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The Art of Bioethics

13 August 2025

With seemingly unalarming regularity the world of Academia indulges in unhinged groupthink. It unwaveringly peer-reviews itself into self-congratulation for stupid and dangerous policy-informing ideas. Since 2020 this has become way more obvious should anyone be paying attention, and it is not an unreasonable case to make that we should all be paying them no attention whatsoever.

Fairly often though in The Current Year[tm], Academia descends into such obviously self-contradictory insanities one has to wonder if they are just trolling us, such is the ridiculousness of things that pass for “respected, trusted, rigorous science and research”. And then there’s Parker Crutchfield.

The website “The Conversation” has a profile on Mr Crutchfield where you can contact him for consulting, advising and even speaking engagements if you happen to want to assault your guests with Parker’s special brand of medical “ethics”. His profile reads as follows:

Parker Crutchfield completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Arizona State University, working in applied ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of science. As Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics, Humanities and law at WMed, Dr. Crutchfield conducts research in medical ethics.

https://theconversation.com/profiles/parker-crutchfield-775987

Mr Crutchfield’s latest contribution to the world of academic slop is titled “Beneficial Bloodsucking”. It would seem that one has to pay to read the full paper, or have some kind of paid access to Wiley Online Library, but they do permit us to read the abstract. You can read it yourself here, but I will paste it here just so we can easily refer to it:

The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS. Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat. We then defend what we call the Convergence Argument: If x-ing prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place, doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, and promotes virtuous action or character, then x-ing is strongly pro tanto obligatory; promoting tickborne AGS satisfies each of these conditions. Therefore, promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory. It is presently feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If this practice can be applied to ticks carrying AGS, then promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.

Parker has a co-author for this particular gem, someone by the name of Blake Hereth. We will look at Blake in a bit more detail shortly, but for now you can rest assured Parker and Blake are cut from the same “ethical” cloth.

Parker and Blake are, it would seem, against the idea of eating meat. This is the foundation on which the rest of their arguments are built. As you work through this sequence of premises and conclusions, allegedly following some kind of syllogistic “reasoning”, you go from the entirely notional and subjective opinion that “eating meat is morally impermissible” to “promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory”.

If that seems like a bit of a leap to you, that’s because it is.

Rare image of a medical ethicist getting from his premise to his conclusion.

Because Parker has a Ph.D. in philosophy and that means he is an “expert” on the subject, and we know that philosophy is the “pursuit of wisdom” that involves careful, rigorous argumentation, logical analysis, questioning assumptions, seeking definitions and exposing contradictions, we should expect a careful and rigorously argued, logically analysed, well defined, non-contradictory exposition that avoids assumptions, i.e. unevidenced statements or opinions. Woah, stop right there bigot! As it is The Current Year[tm] all that stuff is racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic “hate” and we’ve progressed way past all that awful reality stuff into the utopia of Midwit Delusional Fantasy, where the credentials bestowed by Academia for staying well inside the thought plantation and policing the borders like the Stazi make you unquestionable. What we can now expect is a completely nonsensical, internally inconsistent set of conclusions based on nothing but ideological lunacy, rubber-stamped by the entirely corrupt and self-reinforcing “peer-review” scheme. Welcome to the bestest, most enlightened era ever, citizen.

We hardly need to spend any time dismantling Parker’s arguments for promoting a tick-borne disease as part of a “moral bioenhancer” obligation, but just for completeness, and a laugh, we’ll make a few remarks…

Obviously the entire thing rests on the claim that eating meat is morally impermissible, which is going to be a tough sell to all the carnivorous animals out there. Naturally for an academic, Parker does not need to explain why eating meat is morally impermissible, as he is after all, an “expert”. Some of the possible mental gymnastics one could complete to get to the view that humans specifically eating meat is bad but it’s OK for animals might be that we can choose, or that as we are more cognitively advanced, that for some arbitrary reason places an entirely contrived moral burden upon us that prevents us from killing or eating life-forms that are considered beneath us.

The problem with those kinds of arguments is that they are not only logically invalid, but also avoid that pesky reality mentioned earlier. We don’t even need to get into arguments about the types of teeth humans have, or any of the silly evolutionary stuff. Just because we have a choice between eating meat and not eating meat, the conclusion that one of those is bad and one is good is a non-sequitur. There are choices we can make between a good thing and a bad thing, but the fact that something is a choice does not automatically mean one of the things is bad and the other is good. That we are cognitively more advanced than animals and therefore we are morally bound to not kill and eat them is also a flawed argument, as the same argument could be made for animals that eat other animals.

If one eats only vegetation, very small animals get killed in the process. You could pick an apple off a tree and kill an insect. This route of argumentation, i.e. we shouldn’t eat animals because it is bad to kill and eat them is ultimately futile, as there is no way we could go through life and not kill and eat something, even seemingly unintentionally, because the argument for what constitutes an “animal” that we shouldn’t kill and eat can go on and on until we’re at tiny lifeforms that we can’t even see that are being killed and consumed. Even the argument that that is unintentional and therefore OK is invalid because once you know it is happening it ceases to be unintentional. What about “plant life”? Is that life not protected by this constructed moral high-ground? Who decided that?

This is not to say that people must eat meat. I am not making any arguments about what people should or should not eat. We shouldn’t torture animals, we shouldn’t make them suffer needlessly, but there is no logical, valid argument invoking moral imperatives that provides a philosophically founded basis for “moral bioenhancer” policies, and here we actually get to the crux of the matter.

The Authors argue that their unfounded opinion leads them to the conclusion that an active promotion of a disease that creates an allergy to meat is morally obligatory. An allergy means the body is overreacting to a normally perfectly harmless substance. The natural position is of not being allergic. Therefore it would be reasonable to conclude that it is natural then, for humans to eat meat, just like it is for over 60% of present-day animals. Having an allergy is a non-natural state. That anyone would even consider making the argument for intentionally making people allergic to something because of their strongly held personal beliefs is quite something. That this contradictory and unethical garbage is coming from someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a “Professor” in the Department of Medical Ethics, Humanities and Law at Western Michigan University only speaks to just how far up it’s own arsehole Academia has travelled.

Luckily for us, due to the way these Institutes of “Higher Learning” operate, even this will probably be found guilty of some -phobia or other in due course, and Parker will have to grovel to keep his “career” as it is not obvious from the abstract that he has quantified how eating meat has a disproportionally adverse affect on one-legged lesbians of colour, and there does not appear at first glance to be a trans-inclusive carbon-neutral recommendation on how we genetically edit ticks that does not conform to the white supremacist patriarchy’s view. This does though, neatly bring us to the paper’s co-author, Blake Hereth.

On Blake’s website he explains…

I’m Blake. I’m proudly nonbinary (pronouns they/them), bisexual, and disabled. I work in neuroethics, bioethics, applied ethics, and philosophy of religion. I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2019.

After initially reading this I thought perhaps Parker will be OK, that he will not suffer the ignominious fate of ending up guilty of a “hate” crime after all, as he has Blake, a “proudly nonbinary” person assisting him, ensuring no transgressions occurred, no feelings were hurt and everything is completely fluffy and lovely, apart from the deliberately genetically engineering ticks to spread allergy causing disease bit.

Sadly it seems that Blake is simply out of touch, a relic of yesteryear, as he also declares he is “bisexual”, and as “bi” means two this is incompatible with the term “nonbinary”. The implied bigotry on display is literal violence, erasing the existence of all the other sexes.

Who knows what fate is in store for The Authors? Maybe the arbiters of permitted thinking will show mercy on Parker and Blake. Parker has after all argued for the deliberate spreading of disease, and previously authored an article titled “Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert”, the abstract of which states:

Some theorists argue that moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory. I take this argument one step further, arguing that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration ought to be covert rather than overt. This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement. My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program. In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bioe.12496

He is sure to curry favour with the Very Important People with that. Never mind that Parker thinks it is “morally preferable” to covertly manipulate people as part of a “compulsory moral bioenhancement program”, which obviously would include making you ill via genetically engineered ticks, as a “matter of public health”. Don’t worry about the literal insanity of all this… all that matters is “public health ethics”, which at this point is, according to Parker, promoting “liberty” and “autonomy” by secretly making you ill.

Blake too will probably be fine despite his bi-gotry, as he has previously authored such insightful works as “A Simple Argument for Compulsory Parental Neuronetting”, the abstract of which is as follows:

Neuronets are brain interventions designed to prevent certain kinds of brain activity, like aggression. Imagine we could apply this technology to prevent parents from abusing their children — maybe like an insulin pump that warns you when your brain shows signs of aggression, allowing you time to release a calming drug like cannabis into your system. Is that morally okay? In this presentation I’ll argue that it’s not only morally okay to offer parents that help them be good parents, but that the parents are morally required to use neuronets like this. I’ll conclude that the state is morally obligated to compel parents to be neuronetted.

Blake Hereth – 2023

Who gets to decide what constitutes “abusing” your children? What kind of lunatic concludes the Government should be forcing brain control on people? Well we have our answer. Blake has also authored and contributed to other articles. I will list some of them here, and I think you’ll detect a theme…

  • How Do We Justify Research into Enhanced Warfighters?
  • Heavenly Overpopulation: Rethinking the Ethics of Procreation
  • The Ethics of AI-Assisted Warfighter Enhancement Research and Experimentation: Historical Perspectives and Ethical Challenges
  • Long Covid and Disability: A Brave New World
  • Moral Neuroenhancement for Prisoners of War
  • Here’s Not Looking at You, Kid: A New Defense of Anti-Natalism
  • What’s Wrong with Child Super Soldiers?
  • The Shape of Trans Afterlife Justice
  • Animal Gods

Parker’s resume includes some equally… ahem, interestingly titled works. Here are a few…

  • The Epistemology of Moral Bioenhancement
  • Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert
  • Abolishing morality in biomedical ethics
  • Engendering moral post-persons: A novel self-help strategy

Just in those four titles we have the contradiction of “compulsory moral bioenhancement” argued for on the basis of “ethics”, and another advocating for the abolition of “morality” in “biomedical ethics”.

But don’t worry about that. It’s all completely fine because as it happens, Parker is advocating to “bring about moral post-persons”, and by “post-persons” he means “moral transhumans”. These created “moral transhumans” are required according to Parker, because normal humans “appear to be incapable of responding to climate change in ways that are likely to prevent the consequent suffering”.

It would be nice to think we can just ignore this obvious nonsense, but unfortunately these are the kinds of people Universities are crammed full of, and they get to write papers that are then used by Governments to justify or excuse outright tyranny and evil.

If you do one thing to help humanity, consider not feeding your children to Academia. They might not eat them literally (no guarantees) but this whole corrupt, self-serving cycle can only continue with fresh minds to pollute. Home education is the best gift you could possibly give to your children. It is way easier than you think, there are so many groups and support systems in place, all run by parents who are already doing this. De-registering your child is simple. There is no penalty, and regardless of how hostile a school might react, there is nothing they can do, and it is none of their business.

If there is anything you want to know about home education in the UK specifically, you can email this address with any questions and I will do my best to reply with helpful information…

contact [at] corruptedsystem [dot] com