The Hampton Roads, VA, Daily Press is beginning a four-part series on a deliberate misinformation campaign by the Department of Defense regarding adverse health incidents among troops who were given controversial anthrax vaccinations.

The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000 hospitalizations involving troops who’d taken the anthrax vaccine, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed.

Instead, a parade of generals and Defense Department officials told Congress and the public that fewer than 100 people were hospitalized or became seriously ill after receiving the shot from 1998 through 2000.

They also showed Congress written policies that required public reports to be filed for hospitalizations, serious illnesses and cases where someone missed 24 hours or more of duty.

But only a sliver of those cases were reported, while the rest were withheld from Congress and the public, records obtained by the Daily Press show.

Critics of the vaccine, veterans’ advocates and congressional staffers say the Pentagon’s deliberate low-balling of hospitalizations helped persuade Congress and the public that the vaccine was safe.

Keeping the actual number of illnesses secret contributed to a shorter list of government-recognized side effects for the drug, giving patients and physicians a false idea of what might constitute a vaccine-related illness or problem. Doctors are expected to know the full list of side effects and alert federal drug safety officials whenever they see a repeat of those symptoms.

Repeated evidence of the same adverse side effect after a vaccination is one of the most telling signs of a systematic problem with a drug or vaccine, as opposed to a coincidental relationship, vaccine safety experts say.

(It should be noted that these are all hospitalizations among people who had taken the vaccine. There is no reason to believe these are all due to effects of the vaccine. But that’s not the point.)

The comments that can and should be made about this are all too obvious. What’s depressing is that making them will have absolutely no effect – on this case, on future behavior by the Pentagon and the Bush administration, or on the right of citizens, including the military, to control their own healthcare and to exercise their liberty free of governmental control.

Hat tip: HealthLawProf Blog.

A researcher from Georgetown U. Law School has published a paper arguing that data from studies of people’s intuitive reactions to “trolley problem” scenarios (a classic ethical hypothetical first posed by Philippa Foot, in which one has the option of either allowing a runaway trolley to hit a group of people in its path, or stopping it in a way that involves killing just one person who would otherwise have lived if you hadn’t intervened) demonstrates that they have similar sets of intuitive moral principles that reside below the level of cognitive awareness.

Aspects of the Theory of Moral Cognition: Investigating Intuitive Knowledge of the Prohibition of Intentional Battery and the Principle of Double Effect

Abstract:
Where do our moral intuitions come from? Are they innate? Does the brain contain a module specialized for moral judgment? Does the human genetic program contain instructions for the acquisition of a sense of justice or moral sense? Questions like these have been asked in one form or another for centuries. In this paper we take them up again, with the aim of clarifying them and developing a specific proposal for how they can be empirically investigated. The paper presents data from six trolley problem studies of over five hundred individuals, including one group of Chinese adults and one group of American children, which suggest that both adults and children ages 8-12 rely on intuitive knowledge of moral principles, including the prohibition of intentional battery and the principle of double effect, to determine the permissibility of actions that require harming one individual in order to prevent harm to others. Significantly, the knowledge in question appears to be merely tacit: when asked to explain or justify their judgments, subjects were consistently incapable of articulating the operative principles on which their judgments appear to have been based. We explain these findings with reference to an analogy to human linguistic competence. Just as normal persons are typically unaware of the principles guiding their linguistic intuitions, so too are they often unaware of the principles guiding their moral intuitions. These studies pave the way for future research by raising the possibility that specific poverty of the stimulus arguments can be formulated in the moral domain. Differences between our approach to moral cognition and those of Piaget (1932), Kohlberg (1981), and Greene et al. (2001) are also discussed.

Mikhail, John, “Aspects of the Theory of Moral Cognition: Investigating Intuitive Knowledge of the Prohibition of Intentional Battery and the Principle of Double Effect” (May 2002). Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 762385

Without reading the whole paper, it’s hard to tell exactly what argument is being made here. However, this seems to me to smack of the common sociobiological strategy of observing a behavioral pattern and then asserting that the fact that it is common proves it must have a biological origin. In particular, statements such as “data from six trolley problem studies . . . suggest that both adults and children ages 8-12 rely on intuitive knowledge of moral principles” implies both that there are such things as intuitive moral principles and that they are relied on in making the decisions the respondents make to the problems. But even if moral responses are hardwired, as sociobiologists tell us, and even if these responses cover such scenarios as the trolley problem, it is unlikely they take the form of “principles” except in the sense in which they result in behavior patterns that could be predicted by reference to moral principles. That is to say, the brain doesn’t work by way of principles, but by way of a network of mutually-reinforcing weighted signals; there is no more “principle” consulted by the brain in adducing an intuitive response to a moral problem than there is a rule saying “be aroused by attractive persons” that results in sexual excitation, or a rule that says “swing now” that results in hitting a baseball.

It is common to describe empirically-observed behavior as if it was rational-rule-driven (“the subordinate ape engages in submissive posturing to avoid conflict with the dominant ape”), but this has to be understood as an abstraction from the actual phenomenon in question. That’s fine in most cases. But when you are attempting to infer, from observed behavior, general behavior-guiding principles for the purpose of establishing a behavior-guiding system of principles, i.e., a moral theory, then the reification of the “principle” analogy becomes a problem.

It seems even more apparent that that is what Mikhail is doing when he says “Just as normal persons are typically unaware of the principles guiding their linguistic intuitions, so too are they often unaware of the principles guiding their moral intuitions.” Again, the assumption is made that “principles” are somehow consulted in the brain, both to produce effective linguistic behavior and to drive intuition-guided responses to moral scenarios. But they are not. In the linguistic case, the inference of principles contributes to the development of a theory that describes how language can be said to work – as long as we don’t believe the brain actually works by way of the same rules that structure the theory we use to describe what the brain does. In the moral case, however, we construct moral theories not to describe human behavior, but to prescribe it. Mikhail is observing behavior to craft a rule-based system to model that behavior, which he then apparently regards as the correct system for determining that behavior where it is not automatic (e.g., among persons with “defective” intuitions, or in scenarios that do not immediately generate any governing intuition).

This is a perilous enterprise for two reasons, one obvious and one less so. The obvious one is a variation of the “is/ought” problem – the fact that certain behavior is what people do has nothing to do with whether it is what they ought to do. The less obvious reason is the one I have been emphasizing above: it is a form of circular reasoning to assume the brain works by way of moral principles, infer those principles from the way the brain works, and then declare that those are the principles by which the brain ought to work. And, aside from circularity, it is false on its face because the brain does not work by way of principles except in a metaphorical sense.

There is certainly a place for prescriptive moral principles – it is the place of normative ethics. But we must find or create the right ethical principles ourselves – not merely observe them in the modal intuitive responses of random persons to moral hypotheticals. Those responses neither encode moral principles nor establish moral norms. The local maxima of psycho-physiological signalling networks, Mr. Mikhail, are what we are put on this earth to rise above.

Hat tip: HealthLawProf Blog (in an interesting roundup of articles on “the principle of double effect” in various contexts).