Category Archives: Ethics

Is modern (secular) morality the fragmentary detritus of a once functioning objective morality? And is the only way back a religious one?

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I have just finished reading, for the first time (and without taking any notes), Philip Kitcher’s new book The Ethical Project. Kitcher’s take on ethics is practical and naturalistic. He calls his kind of ethics pragmatic naturalism, and links it closely to the pragmatism of Dewey and James. He assumes that ethics started out in tribal conditions where altruism failures were a problem. According to Kitcher, the ethical project got its start by establishing roles and rules designed to correct altruism failures. Furthermore, he suggests, with considerable reason, it seems to me, that contemporary ethics is a developmental extension of those first rough attempts to produce, first, a form of behavioural altruism, which was then, by necessity, extended to a truly psychological altruism. (Careful definitions of behavioural and psychological altruism are provided.) When I have reread the book more closely I will get back to what he is proposing in more detail, for what he does propose, it seems to me, might help to break the logjam caused by the many metaethical proposals that are still in play, from the intuitionism of Moore to the emotivism of the logical positivists.

Alongside Kitcher I am also rereading (after many years) Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which starts from the very odd premise that modernity was a mistake, and that to reestablish ethics on sound foundations we have to return to Aristotle and Aquinas. An interesting sidelight on the publication of After Virtue is that the first edition of the book was published shortly after MacIntyre’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. And an interesting comment on that is that the woman who was his wife at the time of his conversion was his third! Since the Roman Catholic Church holds that divorce is impossible, and that the marriage bond is essentially indissoluble by anything but death, it was an odd choice of religious allegiance, except that, in After Virtue, he more or less takes the position of Pope Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (otherwise known as  Pius IX) with respect to modernity, and assumes that it is largely a logical and cultural mistake. (At least that’s the way MacIntyre’s argument seems to me. If only we had retained the virtue ethics of Aristotle as perfected by Aquinas, transitions to the scientific world view would have moved more smoothly, as well as being more intellectually respectable.)

In the first chapter of After Virtue, “A Disquieting Suggestion,” MacIntyre suggests a thought experiment. It is not clear to me that the thought experiment is even entertainable, since it does not explain clearly enough on what basis governance is to be continued in the conditions supposed. He asks us to imagine a time in the future when people have got fed up with science, have removed science from the curricula of schools and universities, killed or imprisoned all the scientists, and then government is carried out — well, how, exactly? Since science is not only physics and math and chemistry and biology, but a fairly strict methodological approach to information, how would a government function where fact checking was ruled out, and decisions were based on pure whim? MacIntyre seems to forget that science is not only composed of lists of facts, but is tied together by theory and based on experience, and that that process can scarcely simply disappear when we stop teaching the sciences. However, imagine it done for the purposes of argument. Now, says MacIntyre, we are to suppose that a generation comes along which is opposed to this science-destructive world outlook. However, during the anti-science period the scientific tradition had been virtually destroyed. There are fragments left, a book here or a page there, and a few memories of phrases and scientific terms, like the periodic table without any sense of what it was once about. But now we are to imagine people trying to reconstruct science in the absence of any understanding of what science was once really about, so they begin using scientific language without really understanding what the language was for, or what it really signified. Science, for this new generation, is a bunch of disjointed technical terms thrown out more or less at random, and repeated pointlessly in a form much like some postmodernist free association.

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Stephen Jay Gould and Nonoverlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

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An issue left over from my last post — Religion and Morality – is the scope of Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA — nonoverlapping magisteria. There was quite a lot of good discussion after that post, though for much of it I was busy trying to organise papers that I have collected over the years into more accessible and readable format. It was a big job, and I’m still not finished, though I have catalogued most of them in my bibliographical database (the Ibidem program that comes with the Notabene Lingua workstation — for those not familiar with the program, it is certainly one of the best around). Perhaps this will help to keep my reading in some sort of good order.

Several issues arose in the discussion. Of course, at the centre of it was Bob Wheeler’s conception of the Divine Command Theory of ethics (DCT). Something is right or a duty just insofar as it is commanded by God. This, as I have tried to show, is a completely unsatisfactory conception of morality. What it adds is the kind of authority that ethical or moral rules are supposed to have, a kind of inescapable inner necessity, that requires that they be followed absolutely in every relevant situation. There are several problems with the DCT. The first one, of course, lies in trying to provide an unquestionable source for divine commands. Much is made of the Ten Commandments, as though they form a guarantee that these rules have been dictated by God, and are therefore not only worthy to be followed, but required of us in an inescapable way. But the commandments are simply written in an ancient text, and it is disputable whether this text can be thought to emanate from God. At all hazards, it cannot be securely attributed to God. Indeed, given many other things in the collection of writings in which this particular text (Exodus 20) appears, it seems very doubtful whether it can be taken as issuing from a benevolent God.

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Sister Margaret Farley has been a cause of confusion among the faithful, and risks great harm to them

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Most of  you, by now, will know about the book by Sister Margaret Farley, R.S.M., whose 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, which rocketed from a ranking of 146,982 on Amazon to 16 (number 1 in religious studies) and sold out in three days (according to a Guardian report). Though delivering a stinging rebuke to Farley, now retired from her position as professor of Christian ethics a Yale Divinity School, the Vatican, through the Inquisition (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), issued a condemnation of the book, its many divergences from Catholic teaching and Sister Margaret’s “defective understanding of the objective nature of the objective moral law,” but does not intend any further discipline, since Sister Margaret has now retired from teaching (and, presumably, can do no further damage).

The quotation comes from the official “Notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” 04.06.2012. The primary author of the notification is William Cardinal Levada, whose name appears on the Notification, who, before being raised to the cardinalate in 2006 was the Archbishop of Portland (Oregon) (1986-1995) and Archbishop of San Francisco (1995-2005). Now, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (also known in the past as the Holy Office of the Inquisition), the present pope’s former position under Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, and making pronouncements about Catholic sexual ethics, it is probably appropriate that we recall that, in 1985, Levada was presented a report compiled by a priest, Tom Doyle, head of a three-man panel,  dealing with (according to Wikipedia) the “medical, legal, and moral issues posed by abusive clerics.” Doyle asked that the report be presented to a meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and was turned down. Levada himself, in an 2008 interview, stated without qualification:

I personally do not accept that there has been a broad base of bishops guilty of aiding and abetting pedophiles… If I thought there were, I would certainly want to talk to them about that.

Father Doyle said, in response:

I vividly recall briefing Levada in May, 1985 when he was an auxiliary bishop, about the sexual abuse crisis. I also have seen volumes of documents and sworn testimony from depositions that clearly shows that most, probably all, bishops clearly knew that priests were raping and otherwise sexually abusing kids as far back as the 40′s….and I limit it to that era because I have not gone beyond that in studying documents. So, Levada’s statement is either an outright lie or evidence of a very narrow understanding and perception of reality.

Yet this is the man who now presumes to condemn Sister Margaret Farley for her stand on various aspects of sexual ethics! It is only fair to remember this, and to recall that, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine the Faith, the man who is now pope joined cause with Levada in covering up the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests and other religious in worldwide Roman Catholic Church. There is scarcely a country in which this abuse did not happen under cover of the pretence of sanctity.

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PD James, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope

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Roya Nikkhah reports, in the Telegraph, that PD James, the author of detective fiction for the discerning, and a conservative Peer, has revealed, in an interview with The Tatler, that she would

   … help a friend or family member die if there was “nothing to be done” and they “wanted to go”.

On the other hand she does not think that the country should change the laws of murder to accommodate such acts. You have to have the courage to act, she suggested, apparently comparing it to coming to the defence of a loved one being attacked.

“If I saw someone attacking one of my grandchildren in a way that was going to   kill and I had a knife, I’d stop it,” she said. “And maybe I’d stop him straight away by sticking the knife in. And I think the better so.”

All very dramatic, but it is not really the same thing, and it is unfortunate that James takes this particular line on assistance in dying. Baroness James apparently does not think that a person has a right to be assisted to die, and that it should be left to the courage of a person’s friends or relations to provide assistance, and then defend their decision in law.

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Slippery Slopes should be slippery, shouldn’t they?

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In his paper in Current Oncology, and in the CTV W5 program on assisted dying, Dr. José Pereira claimed that permitting assisted dying will produce slippery slopes. He calls it “the illusion of safeguards and controls.” But slippery slopes should actually be slippery, shouldn’t they? That means, once you’re on the slope there’s no way of stopping yourself until you get to the bottom. The whole slope should be like a sheet of ice at an angle.

This is what he thinks he shows in his article, which is based on other people’s research. This is important. Pereira does no original research of his own. He takes research papers written by others and says that they provide give evidence of slippery slopes in in places where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalised. There are two serious problems with his approach to the issue. First, Pereira himself speaks with some regularity to Roman Catholic “pro-life” groups. His next big appearance will be at a “Priests for Life” symposium for clergy with the title, “Euthanasia — False Compassion.”

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Udo Schuklenk Interviewed by the Globe and Mail

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Professor Udo Schuklenk, a philosopher from Queen’s University, talked to Marina Jimenez of the Globe and Mail editorial board. He is chair of the Royal Society’s committee on end-of-life decision-making in Canada. The committee, which will release a lengthy report this fall, spent two years studying this issue, and the experience of other countries which have decriminalized assisted suicide.
 

On the record

The assisted suicide dilemma

Globe and Mail Update
Published Sunday, Sep. 11, 2011 4:19PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Sep. 13, 2011 1:32PM EDT

 

What is the impact of Canada’s aging population on end-of-life care?

This has severe consequences. In Canada, seniors, who make up 12.7 per cent of the population, gobble up 30 per cent of health care expenditure. The number of seniors will double in 20 years. So pensioners will make up 24 per cent of population and will gobble up 60 per cent of the health care budget, and up to 100 per cent in some areas, for example heart disease and hypertension.And yet, there is no planning in place to deal with this deluge of elderly people. We are not prepared in terms of infrastructure.

How do Canadians want to die?

Most Canadians would like to die at home. And yet, 70 per cent die in hospital, many in special care units. This is very expensive. Ninety-five per cent of Canadians would benefit from palliative care but 70 per cent lack access. Those without palliative care would be more likely to ask for assisted dying or consider suicide because they cannot bear any longer the quality of the life they’re experiencing.

What about advance directives?

Another big problem is the large increase in the number of elderly who will suffer from dementia. In an ideal world, you’d like to have competent people deciding their treatment. But if you have a large percentage of people with dementia, that is more difficult. The ethical question becomes, you may decide one thing when you’re competent and detail how you want to be treated. But then, if you become mentally incompetent, you may change your mind. So what you’re doing is making an advanced directive for the same body but not for the same mind. That makes it difficult ethically. It’s unclear for whom the choice is made. The values are different when you’re incompetent or demented.

Can you give an example?

Someone could say they don’t want treatment, but once they become demented they may fight this prior advance directive.

What about different cultural perspectives on dying?

There is quite a significant number of ethnic minorities who really believe that truth-telling is bad for their health. They don’t want to know they’re dying. How do you deal with that? This affects indigenous Canadians, as well as some Asian communities. It’s very problematic. Should they just adjust to rational, western, autonomy-based rule? Or should you respect their values?

Do most Canadians have advance directives?

Seventy per cent of Canadians have no advance directives. Once you start thinking through these issues, it is very difficult because so many different things can happen to you. Nearly half of all Canadians have not appointed someone who will make decisions on their behalf. And, your legal guardian might not share your values, so you might want to choose someone else who shares your values and will execute your decisions. As well, some health care professionals ignore advanced directives, they think that, in their opinion, a course of treatment should be followed [even if you don’t].

How do Canadians feel about euthanasia?

In 2009, 70 per cent of Canadians supported legalization of euthanasia. Quebec has always been above the rest of the country, at 87 per cent, and in the West, the number drops to 66 per cent. This is significant. Consistently over 20 years people have said they want to make these choices.

What does the medical community say?

General Practitioners are consistently against decriminalization [of assisted suicide]. But in 1998, 77 per cent of nurses in Canada were in favour of assisted suicide. Also, a 2009 survey of Quebec specialists, who are closer to dying patients, found 75 per cent were in favour of decriminalizing assisted dying. Another survey, done in 2007, found 62 per cent of terminally ill patients were in favour of assisted dying.

Why do people want to die?

Often when people talk about end-of-life decision making, the assumption is it’s about pain. But it’s not. The concern is more about losing control over their lives, the quality of their lives. People need to keep this in mind. For example, there are depressed people with jobs and lives who have undergone treatment but still don’t want to live. Yet people are completely opposed to assisted dying in those circumstances.

What happens when there are conflicts between doctors and the relatives of a patient about their care?

In these circumstances, where there is a conflict between the attending doctor and parents or legal guardians of the patient, and the patient is incompetent, the conflict is settled by the health care consent board. This is a brilliant solution.

What about people in persistent vegetative states?

Should health care professionals be permitted to withdraw care from people in persistent vegetative states? During the first two years, they have a fair shot of coming out of a coma, but then the likelihood goes down really rapidly. They are lying in hospital beds and you can keep them alive forever. To the best of what we know, they do not suffer. This is why in some places when you say treatment is withdrawn, it really means they are no longer fed. Doctors believe that after 10 years, there is no way they will come back. It becomes a resource issues and it is very stressful for the family.

What about terminal sedation?

This has become a big topic; lawyers are looking at it, and so are ethicists. When someone sedates a patient, they cannot request food. So you can give an advanced directive saying “don’t provide me with nutrition and sedate me for pain.” This is an end-of-life choice. You refuse intake of nutrition and you’re sedated so you don’t suffer. The law in this country isn’t clear on this.

What about other examples where the law is unclear?

It is legal in Canada to provide a patient with symptom relief or palliative care that is life-shortening. They have split a hair here, which is bizarre. The logic here is that the intention matters. Your intention as a doctor is you want to prevent the patient from suffering but you don’t want to shorten their life. An example of this would be giving someone a lot of morphine or painkillers [which could hasten their death].

What about the slippery slope argument?

This is crucial to this debate, but it turns out not to be true with assisted dying. This argument was used in the Sue Rodriguez case [who lost her case to have the right to assisted suicide when the Supreme Court ruled against her]. They were concerned at the time because the evidence was far from established, that you would you end up with involuntary euthanasia, especially with resource constraints.

I was concerned about this. But it turns out not to be true. Today, we know what has happened in all those places where assisted dying is legal: Montana, Oregon, Washington, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. You can see, after decriminalization, you have a spike in people requesting and using assisted dying. But then year after year the numbers go down. The reason I believe is that people once they know that if all else fails this is an option, most people won’t make that call. The stress is gone so they die of natural causes.

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Work in progress — natural law morality

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Lobster Dories at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia -- for Rick!

This will be only a short post, a promissory note, as it were. I have been working, lately, on trying to understand the natural law morality of the Catholic church, as it is explained by people like Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, or as it is put in David S. Oderberg’s essay, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Law” (a paper in which Feser is thanked for his contribution and advice), which you can download in pdf format from Oderberg’s homepage. I am reading Feser and Oderberg at the same time that I read Derek Parfit’s magnum opus, On What Matters – a book of two volumes which, in thoroughness and detail of argument, reminds one of Aquinas.

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A Quick Response to a Feser Comment

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In the comments under his latest post Edward Feser says this:

MacDonald did nothing more than assert that Catholicism is comparable to Himmler’s philosophy, on the basis of an extremely feeble analogy, i.e. both views make rigorous demands on their followers. I guess that makes math teachers, drill sergeants, and diet and exercise gurus comparable to Himmler as well. Some “argument.”

One might with at least equal justice (I would say far greater justice) assert that MacDonald’s fixation on euthanasia makes his views comparable to the Nazi idea of “life unworthy of life.” But all of this is beside the real point, which is that MacDonald’s original post “responded” to the arguments I presented in my book with sophomoric ad hominems and red herrings — that is, when he wasn’t simply pretending my arguments didn’t exist.

This really is beyond silliness. Feser completely misunderstands the point, which is worth repeating, since Catholics will continue to get this wrong.

He suggests that my response would turn drill sergeants and diet gurus into Himmlers. Not so. My point is simply one that Plato raises in the Euthyphro regarding piety. Socrates asks Euthyphro a simple question. Are things good because the gods command them, or do the gods command them because they are good? Natural law morality comes down on the wrong side of this question.

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Is Religion Evil?

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This is the title of the last chapter of Alister McGrath’s book, The Dawkins Delusion. It is an important chapter, because it shows clearly why, in earlier chapters, though indeed it was necessary for him to do so in order to make his points with any show of reason, McGrath did not address the question of other religions. The fact that there have been many religions — so many, in fact, that it will doubtless never be known how many gods human beings have worshipped, and why they have worshipped them – is a telling criticism of religion as such, since it raises the pressing question: Even if there were such a being or beings as God (with a capital ‘G’) or gods, on what basis may it be claimed that the god or gods you worship (for any you) are the right ones?

For example, McGrath takes fairly violent exception to the fact that Dawkins describes the god of the Old Testament — the god of the Jewish scriptures — in these words:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misgyinistic, homophobic, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. [TGD, 31]

The only charge on this charge sheet that may be questionable is that the Old Testament God is sadomasochistic. Sadistic, perhaps, but there is no clear sign that this god likes pain and suffering himself, except insofar as he created the world and humankind, and must have known, when he did so, that his creation would bring him sorrow.  Otherwise, every other charge can, I think, be met by evidence from the text itself.

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The Religious Narrowing of the Mind

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Patrick Reilly, founder and CEO of the Cardinal Newman Society, a tattle tale organisation with a watching brief on Catholic higher education in the United States, has written two articles, one in 2005, and one this month (June 2011), on the unfaithfulness of some professors and teachers at Catholic institutions of higher learning to the teachings of the popes, and to standard Catholic doctrine, regarding abortion and assisted dying. It is no surprise that there isn’t 100% agreement on these ethical questions, even amongst Catholics. This month’s contribution to these tattle tale works is entitled “Bishops Betrayed on Assisted Suicide.” The 2005 article, which “Bishops Betrayed on Assisted Suicide” somewhat misleadingly (and self-praisingly) calls “an exclusive report,” is entitled, tellingly, “Teaching Euthanasia.” Ophelia Benson is discussing these over at Butterflies and Wheels, where I first became acquainted with Patrick Reilly and his “petulant authoritarianism” (see Didaktylos’ comment below). Together the articles comprise a condemnation of the tendency of teachers at Catholic institutions of higher learning to think for themselves, and to hold up to the cool light of reason the teachings of the church, and the extension of those teachings in surprising ways by the popes, in particular, by Pope John Paul II, the Polish replacement for the murdered pope John Paul I (Albino Luciani). (I know that’s going out on a limb, but there is, I believe, sufficient reason to be doubtful of the Vatican account of his death. However, nothing that I say stands or falls on this particular “leap of doubt”.)

Luciani, as a former Patriarch of Venice, went so far as to welcome divorced persons, and actually looked into the possibility that the “pill” might be the best way of regulating births. (See “The Scandals and Heresies of John Paul I), and expressed himself as not entirely in favour of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. This document, which put the seal of death on the “pill” and other means of regulating birth, and condemned all so-called artificial means of contraception, led to all the madnesses of the church in denying the efficacy of condoms, even to the extent of prescribing that, should a husband be infected with the HIV virus, it is better to have unprotected sex with his wife than to commit the sin of using contraception. There are, said the pope’s spokesman for family affairs, some things that are worth more than life itself (referred to by Uta Ranke-Heinemann in her book Putting Away Childish Things), including the sanctity of marriage, which can only be preserved by preserving its procreative function — thus showing clearly that the Roman Catholic Church is not opposed to someone killing another innocent person, just so long as they do it in an ethical way which preserves the possibility of procreation.

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