Category Archives: Religious Morality

Stephen Woodworth and the Vagina Man

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vaginaStephen Woodworth, MP for Kitchener-Centre, was invited to speak at the University of Waterloo, where he encountered a man dressed up as a vagina — who, Rex Murphy says, “was chatty to the point of incontinence — and a woman who kept shouting out about what “cunts” would and would not tolerate, and the outcome was that the talk had to be closed down because Woodworth could not make his voice heard above the hubbub. Woodworth was there, of course, to ride his favourite hobby-horse, namely, to argue that we need to have a clear definition as to when human personal life begins. He is not satisfied with the traditional common law definition in terms of extrusion of a live human being from a woman’s body, and clearly wants to see personhood defined as occurring at a point much earlier than that, when the foetus is still in utero.

Since he is himself a Roman Catholic, the presumption must be that he thinks that personal life begins at conception, which means, of course, that no woman would have a right to abortion, unless the woman’s life is in danger, but only in a case where it would be impossible to save the foetus whatever is done to save the woman’s life. If the foetus could be saved, although the woman would die, it has as much right to life as the woman, and so abortion to save the woman would not be permissible, the two having equal value as human persons. It follows that a conceptus has as much right to life as an adult woman, and it would become a criminal act to act in such a way as to endanger life within the womb (or anywhere else, for that matter, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy).

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The Holiness Illusion

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I distrust holiness, and believe that it is almost always a pose. There was a time, though, when I thought it was real, and even aspired to it myself. Indeed, some people thought I was holy, and I was secretly pleased when I overheard people saying that I was truly a “man of God.” But, pleased or not, I knew that I was far from holiness, if, indeed, holiness can be thought to be real thing. There may be people whose thoughts and feelings are, in the appropriate sense, “pure,” but if there are I have not met any, though I have met many who have pretended to be.

I’m not sure when I began to think of holiness as a sham, but it is probably related to two events, widely separated in time, when my father, a minister in the United Church of Canada, who spent twelve years as a missionary in India, and then several years in Bermuda, revealed the skull beneath the skin. I do not report this to disparage my father, who is not here to defend himself, though, truth to tell, he was always a distant and rather forbidding figure to me, though he mellowed a bit when Elizabeth and I were married, when both he and my mother made up — with some deliberateness, it seems to me now – for some of the misery they had visited upon me as a child.

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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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Religion and the Sexual Objectification of Women

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I was going to write something about sexual violence today, but I find it so hard to get my head around what I hear and read about the monstrous objectification of women that I do not know where to start. And when faced with the idiocy of some of the comments over at Butterflies and Wheels  (see here and here), the dim-witted male supremacist ideology of blaming the victim (as well as outrageously suggesting that Ophelia turned the story around to be about her, when nothing could be further from the truth), I wonder what I could possibly say that would be at all relevant to the increasingly misogynistic hyper-sexualised social context that women increasingly confront in their ordinary day-to-day activities. So, I am going to leave that to perk on the back burner for now, and hope that I can find something remotely helpful to say to about a situation that should concern us all.

I’ll leave that as it came to me, but then I realised that this was something that I needed to address, after all, and I simply went on writing about it, even after having put it, as I thought, on a back burner for the time being. What I cannot understand is the attitude of men who think of women simply as objects to use and abuse in perverse acts of sexual violence. What lurks in the minds of men who gang-rape women? And lest we think this happens only in the East, it is important to pay attention (as Emer O’Toole suggests in a Guardian article) to the widespread sexual violence in the West — to the fact, for instance, that a young woman in Ohio was kidnapped by the football team, drugged and then taken from party to party where she was raped and abused by countless young men who clearly lacked the moral ability to recognise her as a human being at all. And instead of the widespread protests that accompanied the Delhi attack, the woman in Ohio seemed simply to slip through the cracks. Football jocks are above suspicion, the young woman must have done something to invite such abuse. What underlies this deep hatred of women? For, what else is it when a 16 year old girl is kidnapped and this happens:

the girl was drugged into unconsciousness, ferried from party to party, raped and urinated on before ending up at home where her parents, discovering she was disoriented, took her to a local hospital?

How is hatred of women like this to be explained? In Delhi the young woman was gang raped and an iron bar was driven into her body so that her intestines were destroyed, and she and her beaten boyfriend were thrown out of a moving bus. The woman, known simply as Damini, was treated in a way very similar to the way Japanese soldiers abused women in the infamous “rape of Nanking”. How do men explain this to themselves? I do not understand.

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Bishops are Nut Cases

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I say that bishops are nut cases with particular reference to Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester, Massachusetts (as well as to another who will be mentioned anon), who attacked “Question 2″ on the Massachusetts ballot, an assisted dying measure which lost by a small margin. I find it hard to see why such matters are a matter of majority rules. This is democracy in the wrong place. If majority rule governs how people will be permitted to die, it could as easily be used to marginalise minority groups — and that, of course, is just what have in the case of those who seek assistance in dying. They are a minority group. But bishops in general tend to be nutty. What is nutty about this particular bishop is not that he is opposed to assisted dying, but that he is opposed for such shallow reasons. It is, of course, not a matter of course that he says that “Catholic health care may never condone or assist in assisted suicide in any way.” Bishops often hide their religious presuppositions when talking about things like assisted dying. This, however, even if not mentioned, can just be taken for granted, and it should simply cancel through as in an equation, so that no one need take any notice of it, and yet he wrote a letter to be read in all the parishes on his diocese, which is, I think, a form of political intrusion that should be forbidden by law to those organisations that, through tax exemptions and other perks, feed from the public trough.

But, what he opposed, he said, was the wording of the bill that was up for decision in the election. And, I agree to some extent. Passing legislation by plebiscite is simply the wrong way to go about things, for public policy needs to be thoroughly vetted before it is placed on the statute books. The nutty thing, however, is simply that he lacks the imagination to see that palliative care is simply not enough. Why can’t people see this? And why can they not see that assisted dying should not be only about people who have terminal illnesses that will cash themselves in within a prescribed period? Compassion and Choices in the US, and Dignity in Dying in the UK are the same in this respect. They seem unable to see that assisted dying needs to be extended to those whose lives have become intolerable to them, whether terminal or not. A terminal prognosis is simply the worst basis upon which to premise assisted dying legislation, for it assumes that terminality in itself is a necessary condition for interminable suffering that only death can end, and it suggests, beyond that, that people who have a terminal prognosis are all eligible candidates for assisted dying, thus satisfying the slippery-slope conditions that so many people say they fear. Of course, saying that all are eligible does not say that all must, but it maps out a class of people whose lives may be seen to be, by definition, intolerable, and that is unsatisfactory. Many people die in peace. Dying is not a terrible experience for everyone, and having a terminal prognosis is not, as I say over and over again, and should not be, a necessary condition for someone to seek to die. Assistance in dying should be possible for people like my Elizabeth, or Tony Nicklinson, or Diane Pretty, Gloria Taylor, or Sue Rodgriguez (they’re all searchable names on the internet). Why is it so hard for people to see this?

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Odium Theologicum

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Sorry folks. I’ve been UA for most of the last two or three days. I had my 71st birthday during that time (on Halloween, no less!), and did a lot of jiggery-pokery with my computer, which is now up and running again with both Windows 7 and 8 in good order. Windows 8 is not compatible with all my programs, so, in order to keep them, as I wish to, I have to run both operating systems. Windows 8 is certainly faster, and has some nice features. It has been suggested to me that using a program to give me the Windows 7 experience in Windows 8 is like keeping training wheels on a bike. Well, perhaps, but then, I don’t find the Windows 8 interface as productive, even if it is functional. And it’s mainly just ugly, so I see no reason to put that excrescence on my desktop. But that’s just me. Samsung, apparently, is offering a similar interface change on all their laptops. Perhaps Samsung knows something Microsoft doesn’t. Anyway, everything is functional once again, and I am back on track.

The odium theologicum is, literally speaking, theological hatred. Referring to the Arian dispute in the early church, at the point where Athanasius (the Patriarch or Pope of Alexandria, who, of course, was later rehabilitated, and is now, amongst theologians, regarded as the main architect of Christian orthodox teaching regarding the nature of the incarnation), having been found by councils of the church in Milan and Arles, guilty of heresy, and sent by the emperor into exile, Gibbon, in his great history, says with cool wit:

The ingenious malice of their enemies had deprived them of the benefit of mutual comfort and advice, separated those illustrious exiles [for more prelates than Athanasius refused to sign the Arian protocols] into distant provinces, and carefully selected the most barbarous tracts of a great empire. Yet they soon experienced that the deserts of Libya, and the most barbarous tracts of Cappadocia, were less inhospitable than the residence of those cities in which an Arian bishop could satiate, without restraint, the exquisite rancour of theological hatred. [Decline and Fall, chapter 21]

The closing expression, “the exquisite rancour of theological hatred,” occurred to me as I watched a debate between Bill Donahue and Christopher Hitchens (which begins with this clip). (It starts off a bit unpromisingly, but after the priest moderator makes a few signs of the cross and offers a quick prayer, and then gives a long introduction in which he suggests that debates and universities were a Catholic invention, and were in any case at home in a Catholic context, we get into the real meat and potatoes of the debate, and then it becomes clear that Donahue had no intention to debate at all. Talk about odium theologicum! Bill Donahue is a nasty tempered, nasty minded, abusive bully. Why anyone should have thought it promising to put this rather abusive person into a debate is hard to fathom, yet he does express well the rancour of theological hatred. Whether it measures up to Gibbons’ “exquisite rancour” may be doubted. Here’s an example of his rebarbative style:

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It’s not, by the way, Catholics for Free Choice, it’s Catholics for Choice, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the truth seems to be that, Vatican condemnation or not, many if not most Catholics in the United States are opposed to some fundamental Catholic principles, such as the absolute prohibition of abortion. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is, according to Wikipedia, “a charity, protest, and street performance organization that uses drag and religious imagery to call attention to sexual intolerance and satirize issues of gender and morality.” It had its origins during the AIDS crisis in the late seventies, and, quoting further from Wikipedia:

The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S. and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors. In San Francisco alone where they continue to be the most active, between 1979 and 2007 the Sisters are credited with raising over $1 million for various causes.

Although their existence may be seen as an implicit criticism of the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on gay sexuality, its main purpose is clearly empowerment and charity. A narrow-minded idiot like Bill Donahue may find this anti-Catholic, which no doubt is a part of its métier, but people like Donahue should not forget that the church brings this kind of opprobrium upon itself by taking such a hard-line in condemning all forms of sexuality besides its strictly reproductive uses. To say that the Order of Perpetual Indulgence (another name for the same thing) is anti-Catholic is perhaps not altogether false, but it is to tell only one side of the story. Of course, Hitchens rather tellingly goes on to point out that the Jesus of Matthew told his followers that those are blessed who are persecuted for his sake, so that Bill Donahue should thank his critics rather than condemn them. But for someone like Donahue to complain about anti-Catholicism when his own abusiveness seems to know no reasonable limit is to fall at the first fence.

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Religion and Democracy really are incompatible

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In a mad dash the other day, just before I had to go out for Thanksgiving Dinner — we do things differently in Canada — I quickly put up a post about the compatibility of religion and politics. Some people have pointed out that the incompatibility here, if there even is one, is very different to the incompatibility between religion and science, which really do conflict. One commentator on that post put it this way:

Eric, your premise rests on this: “The point is this. Governance, just like science, should be based on reason and evidence, and not just on one’s personal prejudices, because one’s personal prejudices have no place in the making of laws, which should be blind to religious belief.”

And it fails because of one word: “should”.   Science is so based. But politics is not based on that ideal. Democracy, politics and governance all are based as much on lies, distortions, half-truths, spin, greed, hero worship, concentrations of power, manipulating people, false advertising, character assassination, etc., etc., etc.

In this sense, there is not a definite outcome, as in science, for religion to be compatible or incompatible with.

And, of course, in this sense, I agree, but I would ask you to notice that science also suffers to a considerable degree from distortions, half-truths, spin, greed, hero-worship and concentrations of power. There’s a considerable dose of false accusation and character assassination around as well. Science is not all bright and shiny compared to the tawdriness and lack-lustre world of politics. Many people still think that Rosalind Franklin, for example, was unfairly treated, since her contribution to the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was considerable. Her work was shown to Watson without her knowledge or approval, and without it, Watson and Crick may not have had the evidence they needed to confirm their theory. The biological world was abuzz at the time with the race to discover the building blocks of life, and Franklin’s contribution has never been adequately or appropriately recognised. Science is a far messier world than is often acknowledged, and religion can find a resting place there too, as a number of accommodationists have shown. Certainly, the straight denial that religion and science are somehow compatible is difficult to establish, and probably has only a minority following amongst scientists (though not amongst senior scientists, perhaps). Of course, I don’t think religion has a place in science either, but it’s not a slam dunk when it comes to showing why not.

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Required Reading

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Update, 16:37, Atlantic Daylight Time, Monday, 20th August 2012: “Required Reading” is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks again to Malgorzata for taking an interest in my occasional thoughts.

Update, 10:40 Atlantic Daylight Time, Friday, 17th August 2012: The Tony Nicklinson judgement is now in, and is downloadable as a pdf file here. I have not read it yet, but the judgement does not rule in his favour. According to the Telegraph:

Tony Nicklinson, the “locked-in syndrome” sufferer, broke down in tears on live television as it was confirmed that he had lost his legal battle to be allowed to die.

The judgement says that it is not up to the courts to decide the issue, but is a matter for Parliament to decide. However, it is clear that, in cases where Parliament fails to act to uphold people’s rights, the courts should make it clear that Parliamentary failure will not be upheld by the courts. While it is true that a judgement in favour of Tony Nicklinson might have had implications far beyond his case, the judgement could have made those implications conditional only upon Parliament’s failure to act. There is not a necessary or logical connexion between a favourable judgement in the Nicklinson case, and an immediate extension of that judgement to other similar cases. The cruelty of the judgement is the direct outcome of years of campaigning by religious entities which will continue to oppose assistance in dying no matter what the outcome. This case however shows how wrong Tallis is in the article linked below, to confine assisted dying to the terminally ill alone. Being trapped in your body, as Nicklinson is, and may be for many years, provides a lack of quality of life which may, in individual cases, be seen to be a great harm.

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The following two articles are, for those who are concerned about assisted dying, required reading. The first is an article, published in the British Medical Journal, of the misery in dying of Ann McPherson, founder of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. Tess McPherson, Ann’s daughter, is also a physician, a specialist in dermatology, practicing in Oxford, and she writes a hair-raising account of her mother’s death which should put an end to the absurd spectacle of palliative care physicians like José Pereira claiming that palliative medicine can control all the pain, distress and indignity of dying. You can access Tess McPherson’s account as a pdf here.

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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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Why does the Catholic Church oppose family planning?

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For the same reason that it opposes assisted dying. Suppose that you had made a claim that every statement coming from your mouth is the absolute truth, and suppose, further, that this claim is not only known by practically everyone in the world, but that millions, perhaps billions of people, believe you, and stake their lives on this belief. Now, suppose that you finally came to your senses, and realised that no one can make such a claim in good faith, and that you, like everyone else, is liable to error, to making judgements in haste and on poor evidence, and that some of your statements – statements that your followers have taken with the utmost gravity, and defended, basing their entire lives on them – seem now, in retrospect, to have consequences that you can no longer defend. What should you do?

While you’re thinking about that problem, remember all those people who trusted you, and genuinely believed that your claims, and the claims made on your behalf, that you could not err, were valid for all time; remember that their lives will suddenly be without the firm foundation upon which they believed they stood, that everything that they believed, everything they had ever published, all the protest movements in which they had participated, and all the shrill condemnations that they had uttered in your name, will be nullified in a second if you suddenly lose your nerve, and say that, after all, you were wrong.

But still, remember, if you will, that the consequences of your claims, and the claims made on your behalf, are not insignificant. Not only have many of your erstwhile followers concluded long ago that you were wrong, but believing that you were right all along has caused much distress. Many people have died in misery, because of your belief that helping them to die was opposed to all that was true and noble and good. Women, who might have lived full, happy lives, have died in misery, simply because you denied them the right to control their reproductivity, and in desperation have resorted to all sorts ineffective, dangerous and often illegal means for ending their pregnancies. Many of their children, growing up in overpopulated cities with few opportunities, died before reaching their teens. People with diseases known to end in misery, have been forced to live through that misery without the option of controlling their own dying as they have controlled their own lives. Who, you may wonder, should you stand with? Those who have trusted you, and believed in your vaunted claims to infallibility? Or those who keep pointing out that no one can be infallible, that all of us are finite, no matter what may have been claimed on our behalf by tradition or councils composed of fallible men.

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