A question for those who have objected to Kyle’s proposed experiments as unethical: Is the Swedish kindergarten unethical? Is it unethical if someone studies the kids that pass through this kindergarten? Is it unethical if they find a non-participating kindergarten in a similar socioeconomic area to use as a control? Is it unethical if they create a control kindergarten?

Or is it unethical to introduce a system like Egalia without any attempt at setting up a metric of measure, a control group, and independent analysis?

I mean if you’re going to introduce it anyway, couldn’t you at least check if what you are doing is harmful? How many trendy social policies (and I’m not limiting “trendy” to the Left) have been introduced on an entire society without any attempt to actually see if they do what they claimed first? Why is that “ethical”, but any attempt to test them first “unethical”?

You want your child to be able to play well with others, so you introduce him to other children his age. If he tries to take a toy from another child, you attempt to teach him consequences by removing something that he cares about.

You want your child to be a successful student, so you praise her when she does her homework. When she gets good grades, you reward her success by taking her out to a concert that she wanted to see.

When the results are good, you continue along the same line. When they are not, you discontinue that approach and try something new. If you have more than one child, you even get to replicate the experiment (usually with different results).

I agree on the social history point, but my goal isn’t to solve the nurture-nature question, but in part to expose the strangeness of having an ethical problem with planned experimentation but no ethical problem with random parental choice that would have precisely similar consequences.

It is true that this isn’t a “closed environment” the way Pinker described, but that would also be an incredibly harsh way to raise a child, raising all sorts of concerns about tainting the data. A controlled approximation of similar life-style among many families acts as a superior variable control than a highly unnatural, closed, laboratory environment.

Well, a part of the more natural family upbringing would require that the children interact with the outside world and that outside world can have very, very strict gender roles, especially in very religious communities. An IRB member might argue that being exposed to unjust and bigoted harassment for not acting their gender is a psychological risk to a child and would at best taint the experiment over the long term, or at worst, end up terminating the child’s participation. Unless you shelter those kids from everyday life, you’re always going to have those social attitudes to take into account. And this is just face to face interaction. What about the gender roles portrayed on TV day in, day out?

It may be more human and make more sense to use historical data from different societies to see how much gender roles can be swayed by nurture, data in which we find that roles of men and women were different based on the societies in question and they can be quite successfully manipulated in times of need or by choice. History is filled with examples of routine gender-bending.

In short, sincere belief in how a child should be raised is the best protection we have for making sure that the child’s welfare is actually being protected. It’s imperfect, but so is everything.

I’d like to know what the abortion agencies have to do with anything?

Just to throw my two cents in, whilst I don’t necessarily agree with the experiment, I do agree that none of the scenarios are inherently more ethical or unethical than the other. I’d probably be more happy with the third scenario as the sociologists may be more rigorous about sticking to the ethical principals and, I think at least, would be *more* likely to stop the experiment if they thought it was harming the child in any way.

If a parent chooses to raise a child in way x because of Catholicism, is that different in a relevant way from scenario 3? I don’t believe it is.

While I recognize that your article is more about the ethics of doing so, I think that these fundamental questions and whether they would cause “severe suffering” need to be answered before you could fully consider the ethics of case #3.

More importantly, I think that having a sociologist parent in any of these scenarios actually makes the experiment useless. These parents cannot maintain both the analytical eye and the parental eye and do either effectively. Additionally, their sociologist work and their thoughts/beliefs on the outcomes would color the experiment too greatly, I believe.

Got empirical proof for that, Doug?

It’s my observation as a parent that no single parenting style is “right” and that, regardless of your expertise or intent, the kids will grow up to be what THEY want. Was it in “Freakonomics II” where they crunched the research numbers and concluded that at least 50% of the outcomes of child-raising are unrelated to parenting?

Long ago, I read somewhere that all parents make mistakes and almost every kid grows up to be OK anyway.

You insist that this experiment would be conducted with no concern for the well-being of the child. I’d counter that most parents who have children do so for reasons other than the well-being of the child. Unwed teen mothers often report that they became pregnant because they wanted the babies to love them–that’s not a concern for the child, is it? What about all of the unwanted pregnancies?

The world is more chaotic and less understood than the tidy paradise you posit.

All right, leave aside the rest (I think the Reimer case and your proposed experiment are more similar than you do) and I’ll address this main point. Raising a child with your particular social ideals means that one has a strong belief in the rightness of those ideals. So as a parent, you are raising your child in a way you strongly believe to be right.
In the case of an experiment, you aren’t trying to do right by the child. Your goal isn’t the well-being of the child. Your goal is something else (scientific knowledge) and you are using the child’s life to acheive that goal. They write dystopian young adult fiction about that kind of thing.
I agree that parents sometimes have bizarre ideals and sometimes do a terrible job raising their children. Your experimenters would fall into that category.

Now let’s explore my cluelessness. David Reimer was surgically altered. What was my caveat? No physical surgery.

The Milgram experiment is another issue, but the concept of authority here is interesting. Let’s presume that in the first scenario, parents are acting based on what they see as appropriate social norms, which act as a kind of amoebic authority. Why is the authority of social norms saying that gender education X is the way a parent should be any different than the authority of the collusion of the scientists. You don’t address why scenario 1 is different than scenario 3.

Now check this out: I’ll argue scenario 3 is MORE moral because 1) the parents are adopting children who would have otherwise been in foster care and 2) due to ethics experimentation regulations, parents would cease their iteration of the experiment if it was seen to be causing “severe suffering” – huh, I seem to recall mentioning that somewhere… – whereas most parents simply see parental sovereignty as unlimited license to harass and pressure their children into whatever form they see fit.

My point with this whole experiment is to out the fantasy that biological parents should be treated with any sort of optimism or bias towards being GOOD parents. There is no difference between selecting a child’s gender rearing for the purpose of an experiment and selecting it based on one’s particular social ideals.

@Vebyast: Slippery slope arguments are not real arguments and they insult those involved in the debate. They assume that we are too simple or too lazy to distinguish between different stages of behavior. Just as I drew a distinction between David Reimer and my thought experiment, we can determine which experiments would and would not be ethical by evaluation and reason.