Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse

Via Drudge:

From The Sunday Times
July 29, 2007

Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse
Jonathan Leake Science Editor
SCIENTISTS have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.

It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals.

Animal rights campaigners have condemned the research, saying that it is morally repugnant to create an animal doomed to mental suffering.

The mice were created by modifying their DNA to mimic a mutant gene first found in a Scottish family with a high incidence of schizophrenia, which affects about one in every 100 people. The mice’s brains were found to have features similar to those of humans with schizophrenia, such as depression and hyperactivity.

“These mutant mice may provide an important new tool for further study of the combinations of factors that underlie mental illnesses like schizophrenia and mood disorders,” said Takatoshi Hikida, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a leading researcher.

The egg cells of mice were genetically modified by inserting a gene associated with schizophrenia into their DNA. The eggs were fertilised and grown into viable baby mice using surrogate mothers.

Animal Aid, a campaign group, said rodents were not a reliable way of modelling human disease.

Links:
Online Video: Mice, Men and Mental illness; Animal Models of Human ...
Of mice and mental illness - Nature Neuroscience
Of mice and mental illness
Mental Illness and Genetic Research - Page 2
BBC NEWS Health 'Fear gene' could unlock mental illness
Animal Aid

The Papers of John C. Calhoun

edited by Dr. Clyde Wilson

I would like to read this volume:

VOLUME XXVIII
A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States
Edited by Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley B. Cook
The Papers of John C. Calhoun, Volume XXVIII is the final volume in a distinguished documentary edition, the first volume of which was published more than fifty years ago. While identical to others in the series in terms of typeface, binding, and letterpress printing, this volume does not contain any of John C. Calhoun's personal papers, rather it features Calhoun's only formal, scholarly writings on political science and political philosophy.

"A Disquisition on Government" is an examination of the first principles of political science, much in the model of Aristotle's Politics or Baron Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. It examines basic principles of politics, including concepts of sovereignty and personal liberty and the relationships between states and nations.

"A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States" is a focused study of American political thought and constitutional history since the ratification of the Constitution. It pays particular attention to antifederalist views of the Constitution, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of the 1790s, and the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Comparable to the Federalist, Calhoun's "Discourse" articulates a southern-based, states' rights interpretation of the Constitution and examines the course of American political history from the viewpoint of the southern statesman.

Calhoun began writing the essays around 1845. His "Disquisition" was near final form at the time of his death, but the "Discourse" was still an unpolished draft. A year after Calhoun's death in 1850, Richard Kenner Crallé, a former secretary in the Department of State and a friend of Calhoun's, was entrusted by the Calhoun heirs to edit the essays for publication. Since the Crallé edition, it has been assumed that the two essays were separate works. However, as the Calhoun Papers staff prepared the concluding volume of letters, speeches, and remarks, they discovered evidence that Calhoun had intended the two essays to be a single, unified work of political theory and a critical examination of America's remarkable experiment in republican government. Whether published separately or together, these essays are among the classical texts of American political thought.
(2003) 6 x 9, 254 pages, cloth, ISBN 1-57003-502-4, $59.95s
Order the Book

Ryan T. Anderson reviews Natural Law Liberalism

Printed in the April 16, 2007 issue of National Review

About Rights

RYAN T. ANDERSON

Pick your fight: the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, or the “clash of orthodoxies” between secular liberals and religious believers. To read much these days is to be assured that never has the world been more divided, or our nation so polarized.

Central to Western political liberalism is the notion that disagreement can be resolved through common deliberation — and that representative constitutional democracy is the best institution for such deliberation. This makes us think that any kind of clash can be solved through rational discussion of the truths we share. At the same time, however, our modern system is founded on skepticism about the ability of people and their governments to define and enforce a universal vision of the good life. This makes us think that there aren’t any real truths to be shared.

It is in response to such worries that Christopher Wolfe has written his new book, Natural Law Liberalism. Wolfe is a Marquette University political scientist who focused his early work on constitutional interpretation and judicial activism. He founded the American Public Philosophy Institute to support the efforts of such thinkers as Robert P. George, Russell Hittinger, and Hadley Arkes, who have been working to rearticulate the natural-law foundations of political life. Natural Law Liberalism is Wolfe’s contribution to the effort.

By liberalism, Wolfe means the whole range of modern political thought, from the early Enlightenment through the American Founding — the philosophical theory of government that emphasizes human equality, personal liberty, individual rights, participatory government, and the rule of law. And natural law, as Wolfe conceives it, is the long Western tradition of reflection on the nature of human flourishing and the rational principles that can guide human action and choice. His thesis is simple: If political liberalism is to justify itself at home and abroad, it must return to the classical tradition of Western thought and embrace natural-law theory as the account of its foundations.

The book’s argument has three parts. Wolfe begins by exposing the weaknesses of modern theories grounded in skepticism about the good life or in personal autonomy. Then he traces the historical development of liberalism and natural-law theory, showing how these traditions are compatible and mutually reinforcing. He ends with a brief sketch of natural-law liberalism, concluding that liberals should “ground their liberalism in natural-law philosophy,” while “natural lawyers should be liberals.”

Wolfe aims his criticism at several contemporary liberal theorists: John Rawls, Stephen Macedo, Amy Gutmann, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Some of these thinkers argue that there are purely political values that justify liberal democracy. These can be shared by all citizens, whatever their distinctive views about the good life, and the state must remain neutral between more comprehensive competing theories of human flourishing.

The other liberal theorists are — like natural-law thinkers — willing to ground political liberalism in direct appeals to the nature of human flourishing, but they define that flourishing in terms of autonomy and self-determination. Accordingly, they believe that the role of government is to secure the conditions for people to choose whatever they consider good. Think of the Supreme Court’s infamous 1992 “mystery” passage in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Wolfe contends that both of these approaches fail. He argues, for instance, that liberal professions of neutrality smuggle in question-begging assumptions that favor left-wing policy on contested moral issues — in other words, “neutrality liberalism” loads the dice by covertly appealing to the liberals’ own preferred conceptions of public reason, and therefore of human nature. In such questions as, e.g., the value of unborn human life or the public recognition of same-sex unions, the appeal to political neutrality results in an affirmation of the partisan liberal view.

But perhaps most damning is Wolfe’s demonstration that none of these theorists could persuade an outsider to embrace Western classical liberalism. They cannot provide a defense of liberal ideals, institutions, or procedures that would be satisfactory to someone who didn’t already accept them. Contemporary liberals propound rules of engagement and procedures for preserving reciprocity, fairness, and “full and equal citizenship” without ever defending the value of these principles in the first place. Who besides committed liberals will find this convincing? How will this convert someone on the other side of the “clash of civilizations” to become a political liberal? And how do these theories provide a framework for settling the issues at stake in the “clash of orthodoxies”?

This is where Wolfe believes a liberalism grounded in the natural law can make significant contributions. He identifies the centrality of human reason and its ability to know the truth as foundational principles for natural-law philosophy. The objectivity of justice and value is grounded in the intellect’s ability to perceive the goods of human nature as reasons for action that direct one toward real fulfillment. It is within this framework that liberalism’s core principles are most compelling.

Political equality, for example, is most securely based on the natural-law understanding of human beings as free and rational. Despite variations of skill and strength, our basic capacity to act on reasons is the foundation for treating all humans with equal respect. There are no natural superiors or inferiors, there is no ruling class or ruled class — it is because citizens can grasp reasons for action and constitute themselves by free choice that justice requires the consent and participation of the governed.

Natural-law philosophy also provides a foundation for human rights, when rights are understood as protecting basic human well-being. So, for example, the right to speech is best understood as protecting the goods enabled by honest communication — goods such as knowledge, friendship, and health. This conception of rights also provides the framework for determining which forms of speech truly fall within the protections of the right: Deceptive speech and hate speech, for example, serve no goods and thus don’t deserve protection (though prudence may demand that we limit the power of government to suppress even these types of speech). Indeed, the natural-law tradition supports strong government in order to provide the necessary conditions for flourishing — while also demanding limited government to respect the primacy of individuals and their communities in determining themselves.

Besides offering stronger foundations for liberalism, natural law provides important correctives to modern thought. Most important, Wolfe believes, is a proper understanding of the state’s role in shaping citizens’ lives: Modern liberal claims notwithstanding, the polis inevitably teaches and forms the character of its citizens. Given that the goods of human nature are rationally knowable, the state should do what it can, in a limited and subsidiary fashion, to promote its citizens’ flourishing. Other natural-law correctives to bad modern theories include the importance of religion as an aspect of human well-being and the role of the family as the pre-political society that gives rise to political community.

Natural Law Liberalism is a scholarly discussion of intricate philosophical theories of government — not quite for the casual reader. As for specialists in the field, they are likely to find the book dated. Its first half comprises articles published during the 1990s. (Did we really need another critique of Rawls’s now well-known shortcomings?) The second half of the book is a general overview of liberalism and natural law, adding little to the work of John Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) and Robert P. George’s Making Men Moral (1993).

The book will, however, make a good introduction for students of political philosophy who are unsatisfied with mainstream liberalism’s responses to the clashes of our time — and who wish to explore alternative conceptions more solidly founded on reason and human flourishing.

Mr. Anderson is a junior fellow at First Things. He is also the assistant director of the Program on Bioethics and Human Dignity at the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.

Environmental movement and Natural Law

John Allen's latest column: For Benedict, environmental movement promises recovery of natural law tradition

The first question had to do with the formation of conscience, and Benedict replied with his now-familiar diagnosis of the cultural situation in the West. By truncating the sphere of reason to only those things which can be empirically verified or falsified, the pope said, spirituality and morality have been "expelled" from rationality, consigned to a merely subjective sphere, understood as a matter of individual taste and judgment.

In response, Benedict proposed a two-pronged strategy, one being the path of religious faith, the other being what he called "a secular path." By that, Benedict appeared to mean natural law, the idea that nature itself carries a moral message that can be deciphered utilizing the faculty of conscience, even by those who aren't Christian or who aren't religious at all.

I wonder if this is Mr. Allen's own interpolation. Joseph Ratzinger has an essay in Crisis of Conscience (ed. John Haas)--I don't know if this is included in IP's On Conscience (link given below). [To be honest I found that essay to be a little bit lacking in precision, especially when compared with the essay written by Ralph McInerny in the same book.] The transcript of the Q&A session between the pope and the priests of the diocese of Belluno, Feltre, and Treviso is in Italian, and the language is a bit daunting. My suspicion is that the Holy Father does not explain the relationship between natural law and conscience in this way.

In the pope's mind, this seems to be where environmentalism enters the picture.

"Everyone can see today that humanity could destroy the foundation of its own existence, its earth, and therefore we can't simply do whatever we want with this earth that has been entrusted to us, what seems to us in a given moment useful or promising, but we have to respect the inner laws of creation, of this earth, we have to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive," Benedict said. "This obedience to the voice of the earth is more important for our future happiness than the voices of the moment, the desires of the moment. … Existence itself, our earth, speaks to us, and we have to learn to listen."

Exactly, because by the Natural Law we are commanded to love ourselves and to love the community, and to aim for the good of the community, which includes its survival. A community can only exploit the earth and degrade the environment so long, before it jeopardizes its own survival. If one wants to say that out of their own self-interest political communities should be aiming at sustainability and living in harmony with the local ecology, while transforming it in ways both beneficial to man and to the other organisms living there, he can do so. (This is the kind of stewardship advocated by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Brian Goodwin.) I would just say that this is reasonable, and that exploitation is disordered.

From there, Benedict said, we may also learn anew to listen to the voice of human nature as well, discovering in other people and in human communities moral laws that stand above our own ego. In that regard, the pope said, we can draw upon the great moral experience of humanity. Doing so teaches that human liberty never exists in isolation from others; it works only if it's rooted in a sense of common values.

An appeal to tradition? Again, I wonder if Mr. Allen is not simplifying what the pope said. As Fr. Pinckaers writes, freedom is ordered to excellence, or to virtue (and to authentic goods).

In other words, Benedict sees in the modern environmental movement the most promising route for recovery of the natural law tradition. What today's rising ecological awareness presumes is that there are limits inscribed in nature beyond which humanity trespasses at its own peril. Without any particular reference to religion, the secular world today is arriving at its own version of natural law theory. Building upon that momentum, and directing it beyond environmental matters to questions of individual and social morality, is what Benedict seems to mean by a "secular path" to formation of conscience.

Not quite, Mr. Allen. One can discover certain precepts of the Natural Law, without having to develop an account of the Natural Law at the same time. Natural Law without reference to the Creator is incomplete. One can frame such precepts in a way that still affirms the primacy of human beings in the created material order, without the excesses of certain members of the environmental movement (Gaia hypothesis, misandry, etc.). Such primacy does not negate man's responsibility to be a good steward.

To extend a metaphor, one might say that Benedict XVI is trying to paint a distinctively Catholic shade of green.

I don't mean to suggest that the pope's environmental concern is entirely instrumental, as if he OKed putting solar cells on Vatican buildings simply because, in some round-about fashion, he thinks that'll convince people not to have abortions. He's made clear on multiple occasions that he regards defense of the environment as an urgent moral necessity all by itself. But Benedict also appears to see something deeper stirring in Western environmentalism, a new sense of moral restraint grounded in objective natural reality.

To put the pope's point simplistically, if the world is willing to limit its carbon output on the basis of the laws of nature, then maybe it will become more willing to accept limits arising from nature in other spheres of life as well.

At the moment, the International Theological Commission, the main advisory body to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has a sub-commission working on a document on Natural Law. A draft is expected to be ready for discussion in October. The project is being led by Dominican Fr. Serge Bonino, the editor of the Revue Thomist; the American member is Jesuit Fr. John Michael McDermott of the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio. It will be interesting to see if the sub-commission develops this line of reflection.

Ah, Fr. Bonino. I can't wait until this document is released.

Transcript of that talk with the priests (in Italian).

From Ignatius Press:
On Conscience by Joseph Ratzinger
Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age by Vincent Twomey