Category Archives: Ethics

Old Age Rational Suicide?

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I’m not altogether sure what is meant by “old age rational sucicide,” but here is an example where, it seems to me, ordinary provisions for assisted dying would have provided all that is needed. There is a video and an article. I will upload the video here, and link to the articles in the Australian newspaper, The Age, here and here. So, first, the video, then a short comment:

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Michael Cook, the Editor of BioEdge, a conservative bioethics blog from Australia, is tied up in knots about this, partly because he thinks of Beverley Broadbent as relatively healthy, and partly because he questions the ethics of the journalist who reported Ms. Broadbent’s point of view without even trying to dissuade her from taking her life. As he says:

In the first place, a journalist is first of all a human being. Didn’t Medew [Julia Medew, the reporter] have a moral obligation to dissuade a relatively healthy woman from committing suicide?

Of course, the answer to that is: it all depends. If Ms. Broadbent had been a young person in the prime of life, who was suffering from a episodic bout of depression with a specific physical or social cause (like the loss of a loved one, a love affair gone wrong, or whatever), it would seem that this would be the appropriate thing to do. However, Ms. Broadbent’s reasoning is hard to fault. She is afraid of being caught up into the medical system in such a way that there is no escape, and rather than proceed with all the ramifications of starting the process she thinks it best to leave when she is still able to enjoy life, but may not be able to enjoy it much longer.

Of course, if Australia had provision for someone like Beverley, and could promise her that, if she started the process, she could exit the process at any time with medical help to die, if the process looked to be a long and arduous and ultimately pointless exercise in trying to stretch her life out another few months or years, that would require surgery or chemotherapy or radiotherapy, etc. The point here is that, facing an uncertain future, and having no legal way out of the complex of procedures that a biopsy might set in motion, she chose instead to stop the process before it began, because she did not feel confident of being able to stop it later with the sort of consummation that she had prepared for herself.

But the fault is neither with Ms. Broadbent, nor with Julia Medew, but with governments which continue to refuse people alternative measures at the end of life. My wife Elizabeth, for instance, might have lived some months longer. She would have had to suffer the continuing indignity involved, as she experienced it, of her nursing care, but she might have opted to stay longer, but only if she had an alternative ending of her own choosing at a time chosen by her. Failing that, she decided to go to Switzerland, and received help in dying from Dignitas, because the alternative would not have been available here. Michael Cooke is simply out of his depth.

He wants to add to Medew’s file blame for not following World Health Organisation guidelines regarding the reporting of a suicide, which warns of the copycat suicides that sometimes follow the reporting of a suicide. But Ms. Broadbent’s suicide was of a very different sort, and not likely to influence those who are liable to die by suicide for other reasons that would be invoked by the self-chosen death of a older person facing possibly difficult medical circumstances. A promise of assisted dying when her outlook became even bleaker, if that occurred, would likely have kept Ms. Broadbent alive. If governments refuse to legalise assisted dying because some people might die before their time, they must take into account the deaths of people like Ms. Broadbent, who might still be enjoying her declining years, had assisted dying been legal.

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Is there a science of morality?

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Let’s get it straight to start with. Without factual information, some of it provided by science, ethics could not get off the ground. But factual information is not enough, despite the continuing attempts by scientists or science-minded amateurs to suggest that science is sufficient to accomplish what moral philosophers have been unable to accomplish — namely, a more completely adequate understanding of the moral life. Michael Shermer, who already has one book to his credit regarding this issue, is now planning another, and if his essay over at Rationally Speaking is anything to go by, this next foray into the world of philosophy is going to be, if anything, less satisfactory than the first. At least it shows a lamentable failure to learn about moral philosophy before undertaking the journey.

Why Shermer should think that he can really provide a grounding for morality without studying what the best of the philosophical tradition has had to say about morality is simply beyond me. The overweening hubris involved is a bit like military commanders who forget that every battle has flanks around which enemies can move unmolested, unless they are protected in advance so as to protect what the Germans call the Schwerpunkt of the battle. Shermer begins by dismissing moral philosophy with disarming words about “the Is-Ought Fallacy of Science and Morality.” To start by dismissing as irrelevant the fundamental distinction between science and morality, without any effort to learn what the so-called “fallacy” of the movement from “is” to “ought” consists in, is a recipe for aporia or confusion which must dog the remaining steps that he must then undertake. It is fine to pass an enemy’s strong points, if you intend to come back and neutralise their power, or if you can blockade them, so that they wither on the vine, but to leave an enemy at your back who is self-sustaining is simply a fallacious strategy, and will render all that you do otiose.

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Margaret Somerville/Wanda Morris Debate Assisted Dying on HuffPo. So far, Margaret is Winning!

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Over at the Huffington Post there is a debate between Margaret Somerville, purported ethicist from McGill University in Montreal, and Wanda Morris, Executive Director of Dying with Dignity (Canada), the voice for choice at the end of life in Canada. Somerville, as is her wont, brings out all the usual suspects, none of which are really compelling, and all of which depend on two things, making you afraid of it, and claiming that it’s simply — it’s really that simple folks! — wrong to kill people. She forgets, of course, that people have been killing other people since the dawn of time, and will go on doing it. Certainly, many acts of killing are wrong and to be regretted and condemned, but merely saying that something is a matter of killing another human being is not enough all on its own to make it wrong.

Margaret’s biggest argument — the real big argument so far as Somerville is concerned — is that permitting the act of assisting someone in great suffering to die (she doesn’t like that euphemism, so we’ll come back to it) is changing something fundamental about the way in which we regard human life, and it will bring about untold changes in our society, and may — in fact she is sure that it will — change the way we regard killing others, so that legalising it in the case of those who choose to die in order to end their suffering will set society off on a slippery slope to disaster and depravity. She’s said this numerous times before, and she puts so much weight on it that it really constitutes her main argument against assisted dying (a ”sanitised” form of language that she deplores, but we will come back to that). Margaret’s problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that she is left asking a vague question about the future: “What long term effects might result from that?” She doesn’t know, but she has this in common with the pope: she believes firmly that this will usher in a “culture of death,” if it hasn’t already arrived, and that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth because we didn’t listen to Jeremiahs like her.

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Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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The Objectivity of Morality

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I have been asked on a number of occasions to speak to my claim that morality is objective. This seems to go contrary to the idea that there must be empirical evidence for things to be considered true, but, of course, I believe that facts supported by empirical evidence are not the only things that should be included amongst the things that we know, morality especially amongst them. I could go on a long round about journey to try to show this. I might begin by speaking about Hume, and eventually come to claims like those made by Philip Kitcher in his rather wonderfully complex yet convincing monograph, The Ethical Project, to show that there are, in fact, reasons for holding that our values are objective, and, while they do not have the hard fact nature of scientific discoveries, are none the worse, as things that we can know objectively, for that. However, I came across last night a talk by AC Grayling which says much that I might have said, and says it so much more elegantly, that it seemed to me of value to include an excerpt from that talk here. When I speak about the objectivity of morality, I mean, more or less, what Grayling says so effectively in this clip from his talk “Setting Prometheus Free,” kindly provided by Atheist Ireland. (The entire lecture is available here.)

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We can go on to discuss the ramifications of what Grayling has to say, but I think the main point that can be made here is that there simply are perfectly reasonable responses to situations, such as the case of the person in danger of being harmed, which indicates that, in fact, we do take morality seriously as an objective aspect of our relationships. To say, of someone who is in imminent danger of being harmed, “Well, this should be interesting,” instead of warning the person of danger, is clearly something we quite naturally and reasonably find repugnant. Our morality is based on such considerations, and, while there is still room for disagreement — which is why autonomy is so important — there are points of confluence where agreement is all but universal. Morality is certainly relative to human need and desire, as Hume saw so clearly, but it is also, as social contract theories make clear, determined by widespread social agreement as to the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Morality, of course, as this suggests, evolves, but it is no less objective on this account.

Ezekiel Emmanuel is wrong about assisted dying

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In the New York Times this morning Ezekiel Emmanuel has a short op-ed piece entitled “Four Myths about Doctor-Assisted Suicide“. Ezekiel Emmanuel, in case you didn’t know, is the brother of Rahm Emmanuel, former White House Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago. His brother Ezekiel has been writing negative things about assisted suicide for years, and takes this opportunity — so close to the election — to keep playing his game of denial (based, I believe, largely on a misreading of the historical evidence regarding the reasons for the contemporary interest in assisted dying), because the question is being debated in New Jersey and is on the ballot in Massachusetts in the upcoming election.

So, what are the four myths about assisted suicide that Emmanuel seeks to disclose, and how valid are the points he is seeking to make? The first one has to do with pain. This is predictable, for the truth is that pain is not the only or the main reason why people seek assisted dying. Indeed, most people who opt for assisted dying have other things on their mind. This is now well-known. Emmanuel says that they are depressed, but that is not the point. Of course, when you are dying or are suffering from seriously chronic degenerative conditions, or severe disability (such as Tony Nicklinson), there is every chance that you won’t be in the best frame of mind, but to speak of depression at this point is scarcely relevant. Some opponents of assisted dying think that depression is a good reason not to provide help to die for those so afflicted, but this is a ridiculous requirement if, in fact, the decision is made in circumstances where one might reasonably be depressed, and, indeed, people who suffer from pathological forms of depression over many years, and who have had enough of life lived under a dark cloud, are reasonable candidates for assistance to die, if that is what they choose. Depression itself is not necessarily an impediment to reasonable or autonomous choice.

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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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Evidence, Interpretation and Scientism

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This post is a continuation of themes addressed in my last two posts about interpretation. There are two reasons for adding to them. First, there seems to be a widespread misunderstanding of scientism; and second, there is a deep sense of confusion about what constitutes knowledge, and how knowledge is grounded. First, as to scientism. In a couple of essays, already referred to, the philosophers Philip Kitcher and Massimo Pigliucci have suggested that there is a worrying narrowing of focus in the new atheism, a growing sense that science, and science alone, provides the foundations for rational understanding of the world, and that reason, in its most robust sense, must be sought and can only be found in the more determinate techniques and findings of the natural sciences.

Thus, when Richard Dawkins, in an enchanting book, tells us that there is something quite magical about the things that scientists know about the world, and that what they know, and the techniques by which they discover this knowledge, is how real knowledge is acquired, the implicit suggestion is that there is no other means of discovering the truth about the world except the methods of natural science. This has been discussed ad libitum in the atheist blogosphere, and it usually takes the form of disputing that there are other “ways of knowing.” At the very least, amongst the ways of knowing, religion is not to be found; but usually the point is made in a quite general way in the claim that the only way of knowing is scientific and empirical, and whatever else people think they know must be accepted as only a simulacrum of knowledge; and I have noticed that critics are almost as quick as the early Christian fathers to charge with heresy anyone who should have the temerity to suggest otherwise, as I have done.

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The interpretive dimension of truth and the limitations of science

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In my last post I began speaking about something that is more important, I think, than people realise, and that raises all the thorny issues of the foundational nature of science, as well as questions about scientism, which I will interpret here as the belief that the only rational foundation for our beliefs is to be found in one or other of the positive sciences, especially physics, chemistry and biology. The social sciences, dealing much more intimately with questions of interpretation, while attempting to provide empirical foundations for their conclusions, are much more closely involved with questions of interpretation, and therefore to the kinds of uncertainty built into our interpretive conclusions. The reason this increasingly seems to me an important field for investigation is simply that some of the internet disputes that involve questions as to how we can underwrite our conclusions increasingly seem to give favoured status to the positive sciences as the only pursuit likely to provide the kinds of certainty we are seeking, especially when we are dealing with a widespread human pursuit that, on the face of it, seems simply to be swallowed up by interpretation, and to provide no point at which it touches down in any determinate way in human experience.

By referring to something that is simply swallowed up by interpretation, I am referring to theology, of course, but within the scope of that term may be included ethics (or moral philosophy), and philosophy itself, which, for many internet atheists, is assumed to be a largely useless pursuit closely related to theology, because providing almost nothing in the way of empirical (observational) foundations. And while most new atheists think (rightly) that it is possible to be good without god, very few seem to have an understanding of morality that distinguishes it from emotivism (the expression of feelings and personal preferences) and relativism, which makes the question of goodness without god largely irrelevant, since moral goodness can be reduced, without remainder, if emotivism is true, to subjective feelings of value.

At this point I want to quote something from a commenter on my last post, Daniel Lafave, not because, I hasten to add, I want to hold it up to ridicule, but because it expresses in a fairly narrow compass where I think some of our problems lie. He had just said, to do him justice, that philosophy has an important role in clarifying the theoretical conclusions to which scientists arrive, based on observational evidence, and that, without such clarification, observational evidence is (or at least may be) of little value. And then this:

The converse problem in philosophy is that too many philosophers think that philosophy has special methods of justification other than evidence, either intuition or conceptual analysis, by which claims can be justified independent of evidence.  For some people this is what makes philosophy different from science.  I think that’s just absurd.  Intuition is just a word for a mental itch, and conceptual analysis at best just reveals something about our existing conceptualization but nothing about the world we are trying to study.  The good thing is that this intuitionist perspective is slowly dying out in philosophy.  Fewer and fewer people think their job can be done while ignoring evidence.

The problem here lies in the reference to “special methods of justification other than evidence,” and then the very rapid segue to what these methods might be, whether “intuition” or “conceptual analysis,” as though that exhausted the field. And this in response to a post in which I introduced the concept of “interpretive evidence,” because it has begun to seem to me that many of the disputes over “ways of knowing” are getting hung up at precisely this point.

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The insidious reach of Roman Catholic Church and the inhumanity, cruelty and intransigence of its ethical dogma

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Update: Saturday, 11 August 2012. I was unhappy with the title of this post, so I have renamed it, though it still does not capture the heart of my concerns. It is hard to find a title that sums up what I want to say. I do think that Roman Catholic ethical priorities tend in practice towards barbaric immorality, in respect of its completely unacceptable intrusion into the lives of women with respect to their reproductive freedom, as well as in its truly vile belief that people must suffer whatever pains may come from their disease when they are dying, or living with completely debilitating degenerative conditions (very often neurological). The Roman Catholic Church’s ability to reach into society with its numerous associations and alliances has made Roman Catholic intrusion into public morality more insidious than that of other religious groups. The power and wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as its international network of diplomatic representatives makes this church a great threat to human freedom, and it is in the interests of exploring this that this post was originally written, although unhelpfully titled.

I know that many Roman Catholics do not share the moral priorities of their church, and I do not want to suggest that Roman Catholics, as individuals, are less moral or humane than others, but the institutional Roman Catholic Church and its tentacles in practically every aspect of public life is a great danger to freedom and must, in my view, be recognised as such. A good sign that many Roman Catholics are unhappy with the hard line being taken by the Vatican is indicated by the fact that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — a group representing 80% of the nuns in the United States, according to a National Post report – may claim independence from the Vatican for its association. Expressing their concern at the Vatican’s doctrinal assessment of women religious in the United States, Sister Pat Farrell is reported to have said the following in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter:

“We have never considered ourselves in any way unfaithful to the Church, but if questioning is interpreted as defiance, that puts us in a very difficult position,” Sister Pat Farrell said in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter on Monday. “Together with people around the country who have been supportive of us, our desire is to do what we can, for their sake and for ours, to help create a safe and respectful environment, where together with church leaders we can raise questions openly and search for truth freely, addressing some of the complex issues of our times.” As a caveat, Sister Farrell added that such questioning “can only take place in a climate of mutual trust.”

It is important to note that not all Catholics are prepared, supinely, to accept Vatican dictates without question. This desire for a more open, respectful environment is clearly shared by many Catholics, and is to be encouraged and applauded.

UPDATE — Email just in from Richard N. Côté, author of In Search of Gentle Death, whose interview with Bill Thompson, of the CharlestonPost Courier, was the basis for the article “Are our lives our own? ” highlighted in a recent post here at choiceindying.com: “Charleston “Post and Courier” publishes remarkably insightful, sane and thoughtful piece on “elective death”.” I thank Mr. Côté for his kindness, and add his comment on my post here, because it is so apt to the subject of this post (I have italicised and bolded the last sentence, which is precisely what I am saying about the barbarity of the Roman Catholic Church, for it does, indeed preach the forced suffering of people as they die):

Thank you for the fine analysis of Bill Thompson’s article, which was based on my recent book, In Search of Gentle Death: The Fight for Your Right to Die With Dignity ( www.corinthianbooks.com). Gentle elective death — and how to achieve it — was the subject of my five-year study, which resulted in a book with two conjoined conclusions. The first is that only the rational adult person suffering intolerable, uncontrollable pain, or who is or soon will be incurably or terminally ill has the right to make the choice of when, where, and how to die. The second is that no other person, state, or religion has a right to forbid it.  To force another to live in agony against his or her will is an obscene act; to have it preached by an organized religion is equally vile.

You can order In Search of Gentle Death here – or by clicking on the Corinthian Books address in the quote above.

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I am going to continue to press this issue — what I consider to be the barbaric immorality of the Roman Catholic Church — because new links to Roman Catholic associations continue to be brought to my attention. I have mentioned before my concern that the Roman Catholic Church is a hydra-headed association of associations, think tanks, policy centres, lobbyist groups, political action groups, etc., many of which are not recognised for what they are: Roman Catholic propaganda organisations. Just this week my daughter, who is presently writing her doctoral dissertation on an issue in bioethics, reported that she had received an email invitation to attend a bioethics conference sponsored by the Centre for Clinical Ethics. Having a professional interest in bioethics she investigated further to see if this conference was one that would be worthwhile attending, only to find that the Centre for Clinical Ethics, despite its innocuous sounding name, is really just an arm of the Roman Catholic Church. On its home page it describes itself and its origins as follows:

In  1982 the Sisters of St. Joseph established a Clinical Ethics Service  which is jointly sponsored by Providence Healthcare, St. Joseph’s  Health Centre and St. Michael’s Hospital, three Catholic institutions  which serve the Toronto area. The first ethics service of its kind in  Canada, this service has grown over the years and today is known as the Centre for Clinical Ethics.

The mission of the Centre for Clinical Ethics is to enable members of  the health care community to identify and resolve ethical issues which  arise in the clinical setting. We do this through education, case  consultations, policy development, and research. As a faith based Centre we are committed to the core values of our three supporting  institutions and to broadening the understanding of the role that faith  plays in the questions which confront people in their search for healing.

Instead of saying that they are bound by Vatican directives concerning bioethics, the Centre for Clinical Ethics misleadingly says that they “are committed to the core values of our three supporting institutions,” all of which, are, of course, Roman Catholic institutions, and accept the dictates of the Vatican, which is represented in Canada and many other nations by a diplomatic representative called a papal nuncio, and thus has direct links to government ministers and departments.

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