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October 10, 2005
MPS Iceland 10: Liberal science and the future
The last session in Reykjavik was about Science, Liberty and Property. It is interesting that issues of science and technology now have reached the agenda of classical liberalism. It is a tell tale sign of a changing political debate. First, let me say that the development is most positive, but that it still needs further debate and identifying of the core issues and what disciplines to use in a classical liberal debate.
Dr. Roger Bate discussed the recent droughts and locust invasions in Africa, which have been blamed on climate change. Bate showed the problems that have been brought on by the Stockholm convention on pollutants, and gave the alternative of the Botswana success story.
Michael De Alessi discussed the hunting of whales. The International Whaling Commission could be seen as a cartel to maintain whale prices, since there are no property rights for whales. Thus the whales are subject to the tragedy of the commons. Back in the 70's saving the whales was in fashion, the problems was that the IWC had no teeth to enforce bans or limitations, thus they differentiated between various spieces of whales. Driven by environmentalist organizations a moratorium on the hunt was created in 1986. Instead of controlling the hunt they stopped it, but still with providing exceptions for some types of whale-catching. De Alessi rightly pointed out that this moratorium has been problematic, and has more to do with politics than science. The bureaucratic political management of the IWC has failed, because of the lack of property rights, and it should be possible to depolitize the issue. After all it would be possible to RFID-tag the whales and reach a positive use of the whales, instead of either overwhaling or the moratorium (which is also difficult to enforce completely) and checking the numbers of different spieces of whales. Some spieces are now more abundant than ever but still considered threatened. The IWC is too slow to react to political and scientific realities, and with few rational reasons left to oppose whaling, the anti-whaling camp increasingly resorts to theatrics and exaggerations.
I think that it is of greatest importance that liberals discuss ecology in order to give a good base for our ideas. It does matter a lot if you see nature as a static, pristine state of balance that you can return to and that has been "upset" by human activities, or as a dynamic system, influenced by many factors and with no given "end" towards striving, instead open for human evaluation. I would say that the current scientific consensus in many ways gives its support to a liberal position. The underlying theories do however influence quite a lot on what you perceive as issues and problems, and possible solutions that are available and practical.
Dr. Kari Stefansson of deCode Genetics was invited as a speaker. He did a good job at presenting the interesting initiative of creating a database of all Icelanders' genome for research (since Icelanders' are genetically a quite homogenous population). The benefits are of course immense for the field of pharmacogenomics.
But there is reason to be hopeful for a bit unexpected reason, that show that the debate has gone in a liberal direction. I do not think that the debate of the 21st century will be about "should we use our knowledge of the genome or not?"- I think we're past that, genomics and biotechnology are already here and will be used. The main issue will be on how we will use them. Certainly, many whant to regulate them so much that they prove ineffectual, but there is also a point for liberals to examine of how these technologies could be used to increase personal integrity while reaping all its medical benefits. My questions to Dr. Kari on how these developments would lead to not only curative medicine, but also personalized preventative and augmenting medicine went unanswered, as well as how we could ensure informed consent for open genetic databases, and insuring that they are used for specific purposes. These are burning issues that are serious troubles for the present "one-size-fits-all" public health care systems.
That is how emerging technologies could be used to the benefit of spreading classical liberal ideas, the pose new questions and open up new opportunities. If you have the base of science covered you could well end up asking precisely the right questions for tomorrow, and thus define them.
Posted by Waldemar at October 10, 2005 11:29 AM