The Paralympics and Super Humans

During the Olympics, our screens were filled with sportsmen and women pushing their bodies to the limit, and achieving amazing feats of speed, distance and endurance. Perhaps more amazing still are the athletes now gathering to participate in the Paralympic games, who don’t let “disability” or "different ability" to stand in the way of their sporting achievements.

For most of the athletes, their results are a mixture of determination, training, sheer hard work and raw talent honed through years of commitment. It is an inspiration! The pressure consistently placed on them for years for one brief moment, it must be incredibly tempting to use any advantage to give your chances a boost.

Inevitably and sadly, the potential benefits of winning a medal, and that desire for personal and national glory, mean that some may be tempted to resort to non-legitimate ways of gaining advantage over their rivals- performance enhancing drugs, for example. The news during the Tour De France and the Olympics was spattered with accusations (and occasional incidents) of abuse and it tarnished some of the excitement and enthusiasm. It made me sorry for the athletes who work so hard for so long, who give their all to a sport and play fair. It also made me reflect on the pressure we all feel to be "perfect" and the lengths we are tempted to go sometimes to chase that elusive ideal.

Many of us have benefitted from medical technologies which have benefitted our quality of life-  whether that be hip replacements, heart pacemakers or just reading glasses. I'm a diabetic and wear an insulin pump - it has radically enhanced my everyday life, and I am grateful to the science that makes it and things like it possible.

Most of these technologies are currently used in a medical context, to restore us to a normal, healthy state.  However, some people (particularly within the military) would like advocate going a stage further- to begin use technology to give humans abilities which we don’t currently have: for example, infra- red vision, which would allow us to “see in the dark”.

How far down the road of building “better” humans should we contemplate going using technology and medical science? Of course, just being fastest or strongest doesn’t necessarily make us better people. In fact, paradoxically, it is often through our most difficult struggles that we find a deeper strength of character and the presence of God in others who support and sustain us.  Complexity is part of being human and oftentimes what we perceive we as "strength" and "weakness".

Are we beginning to subscribe to an ideology that says " there is one brand of beautiful and we can all be sculpted into shape?" Like the athletes who find that the extraordinary pressure to win leads them to compromise who they are and what they stand for, are we aware of the pressure we place on each other to conform to a model, no matter the cost?  Hopefully the Paralympic athletes will be an example and inspiration to us all, in that pushing ourselves to be the best that we can be is part of what makes us human, but what also makes us human is our beautiful diversity.

Let that be an achievement worth celebrating!

Banking ethics: a few bad apples or rotten to the core?

 What has been the problem with our financial services sector?  It seems that so many of our present woes can be connected with it – from the housing bubble to the credit crunch, the Eurozone crisis and currency speculation to the dodgy marketing and selling of PPI and mortgages.  The LIBOR fixing scandal seems to be just the latest in this sad litany of disasters which have transformed the public perception of bankers to something akin to – or maybe even worse than – politicians with duck-houses or phone-hacking journalists.

There has been a lot of finger-pointing and blaming going on, but I don’t really see much purpose in trying to apportion blame to anyone. When it comes to human nature, I’m a bit more optimistic. I do not believe that there are really so many bankers who are all so deceitful and manipulative that they would deliberately go out to do wrong. 

What I think is more helpful and more constructive is offering suggestions for the future to do our best to prevent future harm and where necessary to reconcile and restore trust in the ability of financial services to create wealth in a way which is consistent with an ethical framework which we can all agree on.

The Church and Society Council has recently done this in its submission to the Westminster Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.  The Council has urged the City to consider its values and the devastating implications of putting profit before ethics, and suggested that taking excessive risk should become a criminal offence.

The way in which our economy is structured means that many people are marginalised by market forces, and this is of concern to the church.

Banks are not simply businesses, but provide an essential economic service fundamental to how we operate as a society. 

It is necessary that they operate on principles which are driven not simply by profit, but take cognisance of the wider effects which their actions have on society, especially the most vulnerable.  

The Council has said that excessive risk-taking should become a criminal offence as many people at the top in banking have reaped rich financial rewards with no threat of prosecution  when their actions do harm to the consumers they are meant to serve. 

In addition, we feel that non- executive directors should also be liable to sanction in the event of their failure of provide proper oversight.

Our response also challenges tax havens, argues for more effective supervision of Chief Executives through improved auditing and the presence of more shareholder and employee representatives on Boards, calls for the end of the present ‘bonus culture,’ and recommends changes to the Financial Services & Markets Act 2000 to permit all victims of mis-selling to obtain proper redress through the courts.

Earlier this year, the Church of Scotland’s Commission on the Purposes of Economic Activity published its final report.  The thirteen member commission comprised people with expertise from the fields of business and economics, church and community, politics and trade unionism.  In their report they argue that it is necessary to:

• Reduce inequality
• End poverty
• Ensure sustainability
• Promote mutuality

The ethics of persuasive technologies

Only a few days ago I was blogging about the areas where science religion and technology can benefit from an inner dialogue and today I became even more aware of the need to promote this type of dialogue. The Church and Society Council presented a paper addressing ethical questions on internet advertising practices during an event at the Scottish Parliament sponsored by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce . Why would the Kirk be invited to speak on the ethics of online advertisement?


The internet is allowing everyone to have increased access to educational opportunities, online services, shopping and entertainment. We do not even need a computer anymore; smart mobile phones allow you to access a world of consumer choice and online services. However, online selling and advertising have entered totally new grounds in their adoption of persuasive technologies. In the case of e-commerce these technologies allow online retailers to gather information about your likes and dislikes when you shop online, and present you with ever more tempting offers based on what you have looked at on the internet. Your past viewing and online shopping activities allow online retailers to present you with newer and better tailored personalised offers in the hope of getting you to part (yet again…) with your money. Many advocate that shopping is the way out of the recession. However, I wonder if this is the economic model that we should follow. Everything we buy carries a carbon footprint therefore, we might be encouraging our economy through shopping but we are also contributing to the demise of our planet.

There is also privacy issue; who has given the right to online retailers to access the information of what I have viewed on a search engine? Who owns the information of thousands of internet users, happily using keywords on search engines? Do online retailers and search engines have the right to commercialise with this information? Is it ethical to use targeted consumer behavioural information upon an unsuspecting public? Is this a case of Big Brother watching you, or simply, the birth of an ever better online retail therapy experience? These are some of the questions that the Kirk has been grappling with in the context of the use of persuasive technologies for e-commerce.

I often wonder whether Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world-wide-web, fully realized the impact that his work at Cern in Switzerland would have on society.