Evan Selinger, a super-sharp philosopher of technology up at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is always alerting me to interesting new essays and articles and this week he brought another important piece to my attention. It’s a short new article by Arturo Casadevall, Don Howard, and Michael J. Imperiale, entitled, “The Apocalypse as a Rhetorical Device in the Influenza Virus Gain-of-Function Debate.” The essay touches on something near and dear to my own heart: the misuse of rhetoric in debates over the risk trade-offs associated with new technology and inventions. Casadevall, Howard, and Imperiale seek to “focus on the rhetorical devices used in the debate [over infectious disease experiments] with the hope that an analysis of how the arguments are being framed can help the discussion.”
They note that “humans are notoriously poor at assessing future benefits and risks” and that this makes many people susceptible to rhetorical ploys based on the artificial inflation of risks. Their particular focus in this essay is the debate over so-called “gain-of-function” (GOF) experiments involving influenza virus, but what they have to say here about how rhetoric is being misused in that field is equally applicable to many other fields of science and the policy debates surrounding various issues. The last two paragraphs of their essay are masterful and deserve everyone’s attention: Continue reading →
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