Monthly Archives: September 2012

Why do Canadian News Media think that Margaret Somerville is an Ethicist?

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Again and again Margaret Somerville is seen “gracing” our newspapers, our radio programmes, and pronouncing of moral issues on Canadian television. And, while she is, as Wikipedia tells us the ”Founding Director of the Faculty of Law’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University,” she gives no evidence of knowing anything about ethics beyond parroting the dogmatic Vatican line, especially when it comes to so-called “pro-life” issues. And on these issues, she shows no acquaintance with the literature on the ethics of either abortion or assisted dying, and she is given to imaginative ways of twisting language to get the results that she had before she started. Her latest contribution to her soliloquy on the ethics of abortion can be found in The Globe and Mail, with the unprepossessing title “The Preposterous Politics of Female Feticide.”

She has already been roundly condemned in the comments, many of whom wonder the same thing that I do: Why do newspapers and other news media give her a platform to spout off about her latest disapproval? It’s always the same thing dressed up a little differently. Even so, it is worth spending a few minutes with Margaret, because she shows so clearly how to go off the rails when you want to oppose something in the name of dogmatic certainty. Her ability to make an argument is weak, and, whether she realises it or not, her special pleading is obvious right from the start. So, we begin by taking it as read that Margaret is against abortion, period. There is no place in Margaret’s world for abortion, and she would be happy if we had draconian laws in Canada similar to the ones in some Latin American countries, where women’s bodies become crime scenes when their desperate attempts to abort go badly wrong. Then, after the indignity of being chained to hosptial beds is over, they will find themselves in prison, sometimes for life, because, in their desperation, they sought to terminate a pregnancy. This, I suppose, Margaret sees as a way to honour women, because there would be no sex selective abortions allowed where none are allowed, and this would honour women by making it sure that, no matter what the circumstances, female foetuses would be carried to term, and then would enter societies where they could be subject to the “machismo” of many Latin American societies where rape is rampant. In many Latin American countries, for instance, rape is widespread, and yet, at the same time, abortion is is often illegal except to save the life of the woman. You see how Margaret’s wishes would improve the status of women? It would happen just because women would not be able to abort female foetuses, and, magically, women would be respected. Well, Margaret, it simply doesn’t work that way.

You see, the trouble with Margaret is that she doesn’t think things through. She has a conclusion that she has to reach, and it doesn’t much matter how she reaches it. So, she says, as though butter wouldn’t melt (as they say), that having avoided the Scylla of Woodworth’s “definition of the person” bill (shades of American fundamentalism for the delectation of Canadians), that now Canadian MPs are smack dab up against the Charybdis of Mark Warawa’s anti-female feticide bill. And she seems to think that Canadians will support the second whereas they wouldn’t the first, but that the second will take them to the same place in any case — that is, the second would legitimate the state intervening in the life of women who want abortions for the reason of sex selection, but if you are prepared to allow this intrusion, then why not simply outlaw the practice altogether? Consistency demands it.

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Sam Harris and the Morality of Torture

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In a recent piece over at richarddawkins.net, Richard Dawkins has tried to put Sam Harris’s “defence” of torture into perspective for us. Entitled “It’s What Moral Philosophers Do,” Dawkins argues that Harris has been unjustly vilified for doing what moral philosophers routinely do. He uses an example from P.Z. Myers, regarding the morality of abortion:

We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.

In response to this Dawkins justly says:

Now a reasonable person could disagree with him here. A humane rationalist could be pro-abortion under existing conditions, but anti-abortion under the counterfactual condition of the Myers thought experiment – the conscious, poetry-writing embryo. That is the whole reason why Myers found it worthwhile to invent his excellent thought-experiment.

And I think this is a good response to Myers’ thought experiment. If embryos in the womb had conscious life, as well as life plans and projects, then, it seems, abortion would have to be ruled out as morally appropriate. The point of the argument against the attribution of person-defining characteristics to embryos is precisely that they do not have them. The only one with life projects, hopes, fears, and other attributes that belong to persons, in the case of abortion, is the pregnant woman, and that is why it is inappropriate to arbitrarily define personhood in terms that would apply to embryos and foetuses, because doing so results in the abrogation of women’s rights to make decisions regarding their lives freely, and so is an unacceptable harm.

Imagining thought experiments may be what moral philosophers do, but the purpose of making thought experiments is to come to morally relevant conclusions on the basis of them. As a matter of fact, P.Z. Myers’ thought experiment regarding abortion shows clearly why, if the foetus was a conscious, poetry writing being, with the same sorts of hopes and fears and life projects as the woman in whose womb he or she is growing, then abortion would be an unalloyed moral wrong. What surprises me is that P.Z. Myers did not draw the consequences from his thought experiment that it seems intuitively obvious that he should, for the reason that personhood should not be attributed to foetuses is that they do not in fact have the kinds of consciousness and life prospects and projects that the thought experiment attributes to them. That is precisely why Peter Singer can ask about the rights of mature, fully conscious animals, contrasted with adult human beings with dementia. On what grounds do we give preferential moral treatment to mindless human beings, and none at all to adult cows? The anwsers are not clear, and they deserve close attention.

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Conservative Christians (and almost all Church judicatories) are implacable opponents of assisted dying and abortion, and are prepared to abridge individual freedom to put both out of the moral reach of individuals whose lives will be immeasurably affected as a result

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Please excuse the long descriptive title, which seemed necessary under the circumstances! Christian opposition to assisted dying once more raised its head in Switzerland, where, according to a Reuters report,

Switzerland’s parliament voted against a bid to toughen controls on assisted suicide on Wednesday, rejecting concerns about foreigners travelling to the country to die.

As the report states, this reflects the decision by referendum last year in the Canton of Zürich, where the Swiss law regarding assisted suicide was overwhelmingly supported by the electorate, and the attempt by evangelical Christian organisations to quash the law by referendum failed dismally. Not only did the bid by the Christian Democrat party fail, the bid led to a powerful restatement of Swiss commitment to its end-of-life practices. Susanne Leutenegger-Oberholzer, member of the Social Democratic party, said:

The ability to determine what happens with our lives in our final months is considered very important in Switzerland. Ethical questions are of primary importance here. Lawmakers can’t do much good here. [my italics]

The distinction made in the words in italics is one which I had never seen made before, so it is worthwhile (to me at least) to spend a few moments discussing it. We will see a similar distinction being made in the context of laws governing abortion.

The point that “lawmakers can’t do much good here” is essentially saying that this is not a matter for lawmakers at all. It reminds me of the time that Pierre Elliott Trudeau, when running as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in the 1968 election said that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” As Wikipedia records it:

Trudeau famously defended the decriminalization of homosexual acts segment of the bill by telling reporters that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”, adding that “what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code”.

Essentially, this is what Susanne Leutenegger-Oberholzer is saying about assisted suicide. It’s nobody’s business but the person whose choice it is to die. The law intervenes only in cases where the person assisting has something to gain by the person’s death.

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Islam and respect, continued ….

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I want to begin with something that The Philosophical Primate said in a comment on yesterday’s post, and I hope I will be forgiven for quoting all of it:

I honestly do not believe that Islam is intrinsically worse than any other faith-based religion. Rather, it is merely trapped — for the moment — at an earlier stage in religious development. Islam is currently as Christianity was in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages — oppressive, totalitarian, theocratic, and violent, not least to its own adherents, especially women. So too was Hinduism not so long ago (many remnants of which still remain), shoring up the caste system and demanding (or at least reinforcing) such quaint and charming traditions as suttee. So too was Mormonism until the Mormon patriarchs decided that the benefits of Utah’s statehood outweighed the benefits of their quaint traditions of murder and child-rape/slavery/marriage. So too are any and all religions based primarily on faith (and indeed, faith-based political ideologies like the various forms of Communism), because unsupportable claims are the ideal tool for rationalizing unconscionable actions.

No faith-based religion is worthy of ANY respect whatsoever, at any stage in its development. The fact that broader cultural forces of enlightenment and progress can force reform on backwards traditions does not alter their inherent backwardness, it just makes them more neighborly. That neighborliness is certainly important, but it is not worthy of respect: Rather, it warrants only wary tolerance. Tolerance, not respect — and always wary, because faith remains intrinsically perilous, easily exploited to rationalize any reprehensible nonsense believers invent.

While I largely agree with The Philosophical Primate here, I want to make some qualifications. It does not seem to me helpful to say that Islam is ”trapped at an earlier stage of development.” It is not clear to me that there is any measure of development for religions. However, it does seem to me that Islam has reached a particularly difficult stage in its trajectory at which it feels trapped by circumstance into becoming, along some of its axes, a particularly virulent form of itself, at a time when Christianity (in particular), under pressure from the Reformation and the wars of religion, has been forced to become more liberal and tolerant. I agree that no religion is deserving of our respect, and that about them all we should be warily tolerant. But I do think — and I do want to say this with tolerance and respect for those Muslims who have been able to make the transition to modernity without abandoning those things which they consider to be of spiritual value in their faith – that there are aspects of Islam which make it particularly dangerous, and largely inhospitable to significant revision, at least on a large scale. It is perhaps worth mentioning those features here.

First, there is no central authority in Islam, so Islam is how it is interpreted by any number of different “authorities”, and this tends to produce a kind of competition to the most literal reading of the religion. Where authority is dispersed in this way, the tendency is to try to outdo others in faithfulness to tradition, to the words of sacred texts, and to severity of interpretation. (The same tendency can be seen at work in evangelical Christianity.) And this dispersed authority is further intensified by using the street as a way of enforcing the conclusions of the “scholars”.

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Islam is not a respectable religion, and it does not deserve our respect

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Yesterday, Jerry Coyne put up a video of 20 Muslim scholars and academics speaking on various aspects of their faith. Taken together they make a strong case for not only not respecting Islam, but for positively disrespecting it. Here is the last clip from the film. Watch this first, and then I will go on with the rest of this post.

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As Jerry says so clearly:

What is most frightening—and enlightening—about this, is that it shows how sincerely these people—eloquent and educated people—actually believe in the ludicrous dictates of Islam.  That’s often forgotten by those who excuse terrorists by claiming that the terrorists’ motivations are not religious but political.

It is ridiculous to claim that the issues raised by Islam are simply political. They’re not. They are deeply embedded in the fundamental texts of Islam, texts which, not to put too fine a point on it, are of doubtful provenance and authenticity. As Joseph Schacht, whom Wikipedia describes as “a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York,” is quoted by Tom Holland (in his new book In the Shadow of the Sword) to this effect:

We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet. [36]

In other words, the founding documents of Islam are sometimes centuries older than the supposed prophet of Islam, and their historical provenance is insecure. Nevertheless, Muslim scholars are not yet prepared, at least in any considerable numbers, to face the fact of the critical historical study of their founding texts, and, as the person in this video takes it for granted, not only do the texts bear the authority of God himself as a final revelation; but even their most primitive and brutal prescriptions must be adhered to. He even suggests, in what would be funny if it were not so pathological, that those who sin in the ways described, by committing adultery or engaging in homosexual acts, actually want to be treated in these brutal ways; they want to be killed by stoning. Such people, as one person says, if they exist, which she takes leave to doubt, are suffering from some psychopathology and need psychiatric help.

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The most godless place on earth. Some reflections on the future of nonbelief

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Apparently, from all accounts, Eastern Germany is one of the most godless places on earth. In one survey not one person younger than 28 evinced belief in a god, and the percentage of those who self-described as atheist was 59%! This is discussed by Peter Thompson in the Guardian at Comment is Free, based on a study by Tom Smith at the University of Chicago (the link takes you to the study in pdf, but the tables referred to in the study are not included). Peter Thompson ends his article with the thought that, rather than the question being whether or not Europe should be considered a Christian entity, the question should instead be

whether it is folk atheism that represents the future of Europe.

What is interesting is that atheism itself seems to be one of the major impediments to the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whereas other Soviet Bloc states have largely reverted to their pre-Soviet religious identities, including Russia, in which the Russian Orthodox Church has shown, not only signs of revival, but also of renewed identification with the state, in Eastern Germany atheism put down deep roots. Indeed, atheism and German Democratic Republic nationalism were closely identified, and the Jugendweihe, or youth consecration ceremony, marked the transition from youth to the assumption of more adult responsibilities.

The intersting thing about the Jugendweihe, which was actually founded in 1852 by a Protestant Pastor in Nordhausen as an alternative celebration to the religious rite of Confirmation (Konfirmation) for non-religious families, is that, though it largely fell into disuse after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has been revived to fill a felt need. Many people who had no religious affiliation had begun to ask what they could offer their children to mark the transition from childhood to young adulthood, a celebration of their passing on to a new stage of life. However, though the Jugendweihe ceremony has been revived, it is no longer permitted to be celebrated in schools, nor do the kids get a holiday as is given to their religious age-mates when they are confirmed.

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Scientism, again …

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I apologise to those who find this kind of thing boring, but I simply can’t let this go, so here I am with scientism once again, and I’ve spent too long puzzling over this just throw it all away. The length, I’m afraid, is heading into the stratosphere, even for me! Anyway, I promised Jerry that I would come back to it.

I have been reading Jason Rosenhouse’s posts on scientism over at Evolution Blog, here and here. I don’t want to make heavy weather of this, but, again, I think the point is being missed. Jason also has another post about scientism, in response to Kitcher’s New Republic essay “The Trouble with Scientism” (which you can access here). And, of course, there are Jerry Coyne’s comments on Kitcher’s essay, which you can access here and here. (And, while I do not link to them, Massimo Pigliucci has a number of posts on scientism over at Rationally Speaking.) So, it’s not as though the issue has not raised a number of concerns. I pick Rosenhouse and Coyne because I admire them, and because I owe both of them so much. (Along with Ophelia Benson, they have been my mentors — unknown, perhaps, to them — on how to go about the business of blogging.) I do think, though, that on the subject of scientism they seem to me to miss the point.

The general response to Kitcher’s concerns about scientism are to say, basically, that those disciplines that do produce knowledge, produce knowledge because they use the same methods, the same “ways of knowing” as science. The implication is that, where a discipline, like archaeology, ethnography, economics, history, etc. is successful in advancing our knowledge, it does so by invoking the same methods, and obtaining the same kinds of evidence, as does science. Here is how Jerry puts it in “The trouble with ‘The trouble with scientism’”:

If you look at [Kitcher's] examples of where scholars have produced increasing understanding and progress, it is in disciplines like history, economics, ethnography, and archaeology — fields that rely on the same “ways of knowing” as does science.

We’ll come back to that locution “ways of knowing” in a moment, but at this point I want to quote a similar opinion from Jason Rosenhouse (from his second post on the silliness of scientism):

The humanities are under attack, but not because of anything scientists are doing. It certainly has nothing to do with anything Philip Kitcher discussed in his article for The New Republic. (That was the one where he made the strange argument that scientism is false because the humanities are more like sciences than is sometimes acknowledged, as we have discussed.) [my italics]

Now, it seems to me, based on these two remarks, that we need to go take a closer look at the idea of ways of knowing.

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Further progress in the “right-to-die” movement

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A lot of things have been happening lately in the right-to-die movement, and they are worth recording here. Perhaps the most powerful statement so far made was made by Tony Nicklinson, who, after losing his High Court case for the right to die, lost hear, refused to eat, and died a few days later, finally free of the burden of a life which was becoming increasingly intolerable for him. That the courts would not set a precedent — and there is no obvious reason why they could not — because this is a matter for a Parliament which has shown scant interest in the issue for years, was a great disappointment, not only to Tony, but to many other people who are seeking relief from intolerable conditions of life.

A lot of commentators have remarked that the court could not have acted, for to have acceded to Tony Nicklinson’s request would have been, effectively, to legalise euthanasia, and there seem to be a lot of people who are unwilling to take that extra step, including many in the right-to-die movement. That they are completely wrong about this doesn’t seem to dawn on them. It may be that the preferred way is to provide the means for assisted suicide, so that the person who is suffering is the one who actually has to do the deed, but this excludes, by definition, all those who cannot do the deed, like Tony Nicklinson, and others who have lost the use of their bodies. Many people with MS and ALS end up in this state, and the limitation of assisted dying to assisted suicide means that these people will be forced to make the decision to die earlier than they otherwise might have done, because they would know that, once trapped in their bodies, they are trapped forever, unless they wish to starve themselves to death. But what people who was assistance in dying want is to be in full possession of their faculties when they die, and those who starve themselves to death eventually pass into a comatose state, and then they die. Why they cannot be helped simply makes no sense. It is significant that those who have fought this in court are those who are or who were likely to be in a state where assisted suicide would have been of no use to them. Tony Nicklinson, Diane Purdy, and Diane Pretty: all except Ms. Purdy were unable, at the time of their court challenges, were unable to die by receiving assistance in suicide. And still, unfortunately, the right-to-die organisation in Britain, Dignity in Dying, has not got the point.

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Not all Muslims are rampaging through the streets

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This post is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks once more to Malgorzata.

It is only fair to point out, as Tim Harris said in a comment the other day, that there are some people, at least in Libya, who are protesting against Muslim violence, and are opposed to terrorism. Of course, I had no doubt that there were, but there have been public demonstrations to this effect, and Elizabeth Reeve, over at The Atlantic, has reported on them. There are pictures too.

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Was Jesus Married? Probably

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A small papyrus fragment, preserved in the sands of Egypt for nearly two millennia, contains words referring to Jesus’ wife, and the whole world is agog with a sense of scandal. It’s a bit like the pictures of Kate Middleton topless, we are seeing something titillating from a great distance, and even scholars have no idea what to do with it — even though that won’t stop them, as the Royals unerringly did, from making fools of themselves. Tom Holland has probably taken the most politic and reasonable line when he says, in his Guardian article about the fragment:

What the fragment does not do is shed any light on the marital status of the historical Jesus – let alone whether he truly had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene. … What it does give us, though, is a glimpse into an otherwise occluded moment in the evolution of Christianity, and a reminder of how effectively religions have been able to manufacture for themselves, in defiance of messy reality, a streamlined and authorised past.

This is important. When we look at Christianity or Islam we see them as somehow “ready-made” religions, but it took centuries before they took their present form, centuries of sifting and sorting, writing and rewriting, until they had attained an authorised form and had an authority that could authorise them. It helped that the Emperor was onside. Had he not been, I doubt that Christianity would have reached us in anything like its present form. It might not have reached us at all. The New Testament, for example, was not gathered together as an authoritative text until after Christianity had been made, by Constantine’s acceptance, the religion in waiting of an empire.

So, was Jesus married? Probably, and if he was, given the early history of the formation of classical Christianity, this is something that it would have been in the interests of those who had already accepted of the body as somehow unholy to suppress – as Jesus himself effectively does in the canonical gospels when he remarks that some are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs by others, and some have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God (Matthew 19.12), and that his message about sex was hard for men to accept (for it is quite explicitly directed, as most religious messages are, to men) — to conceal the fact that Jesus was a man like other men, and that, like every faithful Jew, he had married. The story of Jesus told in the gospels is almost entirely mythological. If Jesus existed, he was not like this — which is why I am convinced that, even if Jesus was a real figure in history, the Jesus of the gospels is almost entirely an imaginative fiction. Whether there was a real, historical person at the centre of the story is largely irrelevant to the Jesus of Christianity.

What bemuses me is why anyone should think this fragment of a piece of papyrus religiously important. It cannot really tell us whether or not Jesus was married. It cannot plausibly be thought to confirm or disconfirm anything about the historical figure who has already been raised to the nth power and made to seem like a god once walked the earth. We can be assured that he was not like that, and since he was not like that, the likelihood of his having been married (or failing that, as some have suggested, following the hints about “the beloved disciple”, his having been gay) is, I should have thought, fairly high. Why should this surprise anyone? If Jesus was a man — and if he was an historical figure, what else could he reasonably be taken to have been — then he was like other men, and probably had a sexual relationship with someone. The only people who should be bothered by this are those, like the pope, who at least pretends to have been always celibate, and who still thinks that marriage is, somehow, not quite up to spiritual snuff, and such people we can safely ignore.