Currently browsing posts about: Ethics

[Sorry for my error: This post did not get sent out yesterday to subscribers so I am re-posting it.  Apologies if you are getting it twice.]

Let me start by confessing that I did not review the references in the MAHA Comission report I wrote about last week—except for mine.

The reference to my book, Food Politics, is a bit garbled (In Food Politics?  No.  This is Food Politics), but these are basically OK.  It’s easy to make mistakes like that one and I rely on the help of many proofreaders and factcheckers to try to avoid such errors in my published books and articles.  I checked a couple of the other references related to food topics and they seemed basically OK too.

So I was surprised by the report from NOTUS that The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist,

This finding was immediately attributed by the New York Times and other sources to the report’s having been referenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), a tool well known to be scientifically inaccurate and to make things up.

To immediately plagiarize (well, quote) Ted Kyle at ConscienHealth: The MAHA Report: Make America Hallucinate Again.

I was also surprised—no, dismayed—by the administration’s response to these discoveries.

According to FoodFix,

White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt told reporters…“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed,” Leavitt said. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that’s ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”

FoodFix also quotes the HHS Press Secretary:

Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children…“It’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.”

Formatting issues?  Oh come on.

Calley Means, the top advisor to RFK Jr, posted “The least surprising thing about the MAHA Report is that the media and failed medical leaders are talking about footnotes instead of its actual content.”

Sorry.  Footnotes matter.  Everything in a report making policy recommendations depends on where its information comes from.  Hallucinating references implies hallucinating data.

The MAHA Report is now being continually updated to fix the citation problem.

Some of the updates are introducing other errors. 

Yikes.

The Washington Post has published details: The MAHA Report’s AI fingerprints, annotated.

I was interviewed by Reuters about all this:

Nobody has ever accused RFK Jr. of academic rigor…The speed (of the MAHA report) suggests that it could not have been vetted carefully and must have been whisked through standard clearance procedures. The citation problem suggests a reliance on AI.”

Science magazine headlined the downplaying of the fake citations and pointed out the irony:

Problems with the MAHA report’s integrity came to light even as Kennedy has threatened to prevent government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, which he claims are “corrupt” and controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy has instead proposed a state-run alternative.

Discovery of the fake citations also came just days after President Donald Trump unveiled an executive order that called for “Restoring Gold Science Standards” to government activities…One goal, Trump wrote, is to ensure that “Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”

Yeah, right.  The MAHA report cites articles—26—from those “corrupt” journals as sources for its statements.

All of this has led cartoonists like Clay Bennett to ridicule the report.

Here’s another good one from Carlos Muñoz.

Ridicule—or lack of credibility if you prefer—is one reason why this matters.

What I had drilled into me as a graduate student in molecular biology was the importance of reading references, and never under any circumstances citing a reference I hadn’t read.

Why?  Because the credibility of my work depends on where I got my information—how I know what I claim to know.

When I managed the editorial process for the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, checking references was crucial to supporting the report’s recommendations.  It took years to get the report out, not least because of the enormous amount of vetting involved—from scientists, but also government agencies.

This report, unfortunately, was a rush job.  It astonished me that it got done in only three months (I really want to know who wrote it).

It’s one thing to make editorial errors in citing references (try as hard as I can to get them right, errors invariably get overlooked).

But this report had references that were made up.  Hallucinated.  This means nobody looked at them.

If its references are not reliable, nothing else in the report can be trusted either.

And that’s a shame.  It said a lot of things that badly needed to be said.

Too many corners were cut in throwing this together at the last minute.  I know this was a rush job because I have four versions of the report.

• Version 1: May 22 early morning.  It has no references at all.  My first reaction: What?  No references?
• Version 2: Also May 22, but later in the morning. It has references but not much in the way of formatting.
• Version 3: May 22. This is the one released to the public.
• Version 4: This is the one online on May 31.  Other versions, perhaps multiple, came in between and may come after.

None of this bodes well for the future of MAHA initiatiatives.  Sad.

 

Let me start by confessing that I did not review the references in the MAHA Comission report I wrote about last week—except for mine.

The reference to my book, Food Politics, is a bit garbled (In Food Politics?  No.  This is Food Politics), but these are basically OK.  It’s easy to make mistakes like that one and I rely on the help of many proofreaders and factcheckers to try to avoid such errors in my published work.  I checked a couple of the other references related to food topics and they seemed basically OK too.

So I was surprised by the report from NOTUS that The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist,

This finding was immediately attributed by the New York Times and other sources to the report’s having been referenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), a tool well known to be scientifically inaccurate and to make things up.

To immediately plagiarize (well, quote) Ted Kyle at ConscienHealth: The MAHA Report: Make America Hallucinate Again.

I was also surprised—no, dismayed—by the administration’s response to these discoveries.

According to FoodFix,

White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt told reporters…“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed,” Leavitt said. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that’s ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”

FoodFix also quotes the HHS Press Secretary:

Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children…“It’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.”

Formatting issues?  Oh come on.

Calley Means, the top advisor to RFK Jr, posted “The least surprising thing about the MAHA Report is that the media and failed medical leaders are talking about footnotes instead of its actual content.”

Sorry.  Footnotes matter.  Everything in a report making policy recommendations depends on where its information comes from.  Hallucinating references implies hallucinating data.

The MAHA Report is now being continually updated to fix the citation problem.

Some of the updates are introducing other errors. 

Yikes.

The Washington Post has published details: The MAHA Report’s AI fingerprints, annotated.

I was interviewed by Reuters about all this:

Nobody has ever accused RFK Jr. of academic rigor…The speed (of the MAHA report) suggests that it could not have been vetted carefully and must have been whisked through standard clearance procedures. The citation problem suggests a reliance on AI.”

Science magazine headlined the downplaying of the fake citations and pointed out the irony:

Problems with the MAHA report’s integrity came to light even as Kennedy has threatened to prevent government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, which he claims are “corrupt” and controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy has instead proposed a state-run alternative.

Discovery of the fake citations also came just days after President Donald Trump unveiled an executive order that called for “Restoring Gold Science Standards” to government activities…One goal, Trump wrote, is to ensure that “Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”

Yeah, right.

All of this has led cartoonists like Clay Bennett to ridicule the report.

Here’s another good one from Carlos Muñoz.

Ridicule—or lack of credibility if you prefer—is one reason why this matters.

What I had drilled into me as a graduate student in molecular biology was the importance of reading references, and never under any circumstances citing a reference I hadn’t read.

Why?  Because the credibility of my work depends on where I got my information—how I know what I claim to know.

When I managed the editorial process for the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, checking references was crucial to supporting the report’s recommendations.  It took years to get the report out, not least because of the enormous amount of vetting involved—from scientists, but also government agencies.

This report, unfortunately, was a rush job.  It astonished me that it got done in only three months (I really want to know who wrote it).

It’s one thing to make editorial errors in citing references (try as hard as I can to get them right, errors invariably get overlooked).

But this report had references that were made up.  Hallucinated.  This means nobody looked at them.

If its references are not reliable, nothing else in the report can be trusted either.

And that’s a shame.  It said a lot of things that badly needed to be said.

Too many corners were cut in throwing this together at the last minute.  I know this was a rush job because I have four versions of the report.

• Version 1: May 22 early morning.  It has no references at all.  My first reaction: What?  No references?
• Version 2: Also May 22, but later in the morning. It has references but not much in the way of formatting.
• Version 3: May 22. This is the one released to the public.
• Version 4: This is the one online on May 31.  Other versions, perhaps multiple, came in between and may come after.

None of this bodes well for the future of MAHA initiatiatives.  Sad.

 

Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A Goldthwaite, eds.  Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically.  New York University Press, 2024.

I did a blurb for the back cover:

In Ethical Eating, authors from all walks of life relate their daily struggles—moral as well as economic—to eat diets that promote human and environmental health and meet deeply held principles of food equity and social justice.  Their accounts of these struggles are sometimes funny, always moving, and entirely recognizable by anyone trying to eat ethically.

This book contains several dozen short-to-medium length essays describing authors’ struggles—I use the word advisedly—to figure out how to eat in today’s impossibly complicated food system.

The book is designed to be used in food literature courses, and I can see why.

Each essay raises subject-to-debate issues about the costs and consequences of making principled dietary choices on a day-to-day basis while living with the usual complexities of life.

The writers are almost all unknown to me, so the book is an introduction to the concerns of people who care about the same issues I do, although often in very different ways.

Amazon has examples from the text and the Table of Contents .  Here’s a sample of the TOC—there’s much more in the book:

 

Alan Goldberg, editor (with Cara  Wychgram, associate editor). Feeding the World Well: A Framework for Ethical Food Systems.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.

This book contains papers presented at a symposium sponsored by Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Bloomberg School of Public Health in November 2018.  I was one of the presenters and my paper appears as Chapter 8.  Conflicts of Interest in Food and Nutrition Research, pages 89-97.

The book contains 31 chapters on ethical issues in food systems, specifically as they relate to the environment, producers and workers, public health, and animal welfare.  The book constitutes part of the Choose Food project, which seeks to identify the range of ethical concerns about food production and consumption.

I don’t ordinarily recommend multi-authored books, but this one is especially clear and well written thanks to the extraordinary leadership of Alan Goldbeg and the even more extraordinary editorial work of Cara  Wychgram.  The book reads as if it is written in one voice, which alone is a major achievement. 

I know this because my chapter is based on a transcript of my presentation, which Cara edited, and I think it reads clearly and well.   (Here is a draft of my chapter; you can decide for yourself).

If you are interested in what food ethics is all about, this is a great way to begin.  And a good time for it!

Christopher Schlottmann and Jeff Sebo.  Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach.  Routledge, 2018.

The authors are colleagues at NYU.  They asked me for a blurb which, after reading this book, I was honored to do.  Here’s what I said:

Schlottman and Sebo have produced an utterly superb analysis of the ethics of eating animals, brilliantly distinguished by crystal-clear thinking, accessible writing, and plenty of insight into values and sources of bias.  Every eater will have much to learn from this book.

The book goes from theory to practice and takes on all of the tough ethical issues involved in food production, food consumption, and food activism (legal and illegal).

The authors’ approach is impressive:

We designed this book to provide readers with both the critical thinking tools and basic concepts and information necessary to analyze the many challenges and values concerning food, animals, and the environment.  This includes explaining how to make clear and consistent arguments, how to assess the relationship between facts and values, how to assess the relationship between theory and practice, and how to think rigorously and systematically about the empirical impacts of food systems and the ethical questions that these impacts raise.

This is exactly what this book does.

Whether or not you choose to eat animal foods (and I do), the environmental, health, and moral issues raised by animal agriculture deserve serious discussion.  They get that discussion here.

Jonathan K. Crane.  Eating Ethically: Religion and Science for a Better Diet.  Columbia University Press, 2017.

I did a blurb for this one:

This entertaining and provocative book draws on biblical and philosophical sources to argue that eating is an act of ethics, and that we would all be happier and healthier if we adhered to the Bible’s dietary advice—eat enough, but not too much.  Anyone interested in food will be fascinated by the stories Jonathan Crane tells here.

Here’s an excerpt, to give you a taste of what it’s about:

I call this kind of discussion eating ethics.  Its ethics are not confined to philosophical schools of consequentialism (where the ends justify the means) or deontology (where an act is moral to the degree it complies with a preconceived duty or principle).  Rather, its ethics lie in the truth that eating is in and of itself an ethical enterprise, no matter how one thinks about it.  Just as eating is an inherently ethical enterprise, food itself is similarly an ethical construct: it is socially defined and defining, as demonstrated by conversation in dietetics…it directly impacts me the eater and the eaten, not to mention the contexts in which this eating occurs, inclusive of humans, other sentient creatures, the environment, and more, as food ethics readily explains.

The book ends with this statement:

For all of these reasons, how and why we eat are two of the most urgent and pressing ethical enterprises of our very existence, and they lie daily in our own hands and mouths.

Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, Tyler Doggett.  Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings.  Oxford, 2016

The back cover has a comment from me that must have been something I wrote when reviewing the manuscript for the publisher, who asked: “Who will want to read or use this?” I said—and meant:

This would be extremely useful for undergraduate courses in food ethics or contemporary food issues.  It would work well in courses on contemporary issues in food systems.  The topics are excellent.

OK, I’m biased.  It has two pieces from me in it, one an update on the report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Food Animal Production, which came out in 2008 (I was on that committee), and the other an excerpt from the 2007 edition of Food Politics.  It has loads of interesting excerpts from the work of lots of other people writing about food and ethics from different perspectives.  I really do think it would be fun to use this in a food ethics course or to read if you are just interested in what people are thinking about food ethics .

Terence Cuneo, Andrew Chignell, Matthew C. Halteman, editors. Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments over the Ethics of Eating.  Routledge, 2015.

I was happy to do a blurb for this book, having met Andrew Chignell and participated in an online course he ran at Cornell based on the book.

In recent years, I’ve seen an explosion of student and public interest in the politics and ethics of food.  It’s great to have philosophers contributing to this discussion, and this book explains why.

When thoughtful people differ about issues in food and nutrition, it isn’t always easy to decide what the right thing is to do.  Philosophers have ways of looking at controversial issues that help with such decisions.  This book lays out some typical arguments and explains how the major philosophical frameworks can help sharpen the discussion.