h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"But the whole question of what to do with the new powers and capacities of science in this respect were broached by Mary Shelley in Dr. Frankenstein whose "demon" reproached his creator with having given him a life that was so cursed that people must inevitably be repulsed and terrified by him."

Seems like a good enough excuse to present "a cultured, sophisticated man-about-town"
(ends with a song ): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkG_bH4deqs&feature=related

Just to be clear, the paper that caused all this fuss distinguished what it called "post natal abortions" from "euthanasia". Euthanasia is - by definition - something done for the benefit of the person whose life is being ended. If and whether euthanasia is permissible in general, and with newborn babies in particular - is a subject of keen debate, but all sides accept the definition.

The paper was making the argument that abortions are allowed for reasons that are not dependent on the interests of the foetus but on the interests of the woman and/or existing children. And therefore, by extension, why not allow "post natal abortion" for reasons that are not related to the interests of the newborn. There are a number of other steps in there (read the paper linked earlier), but that's basically the argument. It's not particularly original - the "if abortion, why not infanticide' reductio argument is not new.

And no-one who is familiar with how applied ethics works (or who has the capacity to figure it out) should be at all surprised that debates like this go on.

Similarly, when the ethicist Peter Singer suggests that because the mental capacities of the great apes exceed those of a two year old child we may want to consider whether we should select young children for medical experimentation in place of apes, he probably isn't making a moral case for doing do but simply teasing out the ethical principles. (And, possibly, making a case for ending experiments on great apes.)

However...

QUESTION: Should the onus be on the ethicist to make their intentions clear? There are all sorts of ways their Modest Proposals can be taken out of context.

While it is true that abortions are allowed in the UK on the grounds of the impact of the pregnancy and childbirth on the mother, is it true to say that this is the same as saying that this is "in the interests of the mother" rather than that of the foetus/child.

The great Swiss historian Burckhardt, who insisted that human life throughout history has been essentially the same, merely changing in superficials, also asserted that at any point in his life he would willingly have changed his life for the state of never having been born. This was not an uncommon thing for people to feel in "the age of catastrophe" and similar periods.

The pro-abortion slogan was "every child a wanted child", when perhaps it should have said "every child a loved child".

There are many children who never know a mother's love, and yet in terms of "heart" and "soul" such things are crucial to our development as "human beings"

Is being born "a good thing"? Is life "a good thing"?

There was a case perhaps ten years ago in which a mother took out a civil action against the clinic that had been paid to sterilise her because she had finished with child-bearing. She subsequently became pregnant and gave birth to a healthy baby. She sued the clinic for damages and the additional expense involved in parenting another child.

The Judge found against her saying that he did not feel that he was entitled to set a precedent which claimed that a human life was 'de facto' bad, and that being a mother was a misfortune in a world in which so many people were not able to have children and were desperate to adopt.

Cass

I think what happened here is that the paper concerned was published in an academic journal and was somehow picked by someone who misunderstood it and wanted to make a fuss. The editor of the journal wrote a blog post explaining the context, and a bunch of people ignored pretty much everything he said and posted a load of ill-informed (and in places abusive) comment.

Lot of whipped up fautrage over very little, if you ask me. I'd say the duty lies with people who are going to complain about things to understand what it is that they're complaining about, rather than taking someone else's word for it. And that would involved reading the paper.

Personally, I think the paper is not good for two reasons. Firstly, their definition of person is bad. Secondly, and more importantly, they don't take politics into account. The reason we kill foetuses and not babies is not, and never was, anything to do with reason. It's the same reason that we feel happy killing a fish but not a cat. Some part of our brain empathises with things that we perceive as 'like us'. This is why anti-abortionists always want to show pictures of foetuses that look like babies, not because they are making a reasoned argument about their personhood but because they want to directly access that bit of your brain that thinks babies and kittens are cute.

So in a way I agree with the paper, but not for their reasons. I don't find much difference between a newborn and a foetus. A newborn is mostly just acting on instincts, like an animal, and has had no experiences of the world. Purely on the basis of reason there's very little coherent difference. However, the non-reasonable (I don't say unreasonable) political stuff is important. We don't, and I'd argue cannot, live in a world where our actions are governed only by reason. There is no objectively right thing to do. What is right or wrong is what we make it, and at some point that has to come down to what we feel is right or wrong.

So the paper is wrong because what is right or wrong is defined by a social, political process, and their arguments don't bear on that. And it's misguided because you don't change anyone's mind on a subject like this in a paper like that.

Interesting article, but once again the Daily Torygraph has done a fantastic job of sensationalising a story and misrepresenting an academic debate.

I do not think for a second any serious academic, healthcare professional nor credible journalist would ever consider infanticide ethical (save perhaps in an incredibly rare circumstance - discuss!?!).

However, occasionally in academic debate one may introduce an extreme viewpoint, or make a radical argument to generate genuine debate.

That somebody at Oxford has argued that killing a newborn baby is akin to killing a foetus or embryo does not mean that the person who argues such an extreme position is actually advocating infanticide, merely that someone has argued the point from a philosophical standpoint. Indeed this almost seems like an argument which may have originated from someone with a positively pro life viewpoint to support a the hypothesis that life begins at conception not at birth.

Whilst I was not present when this argument was raised, I could see how a "journalist" could in all honesty say someone at Oxford has argued killing babies is ethical, when in reality nobody at Oxford has accepted nor takes seriously the argument that infanticide is morally correct, including the individual who introduced the premis to the floor.

I conjecture the story is a gross misrepresentation of the debate. All in all a very poor story in my opinion.

Dogster I think you've missed the point slightly. The paper isn't about politics or odd human prejudices, but about reason and arguments. While some people may affect to believe that there's no such thing as right and wrong (though I've never met anyone who really does believe this, and I invite people to consider 'better' and 'worse' as alternatives) there is such a thing as good and bad arguments, rational and irrational. If the paper can show that there is no moral difference between a foetus and a newborn, and that difference in treatment cannot be justified rationally, it's succeeded in its own terms at least. It's philosophy, not sociology or social psychology or politics.

The whole debate about the moral status of the foetues and newborns reminds me of the 'bald man' problem. A man with a full head of hair is not bald, and a man with no hair is bald. But at what point does he go from not being bald to being bald? We could try to introduce a concept of 'balding' to help us, or 'slightly bald', or "balding temples of doom', or 'Shearer's island' and so on. But none of this particularly helps us. It's a continuum, and there will almost certainly be a degree of arbitrariness about where significant boundaries are set.

Does anyone thinks that that article help the debate?

I´ve had a look at it again.At the end they mix in the same bag diffent reasons where abortion can be applied. Doing that they are taking side with pro-life groups, even if that wasnt their intentions.

I think the article only helps to misguide people, and the issue that I thought was being debated, terminal illness at birth or unbearable lifelong sufferings, is messed with absolute barbarities like to kill a baby for economical reasons( they say that at the end of the article)

They also forget that by law, a newborn is a person.

I think they have failed completely.

@Otto:

I think I see where Dogster's coming from. No - the article isn't concerned with politics. It's arguing on purely philosophical grounds.

But my reading of what Dogster is saying (which is pretty much what I think - I may be projecting) is that we can't solve such issues within purely philosophical parameters. The issue of whether it is morally acceptable to kill a baby for reasons other than its own good involves decisions on a range of dimensions. There will be many different judgements on these - and on which take precedence. The decision inevitably becomes a matter of individual - let's call it 'taste'. At the collective level - who shares the same taste - it becomes political.

I don't thing any amount of moral philosophy can overcome that. It's value is in unpicking the dimensions so that at least we can talk about them intelligently.

I agree that there is a valid distinction between "Pure" and "Applied"...

But part of the problems that we face in the crisis of what used to be "Western Civilization" is a clear and common view of just where we draw the line between what we can think of doing and what we actually are prepared to do. It certainly seems to be fashionable to create film fantasies that try to model catastrophic "utopias"- not to mention video-games.

During the Age of Catastrophe 1914-1945 there were many examples of chaotic and unstable "Big Bang" times being used to justify the application of logical and scientific thinking "for the greater good"- and "Pure Science" could be harnessed to pursue "Final Solutions" like the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

Did not G.B. Shaw write that everything that was not forbidden should become compulsory bypassing all thoughts of judgement and discretion- that are the essence of freedom?

Cass

I agree that there is a valid distinction between "Pure" and "Applied"...

But part of the problems that we face in the crisis of what used to be "Western Civilization" is a clear and common view of just where we draw the line between what we can think of doing and what we actually are prepared to do. It certainly seems to be fashionable to create film fantasies that try to model catastrophic "utopias"- not to mention video-games.

During the Age of Catastrophe 1914-1945 there were many examples of chaotic and unstable "Big Bang" times being used to justify the application of logical and scientific thinking "for the greater good"- and "Pure Science" could be harnessed to pursue "Final Solutions" like the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

Did not G.B. Shaw write that everything that was not forbidden should become compulsory bypassing all thoughts of judgement and discretion- that are the essence of freedom?

Cass

Was there ever a clear and common view of where moral lines should be drawn?

"Was there ever a clear and common view of where moral lines should be drawn?"

What's striking (to me, anyway) about ethical and moral codes is not how much difference there is, but how much agreement there is. How many different cultures, religions, and philosophies have ended up with something like "treat others as you'd want to be treated"? Jesus, Immanuel Kant, and Bill & Ted are at one on this point.

Where there are ethical dilemmas and difficult ethical questions, it's because two (or more) commonly held values or principles have come into conflict. While there may be disagreement about how to resolve cases of conflict, there's a surprising amount of agreement about the underlying values and principles.

Looking back to the Ten Commandments, as a moral code. Now granted that's been very influential in shaping contemporary western codes, but it's stood up pretty well, on the whole. Take out the bits about God and there's a lot for humanists to agree with. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, don't kill, be nice to your mum and dad. Similarly with Aristotle's virtues/moral excellences. The only thing that reads oddly now is that - roughly - he regarded modesty as a vice and pride as a virtue.

Edward the Bonobo

Well I suppose this is a major theme in my "Modern Lessons from Medieval History".

"Medieval" and "Modern" History were both based upon what one historian summed up as the way that Roman Civilization had eventually pooled together all the wisdom/experience/and thought of the Mediterranean world- Greek thought and art, the religion of "The Fertile Crescent nb. Judaio- Christian, and Roman Law and military capability.

During the Dark Ages and long afterwards people looked back to "Golden Ages" when life had been more Civilized: and indeed that Mediterranean World (like the Western one) almost certainly collapsed as much from pressure from without to share in its benefits as it did from internal decline and fall.

Centuries of Dark Age gave way to Medieval stability based upon the "elective monarchies" of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, which established what G.G. Coulton termed the "Omnicompetence of the Church".. not an infallibility but the best that was available this side of Heaven.

On the continent the French ideal was realised in the reign of Saint Louis- very much in a continental tradition of the need for a central authority that was worthy to be obeyed, along with the "bourgeois" bureaucracy that Saint Louis created.

England, however, had its own rather different tradition in which the crucial dividing lines were "applied" and not theoretical or "pure".

In "Anglo-Saxon" England those who were known to be "oath-worthy" when accused of crimes had only to produce 12 "jurors" (men who were oath-worthy) who would swear to his/her innocence. Case closed.

Henry II as a Frenchman changed the jury system. But it is still the case that in England people are judged innocent or guilty according to the assessment of their peers and not of their superiors. And moreover for many centuries actual punishment was handed out by those who knew the individual and punished him or her according to their knowledge and experience of just how evil they were as members of the community.

Jesus had said "By their fruits shall ye know them"..

I was once a character reference for one of my Brixton pupils who was up in court accused of having kicked a police-woman, and I could say in all honesty that this would have been an act out of character. I was pleased when he was acquitted and told one of the officers afterwards that he should not feel bitter about losing his case.. The boy had seen the law in action, and if such a boy was to be criminalised we as a Society were heading in the wrong direction.

Make the punishment fit the crime. Many a true word spoken in humour.

An English tendency towards clemency and toleration became particularly significant after the Black Death when the Inquisition was used elsewhere to try to bolster and rebuild the position of the Church that had been shown as far from Omnicompetent in the face of the Black Death.

But of course in modern juries one of the first principles is that the accused are totally unknown to the jury who can only use their collective knowledge/common sense and what evidence is produced by the legal professionals in court- produced out of the pre-prepared witnesses.

Cass

@ Otto:

In principle - I agree. In practice...haven't all civilisations been prepared to redefine away their core ethical principles for convenience?

- Theft? Well colonisation doesn't count, obviously.

- Killing? Ah. No. We only meant killing *us* lot.

- Doing unto others...? Well there are certain things we can do to them, but they'd better not try that sort of thing on with us!

Perhaps people have simply been hypocrites down through the ages. On the other hand - did they see it that way? Were not some of the deviations from moral principles seen as specifically moral? Politics is trumps.

Otto Fisch

For almost a decade I taught a very successful course which all pupils in our school took as part of the English "God-slot" and which gave the pupils a half-GCSE.

The course was called "Religion and Life" and it looked at personal life issues as addressed by Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. Having intelligent pupils from all these faiths, and others, and none- in our multi-cultural South London we had some great discussions: and it was one of the most popular and successful things that the school did.

When a parallel course and text-book "Religion and Society" was created we adopted it for the year below.

The problem with science as a guide for life is that really it has to follow Compte's philosophy of trying to base all life upon those things that can be subjected to the light of reason and enlightenment, as if the dark, the subconscious, the dark matter, and all other things which people can imagine to exist do not exist at all.

Over many years of teaching I regularly had to remind colleagues after a spate of assaults that we were in "the rape season" when girls and women had not yet adjusted to the earlier time of nightfall and were walking in dark and deserted places as if there had been no change. Here is South London we have just had a series of stabbings which seem to show youths feeling more confident about moving around in places where they do not belong as the weather seemed more like May.

Cass

Edward the Bonobo

You wrote- "In principle - I agree. In practice...haven't all civilisations been prepared to redefine away their core ethical principles for convenience?"

But surely one of the features of Civilizations has been the way that the collective tries to use its unity in order to defeat the forces of Chaos, disorder, barbarity, evil.. And they determine "the place of slaughter" and the weapons, methods to be used, or at least combated.

There does seem to be here an East-West divide for the Mediterranean and its surrounding lands seems to have had a much greater potential for order and stability (up until perhaps now) than other places where, as the Japanese have just been reminded Nature can be Savage and wipe out just about everything.

Hence some of the earliest documents from Mesopotamia show the importance of a God of destruction and earthly power- Enlil the God of the Storm. When Enlil strikes just surviving to rebuild Noah like is an victory, and when at war you try to get Enlil on your side. Perhaps the Americans knew this when they launched "Desert Storm" and Saddam Hussein almost certainly knew it when he claimed a great victory in having survived the first Iraq War and set about rebuilding.

For me this Phoenix capability is the real sign of a Civilization. The French have it much more clearly than the British.

Cass

> In practice...haven't all civilisations been prepared to redefine away their core ethical principles for convenience?

I've seen the argument that moral progress consists largely of expanding the "in group". Hey, you can find that idea in the teachings of Rav Yeshua.

TRiG.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2010/06/14/why-being-liberal-really-is-better/

Otto,

For a start, I don't think we can consider that this paper was written entirely without considering politics: it was in the British Medical Journal, not in a philosophy journal. As to whether it succeeds as philosophy, I suppose that depends on how interesting you find their definition of personhood.

> Jesus, Immanuel Kant, and Bill & Ted

Much as I appreciate this most excellent list, they are all working within the same cultural framework (Christianity).

But I agree there are lots of basic things that most/all cultures agree on (they even tend to agree on their being one rule for us and one for them). I suspect this is more about pragmatic politics than moral philosophy though.