Recently in Ethics Category

Ilya Somin points to a recent discussion of what life would be like if we have virtual reality machines that we could spend most of our life in. He's right to mention that this isn't a new debate based on the technology we now have but goes back (in the technological form) at least to the 70s, with Robert Nozick's experience machine.

There may have been other forms of the discussion. In fact, I'd be surprised if it never came up with the Epicureans, although I know of know extant document raising a similar puzzle for them. But it strikes me as odd that the Stoics or some other group wouldn't have raised the possibility of someone being misled about reality but experiencing pleasure, which seriously separates the two views of what counts as a good life. Epicureans would have to find some contingent reason why it would be bad to get in the machine, e.g. it may break down and then you'll miss it later, which constitutes pain (Epicurus' reason for never eating gourmet food) or someone might program in bad experiences while you're in it, and you'll never be able to get out to change the program back to what you wanted (which is similar to the Epicureans' response to the problem raised by an invisibility ring allowing you to get away with whatever you wanted). On the other hand, most people's reasons for not replacing your real experiences with machine-generated ones (at least as a permanent lifestyle) is because it's not real. That's just a bad life.

Somin's post indicates that he's unsure whether people would turn their life over to such a machine. His reason is that there are lots of people with lots of difference preferences. I think he's right about there being variation of preferences, but I think we all have the same basic preferences based on what's really and truly good. We just make mistakes about what will get us those, and those mistakes might lead some people to get into the machine.

I'm a lot less sure than he is that there would be very high numbers of such people, though, at least if my students are any indication. I present this issue in pretty much every ethics class and every ancient philosophy class I teach. That's been somewhere from 30-60 students every semester for the last several years. Once in a while I get a student who says they'd get in the machine. It's never been more than 2-3 in any given class, and more often than not no one thinks they'd get in. Maybe this is weighted in a certain direction because they're college students or something, but I really have a hard time believing a large number of people would turn their whole lives over to a virtual reality just because it's possible to do so.

This is over a month old now, but I'm way behind on a number of things, and it won't get better until the semester is over in a couple weeks. Hugo Schwyzer wrote a while back about a bad policy at what seems to be an emergent-type church involving having married couples promise to have sex every day for a month in an effort to build sexual intimacy. He's probably right in a lot of his criticisms, and I can think of some he doesn't mention. But I disagree with one of his points, and I think it's one he's particularly emphatic about.

He thinks the bad guy here is duty, as if a duty to have sex with one's spouse is bad. His argument is that good things lose their goodness when they become a mere duty. In one sense of what someone might mean by a duty, I think he's right. However, in a pretty common sense of the term, I think he's very wrong, and I think his view is strongly at odds with the moral perspective Paul expresses in I Corinthians 7 and Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount implies.

It's worth distinguishing between (1) duty in the sense of merely following rules without any further reason and (2) duty in the sense of going the extra mile for another person or doing what you'd want them to do for you if you were the one who strongly desired sexual connection. The first kind of duty is worthy of the Schwyzer's criticism. The second is not.

Suppose one member of a married couple has a strong desire for sexual intimacy, while the other doesn't. I'm not talking about cases of serious illness or complete exhaustion. I simply mean one wants to and the other doesn't. The one who doesn't is completely capable of engaging in sexual activity and enjoying it but simply isn't interested. Now it may be the loving thing to do for the interested party to back down. I don't want to suggest that forcing sex even in marriage is remotely excusable. Nevertheless, the question I'm interested in here is not the moral obligation of the interested party. What Schwyzer was addressing is whether there can be a duty to have sex, not whether there can be a duty to refrain. I'm sure he'd agree with me that there are plenty of instances of that.

The Pauline view is clear on this. In I Corinthians 7, Paul commands husbands and wives to seek to be available to each other sexually except in times of special devotion to intense prayer. That suggests a duty to have sex. It doesn't mean a duty to have sex every night, as the proposal in question suggested. But it does imply a duty to have sex. This Pauline view can be easily motivated by Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly by the Golden Rule (do to others what you'd want them to do for you) and the extra mile (if someone asks you to carry something a mile, do it for two miles, and if someone asks for your coat offer up your shirt too). Jesus speaks as if this sort of thing is a typical characteristic of his followers, and those who don't do this are failing to be like citizens of the kingdom of God out to be. I can see how someone would apply such statements to the case at hand by arguing for a duty to have sex even when one isn't interested for the sake of the sex.

But this is not duty for the mere sake of duty. It's duty for the sake of the other person. If a person motivated by love for another person has a duty to do what's loving for the other person, there may well be times when that involves having sex when one otherwise wouldn't have been interested, and Jesus' teaching does seem to include cases like that. I'm not sure why cases of voluntarily being willing to have sex when one isn't interested should be exceptions to the kinds of loving acts he commands in those passages. This doesn't mean setting an arbitrary rule to ensure that couples have sex more often, but it does suggest that the motivation Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount involves a duty to show the kind of love that might include things like this. So I would defend Paul against Schwyzer's argument by pointing out that a duty to sex in the Pauline sense seems to follow fairly easily from the kinds of teachings in the Sermon on the Mount that I'm sure Schwyzer has no problem with.

David Bernstein raises some good questions about how the FLDS case has been handled. But he quotes an op-ed that seems to me to be dead wrong:

You've ruled the existence of five girls between 16 and 19 who were pregnant or had children was evidence of systematic abuse, even though in Texas 16-year-olds can marry with parental consent. You've ruled young toddlers are in "immediate" danger because of their parents' beliefs or what might happen 15 years from now, not because anyone abuses them.

Excuse me, but unless these girls were the first wife of the father of their children, they weren't married. Texas allows parents to consent to marriages of their children when they're 16. They don't allow parents to consent to non-marital sex with a dude who's already married to someone else but wants to have a pretend wife in addition. That's not marital sex, since they're not married. Since the men are already married, there's no marriage the parents could have consented to, and that makes it rape. Automatically. The girl can't consent, and the parents can't consent to an illegal marriage. The legal question ends right there. This is child abuse.

Someone might try to argue that the law doesn't track with the right answers to such questions when you're talking about what counts as abuse morally speaking. But that's not the issue here. What matters is whether it's legally abuse, and it's legally rape if the man in question is already married to someone else and thus can't have gotten genuine consent to a legal marriage from the girl's parents.

It's hard to resist commenting on what GatoRat says in the comments:

Several of those old girls already have children. If a fifteen-year-old is pregnant with her third child, were the first two immaculate conceptions?"

It is correct to point out that there were clearly pre-16 cases. It is not correct to confuse immaculate conception with virginal conception. I don't see how the idea of a child being conceived without original sin is relevant at all to this discussion.

I've discussed the relation between rights and obligations before. One thing that a lot of people seem to think is that you can have responsibilities or obligations toward someone who doesn't have any right to you doing what you do. On the other hand, others thing that any obligation you have toward someone implies that they have some right to you doing it.

One thing that affects how you think of this is whether rights are explanatorily prior to obligations or the other way around. I'm not at all attracted to the view that rights are fundamental and that obligations are derivative from them, but that's a view that a lot of people have. I'm much more inclined to think my rights arise because someone has an obligation toward me.

If rights are prior to obligations, then here's a funny result. If an obligation requires that there already have been a right, then what about my responsibilities to myself? I think Immanuel Kant was right in taking us to have such obligations. If I seek a bad life for myself, that's immoral even if I don't harm anyone else in the process. If I do things that harm myself but don't affect anyone else negatively or positively, I have still done something wrong. I have violated my obligations to myself. But how can this be if every responsibility is based on a right? What right do such obligations rely on? Do I have a right to myself doing this? That's an extremely odd way of talking. Do I have a right to certain behavior on my own part?

Jay Watts, in the midst of saying a lot of other things, argues against using the skin cells from aborted fetuses for research. I'm not convinced that there's a strong pro-life argument against this practice, though. What follows is my comment on Jay's post:

I think we need to separate the following acts:

1. Taking skin from a dead human being in order to save thousands of lives.
2. Killing someone in order to save thousands of lives by using their skin.

There might be general moral disagreement over 2 among different ethical theories, but I don't think most views have problems with 1 unless they assume the libertarian premise that people's body parts shouldn't be used without permission, even if the person is dead. I generally share that premise when it comes to something on the level of whole organs, but I don't think it's a big deal if the government scrapes some skin off me without my permission after I die and then uses it for saving thousands of lives.

So what's different with abortion? The only difference I can think of is that these fetuses are being killed immorally, even if it's legal. But suppose it were even illegal. Once you allow what I allowed for in 1, it shouldn't matter if I happened to have been murdered or if I died of a disease in the hospital that no one was morally responsible for giving me. So why should it matter with aborted fetuses?

I'm not seeing a strong pro-life argument against this except maybe on consequentialist grounds, and that would only be because people might improperly draw the wrong conclusion from allowing this to the view that the killing itself was justified. But is that a good enough reason to avoid saving thousands of lives?

I wanted to write up a careful argument about this, but I've got enough things to blog about that take time that I'll just post this now with a question. A couple weeks ago Eugene Volokh pointed out a case where two lawyers' insistence on attorney-client privilege allowed someone to go to prison for 26 years. They knew their client had done it, but someone else was tried, and they couldn't bring the information forward by the ethical standards of their profession. It sounds as if they would have come forward if it had meant saving his life but not in the case of a very long time in prison.

Is this a case where the prevailing ethical norm is just wrong? Is attorney-client privilege isn't worth allowing someone to go to jail for 26 years (as it turned out; it was a life sentence, but they didn't know if their client would even die before the innocent guy who was convicted, so it could have been the rest of his life for all they knew). Perhaps this is just a case where you have a moral obligation to break the ethical rule of the profession and take the consequences of disbarment. A lot of commenters on the post seem to think that, anyway. If so, it's a nice case of a very strong prohibition on something that nonetheless is not absolute. (Even on the view of these lawyers, there was at least one exception, the case of capital punishment. But if there are more exceptions, then I think it's a nice case of a difference of degree making an ethical difference.)

One of the most irksome things about the fascination in cable news with certain missing persons cases is that virtually all of the cases they pay any attention to are of blond, white girls or young women, and they pay absolutely no attention to the vast majority of missing persons cases, and yet the few they can find with an attractive blond girl will get hours a day for months. It's such a clear example of a kind of white racism that isn't what most white people think of when they hear the word 'racism'. White people think of negative, overt, conscious attitudes against non-whites when they hear that word. This is clearly not that, and yet there's no way it's not a kind of racism.

In light of that, see this interesting poster campaign. [hat tip: Racialicious]

A janitor at the University of Indiana at Purdue is in their continuing education program, trying to improve his lot in life on the side. He reads during his break time. One book he reads is called Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. It's not exactly favorable to the KKK, but it does include their name in the title.

Somehow the university thought it was ok to ban him from reading this book during his breaks [hat tip: David Bernstein], because there were black people around him, and they were offended that the book mentions the KKK. Here is the statement from the affirmative action office on why this counts as racial harassment:

"You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence...you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers."

First of all, how could someone possibly think that it's immoral to read a book that's highly critical of the KKK while in the presence of a black person? Second, it's not as if he was reading it aloud. All they had any access to was the fact that he was reading it. Third, even if it's immoral to read something in the presence of someone else, how does that give the university a good reason to ban it. It's not as if he was waving the book around and saying anything to anyone else about it. He merely had the book and was reading it. Fourth, why would they want to give the appearance that they're hindering a janitor, who does some of the dirtiest jobs at the university, from getting his education? It doesn't reflect all that well on them. Fifth, they accuse him of being insensitive and expressing disdain for his co-workers, when he's the one who tried to explain the book's content to several people who refused to listen to him and insisted that anything even remotely discussing the KKK is offensive. How backwards is that?

Well, they recanted while pretending to clarify their position. Some higher-up must have realized how silly the whole thing was.

I don't spend a lot of time harping on this point, but this is a pretty good instance of something I've tried to motivate a few times before. There is certainly plenty of room for improvement in how sensitive white people are to black people's experiences, and a lot of offense can occur that isn't intended. Nevertheless, it only hurts that cause to insist on offense over stupid things like this. The guy was reading a book whose very title shows that it's not in support of the KKK. It's not a good idea to try to get your employer to ban someone from becoming educated about the realities of race relations, something white people certainly need more of.

John McWhorter's stuff on victimology is often dismissed among those on the left who recognize real racial problems (not that McWhorter ever denies those, of course). But he's surely right that there's a culture of complaint about relatively trivial offenses and in many cases immoral complaints about non-offenses like this one. This kind of reaction only fosters the attitude among many on the right that racial problems are caused by black (or in general non-white) people who won't learn to get over it, because it confirms that at least in some cases there's some truth to that.

In a comment on this post, Kenny Pearce directed me to Robert Adams' paper "Christian Liberty", which appears in Philosophy and the Christian Faith, ed. Thomas V. Morris, a book I happen to have. I had been making the claim that a Christian ethical theory that fits with the biblical texts requires us to be perfect, as God is perfect. It thus allows for no actions that are what philosophers call supererogatory. A supererogatory act is supposed to be something that would be a wonderful thing to do but is far beyond what you can be expected to do. As I'd been saying in the post I linked to, I don't think Jesus believed in such acts. The Sermon on the Mount seems to me to preclude such a category. Since I think the Sermon on the Mount accurately captures moral truth, I reject the notion of supererogation.

Adams says that a Christian ethical view needs to allow for supererogation to capture the sense of options in Christian life. There's no other way to account for Paul's insistence that Christians are free in Christ and no longer slaves, that Christians are friends of God and no longer in servitude. I have two responses, one exegetical and the other philosophical.

The exegetical point is that I think he misconstrues Paul's point. Paul isn't saying that we are free from God's command. The freedom is first of all a freedom from sin. It's a freedom to serve God, which is put in slavery language. Christians are no longer enslaved to sin but are instead enslaved to God. This picks up on the language of Exodus. The people of Israel were freedom from slavery to Pharoah to become slaves of God. The Hebrew term in question is often translated as "worship", and so translations often say that Israel is freed from slavery to Pharoah to go worship God. But the verb is the same. It's a movement from slavery to Pharaoh to slavery to God. God is the master. It's just that God is a master who loves his people and wants what's best for them, while Pharaoh is just taking advantage of them.

The parallel language in Paul's epistles about Christians being freed slavery from sin to become enslaved to God should be no surprise given the old covenant antecedent. Freedom in Christ is slavery to God. So I don't see how the movement from slavery to freedom involves moral permissibility to do as we wish provided that we meet some minimal moral threshold. It in fact binds Christians to serve God fully and completely, to surrender any self-directed goal in favor of becoming like God, having a heart that values what God values, having motivations that line up with God's will, and acting in a way that a morally perfect being would act. This is in fact what the Sermon on the Mount enjoins. "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect", an echo of Leviticus 18, which says "Be holy, as I am holy."

Now this doesn't mean that there aren't options in Christian living. As Adams points out, there are two ways of generating options. One way is supererogation, which allows for the less-than-perfect to be morally permissible. That's what I don't see Jesus allowing for. The other way is what Adams calls indifferent actions. These are things that are equally good, and so we have the option of choosing whichever of the equally good things we will do. If there really are equally good things, all things considered, then I have no problem with those.

I'm not sure they will easily occur, though, and Adams seems to agree. He just says it's because of nuances in ethical importance that may play a role. I can imagine he has in mind things like the fact that two actions might be equally good but that one of them involves going against my natural tendency and thus allows me to develop a trait that I ought to work on. He might have in mind two actions that, other things being equal, are equally good, but one of them involves a better fit with my special obligations to my family. In such cases, it's pretty clear to me that the one that is better, all things considered, is morally obligatory. So these aren't options after all. But there is room for all considerations to work out equally. It just doesn't seem likely that they will be exactly equal. What seems more likely is that they will be so close to equal that I won't be able to discern the moral difference or the balancing out of moral considerations in the right direction. There is always the problem of figuring out what is the best option when various possible courses of action appear in front of me.

This difficulty suggests to me a philosophical distinction that I think lies behind my disagreement with Adams. He wants a moral theory that allows for options in order to explain the difference between legalism and Christian freedom. But he is locating that difference in moral obligation. There can't be moral obligations that I ought to do, or I am not free in some sense. I am not morally free to do what I want. I think this is the wrong place to locate Christian freedom, because I think we do have an obligation to do what is best. It is a moral obligation, not some other kind of constraint. What Christian freedom amounts to is not freedom from moral obligation. Paul even says so. He says there's the law of Christ.

What we don't have are very specific laws that are to be followed absolutely, without room for reflection on whether those laws apply in our case or whether those laws conflict with other laws and what we should then do. Christian freedom, on my view, consists of not being bound by laws to be followed without reflection. It consists of being bound by general moral principles that require careful thought about what we ought to do, what we ought to be motivated by, what attitudes we ought to have, what character traits we ought to be developing, and so on. Adams seems to want freedom from obligation, but I think Christian freedom is rather freedom from rigid rules. Morality isn't about rules. It's about conformity to a standard, a standard who is a person. Christian morality has to do with being conformed to the image of Christ, being transformed to becoming perfect. It is much more complete than simply an ethics of action. There is something morally wrong about us if we are not perfect, and our moral obligation is to pursue perfection. This is the thrust of the ethical teaching of Jesus and Paul both (along with the rest of the Bible, I might add).

Barack Obama's opposition as an Illinois State Senator to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act has been making the rounds, with a lot of people overstating their case on both sides. Some conservatives are taking this as a sign that Obama thinks infanticide is morally ok, and some liberals are acting as if his approach is what any supporter of keeping abortion legal before viability should say. I'm not sure either is true, but I'm also not sure this reflects well on Obama.

Here is the law. It says that if a baby is born alive, whether by intended delivery or by failed abortion, it is legally a person, a human being, a child, and an individual. It counts as born alive only if it is completely removed from the mother (ignoring an umbilical cord connection, which does not count as a sufficient connection according to this law). Partial-birth abortion is thus not ruled out, because a partial birth is not a complete removal of the fetus. As long as the birth has not fully taken place, this law threatens no actual abortion rights.

Obama's reason for not supporting this ban is not because he thinks it's ok to kill a born fetus. As far as he's said, he does not actually support infanticide (and he didn't vote against the law; he just voted present, although that in itself was part of a strategy devised by Planned Parenthood of Illinois to protect pro-choice politicians from voters seeing how pro-choice they are). For his actual words, see comment 9 here. What he says is that he worries about the logic. Here is what seems to me to be his argument:

1. The Supreme Court has declared laws banning abortion before viability to be unconstitutional.
2. There is no difference between the moral status of a fetus inside its mother before viability and the moral status of a born baby at the same developmental stage.
3. Therefore, banning the killing of a born baby at this stage is morally tantamount to banning abortion at a pre-viability stage. (from 2)
4. Therefore, the law is unconstitutional. (from 1 and 3)

This argument does not amount to supporting infanticide morally. It is merely an argument based on the constitutional issue. According to Supreme Court precedent, this law is unconstitutional, and thus it's pointless to pass it. He gives no moral argument against the ban, just a pragmatic one. So from this speech alone it's impossible to get any clear support for infanticide.

Nevertheless, I think this is a terrible argument. The first premise is clearly true. I would argue that the second is also true. I see no difference in the intrinsic moral status of the fetus merely because it is contained within someone or is separate. However, I don't think 1 and 3 guarantee 4. There's no legal reason why morally inconsistent laws can't occur. You can ban something that's morally equivalent to something else that's unconstitutional to ban, as long as the first thing isn't unconstitutional to ban. But the real problem I have with the argument is his inference from 2 to 3.

The standard pro-choice argument is not that a mother has a right to kill a fetus growing within her. Only the most extreme abortion-choice proponents hold such a view. The standard view is that a woman's right to control her body is morally more important than whatever rights a fetus might have. That argument allows for a fetus to have some sort of moral status such that killing it would be prima facie wrong, even if the bodily rights of the mother outweigh that. What this means is that the standard pro-choice argument does not accord a mother the right to the death of the fetus. If it survives removal, her rights have been satisfied. That means the moral status of the fetus is what kicks in to determine what you should do in such a case, and this law settles that question. It does not threaten the woman's bodily rights, at least not according to the standard justification of abortion rights.

I've been teaching capital punishment for the last week in my ethics class. There are two main arguments for the death penalty, and I see them as relatively independent of each other. Retributivism is the view that the death penalty is the only just punishment for premeditated murder because it is the only punishment that's proportional to the crime. A life was taken, and that is so serious that no other punishment matches up with what the murderer deserves. This sort of argument rarely occurs in public policy arguments, in my experience, even though it's the argument with much stronger philosophical support historically. I think that's probably because our culture has moved away from liking the idea that we deserve anything bad when we do wrong. Most people do accept a kind of retributivist justice when they get robbed of something they think they've earned. They just don't want to extend retributivist arguments against wrongdoing.

So death penalty advocates have often relied on deterrence claims in recent decades. The only problem is that studies aiming to establish whether capital punishment deters any potential murderers from killing have been fully inconclusive. The ones with the strongest conclusions have tended to be the ones with the least credibility. The weaker the conclusion, the fewer problems critics have been able to find. This is so in both directions, and many people familiar with the literature have concluded that we can't know whether capital punishment deters, and that has left philosophers defending the death penalty trying to establish why we should retain capital punishment even if we can't show that it deters. A couple of those arguments are, I think, quite brilliant. One takes a form of Pascalian-style wagering based on the potential rewards if you bet on deterrence and win vs. if you bet on it and lost, compared with what happens if you bet on non-deterrence and ban capital punishment. There are difficulties with these arguments, but I find it fascinating that people would go to such lengths to defend the deterrence value of capital punishment because studies on deterrence are inconclusive, when the historic justification for the death penalty doesn't assume any deterrence at all.

That was the state of play a few years ago. It's pretty much how all the ethics books dealing with the question leave things. It amazed me, therefore, to see that The New York Times highlighted a dozen studies in the last few years that conclude that the death penalty does deter murders, from as many as 3 to 18 murders per execution. This article was published in November. I only heard about it because Joe Carter linked to it. I didn't save a link to it at the time and had to do some careful Google searching just to located it again. I didn't see other reports of it in that searching.

That surprises me, because this is huge if these studies turn out to be well-founded. It changes the whole debate about the second justification for the death penalty, and apparently it's changed the minds of a number of important figures, including Cass Sunstein, a well-left-of-center law professor who had been completely opposed to the death penalty. I haven't seen these studies, and I'm not sure I'm qualified to evaluate them fully even if I did see them, but I do know some people have criticized them, although that tells us very little. Some people will criticize anything that gives a conclusion they don't like. I'm going to be looking out for further developments on this. I don't think those who support the death penalty should abandon retributivism, but if the death penalty does deter that's worth knowing about, because those who aren't retributivists might be basing their whole evaluation of the death penalty on this one question.

Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion" is sometimes said to be the most-reprinted article in philosophy, and I believe it. It's one of the most influential papers in all of applied ethics, and several of the arguments Thomson makes have become standard moves in completely unrelated discussions.

One of Thomson's claims is that it would be morally indecent to have an abortion in the ninth month for fairly trivial concerns but that we shouldn't expect a young teenager in her first trimester, pregnant by means of rape, to go through with a pregnancy. She thinks it would be a wonderful moral decision to choose to go through with it, but it's more than we should expect. Philosophers regularly speak this way. They find a middle ground between what is wrong and what is morally required. That range includes anything that would be morally excellent to do but not morally required. This does fit with a lot of people's moral intuitions. There are sacrifices that would be morally admirable to make, but no one is really obligated to make them. This class of actions is called supererogatory. Thomson is saying that it's supererogatory to go through with a pregnancy in some conditions, but it's morally obligatory to go through with it in other cases.

What struck me as odd as I was reading the paper again this time around while preparing to teach it was her use of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan to express this view. She says the ninth-month abortion in the above paragraph wouldn't even be an example of a Minimally Decent Samaritan. We should expect more morally. But going through a pregnancy in the other case would be an example of a Very Good Samaritan, i.e. well beyond the call of duty. I'm not going to dispute the possibility of distinguishing between a range of cases, with some supererogatory and some morally obligatory. It does seem strange to use the Good Samaritan parable to do so, however, since Jesus' point in that parable is that you ought to love your neighbor as yourself, and your neighbor is anyone in need, which means you ought to go way beyond what you thought you were obligated to do, and this is even in cases involving complete strangers whose social position means you wouldn't normally even rub shoulders with the person. In other words, Jesus is at the very least minimizing the category of supererogatory actions. He doesn't explicitly deny that there are such actions, but it's hard to avoid the impression on reading the parable that he thinks most actions philosophers would classify as supererogatory as actually morally required.

That suggests an interesting response to Thomson's argument. What about those who don't hold to a view like Thomson's about supererogatory actions? What we ought to be as good as we can be? What if we ought to do as much good as we can do? Thomson's intent is to assume for the sake of argument that a fetus has full moral status and a right to life, arguing then that there are still reasons to think abortion is morally permissible under certain conditions (and as she goes it becomes clear that those conditions aren't just extreme ones like rape but include any case of failed contraception, provided that the abortion takes place early enough in the pregnancy). There are lots of places people might question her argument, but one place I hadn't thought about was to question her reliance on there being a wide range of supererogatory acts. If not, then you might concede all her other points and still oppose abortion. If you think it's morally better to go through with a pregnancy, as Thomson concedes (and many pro-choice people have since then), then once you deny supererogation you end up with a moral obligation not to have an abortion, and this has nothing to do with fetal rights (Thomson is no longer assuming for the sake of argument that the fetus is a person when she gets into the Good Samaritan stuff).

So Thomson's argument gets turned on its head. She started with an argument defending abortion even if the fetus is a person with full moral rights, and once you deny the supererogation premise you end up with an argument that abortion is often immoral, without assuming anything about the personhood of the fetus. It does involve a pretty controversial premise, but it's an interesting argument nonetheless, and there are lots of people who deny supererogation (or at least should do so given their other commitments).

I started the semester off in my applied ethics class with a unit on abortion, so I've been thinking a lot about arguments in the abortion literature that you don't often see at the popular level. I haven't taught this subject since fall 2004, so I'm sort of coming at a lot of this from a fresh perspective and rethinking a lot of the arguments I've been familiar with. Several things have occurred to me that seemed worth blogging about, so you can look for several posts on abortion in the next week or so as I write up my thoughts on some of these things.

One highly-anthologized article on abortion is Don Marquis' "Why Abortion Is Immoral". Marquis sets out to explain why abortion is immoral without assuming the personhood of the fetus. He instead develops an account of why killing in general is wrong. Killing is wrong, says Marquis, not because of some intrinsic property of the thing being killed (e.g. its capacity to feel pain, its consciousness, its ability to plan for the future, its self-concept, and so on), but because of the future it would otherwise have or be likely to have if you don't kill it. The reason it would be wrong to kill me is because of what you're taking away from me if you do so -- my future. The reason it's wrong to kill anything is because of the future you're robbing it of.

Now it follows that you're robbing a fetus of a future, and the future you're robbing it of is one like the future you and I have. You're even robbing it of more of a future, since it won't even get what you and I have already had that's now in our past. So abortion is wrong because it robs a fetus of a future like ours. This is so even if a fetus isn't a person. It has moral status not because of its current properties but because of what you would be taking away from it if you do certain things to it. In other words, its future (or what would otherwise be its future) is what guarantees the wrongness of killing it (and what you might derivatively call its right to life, but this is now being framed in very different terms.

That's the primary argument of Marquis' article. He doesn't spend much time developing it. Most of his effort goes toward motivating his theory of why killing is wrong and explaining why it's superior to person-based accounts. In this post, I'm not going to focus in on whether his theory of killing is correct, but I do want to flag a part of his support for it that strikes me as question-begging or at least as only appealing to a relatively small subset of potential readers.

One of the features he presents for his view on why killing is wrong is that it gives the right results about a number of other issues. Philosophers often give such arguments. They present a theory about something, and then they point out that their theory fits nicely with people's intuitions about other matters, and the alternative theories they're considering conflict with those same intuitions. The problem in Marquis' use of this strategy is that he chooses some controversial intuitions, indeed a pretty strange combination of them.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

I've often heard the charge that theists have a harder time responding to the problem of evil if they hold to a deontological ethical view. Deontology recognizes duties that can't easily be overridden by consequences the way consequentialism allows. Consequentialists say the right thing to do is to do whatever leads to the best consequences. If God does this, then God can do things that lead to bad consequences as long as the good consequences that also happen are better enough to outweigh the bad. So it's easier to deal with the problem of evil if all it takes to justify God's allowance of evil is that it leads to a slightly better outcome overall, even if it's worse with respect to the evil itself. Deontologists, on the other hand, might just say that the duty not to harm or not even to allow harm can't so easily be outweighed by the overall good. Some things are just wrong, and God shouldn't therefore do them. Allowing very great evils seems to be a pretty good candidate for that category of action. It's thus harder to respond to the problem of evil with a deontological view than it is with a consequentialist view.

I used to be a little disturbed at this problem, wondering whether a "higher goods" type of defense that I favor requires a consequentialist view, a view I'm not otherwise attracted to. But it's occurred to me recently that the problem assumes a kind of deontology that I don't agree with. It assumes the absolutism of Immanuel Kant's deontology, not a more moderated kind of deontology such as that of W.D. Ross, which I favor. On Ross's view, we have prima facie duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of lying to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to lie, but in a case of lying to protect your reputation it's still going to be wrong to lie, even if the consequences are better from lying. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either.

Now apply this to the problem of evil. There will be potential cases when God would not do something wrong, because even though the consequences are better it would be wrong to do it. But it leaves open that some goods are so important that God might allow pretty serious harm in order to achieve them. This means that the moderate deontologist can have consequence-based responses to the problem of evil that an absolutist deontologist can't have. This may have been all I was worried about losing by adopting a deontological ethical view, even if consequentialists might have yet more to say to defend a divinity from being immoral for allowing evil.

Consider the following words from Rudy Giuliani (hat tip: DaveG):

Giuliani, who appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said in response to a question that he did not believe homosexuality was aberrant.

“The way somebody leads their life isn’t sinful. It’s the acts,” said Giuliani, who supports gay rights and lived with an openly gay couple after separating from his second wife while mayor. “It’s the various acts that people perform that are sinful, not the orientation that they have.”

What could that possibly mean? Here are the three main views on this issue:

View A: There's nothing wrong remotely in the area of homosexuality.
View B: Homosexuality (as a sexual orientation) is involuntary (or largely involuntary), but homosexual acts are immoral.
View C: It's morally wrong to be gay, even if you're celibate.

Now I think Giuliani has ruled out all three views. There are acts that he thinks are wrong that are remotely related to homosexuality. So it's not A. It's clearly not C, since he says a homosexual orientation isn't a sin. B might seem the most plausible, and it does seem to follow from his denial of the other two, but he does say that "the way somebody leads their life isn't sinful". Unless he means that in a way that isn't its most natural meaning, I think he's just contradicted his statement that various acts are wrong.

I have two overly charitable interpretations that might make sense of this.

1. View B is his view, and when he refers to the way somebody leads their life he's not talking about acts but orientation. In favor of this is the parallel between his contrast between how you lead your life and your acts and his second contrast between orientation and your acts. But it's extremely strange to talk about orientation as equivalent with how you lead your life. How you lead your life seems more akin to acts than it does to orientation.

2. DaveG's interpretation is correct, and View A is what Giuliani meant to say, which means the acts he refers to have nothing to do with homosexuality. He's making a general claim that sins are acts, and homosexuality isn't an act, so it can't be a sin. The problem with this is that there are acts associated with homosexuality, and his point doesn't say anything against View B, which is an extremely common view. Also, his contrast between acts and orientation does seem to be parallel to the contrast between the way you lead your life and your acts, which would suggest some connection between the acts and the orientation.

I also have a somewhat uncharitable interpretation that might make some sense of it:

3. View A is his view, and the acts he has in mind are ones that don't actually have to do with homosexuality but are commonly associated with it anyway, e.g. male-male incest, paedophilia/pederasty, male-male rape, etc. Homosexuality entails none of those, but they are male-male, and thus they are technically homosexual. What's somewhat uncharitable about interpreting him this way is that it makes him out to connect homosexuality with such acts even when he's trying to defend it. It wouldn't be my first choice to attribute such a view to someone just to try to make sense of what seems to be a contradiction. But I'm not happy with any of the above options, either.

A recent update from the Family Research Council takes an interesting tactic from the point of view of bad rhetorical moves. What do you do if you want to convince people that you're on the side of families? Probably not word things in such a way that you sound as if parents of adopted children aren't parents. Not a good idea. Yet this is exactly what the FRC has done (and I must say it's not the first time I've seen this from mainstream opposition to gay marriage).

It is outrageous that courts in some states have become complicit in this denial of biological reality by allowing homosexual couples to have custody of newborns and birth certificates that mislead about the true parentage of the child. 

So what counts as true parentage? I accept that birth certificates of adopted kids ideally ought to list the biological parents, for a lot of reasons. But I would never in my right mind suggest that this is the same thing as saying birth certificates ought to list the true parents, as if adoptive parents aren't the true parents of the child. So here's a hint to the FRC. If you're going to argue against adoption by gay people, it's not going to endear people toward thinking of you as a legitimate family advocate if you also in effect include adoption by straight married couples as part of your target by speaking of them as if they're not real parents.

It turns out divorce is bad for the environment. So is breaking up any cohabitation. I guess marriage and cohabitation are good for the environment, then. It's interesting that they worded the headline to emphasize the negative rather than the positive, though. [hat tip: Jonathan Adler]

Somtimes it's morally important to recognize that someone may inappropriately and irrationally be offended by something you do. It's worth going the extra mile to prevent their offense, even if that offense stems from something silly. Other things are more important than the little amount of effort it might take to avoid that offense.

But aren't there times when giving in to stupid reasons for offense is catering to dangerous trends and opening the door for complete abandonment of careful thought? Perhaps a good example of something that stupid would be asking Santas to avoid saying "ho, ho, ho" for fear of offending women who think you're calling them prostitutes. There are enough serious worries in this world about people using terms that are actually offensive to women that putting serious effort into telling your employees this kind of thing just seems like a waste of time.

What's worse is that this trivializes the kind of language necessary to address real social ills. This kind of warning insults anyone who has actually been called a ho (and in fact all women, since all have been subject to blanket descriptions of all women as hos). If you can't distinguish between real misogyny or sexism and something that no reasonable person could take as anything but innocent, then your moral priorities are so twisted that I'd rather not have you giving moral recommendations to anyone.

Update: Snopes debunks this. The reason had nothing to do with confusing the sound "ho" with the U.S. slang for prostitute but just to avoid such a deep, booming laugh. But this strikes me as harder to believe than most of the stuff coming out of Snopes, bedause another report from Australia later that week had someone actually getting fired for exactly these reasons, and I thought the source for that was pretty reliable (not that I remember it now).

In my post on some moral issues related to torture, I said I was planning another post on legal issues. As I've been thinking about what I wanted to say, I've realized that I don't really have anything to say about the legal issues. I don't know much about what the laws related to this issue actually say, and I don't have a clear proposal of what they ought to say other than the very general things I wish could be true of laws on this. The issues that I had really wanted to say something about are actually linguistic, not legal. I wanted to say something about the word 'torture' and why I think it's unfortunate that so much has focused on what falls under that term.

Here's the problem, as I see it. We've got a law (or treaty or something) that uses the word 'torture'. It then says torture is disallowed, or at least disallowed under certain circumstances. Part of the legal debate is whether cases of detainees in the war on terrorism count as falling under the law in question, and part is whether these techniques count as torture even if the detainees do fall under it. I have nothing really to say toward answering those questions, at least nothing that hasn't already been said ad nauseam. What I want to say is that it's unfortunate that those are the questions being debated.

Suppose you're a government official responsible for making decisions about what interrogation techniques are allowable and when. You're presented with this meaningless law that says we can't torture that doesn't tell you what counts as torture. In that case, it seems as if you have to figure out which cases count as torture according to what the English word means. It's plausible that one piece of evidence in figuring that out would come from interviewing the public about what they think counts as torture, since their use of the term is what makes it mean what it means to begin with. I think a number of philosophers of language would resist this, because we don't always know internally what factors in the world influence what our terms mean, but leave that worry aside. Suppose this would help us determine what counts as torture.

I don't think the actual case is like that. It's well within the realm of possibility that what legally counts as torture doesn't line up with what the English word 'torture' means, because the laws and codes dealing with torture often define it or give examples to declare which techniques legally count as torture. That means giving cases and asking if the cases seem like torture doesn't help. Besides, I don't think the opposition to some of these techniques really wants the law to be as vague as simply equating legally-defined torture with whatever the word means in English. They want lists of disallowed techniques, not some sense that the word in the law just means exactly what the word means. Laws like that are usually bad laws, because it's hard to enforce something without specific stipulations.

It's also within the realm of possibility that the legal definition of torture, which again might not line up with the popular meaning of the term in ordinary English, might actually diverge in meaning in different contexts. In particular, different kinds of laws might deal with different sets of things called torture. Is what counts as torture in a context of declared war against another country going to line up with what counts as torture in the war on terrorism? It's obvious that such a context shift doesn't change what the English word means. But if the legal definition doesn't line up with the meaning of the English word, why should we expect the same legal definition in both contexts?

This leaves us with a problem. How do we determine what legally should count as torture, given that it doesn't have to be whatever the English word means and it doesn't even have to be the same in all contexts? Here is my proposal. Stop discussing which techniques are allowed absolutely, because imaginable circumstances might allow some techniques that aren't allowable in less severe circumstances. The issue isn't whether we can list the techniques we do or don't allow. What matters is putting a system in place that can safeguard the process so that extreme methods are not used except in very extreme situations.

I'm not the sort of person to come up with ideas on what those safeguards are. I have no special background in law or the military. But I do know ethics, and I do know language, and what I'm seeing coming from the opponents of waterboarding and other techniques doesn't seem to me to fit with what seem to me to be the best ways of looking at the ethical and linguistic issues. The debate shouldn't be about what the word 'torture' in English includes, as if we can think about the technique and just intuit that it counts as torture. It also shouldn't be about blanket generalizations. It should be about putting specific procedures in place that should be followed in non-emergency situations to safeguard what kind of technique can be used, with another set of procedures in emergencies that will allow for on-the-spot decisions that can be allowed more leeway but still with serious repercussions if a subsequent evaluation leads to serious questions about what was done given what was known, what could be known, and what could be expected to be known.

Now a lot of the comments people have made on my first post have come from worries about abuses by those who would torture immorally for their own reasons and those who could give too much benefit of the doubt to those who would commit such abuses. That's a problem. But it's also a problem if we end up with a too-tight restriction when the extreme case occurs. What I would like is a safeguard system that can avoid both problems.In hard moral cases there isn't always a solution that gives you everything you might want. It does seem at least in principle possible for someone especially good in that kind of intelligence to come up with something that could do that (or at least end up with something in that direction). So I think it's possible that we're working with a false dilemma: restrict the interrogators more than the status quo does, or defend the insistence of the current administration that extreme techniques ought to have some place in extreme cirtcumstances. Couldn't there be a system of safeguards that moved toward achieving both aims?

On Tuesday several news sources announced a new technique to derive stem cells that seem to be just like embryonic stem cells, except that it can come directly from any adult cell (at least that's how I understand what they've done). If this is all it claims to be, then there does seem to be no need to derive embryonic stem cells from any method that kills an embryo. It's unsurprising that pro-life groups feel vindicated in their claim that we needn't pursue methods that are ethically controversial to get this benefit, and CNN recognizes this in an article yesterday.

What baffles me is that they've sought to present this as if both sides of the embryonic stem cell debate feel vindicated. They even have a quote from Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to that effect:

Our top researchers recognize that this new development does not mean that we should discontinue studying embryonic stem cells," he said in a written statement. "Scientists may yet find that embryonic stem cells are more powerful. We need to continue to pursue all alternatives as we search for treatments for diabetes, Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries.

He added that Tuesday's announcement "reiterates the need for federal support for medical research and again points out the president's misplaced priorities in vetoing the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill which included a substantial increase for the National Institutes of Health."

Now if he'd only said the first part, I wouldn't necessarily have any problem. I might disagree with his assumption that human beings at such an early stage have no moral status, but I wouldn't complain about his point. Someone seems to have achieved something that could accomplish what advocates of destroying human organisms for stem cells had wanted to do but without destroying any human organisms. But it's possible that that's not true.

As Russell Korobkin points out, it's still necessary to investigate whether these cells have all the features people want in embryonic stem cells and whether they will have negative features that will prevent their use (e.g. like the cancers in all the embryonic cells, although I have to point out that their presence wouldn't make this any worse than what we've got with embryonic stem cells). It's also still worth thinking through exactly what's going on here to see if it does raise any ethical objections. I certainly haven't done that.

Nevertheless, here is what you cannot rationally do. When someone presents something that at worst does not confirm your position and at best undermines it significantly, you do not present it as vindication of your view. This research may well show that it's completely unnecessary to destroy human embryos for what we might have wanted them for. Senator Harkin has been proposing federal funding to destroy human embryos. If this research is what people are saying it is, then it may well remove any need to do what so many question without sacrificing any consequences. The fact that this may not turn out to be what it's been claimed to be does not vindicate Senator Harkin's position. At best (for him), all it does is not confirm the opposing position that there will be better ways to do what Harkin wants. Not confirming your opponent's position is not vindication of your own position. The non-existence of Santa Claus doesn't confirm his opponents' position on this issue, but it would be crazy to suggest that it confirms support for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. It's simply irrelevant. Well, so is the failure of a proposed method for producing similar cells. And this isn't the failure of such a method anyway. It's the announcement of what seems like a strong possibility of non-failure in one such method.

So I would encourage the author of the CNN piece and Senator Harkin to pay a little more attention to what counts as vindicating a thesis. The way the piece reads, and the way Harkin's statement comes across, it sounds as if it's ok to ignore a positive movement toward confirming one view as if it also moves positively toward confirming the opposite view. It's fine to say that you don't know if it really does confirm that view, but don't pretend it somehow confirms the opposite view when there's no reason to think it possibly could do so.

There's been a resumption in the discussions of torture with the Michael Mukasey attorney general hearings. I haven't had much chance to say anything about these issues, but I've been thinking that there are two questions people I've been hearing and reading have been sidestepping. Some of the questions are legal. There are international treaties that weigh in on the issue, and there are explicit laws and policies that may have a bearing. I'm not interested in those issues for this post, but I hope to come back to them later this week. For the moment, I want to offer some moral considerations apart from whether any law or treaty applies to any particular technique.

Here is a plausible moral view (which I've tried to motivate a little more in general here and here). There are lots of things that are generally immoral that in extreme circumstances might be morally justified or at least excused. This is almost uncontroversially true of killing. Hardly anyone will oppose killing in self-defense or defense of others. It's also not that controversial to say it's true of causing lesser degrees of pain for the sake of achieving some further goal (e.g. cutting off someone's arm to amputate it when their arm would otherwise cause them to die from gangrene). It might be true in cases of causing one person pain in order to prevent a great harm to many people, as happens with interrogation methods that cause some psychological discomfort but are not controversial.

Given all that, it's at least an option on the table to consider more extreme methods of interrogation as different only in degree and not in kind. It's a greater amount of discomfort, pain, and distress. So it should take a greater amount of seriousness in the situation for it to be morally allowable. But I don't see how it's going to follow automatically from the greater amount of discomfort, pain, and distress that we should have an absolute moral prohibition on it. Maybe some techniques are so awful that the moral seriousness of the situation needs to be so high that it's almost certainly never going to occur. But that's still not an absolute moral prohibition.

Notice that I haven't used the word 'torture' in any of that discussion. I've been using more precise terms that actually mean something. If this view is correct, and I haven't argued that it is but simply claimed that it should be on the table, then techniques like waterboarding may well be immoral in almost any case that someone might propose to use them but not necessarily immoral in every case.

Leaving aside any actual laws and policies, what does this mean for what the ideal law or policy should say? I'm not sure it follows that any particular law or policy is the right one, but it does suggest that there should be extremely strong safeguards against using such techniques except in very extreme circumstances, and it seems perfectly fine given such a view that there would nevertheless be some way such techniques could nevertheless be used in extremely rare, extremely serious situations. I have no idea how such a policy would work, but it seems to me that absolute prohibitions and blanket allowances would both fail to capture the correct moral view if what I've been outlining is correct.

Again, I haven't argued that this view is true, but it seems to me to be one of the views we should have on the table, and that means absolute prohibitions and blanket allowances should not be the only options on the table. Meanwhile, the opponents of waterboarding aren't allowing anything but a blanket prohibition to be on the table, and many of the supporters of extreme interrogation techniques have not shown much willingness to figure out how to have safeguards to keep these techniques rare. I think that's unfortunate.

Racialicious links to a post asking how racism harms white people. It's a good question that I think whites and non-whites should spend a lot of time thinking about, and I don't think most of the comments on that post have really gotten to the most fundamental issues. The question does assume that there is never any anti-white racism, which would be a mistake. A question that would better express the original intent is "How does white racism harm white people?"

I would think that the primary way racism of any sort harms the racist themself is that it is bad to be a racist. It's just bad to be bad. It's bad for you, not just because it has bad consequences but merely because it's bad to be bad. You harm yourself intrinsically by being a bad person.

But there are all sorts of bad consequences of racism on those who are exhibiting it. One is that much of what's excellent in the culture that surrounds us, including things racists appreciate and rely on, is due to those racism harms and victimizes. So there's a kind of inconsistency in any kind of racism that names things as bad in the person one isolates as "other" while recognizing any of those good effects as good. It's bad to be inconsistent, because it's irrational. So that's another negative impact of racism on racists themselves.

We need to distinguish between racists as evil people with evil intent and other kinds of racism, which don't all involve racists. Lots of people contribute to institutional or structural racism by taking part in practices that in effect harm people along racial lines, even if the people involved aren't racists. Also, virtually all white people are affected by residual racism, which affects our unconscious responses and attitudes to non-whites, all the while not constituting what it is to be a racist. Both of these have similar characteristics with being a racist, in that it's bad to take part in bad practices and to have bad unconscious responses to people, even if such things don't make someone a racist.

More generally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we're all morally and socially interconnected, and harm toward an entire community of people is thus harm toward an entire segment of humanity, and we're all part of humanity. Thus harm toward other human beings of any sort (including racism) is thus harm to ourselves inasmuch as we are all human. Crimes against humanity are crimes against ourselves. So even any racism that I have nothing to do with causing or perpetuating is a harm to me, even if I'm not the immediate victim. All racism is harmful to all human beings.

It's only after all that that I'd bring in things like how our lives will be better off externally when we interact in a moral way with those who are different. It seemed to me that most of the comments on the post that started this were focusing on those questions, a