I mean how many of us pay thousands of dollars to get a new car or purchase houses for 100s or thousands? These aren’t truly necessities. Sure, I live four miles from work and it’s almost always below freezing but I could leave two hours early every morning and walk. Sure, it might be shameful and unpleasant but most of us don’t have to buy a house or even rent an apartment of our own. We could live in our parents basements or share an apartment with others. Even if we walked miles in the snow every day and choose to live in our parents basement we would still be many times better off than the billions of people who live on less than a dollar a day. Our purchase of a new car or choice of a nice apartment is as wasteful relative to the way most of humanity lives as an executives expenditure of 1.2 million to redecorate his office.

Ultimately we evaluate our standard of living relative to our friends and associates. Owning a car or living in our own residence seems reasonable because that’s what our colleagues do and our social circle expects that we will do as well. The fact that we, just like these executives, could pass up those conveniences and gift that money to the poor doesn’t make us monsters in our eyes because we aren’t being any more selfish than our friends. Similarly in the circles these executives travel in these expenditures aren’t out of line. Sure, they look obscene to us but no more so than our use of resources looks to the worlds poor.

At first glance this seems to be a truly stupid question. After all it’s bad when people die early. Isn’t it? Well, I certainly don’t want to die and neither do most people but that misses the point. We all die eventually and even if we personally want to put off death as long as possible can we truly say that a society where the average life span is 90 years rather than 70 is a better place? Would a society where the average life span was 200 years be even better? What sort of life span would be optimal?

It’s tempting to answer ‘infinite’ and certainly it would be wonderful if we could all retain our youth for forever and never have to grieve over lost friends and family. However, for the immediate future this simply isn’t possible. No healthy diet or prudent lifestyle can reduce the (average) number of friends we must mourn¹ and no amount of yoga or wheatgrass smoothies can prevent old age from taking it’s toll. Moreover, suppose we really could increase our lifespan indefinitely. At least for the next century or so we would have to virtually stop reproducing to avoid outgrowing our resources.

Ultimately we can’t simply say ‘life is good so we want more of it.’ Almost certainly such a policy would actually demand we divert money from healthcare into programs encouraging reproduction. As a society we’ve already reached the conclusion that it’s better to maintain a relatively small population that can live well than to expand into a great multitude that can barely make do. But rationally applying this insight to this question suggests that investing in longer life spans might not make sense.

Certainly we feel greater pain when someone is snatched from life too early and so we certainly shouldn’t stop pursuing more effective treatments to save people who might otherwise be struck down in the prime of life. Nor would we want to create distress or anger by denying people treatment. However, researching ways to further prolong our life span would likely introduce greater variability (some people die of heart attacks at 65 others make it to 130) and thus prolong the time people would have to endure the loss of loved ones as well as the sense of tragedy and anger at their deaths. Other things being equal a society is better if people spend a smaller proportion of their lives old and frail and since extending old age is unlikely to make people substantially happier (on average²) investing in technologies to lengthen our lifespan seems counterproductive. Of course we should look for technologies that let people be healthy and fit for a greater fraction of their lives and if we are able to make 80 feel like 55 that might justify more investment in keeping people alive till 80.

The observation that merely putting off death is not necessarily a desirable end in and of itself also has substantial consequences to what kind of charity and aid is best to give to the third world. However, that will have to wait for another post.

This is just one more example of the idiotic tunnel vision of groups like MADD and our general irrationality in calculating costs and benefits. Ultimately drunk driving does differ in kind from any other kind of careless driving. If you drive after having just a little bit to drink and double the chance you will kill someone it’s no more harmful than driving while slightly sleepy, upset about your breakup or anything else that also doubles your chance of committing vehicular homicide. One might try to argue that drunk driving is in general far more dangerous than say driving while drowsy but this isn’t so clear.

According to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) there are about 1,550 deaths annually where drowsiness is cited by the police as a factor. Admittedly this is a much lower number than the 15,829 alcohol related deaths reported in 2006. However, as the NHTSA says it is quite likely that drowsiness is radically under reported. After all the crash is quite likely to wake you up (or put you to sleep) and who is going to volunteer to the officer that they were too tired to be driving? Moreover, we should expect these figures to underrate the danger of drowsiness compared to drunk driving since drowsiness is not testable post-mortem while BAC is.

Of course it’s reasonable to think that strong moral condemnation of drunk driving is more likely to reduce deaths than similar moral condemnation of drowsy driving. I’m not sure¹. However, even if this justifies more severe treatment of drunk drivers and a greater degree of cultural condemnation it doesn’t justify importing your prejudices and unexamined emotional reactions into the debate. We should step back and take a look at which measures/responses are most likely to save lives and balance this against the costs. What I have a problem with is people judging drunk driving more harshly because drinking is considered `sinful’ while working late at the office is considered virtuous. The whole tone of moral outrage against drunk driving is a classic example of demonizing people who aren’t like you. Sure most of us may drink but even most drunk drivers likely don’t think of themselves as such (I’m a big man and only had…) while it’s much easier for everyone to identify with someone who had to drive while sleepy. Maybe we should try and change that but anytime we single out one activity like this I worry that we won’t make the correct trade offs.

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

I think this is spot on. As I’ve been saying for a long time the tendency to view global warming into a personal moral issue is a monumental mistake. For starters by moralizing the environment we immediately alienate a great many people who might have joined an attempt to solve an economic and engineering problem. Surely global warming is an issue that has moral consequences (like any other) but by associating it with the idea that we have a moral duty to live more simply and repudiate consumerism you not only ensure that people with other moral views aren’t inclined to join up but you also create a sort of righteous indignation that interferes with compromise and creates animosity. I mean if global warming had been presented as a pragmatic concern I doubt we would have seen the same extent to denial and resistance to what is ultimately an extremely technical scientific conclusion. However, because global warming was used as part of a sermon to lecture the public about their evil consumerist ways it inspired a strong bitter backlash.

It now appears we are almost past the hurdle of global warming skepticism but nevertheless the moral attitude toward the environment continues to create problems. For instance consider this selection of posts for blog action day. Following the usual formula for personal moral advice these posts tell people what simple sacrifices they could make to use less energy, recycle more and otherwise be more environmentally friendly. What could be wrong with this?

Well everything. For starters by making the issue into one of personal morality we’ve implicitly adopted the idea that environmental solutions must be sacrifices because we don’t give moral credit for things that we want to do anyway. In our personal lives this tends to result in nothing worse than wasted effort but by encouraging this idea we create an environment where the best solutions (those that require the least sacrifice) aren’t properly favored. Also, just as we tend to unreasonably view Mother Teresa as a better person than Bill Gates so too does moralizing environmental choices skew our praise toward useless sacrifice. There is no good reason whatsoever to try and minimize the total volume of waste you produce but because we have moralized environmentalism we end up stupidly glorifying people who carry their trash around with them. Even individual choices to conserve energy aren’t very useful as they lower the price of oil based fuels for others.

If people just wanted to waste their time like this that would be one thing but the real problem arises because the public only has a limited willingness to sacrifice for the environment. After all if I sort my recycling and turn the thermostat down at night why should I have to pay a tax on gas too. It’s bad enough that turning the environment into a personal moral issue uses up people’s willingness to sacrifice on inefficient solutions rather than the needed national fixes but it even creates antipathy for useful economic fixes. So long as it’s an engineering/economic problem the idea of trading emission credits seems perfectly reasonable but the moment you start viewing CO2 emissions as a moral harm the idea that you can purchase indulgences starts to rub people the wrong way. In fact I’ve seen more than a few environmentalists objecting to carbon credits on this basis.

Unfortunately I don’t have the slightest clue what we can do to unmoralize the environment at this state.

Before we even examine what Wills says it’s easy to see that his conclusion couldn’t possibly be true. If you accept a religious account of morality as every major religion does then all moral questions are religious questions. Now I dispute the idea that god could possibly be responsibly for morality¹ but short of throwing out traditional monotheism you’re stuck with the conclusion that abortion is a religious matter. A slightly more defensible claim that Wills could have made is that abortion is not a scriptural matter but this is only better in the sense that the entirety of modern religious moral teaching lacks scriptural justification² and it wouldn’t give him the conclusion he wants (religion should stay out of the abortion debate). So keeping this in mind let’s see what he has to say.

It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

For starters no one believes that all forms of killing deserve to be punished equally. Evangelicals might reasonably think that falsely believing a fetus wasn’t a person was a mitigating factor in their crime. Arguably it wouldn’t even be murder since they would be lacking the relevant intent to take a human life. Ultimately though at best he has shown that some evangelicals have compromised between the pull of religious teaching and mainstream social belief in an inconsistent way. It is of no relevance to the question of whether abortion is a religious question.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past.

Uhh so? They didn’t used to consider the murder of infidels to be morally wrong either. Does this show murder isn’t a religious issue?

The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments — or anywhere in Jewish Scripture.

As I’ve already observed if we insisted that only things with clear cut scriptural support counted as religious we would have to throw out almost all the teachings of every modern religion. The dirty secret of modern religious practice is that we decide what teachings we want to believe in and then search for things that support that view in our holy books. This is a compelling argument that religion is an absurd internally incoherent practice but it is misleading to raise a general failure of religion as if it were of specific relevance to abortion. In any case it brings us no closer to the claim that abortion is not a religious issue since obviously not every matter of religious importance is addressed in scripture.

Much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception — that it is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion. Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.

Gahh, huh? So the question of whether a soul is implanted in a just conceived fetus isn’t a religious question? People who would say yes wouldn’t be making theological arguments? This doesn’t make any sense. As far as the pope this sounds like yet another time people take the complex technical statements that characterize catholic theology and confuse them with their natural language notions. Besides, the idea that there is some bright line division between natural law and religious fact is just flat out wrong. Whether christ rose from the dead is clearly a matter of religion and theology but whether or not any human body ever ceased pumping blood for 3 days before starting to function again is clearly a scientific one and yet one can’t be true without the other (hence the reason to believe they are both false).

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise, not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer — they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.

Huh? Wait is he really arguing because the experts disagree there isn’t actually a clear cut answer? The argument here is so bad I can’t even guess what he is trying to say. I mean I could create a religion tomorow that says right out in it’s holy book, ‘And on the third day god said abortion was immoral,’ and no failure of scientists and philosophers to agree with me could change the fact that my religion said abortion was immoral. I mean short of straight out arguing that religious belief is unscientific and should be abandoned this point has no grip whatsoever.

So evangelicals take shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot be indiscriminately pro-life. …. And if one were consistently pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia, insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells, asparagus and so on. …. Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. …. The universal mandate to preserve “human life” makes no sense. My hair is human life — it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows.

God this guy is a fucking idiot. When people talk about “human life” they don’t mean any living human cells they mean the life of a human being. Now of course scientifically this term turns out to be imprecise and kinda meaningless but the central thesis of most religions is that humans poses a unique indivisible soul the presence of which is what they mean by human life. If pro-lifers religious beliefs are true they have a perfectly consistent position.

Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

According to most pro-life religious beliefs, yes. So what. God kills lots of people. True the belief that it is wrong for us to intervene and cause someone to die but not for god to kill them is absurd but it is another general problem with religious doctrine nothing specific to abortion.

The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.

Why is that the question? Why should I give a fuck what Aquinas said? The question is whether it is immoral to abort fetuses not whether they can think, do arithmetic or play snood. Animals can think and there are plenty of animals seemingly as intellectually capable as a newborn human. The idea that there is a simple rule that killing is always wrong and that we just need to decide when an abortion is killing is the essential fallacy of the abortion debate. Killing isn’t essentially wrong it’s the harmful effects it causes like grieving relatives and the fear that someone might kill you that make it wrong. Thus birth is a nearly perfect psychologically salient boundary at which to draw the line at which we will no longer accept killing but this is way off the topic supposedly at issue.

It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her, not just a fetus. ….. Given these uncertainties, who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious leaders? They have no special authority in the matter, which is not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority is given by the people it represents, and the people are divided on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest to the decision.

Gahh, there is no natural kind ‘child’ distinct from ‘fetus’ they are just names we choose to apply to stages of development based on our moral classification of them. But ignoring this is he really arguing that because the woman is the most emotional about the issue the most caught up in the events of her life she is the best one to make this decision?

Let’s try this argument elsewhere. Why not say that the decision on whether or not to kill your husband for his money is best made by the woman in question because she is the one closest to it? That’s absurd. In general we recognize that social and moral principles are best formulated by experts given time to deliberate and think. The reason that it should be legal to have an abortion is because on reflection the best arguments show that it is a net societal benefit not because it would be unacceptable for others to step in and stop them if they were doing something that inflicted massive societal harm.

Anyway if you want to argue that abortion should be legal and morally acceptable that’s fine but it really bugs me when someone like this uses laughably absurd arguments to try to pretend they aren’t taking a position on the issue just pointing out that others don’t have standing to really comment. Can there be better evidence that most people aren’t interested in logic but in feel good group affiliation than the fact that a total piece of crap like this piece was published as if it was a reasonable commentary on the morals of abortion?

In particular many liberal’s beliefs about Iraq consist of the following two views:

• Invading Iraq was a horrible mistake that made the average Iraqi much worse off than they were under Saddam, often with the clear implication that a civil war or some other sort of massive bloodshed is inevitable.
• If we could do something for the Iraqis we should but we can’t so we should just leave now.

I realize this doesn’t summarize all liberal’s beliefs about the war (certainly not mine). Some people believe (unreasonably IMO) that things will get much better once we leave and there might be some who even believe the Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam but I get the sense that the two views I summarized represent at least a significant percentage of mainstream liberals.

Don’t they entail that we should stay in Iraq but just clamp down just like Saddam did? For those of you who doubt we could do this all we would need to do is pick some local strongman and use our troops as muscle to help him establish himself as Saddam 2. Heck, maybe we could even keep our hands clean by just giving him implicit support and training his forces.

So why shouldn’t we kill a few innocent people now to save many more from a potential civil war? Or was the initial invasion actually a good thing?

In short I think that Mearsheimer and Walt certainly ought to be blamed for foolishly adopting some silly beliefs and presenting them poorly I think just as much blame lies with their opponents for encouraging people to take this crap seriously. The fact that we tend to blame only one side not the other regardless of the causal impact of their choices is yet another deep seated human irrationality that always seems to bite us in the ass. I argue for this views at far too much length below.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s book builds on their controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books where they criticize the influence of the “Israel Lobby” on US politics and accuse it of distorting our foreign policy to the detriment of both the US and Israel. Just as in the interview the article made a point of saying that the “Israel Lobby” included a great many non-Jews while many Jews weren’t part of it and disapproved of it’s tactics. Still, I think the article could have been worded more carefully since on a subject like this the following sentence just invites confusion.

And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

And this one is just as problematic.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

Now my overall perception from the article is that M&W are merely making (potentially false) claims about political influence. Claims that would be unremarkable if he had explained say the tendency of government aid to flow to the middle class rather than the most needy by a reference to the disproportionate political power of white suburbanites and suggesting that your opponents don’t want an open debate appears to be de rigueur in American political discourse. However, when discussing a subject like this with obvious potential for misinterpretation it is negligent not to word this more carefully. Still, poor wording is hardly a capital offense and in the interview Walt went out of his way to clarify these sorts of misconceptions, e.g., emphasizing that he didn’t view it as disloyal or even wrong to support Israel only that the policies the “Israel Lobby” supported were horribly misguided.

Now merely from a rhetorical point of view it would be bad tactics to respond to the calm reasonable sounding academic with an outraged lecture about the role of disloyalty accusations in the Soviet and Nazi genocides but when the individual your criticizing credibly denies making any such allegation at all it just plays to the (mostly false²) idea that accusations of antisemitism are being used to stop any discussion. As if this tactic wasn’t foolish enough Foxman responds to the idea of a hard right “Israel Lobby” by snapping, “Why is it their business how the American Jewish community works?” Not only is this a terrible argument (voting patterns are everyone’s business) but there is no more surefire way to convince people your covering up a dark secret than to tell them something is none of their business. Why do you think the UFO buffs simply won’t accept the fact that Area 51 is just a boring aircraft research facility?

I understand why Foxman has the reaction to M&W that he does. Obviously talking about the “Israel Lobby” and their ’sinister’ goals is a way to disparage the people who disagree with you. If you are primed to respond to the standard antisemitic slurs about Jewish disloyalty or conspiratorial power when you hear someone blaming the “Israel Lobby” using dubious evidence you are going to hear exactly what you expected to hear. Human psychology just works like that, especially about particularly emotional issues.

Unfortunately, the sort of underhanded argumentative move that M&W pull of dehumanizing the people who disagree with you by giving them an intimidating name, whether it is “Israel Lobby,” “big business,” “military industrial complex,” “agribusiness,” “the religious right,” or “liberal” is all to common. People think their ideas are obviously right and need an explanation for why other people disagree with them. Lacking my arrogance most people feel a tension between how obvious the conclusion feels to them and the idea there are a bunch of other folk like them who think the exact opposite so they resolve it by dehumanizing their opponents with a big scary name which lets them conceptualize themselves as the underdog nobly fighting the good fight. I think this is a much more plausible explanation of M&W’s motivations than any sort of antisemitic agenda.

Yes, the arguments made in M&W’s paper and presumably the ones in the book as well are extremely poor. In addition to the dubious factual claims they barely touch the substantive issue: what policy should the US take towards Israel. However, while I respect them less as a result and I wish academics would do better I’m hardly surprised. This is the same kinda of emotionally loaded but irrelevant crap one always sees in political discourse, especially when it involves Israel and Palestine. Even otherwise rational people start citing dubious historical events and making totally irrelevant arguments about who is at ‘fault’ for the current situation instead of asking what would be most likely to fix the problem. It is no more antisemitic when the anti-Israel side does it than it is anti-Muslim when hard line pro-Israeli partisans do.

Is it the case that M&W’s article and book provides aid and comfort for antisemitic elements? Well I’m sure some of them will get a kick out of reading it but it isn’t neo-Nazis feeling smug that we want to avoid it’s increased membership and I’m skeptical M&W’s work is going to aid in recruitment. It people like David Irving who let the neo-Nazi types feel that the truth is on their side but it is being suppressed by conspiracy. Moreover, by Foxman’s own theory he is just as culpable as M&W. He blames M&W for mainstreaming the concern about the “Jewish Lobby” to the point where it is being discussed on NPR but that never would have happened with the accusations of antisemitism and the like from people like him. Had the ADL and other Jewish groups reacted with a shrug and merely debunked M&W’s arguments instead of becoming outraged M&W’s article would have died the obscure death it deserved.

Even if their work was likely to encourage neo-Nazis this doesn’t mean it is any more morally culpable for them to publish it. After all we don’t think that scientists are blameworthy for not suppressing experimental results suggesting that certain gender differences have biological causes even if we later find them to have made a mistake. Yes, I think one can make the case that subjects like this require greater care and thus M&W are to be blamed for not exercising greater thought and care in both forming and presenting their views. However, any theory that holds people to a higher standard about racially sensitive subjects because of the greater risk of harm cuts both ways. If M&W are to be blamed for not questioning their emotionally laden beliefs about US policy towards Israel or not taking more care to avoid encouraging antisemitism than so too should Abraham Foxman for not questioning his assumptions about the nature and motivation of M&W’s view and especially for responding in a way that, under his own theory, aids genuine antisemites.

I think we should blame both of them but they are venial sins not reasons to shun them.

Don’t get me wrong. I think M&W’s arguments are a pile of crap. I just don’t think the responses to it have been much better nor do I think that it’s much worse than what I’ve come to expect from political dialog in this country. Mostly I agree with this post about the matter except I’m far more cynical about political discourse in general. The reason I care about the issues is that I’m bothered by the hypocritical standard about when we blame people for encouraging antisemitism. If we are really interested in what matters (stamping out antisemitism) then any behavior that can reasonably be seen to encourage antisemitism should be equally blameworthy but in practice we don’t judge blame based on actual impact but by sorting them out into sides. Of course this is hardly unique to antisemitism, it is the same reason that people are more interested in what you believe about affirmative action than why, but this was what made me think about it this morning.

I mean presumably most people believe that animals aren’t ever morally responsible for their actions (certainly the Christian view) but these explanations suggest that the animal could have been at fault if things had been different. What even makes something the animal’s habitat as opposed to our habitat? Would the shark somehow have been blameworthy if it knew it was attacking a human but was hungry anyway?

What seems particularly ironic about all this is that almost all the excuses (except total lack of moral responsibility) given for animals seem to apply equally well to people who destroy the animals habitats or hunt the animal down in revenge.

Now some people seem to think that reporting on or distributing this information is immoral as the sex lives of politicians should remain private and others find this an unpalatable invasion of privacy. Presumably this is the reason that ABC refused to identify any of Palfrey’s non-politician clients. But this is mind bogglingly hypocritical. I mean jesus christ the men on this list are faced with potentially losing their job or being divorced. Ms. Palfrey is facing prison time. It’s insane to think that prostitution is bad enough to throw Palfrey in jail for it but not bad enough to cause some guys to be embarrassed. Unless the guys calling are on the record as supporting the legalization of prostitution I have no sympathy for their plight.

Every day the government takes away people’s freedom for no other reason than prudish moral disapproval¹. It is the people who don’t really believe prostitution (or drug use) is that bad (such as the johns) but stay silent out of ambition or fear of censure who are really guilty here not Madam Palfrey. None of us would defend the person who let an innocent man go to jail rather than reveal he was having an affair and tacitly supporting the criminalization of prostitution is even worse. You don’t even need to admit you have been to a prostitute to argue for it’s legalization. Just like homosexuals working for gay bashing senators these clients deserve to be punished for their hypocrisy if anyone does and more importantly we ought to discourage this sort of hypocritical behavior.

If we really knew the names of everyone who used drugs or visited prostitutes they would become legal within the week. I’m hopeful the loss of obscurity (aka privacy) that everyone complains about will bring us to a point where this sort of hypocritical moralizing is no longer possible.

In case you aren’t familiar with the situation so far Ms. Palfrey ran Pamela Martin and Associates, an exclusive escort business in the Washington DC area for the last 13 years and is now being charged with running a prostitution ring. Of course she contends that her escort service only provided legal services and any sex her escorts might have had with clients wasn’t part of the service her business provided. Since many of her clients were in government, some highly placed like Senator David Vitter and Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias (who has resigned as a result), Ms. Palfrey had the brilliant idea of releasing all of her phone records with the potential benefits of creating pressure to make the case go away or availing herself of a list of high profile individuals who would testify that no sex was involved. Unfortunately for Ms. Palfrey the strategy seems to have been backfiring as the exposed individuals seem to be fessing up or resigning.

Besides the sort of simplistic rhetoric offered in defense of their supposedly principled refusal to vote for the war (can’t invade a sovereign country etc..) doesn’t hold up under even the most casual analysis. In short this sort of stance is motivated by emotional gut feelings not a principled moral stance. It is this substitution of emotional feeling for moral principle that caused my disgust and motivated me to post about this issue rather than the hundreds of other issues that our representatives take silly stances on.

My conception of moral virtue is that what makes someone virtuous or not is their ability to subordinate emotional reactions to rational (moral) analysis. One does not (directly) control (even in a subjective way) what emotions you feel. One does not so much choose to feel rage, gratitude, sexual attraction as find these feelings impinging on one’s consciousness. Thus it makes no more sense to praise or blame someone for the emotions they feel than for the situations that are beyond their control they find themselves in. In other words the man with the strong fetish for young boys (pedophile) who resists that temptation is a far better person than the otherwise similar individual who doesn’t feel it at all.

I think we all feel share this intuition and agree that we should judge the character of a man by how they deal with their temptations not by the number of temptations they feel. We ought to treat moral emotions in exactly the same way. The man whose immediate emotional reaction when someone insults his wife is that ‘this man must be punished’ is no worse than the man whose immediate moral reaction is ‘I must forgive this man.’ Admittedly what emotional reactions someone has may given evidence as to their moral virtue because practice and habit sculpt these emotions so having the ‘right’ emotional reactions may be indicative of a practice of placing moral reason first. However, the conventionally moral person who ‘just knows’ that certain things are right and others are wrong because of training in childhood is no different than the person who ‘just knows’ that one slaps a woman when she gives you lip. Being lucky and being trained to have the right sort of values doesn’t make one a better person. The persons reacting to ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ moral emotions are in exactly the same epistemic state so are equally virtuous.

Hence it really disgusts me when people pass off indulging their moral emotions as virtue rather than vice. The real moral virtue is the ability to analyze your reactions to something and suppress them if you conclude they counsel the wrong action. Of course all this bit about moral virtue is really just a complicated description of my emotional reaction to things. To the extent there are moral facts they are only facts about which states of affairs are better than others. Moral virtue is something that we choose to define not something the universe hands to us. It isn’t even really relevant to which states of affairs are better.

This is the reason I am so hostile to supposed deontic justifications for actions or moral positions. When taken by real moral philosophers I disagree strongly (both with their conclusions and the deference they give moral feelings) but I can respect what they are doing. However, when used by almost anyone else it is usually an excuse to just go with one’s moral feelings without analysis.

Well it’s about time. These aren’t people missing a limb or ‘merely’ severely retarded and deformed. They appear to be talking only about babies with horrible incurable conditions that will create years of pain and have a very low change of survival. Frankly as long as we are talking about these cases it really is a no brainer.

The situation these babies find themselves in is effectively that of an individual with a terminal illness who losses all mental facilities including speech and any understanding of the outside world and is doomed to suffer a year of excruciating pain before death. Given such a grim diagnosis I suspect that but for the influence of religious/cultural prohibitions nearly all of us would choose an early death. Moreover, unlike a grown individual the child does not yet have fully formed personality, goals, dreams, achievements, a lifetime of memories or a web of personal relations that (help) make us so desperate to hang on to life.

Of course the standard objections are heard from disabled rights groups

Simone Aspis of The British Council of Disabled People:

Euthanasia for disabled newborns tells society that being born disabled is a bad thing. If we introduced euthanasia for certain conditions, it would tell adults with those conditions that they are worth less than other members of society.

Wait this tells society that being born disabled is a bad thing? Ohh fuck, we couldn’t have people believing it would be better to be born without disabilities than with them. I mean then they might go out and do something horrible like trying to increase prenatal care or give women vitamins. Even if some people hold the ridiculous view that it isn’t worse to be born disabled I don’t think anyone is going to volunteer for the option of pervasive severe pain followed by an early death.

So let’s look at the second claim that this would tell society that adults with these conditions were worth less than other members of society. We can already see it deeply mistaken. We would be doing for the babies the same as we would do for ourselves. In fact it would be forcing these children to endure pointless suffering to assuage our moral sentiments that would show a disregard for the disabled.

But even when applied to less extreme situations, say aborting a child whom ultrasound shows to be missing limbs, this argument is simply fallacious. As Van Gogh and many others illustrate living an enjoyable life and being valued by society are very different concepts. Additionally someone’s worth to society just doesn’t have much to do with whether they deserve dignity, respect and decent treatment. Obviously everyone isn’t above average and some people are worth less to society than others but this has little to do with whether we think they ought to be denied equal treatment, denied basic human dignity or even if we would be friends with them.

Ultimately this argument proves far too much. If euthanasia for the severely disabled tells society that being disabled is a bad thing why don’t programs to end teenage pregnancy tell us being a teenage pregnancy is a bad thing? If this program would tell adults with these conditions that they were worth less than other members of society why don’t teenage pregnancy prevention programs tell adults born to teenage mothers they are worth less than other parts of society?

In addition to the standard arguments from the disabled community we also have the boilerplate concern about the role of doctors.

But the paper quoted John Wyatt, consultant neonatologist at University College Hospital, as saying: “Intentional killing is not part of medical care… once you introduce the possibility of intentional killing you change the fundamental nature of medicine. It becomes a subjective decision of whose life is worthwhile.”

This argument is not just wrong it is downright harmful. The fundamental nature of medicine is not about saving life it is about improving the quality of life. Every time a doctor treats acne, makes surgery a bit more complex to avoid leaving a scar, prescribes ADD or anti-anxiety medication, gives a woman who had a mastectomy an implant or administers painkillers they are improving quality of life at the expense of possible side effects. Making trade offs between life and quality of life IS the essence of medicine.

So yes when the patient cannot speak for themselves it is necessary to make a subjective decision about whether their life is worth living. We are doing it right now and it is infinitely better to face this fact than letting people suffer so we can pretend to avoid the question.

Ultimately I think we ought to go far beyond this proposal. I think we ought to mandate abortion for all fetuses discovered to have birth defects. By mandating abortion we would minimize the moral pain associated with making the decision and I don’t think there is any question that aborting a fetus is less bad than going and making someone disabled (say by poisoning babies). Once we’ve bit the bullet on abortion and agreed it isn’t murder we should be prepared to treat it as such. If people knew they could use birth control for a month and reduce their chance of birth defects a hundred fold they wouldn’t hesitate so how is aborting the defective fetuses any different? I might even favor euthanasia for severely retarded children or those with extreme physical deformities inflicting severe suffering even if non-terminal.

Now certainly there is a principle that says one is morally responsible for foreseeable harm that results from your speech. If you’re giving a speech to an angry mob you know to be capable of violence and say ‘the world would be better if so and so was hanged’ then you bear responsibility for his death. However, we are less inclined to criticize someone for failing to make a helpful point or when the remark falls within a societally accepted zone. I will argue that Summers’ failure to make additional cautionary remarks is less bad than the normal behavior of most distinguished individuals that we would never think of criticizing. Thus by criticizing Summers without making it clear that the commonplace behavior we see all the time is even worse one gives the false impression that he is more blameworthy. Worse this criticism itself is harmful speech as it furthers the notion that the mere suggestion of biological effects is morally outrageous as it is only the content of Summers remarks that differentiates him from all these individuals who skate by without a second thought.

Implicitly I will assume that the moral responsibility one has for making or not making a remark depends only on the foreseeablity of the effects and the harmfulness of these effects. Keeping this in mind let us consider a college president (or any public figure) who publicly supported Bush in the last election (change this to Kerry if you are of the other political persuasion). Now I think the evidence that electing Bush would lead to harm was pretty damn clear (it was also pretty clear the first time too). Anyone unblinded by emotion could have seen the harms Bush had already inflicted upon the nation and thus should have known that supporting Bush would lead to delitorious results. Now while it is unclear to me whether Summers’ failure to be more careful lead to any significant harms but electing a worse president costs hundreds, and perhaps hundreds of thousands in Iraq their life. Yet even among those who dislike Bush few blame outspoken Bush supporters the way Summers is blamed even though if more distinguished individuals, particularly known conservatives, had urged us to vote against him he probably would not have won. Note that if you don’t like this example just substitute your favorite law or issue you think is obvious and clear and ask if your well-intentioned but mistaken opponents are blameworthy for being on the wrong side of the issue. If so why aren’t we hearing the sort of criticism of them we hear about Summers’?

I think an even better example are ministers and public officials who express a belief in christianity (or islam or judaism) Now of all the claims bandied about in public discourse those offered by the major organized religions are the most absurd. Each of these religions makes specific claims about miracles at times in the past, e.g., people rising from the dead. It is hard to think of a widespread belief that has stronger evidence against it. Yet if religion is false it seems quite evident that it imposes serious costs on society not to mention causing conflict and poor regulation. It’s my opinion that merely engaging in the practice of convincing people to believe and devote great energy to a crazy belief system that you should know is incorrect is itself more blameworthy than what Summers did (unless you have compelling reasons to think that deceiving the people is to their own benefit). Still since some are going to argue that organized religion has beneficial effects (I think they ignore the secular institutions that would arise to take their place) let’s focus on specific beliefs.

So consider any priest, minister or layperson who claims that religion forbids one from using birth control. The harm of this belief, particularly in Africa where religious aid often won’t distribute condoms, is blatant. Or consider the religious belief that abortion is murder. Once again the harm of outlawing or even restricting abortion and stem cell research is quite clear. There are a hundred other beliefs that are also easily seen to be harmful if false. Yet if these beliefs weren’t publicly supported by ministers or other laypeople almost no one would believe them. Since the falsity of religious belief is infinitely more apparent than the need for Summers to more carefully explain his point and the harms far greater anyone who publicly professes one of these beliefs is even more blameworthy than Summers.

Finally and most analogously consider the people who argue against biological explanations of performance differences. For instance the people who released the recent national academies of science report claiming to disprove biological effects. Now having read the literature it is equally absurd to hold the extreme view that it is all social without a biological component as it is to hold the extreme view that it is all biological without a social component. At the very least the hormone studies show that their is some indirect effect of biology on someone’s likelihood to succeed in math and science. Many of these biological differences are likely going to be unrelated to ability yet given our social structures affect the individuals inclination to enter and perform in math and science, for instance women’s greater risk aversion.

The extreme social view isn’t just a nice delusion, it negatively impacts our ability to make mathematics and science accessible for women. If we pretend there aren’t any differences between men and women we can’t fix how society responds to the irrelevant differences. For instance if women are biologically more inclined/better at learning one way and men another it is important to ensure that both ways are compatible with our teaching. Unlike the extreme biological view the extreme social view is actually held by educated individuals making academic policy making it at least as much of a threat. Thus if Summers is blameworthy for not making his rejection of the extreme biological theory even more clear in his speech then groups like the national academies are far more culpable for writing reports seeming to suggest it’s all social without even hinting that the extreme social view is in error.

In short I just don’t see how one can coherently call Summers’ remarks blameworthy and not call people’s mistaken opinions about far more influential subjects (war, famine, third world aid, contraception) even more blameworthy. Since we don’t blaming Summers for his remarks is misleading and, since the difference between Summers and these other individuals is merely what position he took, sends the message that you just can’t consider even partially biological explanations.

I have to say I approve of the decisions by the doctors involved. I tend to think the entire debate over doctor assisted suicide is just stupid if doctors have anything to do with executions. However, this issue is at least debatable.

What I don’t understand is why we are executing people with methods that have the slightest risk of causing pain. What is death not enough? Why must we be additionally cruel and make sure they die in an unpleasant fashion? It isn’t like their aren’t plenty of perfectly painless, even enjoyable ways to die. Why not end a killers life with an overdose of opiates? Or as the judge suggested an overdose of barbiturate (there is no good reason it needs to be given by a doctor or nurse but I suspect the judge’s ruling in this case was simply mandated by state law, i.e. it would be illegal for someone else to administer a controlled substance). Hell, given a choice between the current procedure and a large caliber precisely aimed gun to the head I would take the gun out of fear the barbiturate wouldn’t be enough.

I’ve never understood the societal need to inflict pointless pain but surely this case is just ridiculous. We are already killing them for their crime, is it to much to ask to do it in the most painless way we know how?

In a moment I will detail the problems with legal marriage but first let me outline the alternative so they can be compared. Rather than having the government pick out a certain sort of relationship, set the terms of that relationship and reserve certain privileges and benefits to the people in that relationship adults could confer whatever subset of those benefits they saw fit via contract (more or less see below). For instance anyone could sign papers granting another consenting adult joint parental rights to any children they have. This way for instance not only lesbians who wanted to raise a child together but a pair of spinster sisters could do the same. Of course there would still need to be a special underlying legal status for people who have chosen to legally treated as a single entity but it would be available to any type of relationships be it parent-child, brother-sister, or husband-wife. Most people of course would simply take a standard set of these legal relationships requiring no more paperwork than a marriage license does now but the same privileges would be available to anyone no matter what kind of relationship they were in. There are a few details that need to be dealt with (like preventing people from using these arrangements to arbitrarily transfer wealth tax free). I will offer some suggestions on the details in the extended entry below but first let me detail the benefits of this approach.

As I’ve already hinted at the basic problem with marriage is that it forces the government to select what sort of relationships are ‘worthy’ of the economic and legal benefits of marriage. If you think it is wrong to deny the benefits of marriage to gays just because a majority of people disapprove of that sort of relationship it would be hypocritical not to also support the same benefits to people in group marriages or other non-traditional relationships. In fact there seems to be no justifiable reason to grant these benefits only to people in sexual relationships. If one is unfortunate enough to remain single for your entire life why should the government add insult to injury and deny you these benefits if you choose to cohabitate with a friend or relative? If one suggests that these benefits aren’t really a big deal and single folks (say single sisters who live together) aren’t being screwed over then there is no harm in dissolving the legal institution of marriage, people can just live together without these minor advantages, and if these advantages do matter it seems wrong to deny them to the people who are unlucky enough to be single (not only do studies show marriage makes one more happy it lets one reduce many expenses).

Apart from the basic issues of fairness having the government pick out what relationships count as marriage inevitably entangles gets public policy entangled in an emotional mess. Though many people argue that marriage is about incentivizing two parent homes or other desirable child-rearing behavior neither the benefits or who they are granted too have little rational relation to these ends. Why for instance do we allow women over 50 to marry if it is about children? If it turned out that it was bad for children if their parents stayed in a failed relationship for financial reasons could you imagine a tax benefit for divorce? While many of the benefits offered by marriage are also good for child-rearing, and it would be foolish not to let parents receive them, it is clear that the notion of marriage is such a deeply emotional subject for most people that it can never be treated as just a tool for incentivizing behavior. Intrinsically people view the status of marriage as a type of approval and so long as the government decides what sort of relationships are to be approved of our social policy will be distorted by strong emotions and many people will be hurt by governmental disapproval.

Just like other tough moral, spiritual and personal issues it would be best if the government just stayed out of the debate. We all know that having the government decide which churches are acceptable would cause unnecessary acrimony and suffering. The situation is pretty much the same with marriage. It would be best if we could get the government completely out of the bedroom and leave the matter of deciding what is an acceptable marriage to the churches and the couples. Below I will outline some specifics about how we might accomplish such a thing.

Of course despite the eminent sensibility of such an approach it is about as politically viable as free abortions. I can see the political accusations already, “The secular liberals even want to take away your right to MARRY.” You can find a list of the major benefits provided by a legal marriage (as opposed to a purely religious/ceremonial marriage) here. These benefits can be broken down into six major categories plus a seventh usually unstated benefit.

1. Joint Finances (joint ownership, filling joint taxes etc..)
2. Inheritance Rights and Death Benefits
3. Child Custody Rights
4. Medical Decisions
5. Medical leave and similar benefits
6. Immunity for Testimony
7. Immigration Benefits
8. Right to prevent your partner from marrying others

What I propose is that the government allow each of these rights to be exercised via private contract. Couples who wished their marriage to have more than purely ceremonial status would go to the court or clerk and submit forms detailing which rights they wished to confer on each other. Just as now the priest/minister/judge would be endowed with the power to bring these contracts into effect when he pronounces the couple married. Of course you would also be able to enter into these contracts in the normal fashion. If one wanted to make your sister a co-parent of any child you had you could merely go down to the clerk and sign the forms.

While some people might object that deciding which contracts and rights apply to their relationship somehow makes marriage too cold or impersonal I actually think the extra thought required would be a good thing. It might feel good to just jump into a marriage confident love will conquer all but unless the couple explores their mutual expectations and comes to an understanding the marriage likely won’t last. A relationship needs hard headed thought and planning as well as emotion to be successful in the long run. Being forced to make a decision about child custody rights might make the couple talk about their expectations about children and similar benefits would aries in the other areas. Additionally the ability to contract for these rights would provide beneficial flexibility for many people#[flex].

However, I think this is all besides the point. For good or ill there would probably be pre-selected marriage packages one could sign with little more paperwork than a marriage license takes today. Religious couples would likely just take the form their church suggests down to the appropriate state office and couples getting a secular marriage could just pick up a standard marriage agreement at the courthouse or perhaps select one of several common agreements. In any case I don’t think the added complication would be that severe and any extra consideration needed might very well be useful.

Though most of these benefits can be unproblematically handled via private contract with a few minor tweaks special problems arise in a couple cases. Medical decisions and custody matters can both be straightforwardly handled by contract and the exclusivity clause can be easily translated into a restriction requiring your partner to get your consent before entering into one of these contracts with another individual. The special status family (including spouses) get for medical leave should simply be abolished. If a girl I grew up with and feel very close to gets sick whether or not I can take time off to care for her shouldn’t depend on whether or not I’m related to her. Still if you insist on keeping this distinction one could simply grant this right to anyone you have chosen to make any of these substantial legal commitments to. If they get your money when you die, get to co-parent your children, or have joint finances with you it is a safe bet you care alot about them. However, inheritance rights and joint finances pose more complex problems and the testimonial immunity and immigration benefits are particularly tough.

Most of the death benefits a married partner receives (ability to sue for wrongful death, certain sorts of governmental benefits on death) should simply be made available to anyone financially dependent or sharing joint finances with the deceased (divided appropriately of course). The problem for both inheritance and joint property is taxes. It would be inappropriate to make people pay gift or inheritance taxes on their spouses property when they die. After all that property was supposedly owned jointly. However, once you open up these joint ownership agreements to anyone what prevents parents from entering into an agreement sharing finances with their children avoiding inheritance?

I think we can deal with this issue the same way we deal with sham marriages for citizenship. Simply require evidence of genuine joint financial arrangements for some reasonable length of time and require the relationship of having joint finances be transitive (if I have joint finances with you and you have joint finances with fred I must have joint finances with fred). If a parent and child really do share checking accounts, pool their income and all the rest I have no problem if the parent’s wealth transfer’s untaxed to the child. However, it will only be the most exceptional families where the children don’t maintain separate finances from their parents and most especially from each other. Conversely if a ‘married’ couple keeps their income separate, don’t own any property together and otherwise act like two separate financial entities it won’t be an excessive hardship to apply inheritance tax in this case (the surviving partner was already supporting themselves).

This brings us finally to the toughest two issues. The right to grant a foreign national legal residence in the US by marrying them and the right not to testify against one’s spouse. However, for both of these benefits, the restriction to one’s spouse seems unmotivated. If a foreign national is so emotionally important to you that you wish to bring them to the states and live with them why should it matter if the relationship is that of marriage or deep platonic friendship? Certainly there is a risk of people abusing this provision but limits can be set by requiring that the US citizen share their finances with the immigrant which incidentally provides assurances they won’t be using public services. I think a system where any US citizen could grant any foreign national legal residence by sharing finances with them and co-habitating for at least three years (just as with marriage the status is tentative for those three years) would be unproblematic. This is hardly going to open a flood of new immigrants and any immigrants arriving through such a program would automatically have a good starting point.

There is a bit more sense to the privilege not to have testimony against one’s spouse compelled. The fifth amendment guarantees the right against self-incrimination and a married couple is supposed to become one person. If you knew that your spouse would either have to expose you or go to jail you might be very reluctant to tell them important events in your past. However, marriage is not the only relationship where open communication is important and while I firmly believe in complete openness in my relationships many people tell their parents more than their spouses. Why should a parent not get the same right not to testify against their child?

Ultimately I’m ambivalent about whether or not this sort of testimonial exception ought to exist at all. However, if it should we might be able to extend it to anyone with a strong emotional relationship with the accused who has made several of the above commitments to them. If you have agreed to co-parent someone’s children, have the power to make medical decisions for them and there isn’t evidence that these commitments were made just to avoid testimony then it seems reasonable to grant you this sort of immunity if we should grant it to anyone.

Admittedly there are lots of little issues and tweaks that need to be ironed out but I hope I have shown that the project is feasible. There really is no need to have the government deciding what does and doesn’t qualify as a marriage. However, I’m quite pessimistic about this solution being enacted in my lifetime.

[flex]:For instance an infertile couple may wish to extend automatic paternity to children born from a surrogate mother the husband has impregnated to the wife instead the adoption currently required. Alternatively a swinging couple want to do without the presumption of paternity normally made to children born to a married woman. A couple where one partner is ill or has other potentially great financial liabilities may wish to adopt the parenting rights but not pool assets (as I understand it some couples get divorced so the surviving partner isn’t burdened with massive medical bills of the deceased). Finally if everyone had to make an explicit agreement about how assets would be dispersed in the case of a divorce, instead of having to add a pessimistic pre-nuptial on top of the marriage, many acrimonious divorce proceedings could probably be avoided and fairer results achieved.

So my controversial claim is that expecting women (and their partners) who discover their fetus suffers from a developmental disorder or other condition that will cause it to be seriously disabled#[ser] have a moral obligation to abort that child. In fact not only do I believe this but I think anyone who doesn’t think abortion is deeply wrong and agrees to a few other reasonable assumptions is required to hold this position.

Let me stress that there is no sarcasm involved, this is not a “Modest Proposal” style shock piece, I really do hold this position and find these arguments compelling. I realize that many people will be outraged at this suggestion and tempted to dismiss it out of hand. However, I urge you to read my entire post and try to identify where I go wrong. Especially in issues like this we need to make sure our emotions don’t run away with our brains.

Below I will offer a detailed argument which does not suppose that abortion is a morally neutral act. However, let me first explain the intuition behind this conclusion before people stop reading in outrage. Basically the idea is we don’t believe it is wrong not to procreate or abort just because this this choice prevents some people from ever existing. Just because abortion prevents children whose parents would have aborted them from existing doesn’t make it morally wrong. The fact that the disabled are an easily identifiable and somewhat socially cohesive doesn’t change the basic situation

Yet if abortion itself is not wrong then aborting the disabled should be morally equivalent to sorting your eggs for genetically healthy specimens before conceiving and since eggs are just cells this should be morally equivalent to providing pre-conception therapy to your eggs to save your child from being seriously disabled. Yet if your only chance to save your child from a serious disability was pre-conception therapy not only would it not be wrong it would be morally required. Hence it is actually morally required to abort the disabled.

The Detailed Argument

If we don’t want to assume that abortion is completely morally neutral the argument becomes a bit more complex. The structure of this argument will be an initial moral judgement in a related situation and then an argument that the answer should be the same when we consider aborting fetuses known to be disabled. I will first give a quick sketch of the argument and then flesh it out later.

Suppose a lone doctor at a remote clinic only has time to either prevent an expectant mother from miscarrying or to save a five year old from becoming severely disabled#[ser] i.e., option 1 results in a healthy pregnancy but a severely retarded five year old option two results in a miscarriage and a perfectly healthy fie year old. It seems obvious to me that the doctor has a moral obligation to help the child rather than prevent the miscarriage. Yet this is essentially the same choice facing a woman who has learned her fetus will suffer from a congenital defect symptoms of which will appear at 5 years of age. If she carries the baby to term there will eventually be a disabled 5 year old (assume the chances it will survive that long are nearly 100%) on the other hand if she aborts it there will be an interrupted pregnancy but no disabled five year old boy.

Fleshing Out The Argument

So their seem to be two significant differences between the choice faced by the expectant mother and that faced by the doctor I outlined above. In order for the argument to be compelling I need to establish these differences shouldn’t change the outcome. The first difference is that the mother would be making a positive choice to end her pregnancy while the doctor would only be choosing not to intervene and stop a miscarriage¹. Personally I think the distinction between action and inaction is just a comforting story to stop us from feeling bad about all the altruistic actions we could be taking but aren’t. However, I recognize that most people do not share this attitude so let me explain why the active choice to terminate the pregnancy should not change the morally required outcome.

Of course if one thinks that abortion is the moral equivalent of murder this would make a significant difference. However, if you don’t think abortion is on the same level as murder but instead a choice which is morally acceptable for a women to make because she does not think she is prepared to carry a baby for nine months or similarly minor (compared to murder it is of course a major life decision) reasons this tactic is a non-starter. While a significant hardship being pregnant for nine months just isn’t on the same level of suffering as being seriously disabled for your entire life². In other words even if you think aborting a child is a moral harm all other things being equal it just pales into insignificance compared to the prospect of failing to save a child from a life of disability.

I think we can make this point quite clearly by modifying the example a little bit. Supposing it is not a miscarriage he is going to prevent but a mistaken abortion. Say during that time he would otherwise be tracking down a confused wife who is trying to abort a baby she is afraid isn’t her husbands. Maybe they have an open marriage and she only wants her husbands children but a condom broke when she was sleeping with some other guy. Even if the doctor could somehow share with her the information the other guy had a vasectomy (maybe the other guy was the doctor) and prevent an unwanted abortion at the cost of saving the child from serious disability he should still spend his time

The other way the doctor’s choice and the potential mother’s choice differ is that in one their is an already existing formerly healthy child who will become disabled while in the other we are talking about a fetus who would have the condition since birth. Admittedly a parent who has to adjust to a formerly healthy child’s disability may face more psychological hardship (we can assume the child’s disability involves such severe mental impairment or they are so young they are unaware of the change) than one who knows at birth their child will face serious disability. Once again though I think this additional harm is negligible compared to the overarching issue. A short time of adjustment just isn’t comparable to the difference between a life spent severely disabled and one spent healthy.

Aside from this small point the fact that in one case we are considering a child who already exists while in the other we are talking about the quality of life of a child who is yet to exist should not make any difference. The life of a child who is born with a congenital defect, symptoms of which will manifest at 5 years of age, will be substantially the same as a child who develops the same symptoms for other reasons ate age five. Moreover, we do not generally accept the principle that a yet to be born child’s quality of life is less important than that of already existing children³. A company which knowingly releases a chemical into the air immediately harming children 5 and younger is no worse than one which dumps that chemical knowing it will seep into ground water and cause similar harm to 5 year olds and younger but not for five years down the road. Or in other words the future (after birth) quality of life of child who has yet to be born is just as important as that of one who has already been born. Hence the fact that in the doctor’s choice the child is five while in the mother’s choice the child will be five if she chooses to have it do not give a reason to treat the two situations differently.

Summary of the Argument

Now that I’ve taken you through the details let me spell out the argument in it’s entirety. The starting point was the intuition that given a choice between preventing a child from becoming seriously disabled and stopping a woman from miscarrying the doctor’s duty was to prevent the child from becoming disabled. From this we reasoned that the harm brought about by the termination of a pregnancy wasn’t as much as the harm brought about by allowing a child to become disabled. Then we argued that replacing the natural termination of a pregnancy with the abortive termination of a pregnancy did not change this conclusion, i.e., a doctor given a choice between preventing an undesired abortion (an abortion the person really doesn’t want) and saving a five year old child from serious disability should still save the give year old child.

Next I argued that a saving some boy who is already five from a life of serious disability is morally equivalent to preventing some boy who hasn’t yet been born (or even conceived) from becoming disabled at the same age. Hence we can conclude that the harm of an abortion is less than the harm of a child being born with a serious disability. Now faced with the choice of choosing to bear a disabled child to term or have it aborted by definition the least harmful choice, aborting the child, is the morally better one⁴. Hence the moral obligation to abort a disabled fetus.

If this result still doesn’t seem right ask yourself the following. Suppose a couple goes in for in-vitro fertilization where they naturally fertilize more eggs than they implant. If more than enough eggs are harvested and inseminated but one of them turns out to carry a serious congenital disability isn’t it reasonable that the parents have an obligation to avoid using that embryo? If so why should the answer be any different if they haven’t pre-fertilized a bunch of other eggs? Isn’t abortion just the choice not to use a fertilized embryo?

The “But Then I/We Wouldn’t Exist” Argument

Their is a standard response to any statement that even suggests this sort of argument ought to be considered. The critic demands to know if the person making the suggestion is saying disabled people are worthless and we would be better off without them. If the critic is disabled themselves they equate the suggestion with the claim that they shouldn’t exist. While containing a kernel of truth these responses horribly distort the issue.

No this argument does not imply in the slightest that disabled people are worthless. What it says is that pretty much everyone would rather be healthy than seriously disabled. So in a sense it is saying we would be better off without disabled people, in the same sense someone who wishes to cure these disabilities is saying the same thing. It is a very different sense then the one which is being suggested, that we find the disabled so burdensome we should kill them off.

Ultimately this entire argument trades on am ambiguity in being ‘better off without’ some group. We make a huge moral distinction between eliminating or not taking care of those people who are actually born and choosing not to carry certain pregnancies to term. We can believe with perfect consistency both that we wouldn’t ‘better off without’ children whose existence is the result of failed birth control in the first sense of the term while supporting increased reliability for birth control. Similarly we can perfectly well value and respect those people who are disabled while believing the world would be better if fewer of them were born in the future. The language looks startling but is really saying nothing more disparaging of the disabled than a statement which says we would be better off without a world population over 3 billion is disparaging of some 3 billion people.

The “What About Stephen Hawking” Argument

The other response one frequently hears in this discussion goes something like this, “But if you aborted all the babies with congenital defects you wouldn’t have people like Stephen Hawking.” This is true but once again misleading. No doubt if we had another 7 billion homo sapiens we would have several more minds on Hawking’s level but this certainly doesn’t mean we should let the world population soar by this many people. The question is not whether some disabled people make amazing contributions to society, of course they do, it is whether they are any more likely to make them than healthy people which is doubtful and certainly false if we restrict our attention to the severely mentally retarded.

Moreover this argument once again misses the point. No one is saying the disabled are a drag on society we ought to get rid of them (at least no one I know). What I am saying is that pretty much everyone would prefer not to be disabled. If we can fulfill that preference don’t we have an obligation to do that?