Recently in Ethics Category

I've discovered the need to adopt a new way of speaking about people who are recently-descended from Africans. We've learned in the last couple decades that we ought to emphasize someone's personhood above any other characteristic, and thus it's thoroughly immoral to use any adjective in front of 'person'. We need to use predicate nouns instead. We no longer have sad people, for example. We simply have people with sadness. We no longer have short people. We have people with shortness. We don't want to define people with sadness as if their sadness is more important than their personhood, so we have a moral obligation to put the noun form after the word 'person'. Grammar does always indicate metaphysics, after all.

One sphere of language in which this lesson has never been properly applied is in the area of race. Why are we still talking about black people, for instance? Do we really want to define people solely in terms of their race? Do we really want to signal that their blackness is so central to who they are that we're going to pretend that people with blackness aren't people? If we call them black people, then we are treating their blackness as if it's a greater part of our conception of people with blackness than their personhood is. People with person-firstness have instructed us that we should never put disability-related adjectives in front of a noun or pronoun referring to a person, because we don't want them identified with that condition. But we've also learned from the same people that having a disability is not negative, which means this policy is not because disabilities are bad. Therefore, we ought to apply it to other cases when something is not bad but might wrongly be taken by someone to be bad, just as we would apply it to things that are genuinely bad. If race is not to be a negative, then I am not a white person. I'm a person with whiteness. It does make it a little awkward to speak of people with Asianness or people with Australian-first-people-ness (i.e. what used to be called aboriginalness). But it's worth the awkwardness of expression to avoid any chance of identifying them with the racial or ethnic group whose membership they possess.

Even worse, it's especially pernicious to say that someone is black (or African-American or whatever racial term we might choose). After all, using predicate adjectives amounts to making identity statements rather than merely ascribing a property to someone the way we would have thought that adjectives in English, even predicate adjectives, do. It's much more preferable to say that someone has blackness than to say that she is black. People aren't anything except persons. I'm not philosophical. I have philosophicalness. Glenn Beck is not unfair to his political adversaries. He has unfairness to the people who have political adversariness with him. President Obama is not bad at speaking without a teleprompter. He has badness at speaking without a teleprompter. I shouldn't say that I am Christian. I'm a person who has Christianity. I shouldn't be identified with my faith. I should claim, rather, to possess the entirety of Christianity, as if it belongs to me. We need to avoid identifying people with any property ascribed to them other than personhood. It's much better to say that they possess the entirety of the thing that formerly we would have used to describe them.

For more explanation, please see here (except you can ignore the sections explaining how people with blindness and people with deafness have offendedness at the obviously-correct way to refer to them, and you certainly shouldn't read person-with-autism Jim Sinclair's reasons for disliking person-first language).

Russell Moore has a nice post about how, although there's generally a moral mandate upon Christians to adopt, there are plenty of people who ought not to be the ones to fulfill that mandate [ht: Justin Taylor]. In particular, certain kinds of issues tend to come up with adoptions that most people, because of the reasons they're interested in adopting are not well prepared for and do not have the commitment to see those problems through, which leaves kids twice orphaned in too many cases.

I think this is a nice example of what I've elsewhere called a secondary moral obligation, an obligation you incur because you fail at a prior moral obligation. You ought not to have the attitude toward children that you see them as fulfilling your needs, but if you do then it's immoral to adopt, even if it's generally a moral mandate to adopt when such immoral attitudes are not present (and they shouldn't be present) and when there aren't other extenuating circumstances making it a less good idea to adopt (whatever those might be, and I'm open to their being lots of them).

What Moore does not mention is that the same is true of having children naturally. If you have the attitude that children are to meet your needs, then you shouldn't have children, even if (and I know not all Christians agree on this) it's Christian teaching that we ought to seek to have children or at least be very open to it (as many believe it is; whether it is is irrelevant to my point here, but assume it is for the sake of argument). My suspicion is that many new parents who were seeking to have children were doing so for completely selfish reasons. It strikes me as a thoroughly immoral reason to want to have children, and it seems to me that it's just as immoral to go ahead and have children if your desire is for them to fulfill your needs. That's so even if there is a moral mandate upon Christians to seek to have children, as many Christians do believe.

What makes this a nice case of a secondary moral obligation is that you have two obligations that conflict, one of which only appears if you violate the other one. It's wrong to have this selfish kid-possessing attitude, and those who have it ought not to have children. But you ought to seek to have children (on the premise I've been assuming, at least for the sake of argument). There's no inconsistency in such a position, despite the initial surface-level appearance of two contrary obligations. You do have an obligation to seek to have children (at least certain people do, anyway, on this view), and you do have an obligation not to want children for the wrong reasons, but if you do have the wrong reasons for wanting children then you simply ought not to have children, even if that means failing in the first obligation. It's worse to seek to meet the first obligation but violate the second than it is to fail the first because you're meeting the second.

But it becomes a fairly messy question if children come along anyway unintentionally when someone has this attitude. The original obligation still remains in such a case, and you simply ought not to have this attitude, even though most people do before they have children. Once they appear, you ought not to rid yourself of them unless your situation is so bad that they'll have a much better home without you than with you (and this selfish desire isn't usually so bad as to generate that situation; other conditions need to be met for that). I would argue that someone with the selfish attitude toward children does conceive a child, they ought (barring other considerations) to raise that child and to remove that selfish attitude. But that's compatible with thinking they ought not to seek to have children until they can rid themselves of that attitude, especially when it comes to great expense as with adoption.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

Here are some things Herman Cain has said about abortion:

1. He's opposed to abortion in all circumstances, but it's not the government's role to make that decision.
2. The president has no authority to order people not to seek an abortion.
3. He would appoint judges who know the Constitution contains no right to abortion.
4. He would veto legislation funding Planned Parenthood.
5. In the case of rape, it comes down to a family & doctor choice. He's opposed to it morally but shouldn't tell the nation what to think, because the government shouldn't be making our decisions on social issues.
6. The government shouldn't make decisions on whether abortion should be legal.
7. People shouldn't be free to seek abortions. Abortion should not be legal. (This was said immediately after 6.)
8. He opposes abortion with exceptions.
9. He opposes abortion except when the mother's life is threatened.

Sources: Huffington Post, CNN, Wikipedia

When it comes to Herman Cain's view on abortion, we seem to have a choice among (a) the uncharitable dishonest-about-his-views interpretion, i.e. he's not consistently being honest about what he thinks (b) the uncharitable intelligence interpretation, i.e. he's holding a flatly inconsistent set of beliefs in a pretty explicit way, (c) the uncharitable dishonest flip-flopper interpretation, i.e. he's not being honest about some change of views (and one such change has to be within minutes, (d) the uncharitable misuse-of-language interpretation, i.e. he's perhaps saying someone, perhaps only some of the time, that everyone misunderstands because of a highly idiosyncratic use of terms, or (e) he's got such a nuanced set of views that I can't even figure out how to put it together, with all my training in doing so.

(e) is the most charitable, but I'm extremely skeptical that he's so finely-tuned in his language without one of the others being true. I tend to think (d) is the least uncharitable of the others. Perhaps he means "it's not the role of government" and "it's the person's choice" in odd ways. You can, after all, say the second while thinking certain options should be illegal. You just wouldn't say so in an abortion discussion without being radically misunderstood. You could, also, say the first while thinking it's the role of a legislature but not the role of the executive or legislature to countermand the wrongful decision of the courts, but again you'd be radically misunderstood. That's about as good as I can do to put this together, and if it takes something like that, I think he's politically finished. There's no way the general public is going to be willing to be that charitable. But that may well be what's going on.

So here's my proposal. I'm going to take Herman Cain to hold to the following positions, all of them compatible with all of the above statements if they might have pragmatically-odd by semantically-possible meanings, and I'm going to see if I (or a commenter) might find a statement by him that does not fit with this view. So here's the approach I have in mind:

So (1) means abortion is morally wrong in all cases, but it's not the federal legislative and executive's right to do anything on that issue anymore, given the Supreme Court's wrongful intervention on the issue. (2) means the president can't tell people what to think and has been removed from being able to have any direct influence on abortion law at least at the very general level of deciding when it is legal to have an abortion in cases when the Supreme Court takes it to be a fundamental right. (3) clearly states that the Supreme Court wrongly decided Roe v. Wade, despite several claims that he hasn't made such a statement from social conservatives, and his preference for judges who would seek to do what they could to reverse or roll back that decision. (4) signals his opposition to federal funding for abortion or for abortion providers, something a president can have some say in. (5) signals his moral opposition to abortion in rape cases but his willingness to think that (i) that's a case when the law should be less clear than he thinks morality is, (ii) he as president shouldn't dictate what Americans' views on such matters ought to be, even if he has a clear policy preference, or (iii) given the Supreme Court's dictates, it's no longer the president's position but is given to a woman and a doctor to decide, even if he would prefer that the Supreme Court hadn't done that and would undo that dictate. (6) If he means the legislative and executive branch of the federal government here, and he isn't giving his ideal preference but his understanding of the limited role the Supreme Court has given him as president, then it's consistent with his view in his immediate next statement. (7) Ideally abortion should be outlawed, even if it's not possible to do so right now on the level of the legislature and executive. (8) Abortion is almost always wrong. There are exceptions, and he's aware of at least one. (9) One of those exceptions is when the mother's life is threatened, and there may or may not be others (and from above rape is not one of them).

This does strike me as a consistent position, and it does mean taking some of his statements in odd ways, but that's clearly more charitable than taking him to be lying about what his views are, lying about some change in his views, or so confused on the issue that he can't put together meaningful back-to-back statements explaining coherent positions. He does have an Obama-like history of overstating things and having to take them back, but his clarifications don't usually have the character of stating a view he holds and then backing off to a view he doesn't hold, and they also don't usually have the character of being corrected but embarassed to admit it. They usually have the character of not realizing how he might be misinterpreted and then being more careful the second time. It's just that this would be a case where his attempts to be more careful are only partially successful.

So that's my proposal of what I think he most likely is thinking. I admit that there are a couple points where it's a little bit of a stretch, but I don't think the evidence justified being less charitable at this point, and I'm not going to support misrepresentation  even by accident, which is I think what's going on if people are legitimately convinced he's pro-choice if he really isn't. He's certainly got a problem stating his views, but I'm not sure the general-election opponent is any better at expressing his views.

I can't see why pro-life voters would want this man representing them on this issue, but a vote for a president isn't necessarily a vote for the ideal person to represent your cause. It's a vote for the candidate that you think is better than the others. In a primary, that means the person who can best balance (a) the ability to beat the other candidate and (b) the ability to be a decent enough president to be preferable to the other party's candidate. In a general election, it's almost always a choice between two candidates as to which one will be better than the other on the issues you think are most important. It may turn out that someone who isn't the best person to represent your views on an issue does satisfy these criteria. Whether that person for pro-life Republicans is Herman Cain is, at least, not yet settled by this issue, in my view (although there are other issues that might serve as possible obstacles, and I could see this issue turning into one, depending on further statements that I haven't seen or he hasn't yet made). It partly depends on other people, too, but I have a better sense of what they think, at least the ones with much chance of winning.

I've been trying to put Norman Geisler's normative theory on the map of positions I'm aware of, because I think he makes a genuine contribution to the field, and he's been pretty much on the sidelines in terms of ethical theory given that he's only published with Christian publishers for Christian audiences. He calls his view Graded Absolutism, which I think is a misleading term (and arguably a misapplication of the term, depending on how he means it).

Here are four views along a spectrum:

1. Consequentialism (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, G.E. Moore) -- consequences are the only determinant of whether an act is right or wrong; genuinely moral principles never conflict, because there is only one -- to seek the best consequences [but much of the work is determined by what counts as the best consequences, with utilitarians focusing only on pleasure and pain and more comprehensive consequentialists including many other consequences)
2. Rossian deontology (W.D. Ross) -- several moral principles are relevant, and consequences play a role as one of them; different principles take precedence in different situations
3. graded absolutism (Norman Geisler) -- several moral principles are relevant, but not consequences; the same hierarchy of importance exists for these principles no matter the circumstances
4. Kantian deontology (Immanuel Kant) -- moral truths are absolute in the sense that they never have exceptions, no matter how serious the consequences are; moral principles never conflict

Consequentialism and Kantianism are absolute in the sense philosophers usually mean when they use the term about an ethical theory. Moral rules are absolute, and there is never any genuine conflict between them. There is at least one moral principle with no exceptions for consequentialists, because there is only one, and it never has exceptions. For Kant, there are several principles, but he thinks they will never conflict. Deontologists think either that there are more principles that matter than just consequences (as Ross thinks) or that consequences are entirely irrelevant (as Geisler and Kant think). Many deontologists find Kant's view implausible, because there are often cases where moral principles conflict. But they also want there to be moral principles besides just consequences. Ross and Geisler offer different views on what happens next.

According to Ross, there are sometimes several moral principles that play a role in a given case, and one of them will take precedence in each case. But it's not according to a pre-existing hierarchy. Sometimes the situation will make one principle more appropriate than another, but in a different situation the hierarchy is reversed. Perhaps the lying principle is more important than the principle of seeking the best consequences when not much is at stake in terms of consequences. It might make things a little better in the world if you tell a lie, but the principle against lying is more important when the difference in your self-interest and the interest of others is not much changed whether you lie or not. But in a case where hundreds of lives are at stake, the principle of not lying becomes less significant than the principle of promoting the good of others (which is a consequence). When I teach ethical theory, I teach consequentialism and Kant and then present Ross as a moderating position, taking aspects of each but rejecting other aspects of each. Geisler seems to have found a different moderating position along this spectrum, one that's closer to Kant in two respects than Ross's view is.

One Kantian element Geisler wants to retain that Ross rejects is in not counting consequences at all. There might be cases where lying is all right, according to Geisler, if a more important moral principle is at stake. But that principle won't be framed in terms of consequences, and how serious the consequences are plays no role in the moral status of the action. (On this point, I side clearly with Ross. Of course consequences can play a role in determining how good or bad an action is, even if they are not always decisive.)

Second, Ross thinks which principle is more important will vary from situation to situation. Geisler doesn't like that. He wants a rigid hierarchy that is the same in every case. The only thing that determines which moral principle applies is which ones are relevant, and then you go with the highest one in the list that's relevant. This is in fact why Geisler misleadingly calls his view absolutist and why he would not think Ross's views is absolutist. What is absolute is the structure of the moral hierarchy. That never has exceptions and doesn't vary from situation to situation. But only the very top moral principle is absolute, strictly speaking, because the others all allow for exceptions. So it's not absolutist about most moral principles, like Kant's view, just about the top one and about the relative positions of all the moral principles in the hierarchy. Most ethicists who speak of absolutism are thinking in terms of whether moral principles in general are absolute, and Geisler's view would say no to that. But if absolutism is the view that at least one moral principle is absolute, then Geisler would agree with that. The top moral principle in the hierarchy is absolute.

I want to distinguish both of these moderating positions from a number of views that they get confused with fairly easily. First, there's situational ethics. Situational ethics is itself often confused with relativism. Situational ethics in reality is a consequentialist position that takes love to be the only important consequence. It is not relativism, and neither is consequentialism in general or utilitarianism in particular, despite all these views sometimes being called relativism.

The views most commonly called moral relativism are meta-ethical views about the nature of moral language. They find ways to account for moral language without there being objective moral truths. Subjectivism says what's right is just whatever the individual person considers right. Cultural relativism says what's right is whatever your culture says is right. Emotivism says there are no truths or falsehoods about right and wrong, and attempts to say something is right or wrong are more like expressing your approval (they mean, roughly, things like "Hooray for helping people out!" and "Boo! Abortion!" but don't express any content that can be true or false). There are other variations, but what all these views have in common is that there is no truth or falsity of moral statements except, possibly, to express truths about the person making the statement or about that person's culture.

Sometimes an incoherent view common among college students is called relativism. This view is basically an inconsistent combination of one of the above meta-ethical views (usually subjectivism or cultural relativism or an inconsistent adoption of both) with the moral absolute that we ought not to criticize other people's moral views or other culture's moral views. I don't consider that a genuine view, just a confusion and an attempt to combine incompatible claims.

But the views I'm talking about here are very different from what's usually called relativism. They are not situational ethics, because they are not consequentialist, and situational ethics is a consequentialist theory involving love as the only important consequence. They are not meta-ethical relativism. The meta-ethical position they endorse is objectivism. The moral principles for Ross and Geisler are objectively true. It's just that sometimes one principle is more important than another (for Ross) or some principles are always more important than certain others (for Geisler).In both cases, the facts that determine which principles are relevant in a case are objective. For Geisler, the hierarchy of principles remains constant across situations. For Ross, it doesn't. But even for Ross there are objective facts about the situation that make certain principles more appropriate for that situation than other principles. Contrast the view that your psychological makeup, moral views, or cultural background is what determines which principles are important. These views are not relativism but genuinely objectivist moral theories.

In the online ethical theory course I'm teaching this summer, one of the students brought up the abortion question, which led to a discussion among the students, during which some of the usual points came up. I think I just realized more explicitly what's wrong with one common line of argument that I've seen on this topic.

It's often said that someone consents to parental responsibility by having sex. By engaging in behavior that has a risk of producing a new human life, one has agreed to care for that resulting child. A common response to this line of argument is that we don't apply the same line of thinking elsewhere. For example, we don't (or at least shouldn't) hold someone responsible for being raped just because she wears revealing clothing or because she leaves her house to walk to the house ten houses down, during which she risks someone dragging her off and raping her.

What I think I've just realized is that we're conflating two different kinds of responsibility. In the rape case, we're talking about whether someone ought to suffer the consequences of a small risk. The risk of getting raped while walking down the road is very small, and we don't usually say people deserve what happens to them merely because they were walking alone outside. But the abortion question isn't about whether suffering is deserved. It's about whether you have a moral obligation to do something about what results. Conception occurs. Now there's a tiny human organism that results from the behavior in question. So does someone have obligations that incur because of the small risk you took?

That's more analogous to whether I owe damages to someone if the baseball I hit goes through their window, which was a small risk but one I willingly took. Raising a child is a much more serious responsibility than paying a one-time monetary compensation for breaking a window, but the issue seems parallel in many ways (and the obligation might not be raising the child but might simply be going through with the pregnancy, which is quite a bit less at least). If it's not parallel in enough ways, it would be interesting to explore why. Francis Beckwith has pointed out that one indication why we might think we do consent to parental obligations merely from one sexual act is that we assume that very thing in our child-support laws. Should we also assume it in our abortion laws, or is there a morally relevant difference between the two situations (beyond the mere fact that we're talking about men in one case and women in the other)?

Update: An anonymous coward commenter has criticized this post in the comments of the Philosophers' Carnival that includes it. Maryann has closed comments, so I have to respond here.

1. The idea that this post contains any victim-blaming is ludicrous. I said nothing about any victim being blamed for any behavior that victimized the victim other than to say that people should not be blamed for what they're not responsible for. What I did say is that sometimes we incur an obligation when we are not to blame. How that amounts to claiming that you are to blame is beyond me.

2. There's some debate in the comments about whether I meant the baseball analogy to be an analogy with rape cases or an analogy with a case of consensual sex with no desire for children. I meant it as neither. In fact, it's not an analogy. It's an example illustrating that a general principle held by Thompson (which I discussed in point 1 just above) is in fact false. I had in mind only that principle when I gave the baseball case. I wasn't thinking it was an analogy for either case. It was simply given as a case demonstrating that we don't hold to such a principle unless we want to hold to it to avoid a conclusion we don't like about abortion. But what I say about the principle itself because of the baseball case does indeed apply to rape cases. That certainly doesn't mean I'm blaming any rape victims, though, because what I in fact said (as I said in point 1 above) is that any incurred responsibilities in such cases are despite not being blameworthy.

3. There's a claim that I held to certain conditionals and a response that I didn't include those conditionals and did a terrible job indicating that I meant them if I had meant them. Let me repeat my last two sentences: "Francis Beckwith has pointed out that one indication why we might think we do consent to parental obligations merely from one sexual act is that we assume that very thing in our child-support laws. Should we also assume it in our abortion laws, or is there a morally relevant difference between the two situations (beyond the mere fact that we're talking about men in one case and women in the other)?" That does entail, I think, the question: if we hold people responsible for something they're not to blame for in child-support situations, why shouldn't we do so in abortion situations?" And I don't think it's all that hard to get that out of my post if you actually read it.

Pro-choicers regularly accuse pro-lifers of favoring policies that increase abortions by (a) being one-issue voters who care only about laws restricting abortion (and politicians who will appoint, confirm, or be judges who will move things back in a direction that allows more of such restrictions), (b) actively opposing laws and policies that will decrease the number of abortions, or (c) promoting policies that will actually increase the number of unwanted pregnancies.

I'm sure there are people who are inconsistent in applying their pro-life principles by doing such things, but there are plenty of unfair ways to make such arguments, particularly when they ignore other beliefs held by many pro-life people that make their position fully consistent.

For example, contraception decreases the number of unwanted pregnancies, it is argued, and therefore pro-lifers who want to decrease the number of abortions ought to promote contraception. So the charge is that pro-lifers who oppose contraception are thus inconsistent.

It doesn't take much reflection to see that this argument is patently unfair to some pro-lifers. Consider the following proposal. Let's kill everyone on the planet. That would surely decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies. But no pro-lifer would advocate it, because it would be wrong to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies by using such a method. Now no one is offering that proposal, but consider the proposal in question. The suggestion is that by promoting contraception we would decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore we would decrease the number of abortions. You might think that this proposal is much better than simply killing everyone on the planet, which would also produce that same goal. In fact, it is. I'd be shocked to find anyone, pro-life or not, who wouldn't agree. But a proposal doesn't have to be as bad as killing everyone on the planet to be immoral, and at least one possible view would still consistently hold to pro-life views on abortion and anti-contraception views.

Some pro-lifers are simply opposed to contraception in principle. They think it's immoral. They surely don't think it's as immoral as wiping out all human life. But they do think it would be wrong to participate in it or promote it, and supporting policies that attempt to get more people to use contraception would indeed participate in and promote contraception. To such a person, it doesn't matter if they are opposing a policy that would decrease unwanted pregnancies. Decreasing unwanted pregnancies is a good thing, since it removes the occasion in which some people will do something immoral. But we shouldn't do something immoral ourselves in order to remove the situation where someone else will be tempted to do something immoral. So such a person is consistent with pro-life principles while opposing policies that promote contraception, and it's extremely unfair to such a person's actual views to accuse them of inconsistency before exploring what views they might have for resisting the promotion of contraception.

Similarly, if someone thinks it's immoral to promote economic policies that will put more people in better situations and thus remove some of the concerns that lead to abortions, then they should oppose those policies. Suppose the person is a pro-life economic libertarian of an extreme enough sort that they think welfare amounts to stealing, for example. They won't see the good consequences of welfare for those who are tempted to have abortions as good enough to overcome the wrongness of stealing from one group of people to help others. Preventing one bad situation that prevents a temptation for an immoral act is surely a good thing, but if it means adopting an economic policy that one considers immoral, it might eliminate that method, depending on what moral theory we're working with and how one sorts through potentially conflicting moral principles.

Now the argument is much better when directed against someone who doesn't see the policy in question as being intrinsically wrong but just sees it as a bad idea. Most economic conservatives don't oppose welfare programs at any level. Many pro-lifers don't oppose contraception as intrinsically wrong. In the first case, they have to weigh the bad consequences they expect from an economic policy they disagree with against the bad consequences they should expect if something isn't done to change the unwanted pregnancy rate. A lot more factors come into play here, such as which methods will be most effective at reducing unwanted pregnancies, which methods will have better consequences in other respects, how much energy the person is already putting into attempts that they don't see as having bad consequences, and how effective restrictive laws will be as compared with simply changing people's circumstances.

What about the contraceptive issue with those who don't see contraception as intrinsically wrong? A lot of pro-lifers who don't have a problem with contraception in principle will still be extremely hesitant about efforts to promote it among teenagers (or among the unmarried in general, depending on their views about sexual morality). One reason for this hesitation, I think, is that they see such promotion as endorsement of teenage sex (or unmarried sex), and they would see that as participating in something they shouldn't. Or it might be thought of in terms of promotion of something one wants not to promote. Then the wrongness of promoting something wrong or participating in something wrong might be decisive for someone, and we don't have an inconsistent position after all.

Then there might also be bad consequences to consider. I've seen claims that promoting contraception doesn't decrease unwanted pregnancies but actually decreases them. I've never looked at the details of studies on the subject, but I think the explanation for why this might be is that people who most (but not all) of the time use contraception are more likely to feel safer in avoiding contraception than without contraception-promotion, in which case they might have been more willing to abstain from sex than to engage in contracepted-sex most (but not all) of the time. Now it doesn't actually matter to my argument whether these claims are true. Perhaps this effect isn't very strong, and the effect of promoting contraception in preventing pregnancies is much stronger. What matters is that some people believe this claim to be true, and it's not totally unreasonable, even if a closer look at facts might disabuse someone of it (if in fact it's wrong, which I'm not taking a stand on one way or the other). That means they have a consistent position of why they think the effects of contraception-promotion do not actually decrease unwanted pregnancies, and thus they can consistently hold to pro-life principles and want to reduce unwanted pregnancies without wanting to promote contraception.

I recently listened to a Bloggingheads TV diavlog between Sarah Posner and Michael Dougherty, and along the way one of them (I believe Dougherty) mentioned an argument that I don't think I've ever heard before. Apparently some people have argued against promoting contraceptives because they think such efforts will lead to a bad consequence, not just in other areas, but one that has a direct impact on abortion. It may well be, as far as this argument goes, that promoting contraception will decrease the number of unexpected pregnancies, i.e. the number of pregnancies that were not wanted before they occurred. But emphasizing contraception might at the same time reinforce the sense that pregnancy is a bad thing worth avoiding. Of those unexpected pregnancies, such an increased sense of pregnancy as bad might increase the number of unexpected pregnancies been seen as unwanted. That might then increase the number of abortions resulting from unexpected pregnancies, even if the number of unexpected pregnancies goes down because of the contraception. You'd then have to see if it's possible to figure out which effect would be more significant, and my suspicion is that such a task would be very difficult, if not impossible, which might lead one toward caution about a policy that might have a good effect but might also have a bad effect. That would then contribute toward explaining the hesitation from some pro-lifers with respect to policies that promote contraception.

There are plenty of other things that might come to play here, but this should give enough sense that it doesn't automatically follow from pro-life convictions that one ought to favor policies promoting contraception or supporting economic policies that might have the effect of helping more women at risk for unwanted pregnancies to have more economically-viable situations where they'd be less tempted to have an abortion. Perhaps when all is said and done, the best pro-life policy is to oppose abortion and favor restricting it while also promoting contraception. Provided you don't think contraception is intrinsically immoral, that's going to depend on a number of other factors, including some empirical data that I'm not sure is readily available in an indisputable form. But it's not an automatic implication of pro-life principles, and how people settle those other issues will affect what they might consistently say about efforts to promote contraception. Similarly, it's certainly possible that pro-lifers ought to support some given effort to increase the quality of life of those who might be at risk for having an abortion. But whether they should consistently do so will depend quite a bit both on their other views and on empirical data that isn't easily available to most people and may, frankly, not even exist in any understandable form.

I recently listened to the Supreme Court oral arguments in Loving v Virginia, the 1967 case that overturned anti-miscegenation laws. I took a lot of notes and wrote up my thoughts afterward, and here are some of the observations and reflections that resulted.

1. The Lovings' lawyer began by presenting the law they wanted declared unconstitutional, the reason the law was passed, and a little bit about its precursor laws, feeling no need at that point to present any criticism of any it, It was simply clear from his tone that he thought the reasons behind the law were thoroughly immoral. No justice questioned him on this, and it sure seemed to me that they tacitly agreed. I wasn't around at the time, but this seemed to me to be a good sign that by 1967 we'd moved far enough along already that everyone on the Supreme Court saw this law as despicable, morally speaking (which in itself doesn't settle the legal question, and thus they let the oral argument continue past this point).

2. When the Virginia attorney general got his turn, it didn't take long for him to refer to the Lovings' union as a marital relation. He never disputed that it was a marriage, just whether Virginia had authority to declare their marriage illegal. That's one clear difference between Loving v. Virginia and the same-sex marriage cases in the courts right now that we don't often see people drawing attention to. Those who favor laws banning interracial marriage were happy to use the word 'marriage' for those relations. They didn't think such a union wasn't a genuine marriage. They just thought such marriages should or at least could be banned without it violating anyone's constitutional rights. The issue of whether it would be a marriage simply didn't occur to them. It obviously was. On the other hand, that's precisely one of the key issues for same-sex unions. Whether they should count as marriages to begin with has been a crucial issue of controversy, and whether these laws therefore revise a longstanding definition of marriage, and whether a state can resist that, is therefore not an issue that came up under Loving v. Virginia. Those who say that Loving v. Virginia automatically settles such questions by the same reasoning have not recognized this. There are several ways that the arguments aren't parallel in every respect, and that's a noteworthy difference. If the arguments based on the parallel are going to prevail, then this difference ought to be shown to be legally unimportant.

3. Three lawyers argued on the Lovings' behalf. The third, William Marutani, on behalf of the Japanese American Citizens League, made an interesting vagueness point. He was arguing that it's impossible to determine whether someone is white by definition of Virginia law, according to which someone has to be purely white in having no non-white ancestors. The people we call white are of such mixed ethnic background in the melting pot of the United States (and in the European history among prior ancestors) that it's impossible to be sure with most people (at least the ones without good genealogical records) whether they are white according to the Virginia law. It's a good practical reason not to have such laws, even apart from the moral question. The opposing lawyer rightly pointed out that the Virginia statutes about those matters weren't being challenged, so by the rules of our legal system it's not really legally relevant unless someone challenged those statutes in the lower courts first. But I thought it was nice to see someone making that point as early as 1967. It's worth pointing out that he didn't make any mention of the even-more-mixed status of blacks, even at the time (but it's much stronger now, I'd wager), but that wouldn't have helped him except to challenge the definitions of terms used in the law according to how they're used in science or something like that, which is irrelevant to the law's constitutionality, since the law itself didn't make any difference for blacks according to how much black ancestry they had. All it took was a smidgeon.

4. The precise equal protection point is worth reflecting on. There was also a due process argument, but I don't pretend to understand how due process is supposed to work. I've never heard a due process argument that I've understood, for whatever reason. It's not that I understand what's being argued and disagree. I simply have no clue what's being argued with due process claims, and I've never gotten any clarity on that despite hearing lots of oral arguments, reading lots of opinions, and trying to wade through discussions in popular-level presentations. Due process rights, according to some (e.g. Justices Scalia and Thomas), is merely ensuring that the laws are followed and that no improper procedures are followed. I once agreed with this, but that makes it a vacuous claim to say that you can't pass laws that deprive someone of rights without due process of the law. You can't pass laws without ensuring that the law is really passed? Then I discovered that at the time the 14th Amendment was passed, there was much discussion of what's called substantive due process, which reads more into due process than the vacuous sort of view I've lost interest in defending. So when that part of the Constitution was framed, it may well have involved this notion of due process. Nonetheless, I can't make heads or tails of what due process is supposed to be on the substantive due process view or how one would argue that due process rights include some claimed right, other than reading one's own policy preferences into the notion, which I don't consider legitimate judicial practice.

But the equal protection claim is one I fully understand. Every person within a state's jurisdiction is guaranteed equal protection of its laws. If a law treats one person differently from another without a strong enough justification for doing so, then equal protection is violated. The Virginia attorney general conceded that there is no justification for his state's anti-miscegenation laws if all you had to go on were genetic and scientific issues. The only moral justification his state could have to pass such a law, in his view, is the harmful effects of interracial marriages on the children of such marriages and on the participants, and he concedes that these effects are because of the attitudes of the people of Virginia toward such unions and toward children of such unions. So it's a highly contingent claim, one that presumably (as far as he's argued) would not be present in a state without such attitudes.

That's another difference from the arguments of those who oppose same-sex marriage. Their arguments are not based on contingent factors about people's attitudes toward same-sex unions and people's attitudes toward children raised by those in same-sex unions (who are not possibly the product of those unions, to begin with, at least in the biological sense, although some might not exist but for those unions). Some of the arguments of those who oppose same-sex unions are based on statistical claims about marriage as traditionally conceived compared with same-sex unions when called marriages, and some of those (for all we know) might be contingent matters due to social circumstances. If no one opposed same-sex relations, these things might be different.

But not all the arguments are like that. Some have to do with the sociological conclusions of numerous studies showing that not only are two parents more valuable for the sake of the child than one but that having parents of both sexes tends to be better (other things being equal) for the children and having the child with biological parents (other things being equal) tends to be better for the child. So marriages as traditionally conceived will, apart from contingent matters like social attitudes, be better for the children, and thus there's a reason to encourage such unions by calling them marriages and not unions that don't have those features. Whatever the merits or demerits of such an argument are, it's a difference in the justifications used for preventing same-sex unions being called marriage and the justifications used for preventing marriages between those of different races, and that's rarely acknowledged in the arugments of those who think Loving v. Virginia's arguments apply exactly to the same-sex marriage cases. Those differences need to be dealt with for such arguments to go through.

5. I've long thought that the equal protection point itself isn't parallel, for reasons I explained here and here. I don't think I've changed my mind on that question since writing those posts, although I've realized that I need to look into some Supreme Court rulings in the 70s on equal protection and women to see if the sex-discrimination argument should work with the federal Constitution given current Supreme Court precedent. But I'm not going to get into the details of any of that here. This post is long enough already that I don't need to rehash what prior posts already covered or to predict what I might come to after listening to the arguments in those 1970s cases.

There's a category of moral obligations that occur in funny circumstances. Given that you are doing a certain immoral thing, there are nevertheless obligations that you have. The pope has recently conceded (finally) that there are such obligations involving condom use. It's wrong to be a male prostitute, but it's "a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility" if the prostitute uses a condom. In other words, if you're going to be immoral, you do have the moral obligation of wearing a condom. You shouldn't be doing the initial immoral thing to begin with, but if you're going to do it you still have another obligation to be responsible and wear a condom, or else you fail at a further obligation.

The fullest quote I've seen is, "There may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be ... a first bit of responsibility, to re-develop the understanding that not everything is permitted and that one may not do everything one wishes."

Perhaps we could call this sort of thing a secondary moral obligation, one you don't have unless you're doing something you have a moral obligation not to do.

Since some secondary moral obligations might be immoral themselves were it not for the primary moral obligation, there really is an interesting character to them. That's certainly how the pope's view in this case works. Condom use is normally immoral, according to his view. But given certain immoral actions, you then have a secondary moral obligation to perform that normally-immoral act of using a condom.

I want to say something about Andrew Sullivan's response, because I think Sullivan latches on to something important that most people haven't picked up, but he's also got it completely wrong in another respect. What Sullivan notices is that "Benedict has chosen a case where transmission of new life (barring a real miracle) is already impossible". It's not clear if he would say the same thing about a female prostitute, where conception might be possible. It's quite possible that this is why he chose this example. I'm not sure. Does the recognition of secondary moral obligations only occur when the stakes of the effects of risky sex are greater than the stakes of contraception, and the latter still appear in cases of heterosexual non-marital sex?

I suspect Sullivan is wrong about this, though, and the pope would still invoke what I'm calling a secondary moral obligation in cases where there's high risk of STDs with immoral sex of any sort, but Sullivan has given a possible distinction that might come into play. I credit him for spotting that possibility, but I'm wondering if he has any evidence other than the fact that he chose this example when he could have chosen another (which is no more than speculation, actually).

I have to criticize Sullivan's understanding of the larger issue. I don't think he gets the point being made. He describes this statement is taking one form of gay sex as being more moral than another. That strikes me as at least very misleading, if more moral means anything other than less immoral. When you say something is more moral, it sounds as if there's a continuum between things not moral and things most moral, and this is in between somewhere. That's not what Benedict said, though. What he said is that both are immoral, but one is moreso.

What he goes on to say next, however, does seem right to me. It does follow that moral considerations of this secondary sort would apply in gay sex. If gay sex is immoral, there are some instances that are less so than others. Anonymous gay sex is more immoral than gay sex in a committed partnership. Duh. But is such a position really anathema to the Roman Catholic Church? Is Benedict likely to say that there's no moral distinction between killing someone while robbing a bank in order to get away safely and taking sadistic delight in blowing up the entire bank with forty hostages as you go, even though none of their deaths were required for your escape?

I'd be pretty shocked if he thought such a thing. In fact, an alternate position by John Allen strikes me as more likely: "Pope Benedict XVI has signaled that in some limited cases, where the intent is to prevent the transmission of disease rather than to prevent pregnancy, the use of condoms might be morally justified." So the issue is intent, as is unsurprising. Pope Paul VI's statement on sexual morality allowed for some cases where an act that would normally be immoral might in certain contexts be justified given that the intent is not to prevent conception but to save a life. The case of a married couple with one spouse HIV-positive seems to be another, and I know of several instances of Catholic bishops and even a cardinal endorsing condom use in such a case (and the entire Phillipines conference of bishops even made a public statement to that effect).

So is Sullivan's conclusion that the pope is now opened up to a gray-scale of morality rather than black and white morality? Hardly. There's still a fact about what you ought to do and what you ought not to do. The gradations are not between right and wrong, where it's factually uncertain which things are which (or even worse that there are no facts about where the line lies). I've seen nothing to indicate anything other than a sharp line between right and wrong in Benedict's moral thinking. It's just that there are degrees in how wrong something can be. Out of the things that are simply wrong, some have a greater degree of wrongness to them than others. Using a condom to have gay sex in a committed same-sex legal marriage is, on the Catholic view, simply wrong, even if it's not as bad as having unprotected sex with a male prostitute in a one-time encounter.

Given what the pope's position is, it's interesting to see the headlines news outlets are giving to the pronouncement (and I'm just looking at what's on the top of the Google listings). Yahoo's is pretty good: Pope says some condom use 'first step' of morality. CBN seems to be using the same headline. ABC is also in this category, as is Catholic Herald.

Politics Daily, on the other hand, gets it entirely wrong: "Pope OKs Condoms in Some Cases, Such As Prostitutes Avoiding HIV". That doesn't get the point at all. It's not that he's OKing it for them. It's that he can see it as a movement from being thoroughly immoral to being a little less immoral, all the while insisting that they should be doing none of it to begin with. You have the same problem with the New York Times: Pope Says Condoms to Stop AIDS May Be Acceptable. NPR has the same problem with different language: Pope Says Condoms Can Be Used in Some Cases. Al Jazeera has an initial headline that's fine, but then they have a sub-headline that's as bad as any of these. First: Pope softens stand on condoms. Then the summary immediately below says he considers it acceptable in some cases. Others in this category include the New York Post, CNN, and the Huffington Post. The Daily Beast is perhaps the worst: Pope Partly Endorses Condoms.

FOX News is only a little better: Pope: Condom Use Can Be Justified in Some Cases. The reason I think that's a little better is because it's actually true, whereas the NYT and Politics Today headlines are simply false. The pope has not said that it's OK or acceptable to use condoms to stop AIDS, just that it's less immoral than engaging in such behavior without a condom. I think it's technically correct to say, however, that it can be justified in some cases, if the view is that you incur a moral obligation to use a condom in such circumstances by engaging in the immoral behavior. But it's pretty misleading. It suggests that this is all right, even if it doesn't go as far as the others in asserting that. MSNBC has a similar headline, with "OK" instead of "Justified". That strikes me as better than saying he OKs it or that it may be acceptable, but I think calling it justified is a little better.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

Update: The discussion at Evangel has brought up a couple things I wanted to mention here (but I recommend reading the comments there, which are much more full than anything I expect here).

1. Steve Hays provided a link to this story, which suggests both that this isn't really all that new in the thinking of the Catholic hierarchy but that it would be perceived as a change in policy by most in that hierarchy.

2. David Nickol quoted the section of Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae that I was remembering that allows for non-contraceptive intents behind actually-contraceptive measures, as long as there's no contraceptive intent. Here's what he quotes: "the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result there from--provided such impediment is not directly intended for any motive whatsoever." That confirms my sense of things that lay behind my response to Sullivan.

Update 2: Well, here we go. He didn't mean to include just male-male acts.

Update 3: Steve Hays sent me a link to another article confirming the information in U1 of the first update.

Philosopher Peter Ludlow presents the motivation behind Wikileaks to show that ways to resist it won't work, because they assume things that aren't true about why people are doing this. It's basically absolutism about the availability of information. The principle is that if there's information, then we should all have access to it. It's not remotely about calling people toward being more accountable or trying to promote a particular political agenda (aside from the absolutism about freedom of information, anyway, which is a political agenda).

The argument reminds me an awful lot of the kind of mindset Michael Crichton was arguing against with Jurassic Park. It's absolutism about the dissemination of information, without regard to any moral principles about whether it's good to do so or even wrong to do so in particular cases. In that way, it's highly parallel to those who pursue scientific research merely because they can and regardless of any of the ethical objections to doing so.

This is from Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, p.11:

...there are arguments in the works of the pre-Socratic Sophists to the effect that it is individual character and not skin color that determines a person's worth.

He has an endnote that deals entirely with the first half of this sentence, which was about Homer. He gives no source for this claim, and there's no other mention of anything remotely helpful in the context.

This is a little surprising to me, because the only Sophists I know of who we have any record of what they thought about ethics were Protagoras in his relativism and Antiphon in his egoistic nihilism. I wouldn't expect either to put forward such a view as a genuine moral truth, and the others we have any indication about (Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Callicles) seem to have been with Antiphon at least in terms of the basic view.

So does anyone know of any information that Appiah must be aware of that I'm not?

Matt Skene has a very thoughtful post on the intersection of issues related to rights and obligations and recent health care debates. I disagree with a number of Matt's assumptions. I think we do have positive obligations, and I do think they simply are there without our taking them on. I don't think rights determine obligations but the other way around. Perhaps most salient, I don't think we can distinguish between obligations and moral goodness. I think we simply have an obligation to do what's morally best (and yes, I know that that means that pretty much everyone on this planet is thoroughly immoral, but that's not exactly a new view; it's historic Christian doctrine).

But I think there's a lot worth thinking about in Matt's post. His general approach is libertarian. He starts with natural negative rights and argues for no positive rights. In other words, certain things are wrong to do to me, because I have a right for you not to do them, but I have no rights for you to do positively good things on my behalf, just for you not to do bad things to me. But such a view doesn't imply that there aren't moral reasons to do positive things on behalf of other people.

In particular, there are reasons why it might be the morally best thing to do to help those who are less fortunate to obtain good medical care. Matt doesn't think I have an obligation to alleviate the suffering of people I have no other connection with, but he does think it's morally good to do so. It's also self-interestedly good for me to develop the character traits that such acts help develop in me. He's open to, but not convinced by, the argument that it would be in our best interests to contract with one another to institute such obligations by common consent, as we do with building highways. It depends on whether we'd all be better off with it.

Matt suggests an interesting possibility, though. You can donate money to your utility company to offset the costs of low-income utility customers. Presumably this goes to heating assistance aid, which is given to recipients of food stamps once a year and paid directly to the utility company. I'm not sure how else the utility companies would know who counts as low-income. But if we did a similar thing with insurance companies, there might be enough money from those who, like progressives on this issue, think they have an obligation to pay for others' insurance and from some of those who, like Matt, think it's a morally good thing to do. Could that cover everything Medicaid and other public health insurance does? It's worth seeing how much it covers.

I tend to doubt it, since most people who think the government should tax us more to pay for benefits to low-income people are not inclined to give money when it's voluntary (consider our current president as a prime example), but maybe enough people who don't share such views will give the money voluntarily while resisting it when it's government-controlled (as, apparently, Dick Cheney does with a huge percentage of his income). But it's being done with utilities. Why not try it with health insurance and see where it goes? There might even be enough votes in Congress after the 2010 election.

A friend of mine who blogs under a pseudonym has an excellent post criticizing the way a lot of schools and similar child-focused organizations run their fundraisers.

I couldn't resist chiming in and saying that it's pretty evil for anyone to assume of any particular family that they can produce the person-hours to engage in this kind of fundraising and to have negative consequences for those who can't. For a family with limited financial resources, expecting them to come up with the money whether they raise it or not is downright evil, and families with particularly high time commitments simply cannot devote their very limited time-resources to helping their school or organization raise the money that they need to keep operating the way they do.

It becomes not just inconvenient but pretty much impossible in a family with five children, two of them autistic, one of them a newborn, and heavy time-commitments outside just ordinary ways of taking care of the children (say, involvement in a church, several activities throughout the week related to the disabilities of the children, the extra time necessary for dealing with behavior and safety issues raised by serious developmental delays, divided responsibilities between work and education for the sole wage-earner, both of which get sidelined much more frequently than in most families). If any organization our children were involved with were to engage in this kind of behavior, I would simply ignore them, and if they pushed they'd get an earful.

But, even in a family where the parents can sit down and relax even while their kids are home, where they don't have to assign one parent to monitor a very active and destructive seven-year-old for his entire waking existence on top of whatever else might need to go on, where after bedtime the parents can assume they can sit down and do something relaxing for a few hours before going to sleep, it seems to me to be contrary to the usual norms of social interaction in our society to think that you can expect a certain level of commitment from people for this sort of thing. It's one thing to ask parents to put in some time and effort asking some people they know to contribute. It's quite another to expect the huge time commitment that's required to ensure that every family gets a certain level of results. There are much more fruitful ways of raising money that don't involve roping in reluctant people, sometimes those who simply cannot devote their time or energy to anything of the sort. Why can't people use the same standards of moral decency that they apply to most of their interactions with other people when it comes to these things?

Pro-choice activists are making a big deal about a new study claiming to show that human beings feel no pain until about 24 weeks into their fetal life. Lots of studies have appeared contradicting each other on this, so this is hardly news. There's been lots of debate on this for several decades now, and this doesn't seem to me to have acquired some special status above all the other studies yet. Science doesn't work that way. As Ken Miller is fond of stating, you need established confirmation by further studies by people with different methodology before you accept something as established science. You need consensus. This is one study among many, and they don't all agree with each other.

I'm still not sure how it's relevant, anyway. I know of no fully pro-life argument claiming that it's the consciousness of the fetus that makes abortion wrong. There are some moderate pro-choice arguments that restrict the period of abortion to early term that use this claim as part of their basis. But those who base their opposition to abortion on the fact that it's a human organism with its own DNA and thus a full human being with full moral status will be unmoved by this, and those who base their opposition to abortion on the fact that abortion robs the fetal human organism of a future life like our lives will also be untouched.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

Update: Several people have raised important points that are independent of mine, in comments both here and at Evangel and via email.

1. We shouldn't assume the physical structures involved in this study are the only ones that can give rise to pain. There is, after all, well-known ultrasound evidence of relatively early fetuses responding with painlike behavior. Those who question early fetal pain explain it as mere stimulus-response without anything internal, but such a claim is mere behaviorism (i.e. relying on an empirically false view) unless there's a strong argument that the painlike behavior can't be a result of actual pain. I've heard from someone who has carefully reviewed the study much more fully than I could, and from a strong medical background, that the argument in the article simply ignores other possible structures for pain.

2. All that can be observed if pain-behavior and neural activity in places in the brain believed to be associated with pain sensations. No one can empirically detect anyone else's pain-sensations. This argument cuts both ways, since it's possible (from my perspective) that no one else but me feels pain, including early fetuses. But it also undermines the argument that, assuming other people do feel pain, all brain activity leading to pain will be alike in all individuals. As a good substance dualist, I have to have some sympathy for this point.

3. I've heard indirectly from a scientist who does work close to this very area who questions the claims about sedation of fetuses. But, as I said (in my lack of understanding of the state of these questions), this article will need to be tested in the arena among others who have alternative claims to make that they also manage to publish to see if it has staying power. It's not a consensus, and it appears the alternative views have several things to differ with in the approach and arguments of this article. So there's no reason to jump the gun here and think this offers much strong evidence for anything, even if it were relevant to abortion (which it's not, at least if the intent is to undermine reasonably strong pro-life views rather than moderate pro-choice views).

Shelby Steele is often derided as a black opponent of affirmative action. One particular criticism of him is that he takes views that further white privilege by denying its significance for affirmative action. If affirmative action can be justified in part because of the white privilege that continues even when outright attitudinal racism is absent or enough removed to be less noticeable, then those who resist it because it discriminates against white people are ignoring racial realities. I've seen people make such a criticism of Steele. It occurred to me while reading him again on this for the ethics class I'm teaching this summer that the criticism is entirely inapt.

Steele's view does not ignore white privilege. In fact, he doesn't accept the argument that affirmative action is bad because of its effect on whites. There are black conservatives whose criticism of affirmative action is merely the claim that it's reverse racism. Steele himself counters such a claim. He doesn't think that's sufficient grounds for opposing affirmative action. While his most famous treatment of this (and the only thing I've read by him on the subject, or on any subject for that matter) does not go into much detail on why he sees such arguments as wrongheaded, I think it's got to be that he simply acknowledges the existence of white privilege.

His moral argument against affirmative action ignores (rightly, in my view) how affirmative action affects white people, something it can do only if the negative effect on white people simply counters some of the white privilege that he insists does exist. Before he can offer his moderated view against affirmative action that takes its start only from negative effects on the underrepresented groups affirmative action is supposed to help, he first needs to resist the argument against affirmative action based on its supposed unfairness to white people. His main point is that affirmative action has negative effects on the very people it's supposed to help. As time goes on and the negative effects of racism and white privilege that affirmative action is supposed to counter are getting somewhat less, the negative effects start to increase. At some point (and he thinks we've passed that point), affirmative action becomes no longer worth it.

So it's hardly true that Shelby Steele has isolated himself from his fellow blacks to the point where he simply no longer sees white privilege. It's part of his argument for his moderated critique of affirmative action, based on its effects on those it's intended to help rather than its reverse racism, that white privilege still operates and that the initial justification for affirmative action is still present. He just thinks the negatives for its beneficiaries are stronger than the positives. There may be other legitimate criticisms of Steele, but I don't think it's fair to him to claim that he's ignoring white privilege and thereby furthering it. He's fully taking it into account. It's part of his reason for not making the reverse racism charge, and it's what makes his argument a weighing of positives vs. negatives rather than an in-principle resistance based on absolute moral claims.

I finished up my classes today by looking at Thomas Aquinas on natural law, and it occurred to me that a famous proponent of natural law today served as a good example to illustrate one of Aquinas' points. Aquinas doesn't think every moral conclusion that we can derive from natural law should be enforced by human law. He says the moral principles most worth enforcing are those that involve serious, especially potentially-widespread, harm. Almost any natural law theorist is going to see harm to yourself as immoral, but Aquinas wouldn't see that as a good reason to prohibit it by human law. He also says it's not genuinely a law without promulgation, which includes enforcement to motivate compliance.

As I was talking about this in class, I remembered Clarence Thomas' hilarious dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas from 2003 and mentioned it as an example. Texas had laws against same-sex sodomy that no one ever enforced. Cops investigating a serious crime followed a lead and legally invaded a home that they suspected their target was living in. They were wrong. He'd moved, and a gay couple now lived in that home. The police stumbled in on the two men in the process of an illegal sex act. They promptly arrested them, and the two men sued in a case that got to the Supreme Court. Did this law violate these men's constitutional rights by this law?

Thomas' opinion is priceless, and my summary of it got some audible laughs from students who don't normally show much interest in any class content. He says it's not unconstitutional for the reasons given in Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion. The reason he wrote separately was not to change anything from what Scalia had said. He wrote a separate dissent to make it clear that he thought the Texas law was stupid, and that's exactly the word he used. He wanted it on record that he wasn't voting to uphold the constitutionality of the law because he thought the law was a good law. He didn't. He just didn't think it was the place of the U.S. Supreme Court to tell state legislators what to do on such matters. The law itself, however, was a stupid law. It's largely unenforceable, and any enforcement will be so sporadic that it will have hardly any deterrent value anyway. This is exactly what you'd expect of a natural law theorist in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas insists that there shouldn't be human laws of this sort.

I decided to take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Justice Thomas to see what it might say about natural law, and it says the following:

Whereas Thomas' earlier writings had frequently referenced the legal theory of natural law, Thomas distanced himself from that controversial stance during his confirmation hearings, giving the impression that he had no views. Thomas himself later asserted in his autobiography that in the course of his professional career, he had not developed a judicial philosophy.

What he actually did at his hearings (and yes, I just reviewed the transcripts to be sure I was getting it right) was to point out the difference between (a) thinking natural law is the basis of why it's good policy to have certain constitutional rights and (b) thinking we should look to natural law rather than to the Constitution's positive rights when deciding matters of constitutional law. Thomas had long endorsed (a) and never endorsed (b), and what the entry describes as his distancing himself from his previous natural laws views was really his denial of (b), something natural law theory doesn't imply anyway. When he says he had no judicial philosophy in his book, that doesn't mean he hadn't ever developed a view on the foundations of ethics, which is what natural law theories are. Not having a comprehensive judicial philosophy does not mean having no meta-ethical views.

Of course, if I changed the entry and gave as an explanation the fact that this is what natural law theory states, especially if I indicated my credentials as a philosopher, it would be rejected as original research. Wikipedia is the only place in the world where actual expertise on an issue counts against you in terms of recognition as the sort of person who can say something authoritative. It only would allow this if I had written it in a book or something and if someone who had no expertise on the issue had read it in that book and cited it. The best I could do is mention it in the discussion page for the article and hope someone who isn't a philosopher might be convinced and thus change it.

Oklahoma has rendered doctors immune to lawsuits if they lie to parents about the test result of a prenatal tests for disabilities, provided that their reasons for doing so are to prevent an abortion. I want to leave aside the question of birth defects in general and just focus on the Down Syndrome case. The law seems to cover cases when a parent might be preventing very serious pain in a case where the quality of life is very low, and I'm not going to tackle those issues right now. So what I have to say here doesn't cover everything this law does, and even if everything I say here is right it's compatible with that to say that the law still is bad for covering cases that don't have the features that this post focuses on. What I have to say here doesn't get into those cases at all, so don't take me to be commenting on them or the law in general. That would take a lot more work and premises that are more controversial, I think.

So restrict the law, for the sake of this post, to cover just Down Syndrome cases. 90% of children at the fetal stage who are predicted to have Down Syndrome by prenatal tests are aborted. These tests have 5% false positives, so 5% of those cases are probably not genuinely Down Syndrome to begin with. Even if I didn't think abortion was generally a bad thing, I would be opposed to such a practice. I know people who have told me they would have made such a decision with their own child, and I just can't imagine being the sort of person who could think that, never mind do it.

Nevertheless, my initial inclination was to think this is entirely the wrong way to go about trying to do something to resist the deaths of almost all children with Down Syndrome before they ever even get to experience the world. This seemed like a bad law. But on reflection, it occurs to me that it's very difficult to explain why this law (and remember I'm restricting myself just to the Down Syndrome cases here) is all that bad, at least given four premises that I think are widely-enough held (or would be if people had all the facts, anyway).

1. Abortion is generally bad and worth preventing, even if at some cost and even if there are cases when abortion is permissible.
2. It's morally permissible to lie to someone who is going to do great harm, as long as you don't cause more harm in the process.
3. Killing a fetus who tested positive for Down Syndrome is participation in the genocide of those with disabilities.
4. The harm done by lying to a parent who wants to abort a fetus who tested positive for Down Syndrome is not greater than the harm caused by that parent's participation in the genocide of those with disabilities.

Many pro-choice people would agree with 1 but would still want abortion to be generally available (that's what makes them pro-choice rather than pro-abortion), and all pro-life people would agree with it. So I think a majority would support that.

Hardly anyone accepts 2 except a few absolutists, e.g. those who think any biblical commands that apply today and who wrongly think the Bible commands never to lie or, I suppose, contemporary Kantians who accept Kant's absolutism about lying. I know some people who hold such views, but I don't think they're in the majority. Most pro-life and pro-choice people alike think it would be permissible or even a moral obligation to lie to a Nazi hunting down Jews, for example.

I would argue that 3 is a perfectly accurate description for such an act, given that more than 90% of positive test results end in abortion. As a society, we're killing off those with Down Syndrome in huge numbers, and I would guess that many people who might be inclined to think aborting someone after such a test is all right end up being horrified when they discover that statistic. This requires no commitment to any pro-life position, just a recognition that it's a very bad thing to wipe out people just because they have a disability and that people with this particular disability generally have very happy lives and can contribute quite a lot to the world.

So the only way to resist this argument that I think would appeal to a great many people would be to argue that lying in this very particular circumstance causes more harm than the participation in the genocide of those with disabilities. But I don't think that will be as easy an argument as it might at first sound. There is the value of being able to trust a physician, and this does undermine that, but it's a law that only has one allowance for why that can happen, so it doesn't undermine confidence in physicians in general, just in physicians when it comes to this test. Is that such a bad result, given how bad the consequence is of parents being able to get this information? In fact, you might think the doctor's responsibility to the fetus requires not providing information to parents who the doctor knows would then kill the fetus, so the argument that this violates a doctor's professional responsibilities seems counted by the argument that giving the information also does.

I'm having a hard time, then, explaining why I have such resistance to this method of preventing abortions that result from the desire not to have a child with a disability. There seem to be cases where there's a strong argument in favor of withholding that information.

1. The trailer for Going Postal is online. It's one of Terry Pratchett's best Discworld novels, so I expect it to be good. The adaptations have so far been pretty good. I didn't like the Hogfather book as much as most of the series, but the adaptation was great, and The Colour of Magic adaptation (which included the stories from the book of that name and its followup, The Light Fantastic) was very well done. This is the third by the same people, and it's got an even better story to work with, although the downside of that is that it will be harder to measure up to the book.

2. Terry Pratchett has written a letter updating fans on how he's doing. There's no mention of how he's doing with his Alzheimer's in general (other than the clear implication that it's not easy for him right now), but it sounds as if he's done with the first draft of his next book, which awaits editing and revision, and there's a long diatribe against some of the people writing letters to him.

Some of them seem pretty evil, but it doesn't justify his lumping together those who oppose assisted suicide or abortion with those who wanted to outlaw painkillers during labor because it negates the curse of Genesis 3 or those who opposed letting women vote. I expect better of him than this. I feel sorry for him having to put up with some of the ridiculous mail he's been getting, some of it giving a bad name to things I happen to agree with, but it doesn't justify the association of all who disagree with him on a contentious moral issue with those who held positions in the past that we all disagree with now.

I'm curious about the reference to Chesterton's fame "fool the prophet". Google turns up exactly zero on that phrase with his name. Does anyone happen to know what he's referring to?

I previously posted my worries about the glossary entry for the word 'gay' in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment. I'm worried about the following entry also, for several reasons:

Heterosexism: A bias toward heterosexuality that denigrates and devalues GLB people. Also, the presumption that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality or prejudice, bias, or discrimination based on these things.

Consider a man named Jim in the 1960s who does what people sometimes call "passing for white". His family is black, but there's enough white ancestry for him to appear white. Someone looking at him without knowing his family would think he's white. He talks in a way that no one would know his family is black. His employers would never discriminate against him because of his being black, even if they normally did such a thing, because they wouldn't know that he is black.

Jim decides to apply for college late in life, after the civil rights era is long over. There's a checkbox to indicate if he is black, which will be used for affirmative action purposes. Some people think affirmative action is immoral, and some people think it's immoral to ask or report one's race. Ignore those issues for this example, since what I want to get at is a different issue, and I don't want those as distractions. Assuming people should normally report their race accurately on such forms, should he check the box indicating that he is black? If you think he is black-passing-as-white, but you think he shouldn't check the box, exactly why is that (because it seems as if such an action constitutes a lie)?

Now consider a man in our day named Tom who has three white grandparents. His fourth grandparent is Jim. So he has two great-grandparents who are indisputably black and a grandparent who many people would consider black-passing-as-white. But Tom grew up in a white suburb in a family considered by everyone around them to be white, and almost no one he comes into contact with ever learns of or suspects that he has pretty recent black ancestors.

Tom applies for college. Again, ignoring issues about the moral status of affirmative action and assuming people should normally report the race on such forms, should Tom check the box indicating that he is black, knowing that it will qualify him for affirmative action? If not, but Jim should, what is the difference between the two that justifies a different moral result? If you think they both should not check it, is it for the same reason in both cases?

A study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that 40% of diagnoses of brain disorders are misdiagnoses. These are people diagnosed with conditions such as being in a persistent vegetative state, which is often taken as sufficient for removal of life support because of the assumption that no person remains.

This study finds that a significant percentage of people who are diagnosed as being in such a state are not only conscious but can even be made to communicate simple "yes" or "no" by being told to think about some concrete thing if they mean "yes" and a different concrete thing if they mean "no". Different parts of their brain would be active if they were conscious and given these instructions, and that could be detected, A number of these patients were thus able to communicate after being declared to have brains of jello with no possibility of consciousness.

This calls for a massive rethinking of how we should interpret what's going on in persistent vegetative state diagnoses. Either there are different conditions that look the same for all that can be detected (prior to this new method of detecting consciousness, anyway), or the one state that's been called a persistent vegetative state is fully compatible with consciousness, despite what doctors have assumed. Our courts have relied on that judgment to excuse what turns out to be the killing of a conscious human being. This new research raises the standards pretty steeply for when we should make life-or-death decisions based on such diagnoses.

The LifeNews article about this study includes a suggestion in the opposite direction. If these patients can indicate, consent, can't they be asked if they want to die? The doctor the article quotes as being interested in this does acknowledge that there are still problems with consent. I don't think the article shows much awareness of how significant such problems are. It's notoriously difficult to know when someone has rationally consented even if they can communicate in complete sentences, and this doctor thinks he can get patients who can only use this roundabout method to give legal consent to being killed? How will they determine whether the person is being rational in consenting? Congress prohibited the selling of organs, because it's too easy for people at the lower end in terms of income to be manipulated into giving up their organs. Shouldn't we extend at least as much courtesy to those who might be manipulated into giving up their lives?

[cross-posted at Evangel]

John Mark Reynolds' response has helped me to clarify where I think he and I are disagreeing on the torture question.

JMR defends his view based on his argument that torture is worse than killing. Of course, I can easily concede that torture can be worse than killing. But I can't accept that it always is. In 8th grade, a fellow student of mine used to give me wet willies at pretty regular intervals throughout the day. I consider that torture of a very weak sort. It was evil for him to do so, and how I responded was also evil. I got so fed up that I kicked him in the family jewels (or maybe I kneed him). I also consider that to be a kind of torture. Neither is worse than killing someone. Both inflicted pain of a particularly excessive sort. Both involve using someone as a mere means to an end, in his case to take delight in someone else's pain, in my case to satisfy my desire for revenge. Both are wrong, but both are less wrong than killing.

A police officer might cause severe psychological pain by lying to someone in a way that leads to a confession. A police officer might cause physical pain, as long as it's not severe and permanent. Both are perfectly legal in law enforcement, although they are not for military interrogators, who aren't allowed to lie or even touch a suspected terrorist, which was why the Bush Administration wanted more allowed for CIA interrogators, since standard military interrogations were ineffective against al Qaeda. I count such things as mild torture, and they don't seem all that wrong to me, even if one might argue that they are wrong. They certainly aren't worse than killing the suspect.

The key issue is that torture comes in degrees. Killing does too but not in the same sense. What makes an act of killing worse is how you do it, why you do it, and so on. But killing is killing. Torture can be fairly weakly torture, or it can
be pretty awful torture. Killing can be worse because it also involves torture, but the killing itself is not worse. It's the torture that adds to the badness of the killing. Killing is all-or-nothing, and torture comes in degrees in a way that
begs for an analysis that's more complex than simple right and wrong. It's at least a spectrum from not as bad to extremely bad, and it may well be a spectrum from morally required to significantly evil.

I think Mark Olson's question is helpful, so I'll repeat here my comment on his post:

If you only consider consequentialist principles, you can't get an absolute prohibition on anything except the principle that we should seek the best consequences. So to get a moral ban on all torture, there better be some deontological principles at stake. The question is whether those deontological principles themselves are absolutist.

I happen to think the only deontological principle that is absolutist is the moral claim that we ought to give due honor to God and follow him in whatever ways are best for doing so. There are many ethical principles beyond that, and most of them apply most of the time. Some of them apply almost all the time and would require crazy hypotheticals to find exceptions (or very weak cases with moral principles about matters that involve vague concepts occurring along a spectrum, such as consent and coercion, harm, or what someone's motivation and desires are in doing an act).

But to answer your question, I think the deontological principle behind JMR's opposition to torture is his principle that it's always wrong to coerce someone, a principle I've questioned. He doesn't think it's always wrong to cause pain or to cause pain that someone remembers. He doesn't think it's always wrong to cause harm, even permanent harm, knowing full well that one is doing so. He does think it's wrong to cause harm for the sake of causing harm without some higher purpose, but he doesn't think such a higher purpose can be merely getting information that will lead to better consequences when the causing of harm is done to violate someone's ability to consent to giving up that information. So it's mainly an issue of consent to choose to speak when one wants to and to refrain from giving information when one doesn't.

As I've said along the way, I think the problem with that argument is that consent and coercion come along a spectrum, and weaker versions of coercion undermining consent can be morally correct under the right sorts of circumstances. When the consequences increase in their badness, avoiding them might require undermining consent to a stronger degree than is normally moral. That's why I think torture isn't in principle wrong. JMR has a more absolutist view about that principle. We both take it to be deontological, because neither of us thinks slightly better consequences for a serious undermining consent are enough to justify it. But he takes it to be absolutist, whereas I think there could be circumstances where undermining someone's consent via coercion to a great degree can be morally all right, as long as those consequences are extremely serious.

So I'm not sure the disagreement is really meta-ethical. It's more on the level of normative ethics, I think.

For ease of reference, here are the posts:

One Bad Argument in Favor of Torture
Cicero not Nero!
On Pacifism and Torture
A Conservative and Pragmatic Argument Against Torture

Arguments Against Torture

Consider the image of God argument. This is the same reasoning used against killing, and yet the scriptures make it very clear that capital punishment is not just allowable but mandated by God, at least in a certain context. (I'll leave it open whether it should be used today. What matters for my point here is that God not just allowed it the way he allowed divocrce in the Mosaic law. He commanded it in the Torah, and Paul seems to affirm the use of the sword in carrying out justice in Romans 13, so there's not even a plausible argument that the new covenant removes this allowance.) So I don't think the fact that we're made in the image of God is going to rule out all torture, since it doesn't rule out all killing and it's the explicit biblical reason not to kill people.

Aristotelian virtue arguments point out how bad it is to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to torture someone. Of course this is right, but it's also bad to become the sort of person who could bring yourself to kill someone. The argument that we ought to find the right mean, that we ought to be moderate, does not imply that we won't sometimes do something that is usually on one of the extremes. Aristotle, for example, saw honesty and truth-telling as virtues between the extremes of lying and betraying confidences. But there might be some occasions when lying to save someone's life is morally necessary (as God instructed Samuel to do when he anointed David) or betraying a confidence is morally necessary (as happens in courts of law all the time in the pursuit of justice, with the only significant exceptions being attorney-client, spousal privilege, and medical/psychological practitioner/client relationships). Just because the mean is the best spot doesn't mean the actions usually on the extremes always will be. Occasionally you'll find actions that are usually on an extreme ending up as the mean. So Aristotelian golden mean arguments will never rule out an action in principle, since that's not how the view works.

The coercion argument strikes me as mistaken, also. There are certainly occasions when it's right to coerce someone. For example, we put criminals in prison. We threaten to imprison or fine people to get them to testify or to serve on a jury. We impose severe penalties to those who won't pay their taxes. We have on occasion drafted people to serve in the military and kill other people, and when that's a just and popular war most people don't think it's as problematic as in wars that are very unpopular or obviously unjust. We require people to work or show progress toward improving employment capability if they're to receive government benefits of various sorts. It strikes me that the case of torture is most analogous to other kinds of coercion to get testimony, and the major difference is in the method of coercion, not in the principle that it's wrong to coerce people to tell the truth.

There's now a method of modifying the DNA in a blood or hair sample to make it appear to be someone else's DNA.

I saw this on an SVU episode from earlier this season that was on last night while I was finishing up grading an exam. I was hoping they'd just made it up, but I guess not. This is the kind of discovery that it might be immoral to publish if there weren't any way to distinguish the modified DNA from original DNA, but it seems they have concocted a method to detect the subterfuge.

The following two claims seem plausible enough to me:

1. God is not morally obligated to create the best possible world.
2. There are no supererogatory acts.

Supererogatory acts are those acts that go above and beyond what duty or obligation requires. But if God isn't obligated to create the best possible world, and is merely obligated to produce a good enough world, then isn't it better if God creates a world that's better than the minimally good enough world? It seems like a supererogatory act for God to create at all, since it will never be the best act of creation. So there does seem to be a problem if you accept both these claims. But, though I would not submit to martydrom for either claim, there do seem to me to be good arguments for both, and yet they seem inconsistent.

1. I think it's plausible that adding one more intrinsically good thing to a world will make the world better, and its always possible to add one more intrinsically good thing. This means there is no best possible world, and thus it is impossible even for an omnipotent being to create the best possible world. Unless God is obligated to do the impossible, it seems that claim 1 is true.

2. Consequence-based ethical theories have usually required maximizing the best consequences, but a lot of people have rejected such an approach, because it implies that it's wrong to go see a movie because that money could better be spent helping starving people get some food (for one example). So we now have satisficing theories approaches that say that all we're obligated to do is seek good enough consequences. A similar approach occurs in non-consequentialist ethics, where perfect duties are duties everyone has but imperfect duties are acts that someone or other ought to do but no one particular person is required to do them.

We usually take supererogatory acts to be those acts that go above and beyond what duty or obligation requires. Someone can meet all duties or obligations but still be able to do more good than is required. Such acts would be morally better than the acts duty or obligation requires, and thus a person who does them would be morally better than a person merely meeting all obligations or duties.

I don't have a good philosophical argument for why there are no supererogatory acts for humans, but I do think it follows from Jesus' teachings. He taught that we ought to go the extra mile, turn the other cheek, give the shirt and not just the asked-for cloak, etc. It's not just a recommendation to do more than seems morally required. It actually is morally required. So Christians at least have good reason not to believe in supererogatory acts for us.

That's not a philosophical argument. But it's always struck me that the idea of supererogation is often just an excuse not to be good enough, sometimes even to avoid clear moral obligations. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson uses it to argue that it would be perfectly fine to kill your own offspring at a stage when that offspring has full moral status and is dependent on your body, as long as you made some reasonable attempt to prevent that person's existence but knew your freely-chosen actions could nevertheless result in such a situation; Thomson's principle actually implies the conclusion that you have no obligation to care for a baby left on your doorstep or even to inform anyone about it so they can do so. But you can probably accept some supererogation without the monstrous conclusions that follow from the principle Thomson uses to explain her acceptance of supererogation. So I don't think this kind of consideration will necessarily support the claim that there is never any supererogation.

Nevertheless, I do have a philosophical argument for 2 if we restrict ourselves just to God. A perfect being is perfect by nature. God will only do what's consistent with his nature. God won't be more perfect by creating a world that's a little better. So it doesn't seem as if supererogation applies to God. There are no actions that are better to God for do, with other actions merely being less good but morally allowable.

It occurs to me that this way of removing supererogation actually doesn't lead to the inconsistency, though. One way to remove supererogation says that we ought to do the best possible. But this way of removing it says not that we ought to do the best actions possible but that we ought to be the best possible person we can be and do actions consistent with that best moral character. A character-based approach to ethics (as opposed to an act-based approach) will thus think of supererogation differently enough from how we typically do, given the overwhelming influence of act-based ethics, and I think it actually removes the original inconsistency I was proposing above.

A character-based approach to supererogation says we ought to have the best character possible, which on the human level explains why doing lots of good is never enough, and I think that can ground the kinds of ethical claims Jesus taught. But it's not the sort of view that requires maximizing good consequences, and it seems to me to be perfectly compatible with thinking that there is no maximum good world. Supererogation may seem like an excuse not to do what's best, but if the issue is being the best person in terms of your character, then you will seek to be best without its being grounded in doing the best actions. The influence is the other way around. If you are good, then you will do good things because you are good. A perfect being will always act with perfect wisdom and goodness and can be said to act perfectly, even if there is no best outcome out of all the possible outcomes God could consider actualizing. So I think you get satisficing with respect to the best possible world. There is no best possible world for God to actualize. And yet it's not because God only has to be good enough. God will be perfectly good either way. That perfect goodness can result in any of various possible levels of good in the world. The consequences of God's acts aren't what make God good. Rather, a good being will do good if that being creates at all, but God would still be good if he didn't create at all.

Of course, if you take God's perfect nature to be infinitely good, then it doesn't matter how good or bad the finite goods of the created universe are on a consequence-based ethical view, because the universe isn't any better with more good in the world and isn't any worse with less good. So if I became convinced that my proposed solution to the inconsistency won't work out, one way out of the problem might be to say that this is a maximally-good world if you include God's infinitely-good nature in the calculation, and thus even if God created a world that, taken in itself, isn't as good as another, it's still true that the entire situation (created world + God) is infinitely good in a way that can't be greater or less than any other situation (given that God's existence is necessary).

So I think I can actually maintain both claims without any inconsistency arising, at any rate.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

Recently several seemingly-independent sources came up with a series of new recommendations for cancer screenings, saying that new research shows that we should no longer be screening for certain kinds of cancer at the ages we've been doing so, that it should be fine to wait until later on and save the expense that earlier screenings cost.

These recommendations have led to an interesting debate between those who think the cost of prevention is worth it even if more money gets paid than would otherwise happen and those who think cost-cutting is more important than the number of lives saved, because the number of lives saved isn't worth the cost.

A number of voices on one side in the debate, though, has repeatedly made what seems to me to be a terrible argument. They complain that those who object to the new recommendations are simply ignoring the new data. It's as if they stomp their foot and say that the numbers support their position, so the other side should back off. As I said, this is a terrible argument. If this were an empirical debate, that would settle it, but that's not what the dispute is over, so that argument is simply irrelevant. The very interesting debate that I've seen play itself out, as I pointed out above, is between the following two groups:

A. those who think that, even though it might cost more money in the long run, it's still worth screening earlier because it saves enough lives to be worth the extra cost even if it costs more than it would to catch the cancer later and not pay the cost for a lot of people who didn't need the screenings

B. those who think that the cost of screening all these people who didn't need it isn't going to be worth it in the long run, even if it means some people who would have found their cancer and been able to treat it will die because they didn't catch it soon enough

That's a moral debate, not an empirical one. View A places more value on people's lives (which they insist is still enough, even if smaller than we thought) than the financial cost (and that cost's effect on society). View B places more value on the financial cost (and its effects on society) than the number of lives that would be saved (which they say is too low to be a huge factor). Both views can agree on all the facts and still disagree on what we should do. So it doesn't help to keep insisting that the change in recommendations comes from new data from new studies with hard numbers to back it up. The disagreement still occurs even given the new data.

Mike Almeida has an interesting argument against abortion that assumes nothing about the moral status of the fetus. It relies on two commonsense claims:

1. We should remove a benign tumor that will eventually become malignant.
2. If we should remove something that's not yet harmful because it will become harmful, then other things being equal we should not remove something not yet good that will become good.

Some will surely resist the second claim, which is what the parallel reasoning relies on. But it does seem to me to be a generally true principle. It's why we shouldn't pull up flowers before they finish growing.

You know, I'd have thought that philosophers would be the ones pointing out contradictions in what other people are doing, not contradicting themselves. But the American Philosophical Association has just passed a new policy regarding discrimination that seems to me to be flat-out inconsistent. It very clearly commits something that it itself condemns as unethical.

According to Alastair Norcross (via Brian Leiter), the policy will be worded as follows:

The American Philosophical Association rejects as unethical all forms of discrimination based on race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate. This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status, where "integrally connected" means (a) the conduct is a normal and predictable expression of the status (e.g., sexual conduct expressive of a sexual orientation), or (b) the conduct is something that only a person with that status could engage in (e.g., pregnancy), or (c) the proscription of that conduct is historically and routinely connected with invidious discrimination against the status (e.g., interracial marriage). At the same time, the APA recognizes the special commitments and roles of institutions with a religious affiliation; and it is not inconsistent with the APA's position against discrimination to adopt religious affiliation as a criterion in graduate admissions or employment policies when this is directly related to the school's religious affiliation or purpose, so long as these policies are made known to members of the philosophical community and so long as the criteria for such religious affiliation do not discriminate against persons according to the other attributes listed in this statement. Advertisers in Jobs for Philosophers are expected to comply with this fundamental commitment of the APA, which is not to be taken to preclude explicitly stated affirmative action initiatives.

For those who don't know the background behind this, the change is mainly due to a petition to change the APA policy, because it's been widely believed to have been inconsistent before the change. The problem case has been (mainly) Christian institutions that have statements of faith or conduct that faculty have to subscribe to, that include statements that homosexual conduct is immoral and that faculty will not engage in it. Members of the APA petitioned to declare such institutions discriminatory according to the APA's own anti-discrimination policy, which at the time did prohibit discrimination against someone for sexual orientation but did not indicate whether it would count it discrimination to refuse to hire someone who is actively gay while being willing to hire someone who is gay but celibate (e.g. the Roman Catholic Church has exactly this distinction with priests, and a lot of evangelical institutes of higher learning have exactly this practice, as I understand it; it was definitely the policy of the requirements for leadership of several Christian ministry groups I know of on campuses, two of which I know to have had either (a) celibate gay or (b) heterosexually-married but homosexually-abstinent gay or bisexual leaders).

So due to this petition, the APA has indeed indicated that it would include such policies as discriminatory, but it didn't go all the way to banning schools with such policies from participating in APA activities such as the main publication for advertising jobs in the profession. They'll just report which schools don't indicate compliance with the new policy and investigate any schools with actual complaints, indicating also which schools have been investigated and found non-compliant. I don't think the APA has actually achieved the result of consistency now that the petitioners have gotten what they wanted (which some insisted they were supporting only for the reason of getting the APA to act consistently with their own policy). In fact, I think now they've simply instituted a new inconsistency and worked it into their explicit statement.

Consider a college that expects its faculty to refrain from male-male and female-female sexual acts. According to the policy, such a school is discriminating against sexual orientation by discriminating against the "normal and predictable expression" of homosexuality. Such a school would be flagged as discriminatory. But that means the APA is now differentially treating that school and schools that don't make such distinctions. In other words, they are discriminating on the basis of the behavior of requiring faculty to conform to a moral code that includes abstaining from gay sex. Such discrimination is not a problem as long as it's not along the lines of anything in the list or anything that's the "normal and predictable expression" of anything in that list (or one of the other two requirements, but those aren't relevant here). But conservative evangelicals, for example, do consider such conduct immoral, and they do want their faculty to uphold a moral standard on such things. It is in fact the "normal and predictable expression" of conservative evangelicalism to insist that your institution's faculty not engage in gay sex. That means the action of flagging such schools as discriminatory is itself discrimination against religion, based on the "normal and predictable expression" of that religion, i.e. by the policy's own standards.

You could run a similar argument based on political convictions, which is also in the list. Someone, for political reasons, might oppose the normalization of homosexual sexual behavior and thus want their politically-conservative college to reflect that in the moral conduct required of faculty. That means the APA policy is also discriminatory against the "normal and predictable expression" of such political convictions. For that matter, you could say exactly the same thing about a school that doesn't cater to a certain group but that refuses to hire KKK members, which certainly is a "normal and predictable expression" of the KKk's political convictions. The new APA policy begins to look ridiculous once you examine its implications. I don't think it's possible to treat all the categories on their list as equally protected without contradiction, at least if different treatment according to the "normal and predictable expression" of being a member of the category can count as equivalent to different treatment because of merely belonging to the category.

Pro-lifers are trying to pass an initiative defining human organisms as persons all the way back to conception. Opponents of the initiative apparently can't think of a better way to oppose this than to call it the "eggs-as-persons" initiative. I would have thought they'd be smart enough to know the biological difference between a conceptus and a mere egg. Or maybe they just think the voting public is stupid enough not to know the difference.

I also have to note that it amazes me completely that one of their arguments against this is that it now becomes child endangerment for a pregnant woman to drink too much or do something that seriously threatens the health of the fetus. Let me say that again. They think it shows how bad this proposal is that the proposal entails treating someone as engangering a child's health by drinking too much or engaging in wrestling matches while pregnant. Do they think the average voter approves of moms damaging their children by drinking heavily or by abusing their bodies in other ways while pregnant?

But then when you look at the articles from this paper (and the other papers affiliated with it) at any length, it doesn't take too long to realize that they don't have any sense at all of how to convince those who disagree, even though they seem to have a fondness for sending unsolicited email to people who disagree. This is entirely typical of the kind of story they send (several times a week at least) to my university email account. I guess you could call them independent, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of independence I expect when I think of the independent media who are supposed to raise a critical eye to those who hold the central reigns of political power.

In a post mostly about how to argue with those who disagree in a way that doesn't shut down discussion (which would be good for anyone to pay heed to), Jay Watts points to two documents I was unaware of. Both have to do with the common pro-choice argument that if abortion is made illegal again it will lead to lots of deaths from back-alley abortions.

The first document is an excerpt from material written by the Medical Director of Planned Parenthood in 1960, stating quite plainly that 90% of illegal abortions at the time were done by physicians in their offices in a way that was as safe for the mother as it would have been if it were legal. [The Wikipedia entry for "Unsafe Abortion" includes a key quote from this excerpt also, for those who don't want to trust the PDF. So this is out there for those who know what to look for, but I'd never been directed toward it before.]

The second is from NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson, admitting that the pro-choice arguments before Roe v. Wadeabout the numbers of deaths from illegal abortions were simply fabrications on the order of 10-20 times the amount that an accurate assessment could have produced.

I've always thought this argument was pretty ineffective anyway except for someone who is already pro-choice, for reasons Jay mentions at the end of the post. If you're open to the possibility that the fetus has significant moral status, then the fact that killing a fetus illegally might also produce a death of the mother is irrelevant. If you're going to legalize a particular kind of murder (or even something that, for all you know, might turn out to be murder but you're not sure) then legalizing it just because it produces a second death when illegal turns out to justify a lot of acts that are unquestionably murder by anyone's standards.

It's one thing to offer an argument that should only convince those who are already on your side but is a little deceptive because it makes an emotional appeal that isn't really all that rational on pro-life premises. It's quite another to use deliberate deception just the get the political result you want. A lot of misrepresentation happens in politics, and that includes misrepresentations of those who hold contrary views, abortion included. That's politics as usual. I try to resist it, and I hope I'm better than most at stopping it, but it's not the worst kind of dishonesty, since most of the people who do it simply assume the worst of their political opposition or of those who take contrary moral stands, and they at least think what they're saying is true, even if their standard of proof is pretty low in many cases. But simply making up numbers to argue for a policy change is much worse than politics as usual, and that's what these two leaders of the pro-choice movement admitted that the movement had done to get abortion legalized.

Like politics as usual, this happens on both sides of the aisle. But I think we have a much more significant duty to point it out and criticize it when it's this sort of deception, because this is a knowing twisting of the truth merely to get a certain result rather than simply assuming the worst of your opponent. We should avoid both, but it's worth distinguishing between the two and placing an even stronger emphasis on the avoiding the second. I will sometimes point out when I think one side misstates the other's position or ignores how an argument will fail given the assumptions of the other side. It's a lot less common when we can be sure that they're outright lying, though, and it's even more rare to find someone admitting it after the fact. It's kind of sad that this outright lie has become the basis of a fairly common pro-choice argument for retaining the status quo in abortion laws.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

It occurred to me while teaching Nietzsche yesterday that the use of Nietzsche to motivate antisemitism by the Nazi regime is pretty much the opposite of contemporary antisemitism, at least in one key respect. Hitler's use of Nietzsche capitalized on the idea of Jewish inferiority. If it's perfectly fine for the strong to trample the weak, then all it takes is finding a group that can be taken to be weak, and then you can trample away.

The problem Nietzsche would have is that you can't really demonstrate that Jews are the weak. In fact, the history of Jews in the United States seems to demonstrate otherwise. Before Hitler's time, Jews in the United States tended to do worse on IQ tests than the majority population. After WWII, they tended to do noticeably higher than average. The best explanation for that seems to be that Jews were sidelined more often and had become mainstreamed in a way that allowed them to develop the cognitive skills that they already had potential for but hadn't been developing as strongly. Even with the problems in using IQ tests to identify intelligence plain-and-simple, it's certainly true that there are skills that IQ tests measure, and the Nazis would have been happy to accept IQ scores anyway. So it seems as if the facts are just against their claim.

Contemporary antisemitism has to take a different stance. Not only is it ludicrous to take Jews to be inferior in terms of any important skill set for success in life, but Jews have in fact been much more successful in most of the ways people who make such judgments would actually care about than the average for the non-Jewish population. So the narrative is no longer that Jews are inferior and thus need to be trampled because of some Nietzschean mission to lift oneself up by taking advantage of the weak. Now it's almost a reversal. Jews have assumed control of society in some massive conspiracy, and the rest of us are the victims who need to resist the collective strength of the Jewish conspiracy.

Now I guess the two views are compatible. Someone could think that Jewish success is merely due to conspiratorial measures implemented by idiots who succeed only because a few of the relatively smart ones have gotten enough Jews into influential positions to prevent anyone from overcoming their collective strength. But I don't think the idea of Jewish inferiority among such conspiracy theorists is really about intellectual inferiority anymore. It's not clear to me exactly what kind of inferiority it's supposed to be, though. It clearly has some normative element, but I'm not sure it's even thought-out enough for there to be a real answer to that question.

Last night I was catching up on PEA Soup, and this excellent post by Jussi Suikkanen caught my attention. It's about the harm of rape (in particular of men raping women), not just to the woman being raped or even to all women but even to all men, including the rapist himself. One thing I appreciate about the post is a pretty clear listing of ways that rape causes harm in a much broader way in society than it might seem if you just focus on the act of rape itself.

One key element is missing, though. The most significant way that a man harms himself by raping a woman is the harm caused to himself merely by doing such an immoral thing. By committing such a terrible act, he diminishes his well-being in unmeasurable ways. A crucial element of experiencing the good of this life is being a good person. Without good moral character expressed through good actions, no one can live the best life available to us in this life. It would be much better to lack all the kinds of goods that Suikkanen focuses on if having them meant being an evil person.

On a different note, I want to affirm Suikkanen's overall point and expand it a bit. I appreciate Suikkanen's resistance to the common treatment among some feminists of rape as a zero-sum game that sets up social structures to benefit men at women's expense. I have similar resistance to the parallel reasoning that treats anti-black racism as benefiting white people at the expense of black people. There certainly are social structures that harm black people in ways that few white people experience. If you want to call this white privilege, I have no objection to that, as long as it's clear that the racist structure isn't giving whites a boost. Even if there's some boost from it in one respect, the harm to everyone from the existence of such racist structures has become so obvious to me that I can't see privilege of this sort as a real privilege.

If I have an easier time getting a certain kind of job compared with black applicants because of unconscious anti-black bias on the part of the hiring committee (e.g. they have lower expectations for black applicants without having an explicit view that black people are less intelligent or less capable), then I guess there's some sense in which I can benefit from white privilege. But the existence of that sort of privilege is itself a negative, not just for the black people who have a harder time getting a job because of it. It's a harm to me too (and not just because my wife is white and my kids mixed race). It's a harm because it diminishes my interaction with those who might resent me because of my race. It's a harm because the kinds of cooperation and mutual trust among members of the same society is weakened. It's a harm because it makes it takes more work and more thought to be a good person with respect to those of other races. It's a harm because "keeping blacks down" in any sense and to any degree will weaken the good contributions of black people to society as a whole, of which I'm a part. Much will slip through (e.g. much of what some call "white culture" has been so strongly influenced by black culture over more than a century of mass media that has included black entertainers that there's really no such thing as white culture). But the fact that it's still seen as "white culture" and therefore "other" by many black Americans is not just unfortunate for people who have that attitude but for the enrichment of all Americans. I could go on and on.

This is at least one reason for resisting the narrative that paints white privilege as almost a conscious cause of all structural and institutional racism in society. It's common, especially among this influenced by Marxian analyses, to think of power structures in society that perpetuate themselves. I have no problem with this. It seems obvious to me on reflection that there are such self-perpetuating structures. The key objection I have is that many who hold such a view attribute a rational character to these structures, as if white privilege is perpetuated by deliberate choices by those in power (which in this case might not just be heads of corporations or politicians but in some cases might be every white person who benefits), with the goal simply of maintaining that power.

This was true enough with Jim Crow, and it makes the best sense of some really crazy historical moments (like the Supreme Court definition of Mexicans as white that allowed systematic exlusion of Mexican-Americans from juries even though it was already accepted as unconstitutional to exclude blacks from juries systematically). But does it explain why generational welfare inheritance is more common among blacks than whites? Did the white liberals who concocted welfare intend it to be a way to keep black people dependent on the government in order to preserve white privilege? Even my most cynical moments don't go that far. (They only go as far as suspecting that politicians knowingly put band-aids on problems that they know will not solve them in order to appear to be doing something, but the goal there isn't to keep black people down and preserve white privilege but rather a very different selfish motive -- an individual motive to maintain one's political position, completely independently of race.)

Most of the time I'm not so jaded about people's motivations, though. Welfare was never really seen as a political move to try to gain points while doing nothing. Most supporters of particular welfare policies have genuinely seen it to be a good thing, something to help those who are less fortunate and could use a leg up. It wasn't until the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform that we had a distinction between (1) those who rely on welfare because they can't work or are temporarily needing assistance while they seek a job or seek education for a job and (2) those who seek assistance merely to avoid working. That welfare reform brough some problems with it, but it fixed something the original creation of welfare created that was probably unintentional but was an unfortunate consequence. When welfare was massively expanded in the 1960s in a way that got self-sufficient black Americans to become generationally dependent on welfare, which in turn caused many of the more serious inner city problems in many predominantly-black neighborhoods, I don't think many if any of its original supporters had any clue what kind of serious consequences the program would lead to. They just rightly saw that some people in need would be helped (and probably wrongly saw that some who didn't need help should be ushered into that help as well).

There's no need to impugn the motives of such people. But I think it's that kind of inference that the usual narrative of white privilege often involves. It doesn't follow from the facts about how these self-perpetuating social structures work, even apart from its dependence on false judgments about harm and benefit.

In a conversation this evening about the call to forgive in such passages as Matthew 5:21-26; 6:14-15; 18:21-35, one of the participants raised some good questions about what exactly forgiveness requires. My initial thought was to make a bunch of distinctions between things in the neighborhood of forgiveness that might be easily confused with it and then make it clear that not all of them are presumed under the command to forgive. See, for example, my post on the Bob Jones University policy changes on race for a fuller account of the distinctions between forgiving, excusing, justifying, showing mercy, finding mitigating factors, reconciling, showing moral deference, and explaining how an action came about. Some of these are less than forgiveness, and some go beyond it. Some are compatible with it and often go together with it but not required for forgiveness, while others are necessary for forgiveness, and others are quite distinct from forgiveness.

A number of things came out of the discussion, but one thing that I think was very helpful was along completely different lines. Instead of separating all these different concepts and figuring out which are required for forgiveness, someone suggested looking to other biblical commands that are in the neighborhood of forgiveness to see if those are present. It doesn't matter so much (a) which particular things we're going to call forgiveness as (b) whether we actually do those things. If I have not forgiven someone, I won't be likely to turn the other cheek or go the extra mile for the person. Philosophical distinctions can be important, and we do need to think wisely about different categories of action or states of mind, but the more important think is not to let someone's offense against me, however legitimate, to prevent me from seeking the other person's good. If this person is hungry, will I feed them, entirely at my own cost. If they need something, will I provide it? This is a radical lifestyle, but it's what Christian teaching requires.

So if we have a test like that, some of the questions that might arise can be answered pretty easily. Someone might have broken some promises to me. Have I forgiven them? It's not necessarily a good test of it to ask whether I believe they're going to do something they tell me they're going to do. They do have a track record of dishonesty in their promises, or at least unwillingness to follow through on what they said they'd do. But am I willing to take the loss by helping them out when they really need it? Even if I know the person is unlikely to return the money they ask for, the issue isn't whether I trust them to return it. It's whether I'm willing to seek the person's best, and that might (in a particular case) involve giving them the money they want to borrow. On the other hand, it might (in a different case) involve telling them that they can't take my money.

What it depends on is whether I can carefully conclude what's in their best interests and make my decision on those grounds, not on whether I can trust them to return the money and make my decision on those grounds. That's a test of whether genuine reconciliation has occurred, and even if we want to distinguish forgiveness and reconciliation as two separate states it's hard for me to see genuine forgiveness in a case where there's no attempt to reconcile and restore some kind of relationship, at least of the sort where the wronged person is willing to put aside the wrong to the degree required for wanting what's best for the other person rather than wanting what's bad for the person or even simply not caring what happens to the other person, even if not everything goes back to the way it was before.

I think the short way to think of this is that it's probably not Christian forgiveness if there are significant violations of other Christian commands about interacting with other people. Christians are called to love others with a self-sacrificial love, and if someone else's wrongdoing prevents you from doing that then you probably haven't forgiven them. Christians are expected to treat everyone according to a higher standard, including enemies. So if a fellow believer or friend doesn't even get that treatment, then surely something's wrong, and it's not just the original wrong that needs to be forgiven. It's also a wrong attitude on the part of the wronged party. It's easy to try to hide behind a component of forgiveness, perhaps a putting aside of some resentment or a somewhat more tolerant attitude toward the person, while not fully bringing yourself to a position where you're following the radical call of placing the other person's interests before your own.

As you might be able tell from my sidebar, I've been watching a lot of Law & Order lately (all three series that play regularly), and one thing that I've found myself thinking in a number of episodes is that statute of limitations laws often serve injustice more than justice. A serial rapist will go free if they discover who he is one day beyond the five-year statue of limitations. Some crimes don't have a statute of limitations, but a five-year statute of limitations for rape sounds pretty unjust to me given how serious a crime rape is.

I had similar thoughts when we heard about the string of Obama appointees earlier this year who had committed federal crimes by lying on tax forms, sometimes for serious amounts of money, but it was long enough ago that there were absolutely no legal consequences or even requirements to pay up. It just strikes me as unjust. They're criminals, but it's illegal to prosecute them. They ought to be held accountable. So the law seems unjust.

Without doing any research on the history of statutes of limitations, I'd been having that thought. I never got around to exploring the justifications for such laws, though, but I finally did get an explanation on a Special Victims Unit episode (season 1 episode "Limitations") of why there are statutes of limitations. I'd seen this episode years ago, but I guess I hadn't been paying attention well or maybe wasn't raising the question, because a judge explains the original reasoning for such laws in an explanation for how he decides an issue:

The statute of limitations has a long history in common law. It exists to ensure that the defendant receives a fair trial, to make sure that the recollections of witnesses, if any, are fresh, to pressure the government to file charges in a timely manner, and so that, rightly or wrongly, accused citizens need not live their life in fear of the government pursuing them after a long delay.

Every once in a while I run into someone criticizing the Bible because it contains some depiction of someone doing something immoral, usually when the text never endorses that act or even if it's clear from the general context that the narrator considers the act downright evil. For example, Richard Dawkins objects to the story of Jephthah's rash vow, that if God gives him victory he'd sacrifice the first thing coming through his gates to greet him as he returns home, only to be greeted by his daughter, so he sacrifices her. His reason for objecting? Well, Jephthah did something obviously wrong. So the Bible must not be a good guide to immorality.

As has been said many a time, Dawkins would fail an introductory philosophy or religion course if he submitted materials from his book or similar quality work for such classes. This idea that the mere inclusion of an immoral act in a narrative somehow makes that narrative immoral is downright crazy. No one really believes that. Murder mysteries would suddenly because evil, for instance, because a murder does take place in them. You couldn't have crime-fighting stories of any sort, because those would contain evil acts to be fought against.

Nevertheless, despite this idea being absolutely ridiculous, it apparently comes up in contexts that have nothing to do with the Bible. There's been a campaign against the forthcoming Stargate Universe, the third (and I think what may well be the best) series in the Stargate franchise. Darren Sumner of Gateworld has an excellent discussion of what these objections are and why they fail completely.

Aside from the fact that it's pretty dumb to criticize a show you haven't even bothered to wait to see when you have at best partial information, the argument itself seems silly. It's been rumored that there will be some temporary body-switching, with the consciousness of one person controlling the body of someone else in a different galaxy (which the Stargate franchise has done several times before), only this time the controlling parties will have sexual encounters using other people's bodies. That raises obvious moral questions, in particular if the owner of the body in question didn't consent to have their body used this way. But merely depicting them something doesn't imply endorsement, and it's almost certainly true (given what I know from the Stargate writers) that they will want us to question whether this is ok, again assuming no consent (and we haven't been told if there will be consent to use each other's bodies this way by mutual agreement, which for all I know will be part of the arrangement).

The claim (see the comments) is that it's rape, and they shouldn't be depicting it. Well, we don't know if they'll be depicting it. But they do depict rape on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or at least they sometimes come close enough. They did depict rape on Battlestar Galactica. There were people who objected to the latter, but I never understood why the mere depiction of rape, especially when it's absolutely clear that the people doing it are being downright evil, is somehow wrong. It was, in that case, an easy way to show the morally degenerate state of the Pegasus crew under Admiral Cain's command. The Galactica crew were certainly not perfect, but the Pegasus crew had gone well over the edge to true evil. That scene made that abundantly clear, and it was good storytelling.

The difference here, as some commenters in that thread point out, is that main characters carry this out. But main characters can be morally flawed in a good story. They can even be pretty evil. Why is it immoral for a storyteller to have a main character do something as bad as raping someone? I see no argument for this claim anywhere in any of these discussions.

But comparing these two kinds of fallacious criticisms at least helps me understand that such shoddy thinking isn't present just among those seeking to have any argument, no matter how bad, against the Bible. Those who want to have any argument, no matter how bad, against a forthcoming TV show will resort to the same tactics. So maybe this isn't a problem just among those who want to attack Christianity, the Bible, or religion. It occurs much more generally than that.

Rey Reynoso wrote a post a few months ago on Christians and civil disobedience that I'd wanted to respond to in a post of my own, but I never did. I wanted to put a link up to it before it gets too far distant in time, even if I can't respond in depth.

The one thought that I will say is that I think Rey has an interesting proposal, but I don't think it gets around the Rosa Parks problem. The gospel wasn't at stake for her, so I think on Rey's account she still comes out as immorally violating the law. That's the biggest problem case for the Christian view of submission to authorities, since so many people think what she did was not just good but heroic. But I do think the biblical view is that it was wrong, despite being well-intentioned. (The second-biggest case I can think of for contemporary Americans is the American Revolution, which I also think was immoral on biblical grounds but is certainly supported by most Christians in the U.S.)

I've found the same gross misrepresentation of the pro-life position on stem cell research in several different places over the last few weeks. The most surprising place to find it is in a philosophical work in a chapter on the moral status of the fetus. Referring to the position that moral status begins at conception, Anne Fagot-Largeault says:

Since the 1980s, however, there have been extraordinary advances in scientific technology, and these have brought into sharp relief some of the drawbacks of the preceding position. In fact, the position leads to some unconscionable outcomes. On the one hand, it implies that an embryo that is, for example, the carrier of the genetic defect that results in Down syndrome has the same right to live as a non-carrier. On the other, the view entails that we must not use embryonic research in order to strive to eliminate such maladies as Thalassemia -- to do so, according to this view, would entail choosing between the lesser of two evils. In general, this implies a very tragic conception of the moral life, namely that whenever humans substitute their choices for those of God, they can only make matters worse.

Nowadays, this position has lost much of its force. With the explosion of stem cell research, there are so very many cells that have embryonic potential that the supposed natural organic distinction that was once relied upon has crumbled under its own weight. The claim that stem cells have an enigmatic ontological status itself now seems enigmatic. [Fagot-Largeault, "The Fetus in Perspective: The Moral and the Legal" in Laurence Thomas, ed., Contemporary Debates in Social Philosophy, p.117.]

What seems enigmatic to me is why anyone would think the pro-life view on stem cells is that stem cells themselves have any moral status. If you stuck a stem cell in a woman's uterus, I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for it to implant itself and begin developing. You have to alter a stem cell to make it an embryo for that capability to develop, just as you have to alter an egg by fertilizing it or turning it into a clone to give it that potential. No one thinks stem cells themselves have any special status. The only opposition to embryonic stem cell research is that acquiring the stem cells involves killing an embryo. It's not that there's anything special about the stem cells that should lead us to protect them. It's that the embryos should have protection as human beings. Stem cells can be acquired in other ways, and no one objects to those ways. It's hard to exaggerate how unfair it is to the pro-life view on stem cells to claim that anyone assigns some enigmatic status to stem cells themselves or that the embryonic potential of stem cells somehow undermines the distinction between what counts as an organism and what doesn't. There's no scientific reason to support the confusion of (a) stem cells that have potential to become embryos and (b) embryos themselves.

This isn't the first time I've seen this ridiculous portrayal of the pro-life position. I've seen it several times now, but it's pretty disturbing to find it in an academic paper in a philosophy textbook. The author isn't actually a trained philosopher. She's a biologist. But that's no excuse. biologists should be aware of the positions they're writing in response to if they're going to publish essays in philosophy textbooks arguing philosophically against those positions. That I've seen the very same argument in unrelated places suggests to me that perhaps there's a more widespread misconception going around among those who favor killing embryos for the greater good of people who weren't killed at the embryonic stage.

It's hard for me to resist commenting, while I've got the above quote in front of me, on her line about an embryo with the genetic defect leading to Down syndrome and an embryo without such a defect. It's hard to see how it's unconscionable to think those two embryos have the same moral status. It's hard even to see how it's conscionable to think the two embryos have a different moral status. Even those who immorally think it's perfectly all right to abort a fetus purely because it has Down syndrome (a view that a lot of pro-choicers think is horrific, I should add) do not justify such an argument on the view that such a fetus has less moral status than any other fetus. They justify it based on compassion for the fetus that, if they abort it, will never have the supposedly-awful life that they project Down syndrome people to have. There's never any suggestion of the fetus itself having less right to life. It's that view that I find unconscionable, and my reasons for finding it unconscionable make as much sense even on pro-choice premises.

There's one other argument in the quoted passage that makes no sense to me. A lot of people think there are some things that are wrong enough that it requires a huge amount of good being at stake to overcome the moral resistance to doing it so that it would be potentially all right. Killing a human being is one of these. On pro-life principles, it's not going to be easy to get around this problem for policies that lead to killing a lot of human beings whose existence only occurred in order to kill then, in order generate lines of stem cells that have some undefined possibility of leading to some good medical treatments if they can get around the tumor problem and if the more promising stem cell methods without the moral problems doesn't get there soon. That's a pretty clear moral argument, one that I admit involves controversial premises, but none of those premises involves a distinction between (a) making choices and (b) refraining from making choices so that God's can occur instead. The important distinction in the pro-life argument about embryos is that the moral prohibition on killing human life doesn't get easily overcome even if there's a great potential for good that comes from it, as anyone outraged at Joseph Mengele's research could attest to. It's not that making any old choice between two evils should lead to inaction, as if inaction means we don't interfere with God but action means we do. It's that doing some things would be so bad that even good consequences wouldn't be enough to overcome the moral wrongness of the action. You can only conclude that it's opposed to what God wants once you establish its moral wrongness. That's not part of the argument at all. It's the implication of the conclusion of the argument.

Perhaps future-Justice Sotomayor's judicial inclinations on abortion will be tested relatively soon once she assumes Justice Souter's now-vacated (as of today) seat on the Supreme Court (pending her all-but-assured confirmation by the heavily-Democratic Senate). The 4th Circuit decided a case last week that considers the constitutionality of a Virginia abortion ban that in almost every respect is just like the federal law that the Supreme Court narrowly upheld in an opinion written by abortion swing-voter Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The federal law and the Virginia law differ in one respect. The federal law bans deliberate partial-births (defined by delivery up to a certain biological point) in order to kill the fetus. That procedure is outlawed as a method of abortion. The Virgina law bans one further thing. If a doctor is carrying out an abortion by another method, and the fetus happens to get past that point of delivery defined by the law as a partial-birth, it is a crime to kill it via any method. In other words, once the fetus reaches the point defined by the federal law as a partial-birth (whereby it's a crime to deliver the fetus to that point in order to kill it), it counts in Virginia as a crime of a similar level if the doctor goes ahead and kills the fetus whether the intention was to abort it that way or another way earlier in the process.

In other words, the difference between these two laws is that one does not criminalize deliberate attempts to kill the fetus after it reaches the relevant partial-birth stage as long as the doctor had planned to kill the fetus earlier but failed to do so. The other does criminalize that. Which law is more consistent? Surely the Virgina one. It criminalizes any killing past that point, whether there was an intention of killing beforehand or not. Compare the laws against disposing of an infant born from a failed abortion. The U.S. Senate unanimously supported such a law. It doesn't matter if the doctor intended to abort the fetus. If it got to the point where it would normally be illegal to kill it, the fact that it was born as a result of a failed abortion doesn't make it legal to kill it. This just extends the same sort of reasoning to the partial-birth abortion ban the federal government passed that the Supreme Court has declared constitutional. So it seems as if it's actually the logical implication of the federal law, even if the federal law didn't go this far. It basically relies on the principle, found in Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous 1972 paper defending abortion, that a woman doesn't have a right to the death of the fetus just because she has a right to be rid of it from her body.

The 4th Circuit vote was narrowly-divided 6-5 along lines that happen to correspond with the party of the presidents who appointed them. Judges don't often follow a narrow ideology reflecting exactly that of the president who nominated them, but in this case it did work out that way. One judge was appointed by President Clinton as a recess appointment and renominated by President George W. Bush as a courtesy (as presidents do from time to time for previous presidents of another party), but he really counts as a Clinton appointment, since Clinton appointed him initially. Those appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush signed the opinion that upheld the law. Those appointed by President Clinton signed the dissent (none remain from Carter and Obama's one nominee to that court hasn't been confirmed yet).

In effect, the Democratic appointees on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals have endorsed the view that a woman not only has a right to be rid of the fetus but also has a right to its death if being rid of it most of the way doesn't kill it. Otherwise they have nothing to complain about if they're really following Supreme Court precedent (which does bind them). The dissent here strikes me as a pretty obvious case of ideology trumping the law, even granting all Supreme Court precedent as the law. I really hope that if the Supreme Court hears this case it will affirm the 4th Circuit judgment by a 6-3 margin. It will likely not get more than that since three justices remain who will likely seek to continue their opposition to laws like this, but I suppose it's barely possible even if extremely unlikely that Justices Stevens or Breyer will defer to precedent they didn't original support. But no one has any clue about Judge Sotomayor's views on this sort of issue. She could be well to the left of anyone on the Supreme Court for all I know, but it's certainly possible that she's even to the right of Justice Kennedy for all that she's written about the issue (which is basically nothing besides issues relating to the free speech of abortion protesters).