Academia often provides a veneer of legitimacy for people to say insane and evil things.
That’s certainly the case for Parker Crutchfield, a professor at Western Michigan University’s medical school who teaches medical ethics.
To put it simply, Crutchfield has an obsession with covertly injecting people with substances to create a more “moral” world — all in the name of the greater good.
Yes, really. In his book, Moral Enhancement and the Public Good, Crutchfield argues, per the book’s description, “that everyone should be administered a substance that makes us better people.”
He only wants the enlightened few of the world — himself among them — to know the world is being mind-controlled.
The book’s description goes on to make clear that Crutchfield doesn’t want people to know they are being injected with drugs that alter their actions and moral compass. He only wants the enlightened few of the world — himself among them — to know the world is being mind-controlled.
“Furthermore,” the book’s description says, “he argues that it should be administered without our knowledge. That is, moral bioenhancement should be both compulsory and covert.”
This has been the plot of many a dystopian novel. In The Giver by Lois Lowry, for instance, citizens are made to take a medication that prevents them from having romantic or sexual feelings, leaving the government to create new people via “birthmothers.”
In that book, people at least know they are taking a pill, even if they don’t know what it does. But that’s not good enough for Crutchfield. He thinks everyone would be better off if they didn’t know that they were being given a mind-altering substance. This is because the covert administration of the substances would result in more people receiving them. “If the program were covert,” he writes in a related paper (titled “Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert”), “people would be unaware of the intervention, and so would not be in a position to avoid it, resulting in many fewer people failing to receive the intervention.”
Additionally, people who know that a mind-altering substance is being administered to them against their wishes will suffer. So Crutchfield believes it will be better for these people not to suffer and to instead be controlled without their knowledge. He explains: “Some of these people who know that their moral capacities are being restricted, will desire to not be so restricted. Thus, the desires of these people will be frustrated, which results in suffering.”
Crutchfield thinks through how he could secretly administer these medications. He plots that they could be delivered via vaccine (by doctors who don’t know what they’re administering), “by way of the public water supply,” “through forced air systems in public buildings,” or “some combination of these.”
*****
For Crutchfield, it is not enough to keep his obsession merely theoretical. Last year, he wrote up a paper arguing one way his elitist group should make people more “moral.” They should, he wrote, spread ticks throughout the world that infect people with a disease, alpha-gal syndrome, that makes them allergic to meat. This is because, in his assessment, eating meat is morally wrong.
“Among the best and most widely accepted arguments in applied ethics are those concluding that eating meat is morally wrong,” he writes. In support of this, Crutchfield points to Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation.
He further grounds his argument for vegetarianism, writing, “If there are strong moral reasons to not eat meat, then there is a pro tanto obligation to not eat meat.”
Crutchfield is very clear that he doesn’t just think this is a good idea. No, he believes scientists have a moral obligation to figure out how to spread tick-borne alpha-gal syndrome to as many people as possible.
“We aim to establish the main claim that we should promote the proliferation of AGS by promoting the ticks that transmit it,” he writes, going on to say, “If we are right, then today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation.”
The fact that this is a damaging disease that causes anaphylaxis, hives, and gastrointestinal issues when someone eats meat, and has, in some cases, been fatal, is no problem for him.
It fits (supposedly) into his earlier theory that a drug that morally enhances people ought to be covertly administered to the world. And therefore it should be imposed on people.
“Thus, [due to having alpha-gal syndrome] they eat less mammalian meat, which is an improvement in their capacity for moral behavior. It helps them satisfy their obligation not to eat meat, an obligation they would otherwise be disinclined to satisfy,” he writes. “In short, when a tick sucks human blood and transmits AGS, it enhances the moral capacities of the person it bites; the AGS-transmitting tick is a moral bioenhancer. The more they transmit AGS, the better they and the world will be.”
Parker Crutchfield believes society would be morally better if we all had a disease that prevented us from eating meat, and therefore, he believes we have a moral obligation to spread ticks bearing that disease all over the world. That’s his argument. And this paper was published in Bioethics, which is supposedly a journal of repute. It is ranked No. 4 among medical ethics journals.
It is amusing that in his section addressing counterarguments, Crutchfield doesn’t bother to answer the most obvious arguments. For instance, the fact that it’s obviously wrong to purposefully infect people with a disease. Or the fact that forcing people in Africa not to eat meat would cause scores of children to die from malnutrition. Instead, he argues that it’s critical these ticks and the disease they bear be spread covertly. This is, of course, in line with his long history of wanting to secretly spread mind- and morality-altering drugs.
Laughably, Crutchfield believes only tiny indigenous tribes, such as the Makah tribe in Washington state, which hunted whales, should be exempted from tick-borne alpha-gal syndrome for cultural reasons. People from European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures, he posits, don’t have a cultural relationship with meat sufficient enough to be worthy of honoring. “[T]he vast majority of human beings lack a special right to observe meat-eating as a protected cultural practice,” he says.
*****
Crutchfield spouts insanities with absolute confidence in academic journals, but, when asked to account for those insanities, he shrivels back quickly.
When the College Fix last year asked Crutchfield about his argument that spreading the tick-borne disease is a moral necessity, he immediately claimed his paper was just theoretical.
When asked if his paper advocates for the spread of alpha-gal syndrome, he responded, “No.” He, according to the College Fix, described the paper as “a hypothetical ethical framework for discussion.”
Crutchfield also revealed to the College Fix that he himself eats meat — despite his claims that it is so obvious that meat-eating is morally wrong.
It’s sad to think that this is what medical students at Western Michigan University are being subjected to. And it’s sad to realize that this is what passes for refined discourse in academia.
Still, I’ll be on the lookout to see what Parker comes up with next. I bet he can come up with something even more insane.
READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes:
