toast marshmallows”. She labelled people who make these plans as “birthzillas” more interested in birth than having a baby.
In response, Tara Moss argued:
The majority of Australian women choose to birth in hospital and all hospitals do not have the same protocols. It is easy to imagine they would, but they don’t, not from state to state and not even from hospital to hospital in the same city. Even individual health practitioners in the same facility sometimes do not follow the same protocols.
The debate
Why the controversy over a woman and her partner writing down what they would like to have done or not done during their birth? The debate seems not to be about the birth plan itself, but the issue of women taking control and ownership of their births and what happens to their bodies.
Some oppose birth plans on the basis that all experts should be trusted to have the best interests of both mother and baby in mind at all times. Others trust the mother as the person most concerned for her baby and believe women have the right to determine what happens to their bodies during this intimate, individual, and significant life event.
As a midwife of some 26 years, I wish we didn’t need birth plans. I wish our maternity system provided women with continuity of care so by the time a woman gave birth her care provider would fully know and support her well-informed wishes. Unfortunately, most women do not have access to continuity of care. They deal with shift changes, colliding philosophical frameworks, busy maternity units, and varying levels of skill and commitment from staff.
There are so many examples of interventions that are routine in maternity care but lack evidence they are necessary or are outright harmful. These include immediate clamping and cutting of the umbilical cord at birth, episiotomy, continuous electronic foetal monitoring, labouring or giving birth laying down and unnecessary caesareans. Other deeply personal choices such as the use of immersion in water for labour and birth or having a natural birth of the placenta are often not presented as options, or are refused when requested.
The birth plan is a chance to raise and discuss your wishes with your healthcare provider. It provides insight into areas of further conversation before labour begins.
I once had a woman make three birth plans when she found out her baby was in a breech presentation at 36 weeks. One for a vaginal breech birth, one for a cesarean, and one for a normal birth if the baby turned. The baby turned and the first two plans were ditched. But she had been through each scenario and carved out what was important for her.
Bashi Hazard – a legal perspective
Birth plans were introduced in the 1980s by childbirth educators to help women shape their preferences in labour and to communicate with their care providers. Women say preparing birth plans increases their knowledge and ability to make informed choices, empowers them, and promotes their sense of safety during childbirth. Some (including in Australia) report that their carefully laid plans are dismissed, overlooked, or ignored.
There appears to be some confusion about the legal status or standing of birth plans. Neither is reflective of international human rights principles or domestic law. The right to informed consent is a fundamental principle of medical ethics and human rights law and is particularly relevant to the provision of medical treatment. In addition, our common law starts from the premise that every human body is inviolate and cannot be subject to medical treatment without autonomous, informed consent.
Pregnant women are no exception to this human rights principle nor to the common law.
If you start from this legal and human rights premise, the authoritative status of a birth plan is very clear. It is the closest expression of informed consent that a woman can offer her caregiver prior to commencing labour. This is not to say she cannot change her mind but it is the premise from which treatment during labour or birth should begin.
Once you accept that a woman has the right to stipulate the terms of her treatment, the focus turns to any hostility and pushback from care providers to the preferences a woman has the right to assert in relation to her care.
Mothers report their birth plans are criticised or outright rejected on the basis that birth is “unpredictable”. There is no logic in this.
Care providers who understand the significance of the human and legal right to informed consent begin discussing a woman’s options in labour and birth with her as early as the first antenatal visit. These discussions are used to advise, inform, and obtain an understanding of the woman’s preferences in the event of various contingencies. They build the trust needed to allow the care provider to safely and respectfully support the woman through pregnancy and childbirth. Such discussions are the cornerstone of woman-centred maternity healthcare.
Human Rights in Childbirth
Reports received by Human Rights in Childbirth indicate that care provider pushback and hostility towards birth plans occurs most in facilities with fragmented care or where policies are elevated over women’s individual needs. Mothers report their birth plans are criticised or outright rejected on the basis that birth is “unpredictable”. There is no logic in this. If anything, greater planning would facilitate smoother outcomes in the event of unanticipated eventualities.
In truth, it is not the case that these care providers don’t have a birth plan. There is a birth plan – one driven purely by care providers and hospital protocols without discussion with the woman. This offends the legal and human rights of the woman concerned and has been identified as a systemic form of abuse and disrespect in childbirth, and as a subset of violence against women.
It is essential that women discuss and develop a birth plan with their care providers from the very first appointment. This is a precious opportunity to ascertain your care provider’s commitment to recognising and supporting your individual and diverse needs.
Gauge your care provider’s attitude to your questions as well as their responses. Expect to repeat those discussions until you are confident that your preferences will be supported. Be wary of care providers who are dismissive, vague or non-responsive. Most importantly, switch care providers if you have any concerns. The law is on your side. Use it.
Making a birth plan – some practical tips
- Talk it through with your lead care provider. They can discuss your plans and make sure you understand the implications of your choices.
- Make sure your support network know your plan so they can communicate your wishes.
- Attending antenatal classes will help you feel more informed. You’ll discover what is available and the evidence is behind your different options.
- Talk to other women about what has worked well for them, but remember your needs might be different.
- Remember you can change your mind at any point in the labour and birth. What you say is final, regardless of what the plan says.
- Try not to be adversarial in your language – you want people working with you, not against you. End the plan with something like “Thank you so much for helping make our birth special”.
- Stick to the important stuff.
Some tips on the specific content of your birth plan are available here.
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BY Hannah Dahlen
Hannah Dahlen is a professor of Midwifery at Western Sydney University and a practising midwife.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
The “good enough” ethical setting for self-driving cars
Plenty of electronic ink has been spilled over the benefits self-driving cars offer. We have good reason to believe they could greatly reduce the number of fatalities from car accidents – studies suggest upwards of 90 percent of road accidents are caused by driver error.
Avoiding a crash altogether is clearly the best option, but even in crash scenarios some believe autonomous cars might be preferable. Facing a “no win” situation, a driverless car may have the opportunity to “optimise” the crash by minimising harm to those involved. However, choices about how to direct or distribute harm in these cases (for example, hit that person instead of the other) are ethically fraught and demand extraordinary scrutiny of a number of distinctly philosophical issues.
Can we be punished for inaction?
It would be unfair to expect car manufacturers to program their products to ‘crash ethically’ when the outcomes might get them in legal trouble. The law typically errs on the side of not directly committing harm. This means there might be difficulties in developing algorithms that simply minimise harm.
Given this, the law might condemn an autonomous car that steered away from five people and into one person in order to minimise the harm resulting from an accident. A judge might argue that the car steered into someone and so it did harm. The alternative, merely running over five people, results in more harm, but at least the car did not aim at any one of them.
But is inaction in this case morally justified if it leads to more harm? Philosophers have long disputed this distinction between doing harm and merely allowing harm to occur. It is the basis for perhaps the most famous philosophical thought experiment – the trolley problem.
Some philosophers argue that we can still be held responsible for inaction because not doing something still involves making a decision. For example, a doctor may kill her patient by withholding treatment, or a diplomat may offend a foreign dignitary by not shaking her hand. If algorithms that minimise harm are problematic because of a legal preference for inaction over the active causing of harm, there might be reason to ask the law to change.
Should we always try to minimise harm?
Even if we were to assume autonomous cars should minimise the total amount of harm that comes about from an accident, there are complex issues to resolve. Should cars try to minimise the total number of people harmed? Or minimise the kinds of harms that come about?
For example, if a car must choose between hitting one person head-on (a high risk accident) and steering off the road, endangering several others to a less serious injury, which is preferable? Moral philosophers will disagree about which of these options is better.
Another complication arises when we consider that harm minimisation might require an autonomous car to allow its own passengers to be injured or even killed in cases where inaction wouldn’t have brought them to harm. Few consumers would buy a car they expected to behave this way, even if they would prefer everyone else’s car did.
Are people breaking the law more deserving of harm?
Minimising overall harm might in some cases lead to consequences many would find absurd. Imagine a driver who decided to play ‘chicken’ with an autonomous car – driving on the wrong side of the road and threatening to plough head-long into it. Should the passengers in the autonomous car be put at risk to try to avoid a crash that is only occurring because the other driving is breaking the law?
Perhaps self-driving cars need something like ‘legality-adjusted aggregate harm minimisation’ algorithms. Given the widely-held beliefs that people breaking the law are liable to greater harm, deserve a greater share of any harm and that it would be unjust to require law-abiding citizens to share in the harm equally, self-driving cars will need to reflect these values if they are to be commercially viable.
But this approach also faces problems. Engineers would need a reliable way to predict crash trajectories in a way that provided information about the severity of harms, which they aren’t yet able to do. Philosophers would also need a reliable way to assign weighted values to harms, for example, by assigning values to minor versus major injuries. And as a society we would need to determine how liable to harm someone becomes by breaking the law. For example, someone exceeding the speed limit by a small amount may not be as liable to harm as someone playing ‘chicken’.
None of these issues are easy and seeking sure-fire answers every stakeholder agrees to is likely impossible. Instead, perhaps we should seek overlapping consensus – narrowing down the domain of possible algorithms to those that are technically feasible, morally justified and legally defensible. Every proposal for autonomous car ethics is likely to generate some counterintuitive verdicts but ongoing engagement between various parties should continue in the hopes of finding a set of all-around acceptable algorithms.
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BY Ryan Jenkins
Dr Ryan Jenkins studies the moral dimensions of technologies with the potential to profoundly impact human life. He is an assistant professor of philosophy and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His interests include the ethics of transformative technologies such as driverless cars, robots, algorithms, and autonomous weapons. He is concerned with how these technologies intersect with duties of justice, how they stand to restructure our activities, and how they enable or encumber meaningful human lives.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Only love deserves loyalty, not countries or ideologies
We exist via our social interactions with others. Without these connections embedding us in the social world we have no identity, existence or meaning. These ongoing interactions, made easier through habit and accepted norms, define us.
Central among these habits and norms is the idea of loyalty. Our loyalties provide a guide to what we might expect in an otherwise uncertain world. It is about our expectations of future action – my loyalty is based on the feeling that you will return it in future.
Being loyal is not obligatory, but when you breach someone’s loyalty you lose part of yourself. That’s the inescapable cost of disloyalty, whether minor – a friendship lost – or extreme – the firing squad for treason. That is the challenge with loyalty – there is always a chance to be disloyal. If that opportunity didn’t exist, loyalty wouldn’t make sense at all.
Nobody deserves our unconditional loyalty. However, they do deserve a shared sense of reciprocity based on past actions and hopes for the future. If people are loyal to us, they expect we will return that loyalty at some point in the future. And this is where the problem begins.
It can be hard to imagine a self without certain relationships and so we tend to hold to them more strongly.
The future is unknowable. Our loyalty may be called on in a variety of circumstances, from the mundane to the deeply difficult. A brother asks you to lie – how far are you willing to go to maintain that familial loyalty? What has he done to require you to lie? Is it the socially lubricating ‘white lie’ – “please tell Mum I wasn’t late”, or the far more serious – “please tell the police we were together all evening”.
What’s crucial here is an assessment of the act that generated the need to lie – what is the social expectation regarding the behaviour – is it acceptable? Is it the sort of behaviour other people would overlook in favour of loyalty?
We tend to over-invest in those loyalties that are key to our social milieu. It can be hard to imagine a self without certain relationships and so we tend to hold to them more strongly. Loyalty to family, friends, sports team, social activity – without them we lose parts of our self.
Because these relationships form part of who we are, there is a cost to disloyalty, even when it is the right thing to do. The experience of whistleblowers reveals the loss of identity that can come from breaching loyalty. While whistleblowing is often the ethical choice, the individuals tend to be shunned, excluded, exposed, attacked and betrayed.
If our country provides the basics of existence, security of self, food, shelter and the conditions to live a just life, then don’t we owe a debt of loyalty?
Loyalty can be vexing when it is demanded rather than given freely. Nation-states demand loyalty from their citizens to the point of self-sacrifice, especially in times of war. We also see a demand for loyalty attached to ideologies and beliefs. For example, the McCarthyism in the US in the 1950s saw an aggressive enforcement of compulsory ideological loyalty to one political system over another. Do we as citizens have an obligation to be loyal to our country of birth?
If our country provides the basics of existence, security of self, food, shelter and the conditions to live a just life, then don’t we owe a debt of loyalty? No, we don’t. Loyalty to abstractions shouldn’t be demanded. In fact I think we should avoid such commitments because they ask us to sacrifice real loyalties to people – family, friends and community.
The nation doesn’t care for you or me as an individual, that’s the job of our interpersonal connections. It’s also what makes them more important to us. However, a defender of nationalism might point to the threat a conqueror poses to the individual and family. They might argue that you have an obligation to be conscripted to defend your nation as a way to protect the people you are loyal to, but this is different to being loyal to the state itself.
Our loyalties foster connection, provide us with a map of social obligations and help alleviate the threat of an unknowable future. But to call upon them is fraught with risk – we might be betrayed, exploited or the future may change in ways we don’t anticipate. But if there were no risk, there would be little value to being loyal at all, would there?
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BY James Connor
Dr James Connor is an academic in the School of Business at UNSW Canberra and author of The Sociology of Loyalty.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Learning risk management from Harambe
Traditional and social media channels were flooded with the story of Harambe, a 17-year-old western lowland silverback gorilla shot dead at Cincinnati Zoo on 28 May 2016 after a four-year-old boy crawled through a barrier and fell into his enclosure.
With the benefit of hindsight, forming an opinion is easy. There are already plenty being thrown around regarding the incident and who was to blame for the tragedy.
The need to kill Harambe is exceptionally depressing: a gorilla lost his life, the zoo lost a real asset, a mother was at risk of losing her child, and staff tasked by the zoo to shoot Harambe faced emotional trauma based on the bond they likely formed with him.
In technical risk management terms, the zoo seems to have been in line with best practice.
Overall, it was a bad state of affairs. Though the case gives rise to a number of ethical issues, one way to consider it is as a risk management issue – where it presents us with some important lessons that might prevent similar circumstances from happening in the future, and ensure they are better managed if they do.
In technical risk management terms, the zoo seems to have been in line with best practice.
According to Cincinnati Zoo’s annual report, 1.5 million visitors visited the park in 2014 to 2015. Included in those numbers are hundreds of parents who visited the zoo with children who didn’t end up in any of the animal enclosures.
According to WLWT-TV, this was the first breach at the zoo since its opening in 1978. There is no doubt the zoo identified this risk and managed it with secure (until now) enclosures. There is also little doubt relevant signage and duty of care reminders would have been placed around the zoo. Staff would assume parents would manage their children and keep them safe. In the eyes of most risk management experts, this would seem to be more than sufficient.
Organisations need to put energy and effort into so called ‘black swan’ events… that are unlikely but have immense consequences if they do occur.
However, as we have seen in several cases (including Cecil the Lion) it does not seem to be the incident itself that brings the massive negative consequences but rather social media, based on the fact that the internet provides a platform for everyone to be judge and jury.
This flags the massive shift required in the way we manage risk. If we look only at the financial losses to the zoo, their decision may seem logical and rational. They were truly put in a no-win position – an immediate tactical decision was required once Harambe began dragging the child around the water.
Imagine if they had decided to tranquillise Harambe and the four-year-old boy had died while they were waiting for the tranquillisers to take effect – what would the impact have been?
The true lesson regarding this issue lies in the need for organisations to put energy and effort into so-called ‘black swan’ events – ones that are unlikely but have immense consequences if they do occur. These events are often overlooked, based only on the fact they are unlikely, leaving organisations unprepared for when they do.
The ethics of what is right and wrong tend to blur when the masses have a platform to pass judgement.
Traditional risk management approaches try to allocate scores to things and then put associated resources to the highest ranking risk issues. In this case, a risk that was deemed managed actually occurred and the result was very negative.
Whether negligent or not, various social media commentators have held the mother accountable. It seems she has been held to account based not on what she did, but for the apparently unapologetic and callous way she responded to the killing of Harambe.
This shows us risk management needs to consider the human element in a way we previously haven’t. The ethics of what is right and wrong tend to blur when the masses have a platform to pass judgement. There are many lessons to be taken from this incident, including the following considerations:
- Risk management and duty of care should be incorporated in a more cohesive manner, focusing on applying a BDA approach (Before, During and After).
- Social media backlash adds a new dimension to the way organisations should make, report and defend their decisions.
- Individuals can no longer purely blame the organisation they believe responsible based on negligence or breach of duty of care. Even if the individual shifts blame onto the organisation entirely, and they are not held to account by the law, they will be held to account by the general public.
- We have entered an era where system- and process-based risk management needs to integrate human and emotive elements to account for emotional responses.
- Lastly – and unrelatedly – the question of why one story attracts massive public outcry and why another doesn’t raises ethical questions regarding the way we consume news, the way the media reports it, and the upsides and downsides of social media.
In short this is another case of how much work we still have to do – especially in the modern internet age – to proactively and ethically manage risk.
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BY Gav Schneider
Dr Gav Schneider is the CEO of the Risk 2 Solution Group and Head of the Australian Catholic Universities Postgraduate Program in The Psychology of Risk.
BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Why it was wrong to kill Harambe
The killing of Harambe the gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo this week has aroused public sentiment in a way reminiscent of the public outrage caused by the killing of Cecil the lion.
This was not an isolated incident. On at least two previous occasions small children have accidentally fallen into gorilla pens. On both occasions the children were ‘protected’ by a prominent gorilla in the group, one female and one male, incidents which were heralded as examples of cross species animal altruism.
The incidents occurred in 1986 and 1991 in Jersey Zoo and Brookfield Zoo respectively – when rapid response teams would have been unknown. They demonstrate that gorillas are not dangerous animals.
This is further supported by the fact some witnesses’ reports said that Harambe was actually protecting the child and had not demonstrated any malevolence.
Animal behaviour expert, Professor Gisella Kaplan of the University of New England, has confirmed that gorillas are not inherently aggressive and would likely have not wanted to harm the child – a result of their social lifestyle and herbivorous diet.
Nowadays zoos have Dangerous Animal Response Teams, which in the ten minutes since the boy entered the enclosure made the decision to euthanise the gorilla. Members of this team are typically trained by the police to react to a dangerous animal threatening a member of the public.
Zoo animals already sacrifice many rights for the sake of human entertainment, education, conservation, and scientific endeavour.
Their first priority is for the safety of the public, then zoo staff. Only after these are assured is the animal’s wellbeing considered. As evidence of such a policy, Thayne Maynard, Director of Cincinnati Zoo, expressed public regret for the loss of Harambe as a future breeding male, a loss of genetic diversity, without any consideration for Harambe’s rights.
Zoos should have a policy based on an ethical appraisal of potential incidents based on higher level principles. These would include utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics principles.
From a utilitarian perspective, the harm caused by shooting Harambe, to him, his family, human witnesses, and the public generally, may have outweighed the small risk to the child. Harambe’s family will mourn his loss and may even have been traumatised by the event.
Deontologists would argue taking Harambe’s life would never be justified by the small risk to the child – the shooting constitutes a supreme example of a speciesist approach.
Insights from virtue ethics show how this incident has damaged the zoo’s reputation. Public outcry has accused the zoo of having little regard for the rights of its animal occupants – although the safeguarding of the child’s life may be welcomed by some future visitors. Is this the action we would expect of a ‘good’ zoo?
Instead, the zoo seems to have acted from self-interest, afraid of potential litigation should the child be harmed. From a commercial angle a seventeen year old gorilla is worth $100,000 to $200,000; a child’s life many millions. However, the zoo is likely to experience reduced visitor numbers for a prolonged period, as well as being responsible for damage to the reputation of American zoos more generally.
The zoo may also be liable for placing visitors in a dangerous situation, something not unheard of in zoos around the world. Owners of swimming pools in Australia could teach the zoos a lot about preventing small children entering facilities, with detailed regulations and strict monitoring minimising any risk to children.
Some zoos may have deliberately sacrificed safety for an enhanced visitor experience, with limited barriers between the public and apparently dangerous animals.
Harambe’s killing may yet prompt a renewed movement to provide legal recognition of the rights of great apes.
Zoo animals already sacrifice many rights for the sake of human entertainment, education, conservation and scientific endeavour. Our ‘contract’ with zoo animals, where we provide nutrition, good health, and companionship in return for the animals sacrificing their freedom, right to live, and reproduce naturally in a state of good welfare, stack the terms heavily in our favour.
Indeed, killing a defenceless animal that had not shown any aggression is tantamount to tearing up that contract.
The ethical dilemma over whether to shoot Harambe might have been avoided if a movement known as The Great Ape Project had succeeded. For over twenty years a group of philosophers, primatologists, and anthropologists have attempted to gain great apes, including gorillas, rights through the United Nations that would include the right to life.
The movement is based on overwhelming evidence for self-consciousness and other higher level cognitive abilities in great apes, which are undoubtedly greater than in some disabled humans who are adequately protected in law.
Although this has gained support in some minority states, it has yet to gain widespread acceptance, primarily because of determined opposition from scientists who reserve the right to use chimpanzees – another great ape – for medical research. Harambe’s killing may yet prompt a renewed movement to provide legal recognition of the rights of great apes.
Just like Cecil the lion, the killers of Harambe are being judged in the arena of social media. The pattern of argument there suggests members of the public would have preferred that the zoo accept some risk to the child before taking the extreme action of killing a harmless gorilla.
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BY Clive Phillips
Clive Phillips is Chair of Animal Welfare and Director of the Centre for Animal Welfare Ethics at the University of Queensland.