ethics

Corporatocracy and Me

R. Horton

The East India Company was the first modern corporation,

And it is credited with introducing the world to markets that are free,

But it brought the free market enforced by the world’s largest standing army.

It was the beginning of colonialism, imperialism, and Corporatocracy.

The EIC introduced the world to spices, tea, and global slavery.

Some in the United States rebelled with a giant tea party,

It set off a revolution but didn’t bring down corporate rule,

The robber baron bosses soon controlled trade, news, and even schools.

We may think their practices went against the principles of enlightenment.

But the EIC employed such men as John Locke, JS Mill, and Jeremy Bentham.

So the first corporation took control of public attitudes and education.

Promulgating equality for all European, land-owning men.

While denying rights to all those considered less than human.

When the US tried to recognise non-white men with an amendment

Giving them equal protection from abuse and harassment,

The railroad said, “Hey, corporations are people, too,”

And the courts went along as they always do.

 

Well, what’s past is past, and now it’s all good.

We’ve grown used to the idea of corporate personhood.

Citizens United taught us money is speech

You have a voice, but Exxon’s has more reach.

And Monsanto, now Bayer, wants to feed the entire globe,

By controlling food, seeds, farming, drugs, and microbes.

You have no other choice than to just trust them,

As manufacturers lead us on a race to the bottom.

Apple computers are built in factories with suicide nets.

Because conditions are so bad workers prefer death.

Our clothes are made in sweatshops where workers burn.

We’ve no choice to buy them is all that we’ve learned.

In 2007, the financial sector destroyed the economy,

But workers bailed them out with hard-earned money.

Now we’ve cut funding for public education.

Replacing it with the public/private partnership.

Giving business control of science, arts, and research.

IF you want unbiased info, you’re left in the lurch.

But what about corporations great philanthropy?

Don’t They give developmental aid from sense of charity?

No, They buy up or steal resources and flood markets with free food,

Destroying the economy and local businesses for good.

You can scream about Trump or any other entity,

But corporations are your true enemy.

 

US and UK Pudding Differences

R. Horton

Americans are sometimes confused by how Brits use the word “pudding.” In the UK, “pudding” basically just means dessert, so anything sweet could be a pudding. For example, what Americans call pudding (something kind of similar to a blancmange) would be a pudding, so it is possible to have an American pudding for your pudding.

But you would never have a Yorkshire pudding for your pudding, because a Yorkshire pudding isn’t sweet after all, unless it is used to make a Dutch IMG_1026Baby, which is like a sweet Yorkshire pudding sort of. A Dutch Baby enrages some Brits but not others.

No one would have a Black Pudding for pudding, though, because it is blood sausage, and I don’t think anyone would have a Suet Pudding for pudding, either, as I can’t imagine anyone ever eating a Suet Pudding for any reason sort of imminent starvation. American’s might choose a Steak and Kidney pudding before opting for a Suet Pudding, but not by much.

You might be excused for thinking a Christmas Pudding is a Black Pudding, but they are two different things. A Christmas Pudding is dark in colour but sweet, in a way that some people might find tempting to try.

Bob War (a humane farming manifesto)

R. Horton

I was an adult before I realized that barbed wire is not called Bob War, because that was how my grandfather pronounced it, and he happened to be the person who mentioned it to me most often, as he was the person who would always tell us kids that we needed to help repair the fence. Some concerned neighbour would call to tell him some of the cows were out, and he’d tell us to grab some Bob War and git in the truck. We’d drive out to the cow lease, which was several hundred acres, and find the wayward cows, round ‘em up, and repair the fence. Sometimes getting the cows back on the lease was the easy part, and sometimes it took all day.

Repairing the fence was always about the same. First, cut the broken wire and get it outbarbed wire of the way. Second, nail a new piece of wire to a fence post with a fencing staple. You have to get the staple just inside of a barb to keep the wire from slipping through. The hard part is stretching the wire to the next fence post enough to get a barb there to use it to secure the other end of the wire. Sometimes my job was to get the wire in the fencing tool and pull it around the post using the post and tool for leverage. It wasn’t really easy. It required all my limited strength, and it caused me no small amount of anxiety, as my grandfather was not easy going about it. My efforts were usually subject to some harsh criticism.

In the end, though, the cows were always contained, and the fence was always mended – one way or the other. I never felt much happier about it, but that’s how life is when you raise cows. And the cows were fairly happy, I guess, having plenty of room to roam. It made you wonder why they’d ever want to escape in the first place, though sometimes you knew.

Every farmer needs a few bulls, of course, but not too many, so each year we’d cull some of the bulls from the herd and take them to auction where they were bought and either put to pasture or slaughtered. Unless they were breeding stock, the bull calves were castrated and sent on their way to become steers, as steer meat is more desirable than bull meat. I sometimes participated in the making of young steers. You may think the testicles are whacked off with a big knife or something, but we had a device with a strong rubber ring attached and stretched open. We’d pull the testicles through the open ring and then remove the device, which meant the ring constricted around the base of the scrotum. It’s anyone’s guess whether this was more or less pleasant than a big knife.

It wasn’t my concern to know what happened to the calves we sold. I do remember, though, returning to the lease one evening to find a mother cow wandering around the perimeter of the property braying for her calf. She was well-fed and cared for, but she depended on her son’s executioner for winter food, protection, and medication. This is humane farming, you see, not the horrible things you see in the smuggled films from factory farms.

I don’t know how long Mom continued searching and braying for her lost one.

In US, Illness is Financial Anxiety

R. Horton

In August 2016, I moved from Texas to the northwest of England. Last summer, I while walking in the local park I slipped on a stepping stone and sprained my ankle. As the pain pulsed through my body and my ankle began to swell, I began to wonder whether I needed an ambulance, an x-ray, or possibly even surgery.

I did not think about the cost of an ambulance or whether my insurance might refuse to pay for it, the cost of an x-ray if needed, the price of surgery, or even co-pays for medication or any possible treatments. I was worried only about my condition and getting better.

I enjoy hiking, cycling, dirt bike riding and other sports with risk of injury, so I’m not unaccustomed to dealing with the occasional injury. With similar injuries in the United States, though, I always thought immediately of the cost. Mind you, I was never uninsured, but even with insurance proved by the college where I taught, a shattered tibial plateau in 2001 that required two surgeries and months of physical therapy left me with surmountable but daunting bills long after I had recovered. Since 2001, prices have risen dramatically along with higher deductibles, narrower networks, and higher copays for treatment.

In the United States, illness or injury means an immediate calculation of costs and threats to financial security even for working people securely in the middle class. For others, the situation is much worse. Of course, long-term illness or injury can throw middle-class workers out of work, which means they will lose their insurance, unless they can afford COBRA payments to maintain their insurance for a limited time after employment. In my experience, COBRA payments are much higher than people expect or are able to pay.

As a student in medical humanities, I read many narratives of illness. They all focused on suffering from the condition, facing mortality, finding or making meaning in the face of prolonged pain, but not so much about what truly horrifies Americans when they fall ill. Illness or injury should be a time to focus on healing, if possible, or confronting or preparing for prolonged pain in the case of a chronic condition, or to prepare for death in the case of terminal illnesses. It should not be a time to worry about financial ruin for oneself and one’s family.

The study of medical ethics offers many opportunities to contemplate challenging philosophical problems with rich and varied intellectual interest. However, access to healthcare is by far the most pressing problem in the United States. Anyone concerned about illness, suffering, and medicine must assume the obligation to relieve the suffering created by unaffordable healthcare.

 

 

Payment as Coercion: Researchers Versus Research Participants

R. Horton

In the world of medical research, ethicists say it is unethical to pay a substantial amount of money to research participants. If you give a hefty sum for participation, people might sign up for risky research that they would otherwise avoid, so they can only receive minimal compensation for their time. Large payments exploit them and violate their autonomy by removing their ability to refuse participation. Of course, people with little money and few resources will sign up for risky experiments, anyway, because they need the money, even if the sum is paltry. Poverty reduces one’s autonomy and makes one ripe for exploitation, unfortunately.

The other way to look at it, of course, is that individuals are participating in research that may yield lucrative products, may cause unpleasant or harmful side effects, and may be quite inconvenient, indeed. For loaning their bodies to this unpredictable, but likely profitable, enterprise, it might make sense to compensate them more generously for their time and willingness to risk their own health. After all, it is common for workers who engage in other types of risky work to be compensated above normal pay scale. So, I say the industries should compensate their research participants in ways that are commensurate with the risk and inconvenience they are accepting.

Finally, if payment is coercive for research participants, surely it is coercive for researchers as well. Even workers with six-figure salaries can be exploited and manipulated with large sums of money and other favors. Without large payments, doctors and researchers might well be doing the work they are doing, but surely large payments (much larger than any research participant ever gets) must compel them to conduct their research in ways they would not in the absence of such large payments. We might say they have, in effect, had their autonomy stripped from them through coercive payments.

And so it goes.

How the Affordable Care Act has Affected Lives

R. Horton1 Comment

The following was written in response to a Republican politician’s request for stories about how the Affordable Care Act has affected constituents. He was hoping for horror stories, but many people are depending on the ACA for life-prolonging treatment. Her story is here:

In December 2015, our adult daughter began to have debilitating headaches. Then one morning she woke up and couldn’t focus her eyes. She saw her optometrist who sent her to an ophthalmologist who sent her to a neurological ophthalmologist. But it was the end of the year, and her insurance plan was discontinued, and she had to switch plans and start over with all new doctors. I’ll make a long story short. It took 10 months and too many tests and doctors to count for her to be diagnosed with pseudo tumor cerebri, a neurological condition that is characterized by increased intracranial pressure. The pressure was so great that it increased the pressure on her optic nerves and optic disks causing her eyes to cross. She was forced to wear prism lenses over her glasses to avoid seeing double.

After a while, even those weren’t sufficient for her to see well. With treatment, the pressure was reduced, but her eye muscles were damaged, and last December she had extensive eye surgery to straighten her eyes. They are still well aligned (thank God), but the pressure in her optic nerves and her right optic disk have begun to rise again. She is scheduled to have more tests to try to determine if she can have some stents placed to keep the pressure down. She is on some very strong drugs that have significant side effects, but she is managing. She also is facing having regular lumbar punctures or having a permanent shunt placed to keep the volume of cerebrospinal fluid down.

Our daughter works in a skilled professional position but is hired on a contract basis and has no benefits. She was only able to get health insurance through the ACA marketplace. If she hadn’t had that insurance, she would probably either be blind or dead by now. Even if we had sold our home and cashed out our retirement, we probably could not have paid for more than 1 to 2 years of her medical expenses. Is the system perfect? No! But it saved my child’s life. I’m sure that there are many similar stories. So, obviously, I am a supporter of the ACA. Its repeal would have devastating results for so many people.

Personally, I believe that the problem lies with giving too much power to the private insurance companies. Maybe that’s a political judgement; I’m not sure. What I know is that the CEO of our insurance company, Aetna, makes over $40,000,000 each year. I cannot begin to image how that is merited.

I suspect that you are a supporter of the state high risk insurance pool. Here is a link to an article that reviews those pools, and the results are disturbing.

I ask that you read it with an open mind. I know that there are problems with the ACA, but I also know that the ACA has ensured coverage for millions of people who would otherwise have NO care at all. PLEASE, do not repeal this life-giving law.

 

Ask an Ethicist: Expanding Fast-Food Outlets

R. Horton

Just to be clear, I wrote both the question and answer for this.

Question: I’m a CEO of a large fast-food chain. Obamacare (or the Affordable Care Act) requires me to provide health insurance to employees working more than 30 hours each week. Providing insurance is expensive and I would rather not have to hire so many part-time workers to avoid providing benefits. If Obamacare is not repealed, I won’t be able to expand and create more jobs. How can I ethically expand my business without incurring more expenses?

Answer: Any law that prevents you from opening more outlets should be expanded, but that’s just my opinion. Limiting the number of restaurants you open will encourage locally-owned businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs to open their own establishments serving their friends and neighbors. Chains such as yours destroy local economies and limit workers to minimum-wage jobs with no benefits.

What happens as a result of your not offering health insurance and other benefits? The most obvious consequence is that your employees are likely to not be able to go to the doctor, so they will be sicker, and they will come to work sick because you also do not offer them sick time. Having employees work while they are sick might help explain why noroviruses spread so quickly, but I don’t guess you are concerned with that.

Keeping employees part-time to avoid giving them benefits also means that they must work more than one job in order to survive. This in turn means they are not available to their families and cannot pursue further education. The system you want to maintain keeps workers sick, uneducated, tired, and disconnected. While having a constant pool of desperate job applicants probably sounds like a business bonanza to you, it has consequences. If you haven’t noticed, societies filled with people unable to develop personally and professionally, care for themselves, or seek leisure activities are unhappy societies, and that affects everyone.

What would happen if you provided health insurance? Your employees could afford to work only one job. You could have a more stable workforce, meaning your employees would be more reliable, better trained, and more prepared for advancement. It would mean your employees could get treatment for illnesses and come to work in better health. If you and other businesses provided health insurance, it would mean workers would have more income. More money for workers means expanding markets. And that means you may be able to open a few more outlets after all.