When the House recently passed a healthcare bill which included restrictions on the use of federal money to subsidize abortion, liberals were up in arms.  ”It restricts choice!” they cried.  Let’s oppose it!  Let’s vote down the entire bill even if that means more people in the country will remain uninsured.

Now the Catholic Church in Washington D.C. is being told that in order to receive government funds, they must abide by a new D.C. anti-discrimination law in all their charities and employment practices in those charities.  The Church in Washington – part of a much larger, global organization – feels that it cannot submit to those rules and therefore will be forced to refuse said funds and close the doors on a number of the charities they currently run.

Liberals are once again up in arms.  ”What about the homeless?” they cry.   “How dare they not change their fundamental religious beliefs when that means leaving more homeless and poor without charitable services!”

Something about this smacks of double standards.

And thus we come to a very fundamental aspect of government involvement in just about everything.  The government limits choice.  The trade-off can be worth it.  It may mean less affordable abortions but more people covered.  It may mean gay people are given the right to wed, but religious charities have fewer dollars to provide for the poor.

The point I’m making is that there is such thing as consensus, but it usually comes at a cost.  It can’t simply be that everyone gets what they want, nor is it merely a question of ethics.  Reasonable people disagree on issues like abortion.  And we have a system of government that separates church and state, for better or worse.  This leads to concessions and compromises and trade-offs and people are always unhappy at the end of the day.

If we want government health care, maybe we have to give up federally subsidized insurance plans that cover abortion.  If we want gay marriage in D.C. and we also want religious charities to keep doing their good work, maybe we have to make exceptions for those institutions on religious grounds.  Or we can refuse them funding and find ways to implement those charities via the state or some other private charity.

Either way, I see pro-choice advocates and the Catholic Church doing very similar things here.  They’re both up in arms about the government making rules about how they spend the government’s money.  But it’s the government’s money, or rather it’s our money.  And that’s the way it rolls in a representative democracy.  Deal with it.

One fundamental flaw in the idealized concept of small town America is the lack of freedom to exit.  In small towns the freedom to exit is greatly reduced – especially in rural areas where towns are spread out.  Social choice and economic choice are both limited in these areas, and both are equally important.  The freedom to change schools or social circles is far more limited in small towns and rural areas than in larger cities and this can contribute to some of the problems we’ve been seeing in these areas such as rising meth abuse, high teen pregnancy, and other social ills once associated more with inner cities.

Much of this also has to do with economic class of course.  Freedom to exit is always more limited for the lower class, and this is exacerbated in small towns.  [Read more →]

By Jaybird

A while back, E.D. asked me to write an essay on the morality of the Panopticon. Luckily, I had been kicking around an essay defining morality in the absence of a God/architect for a while and so I was able to throw together a mashup essay. The first part explores morality and the middle explores moral imperatives that follow — odd ones, if you ask me, being godless, but one has no choice but to follow one’s path (this is a joke that will be a lot funnier in retrospect). Having explored both of those, it’s fairly simple to finish off exploring Bentham’s Panopticon and how it is not only not good, but how in practice it’s actively evil.

And so we get to begin at the beginning.

It seems to me that the issue of “morality” is really a discussion of choices. In a situation where you can choose X or Y, you pick one or the other (or X or Y or Z, or X or Y or Z or A, or so on and so forth). At the very base is the ability to choose this over that — indeed, if there is no free will, discussions of morality become moot, they’re just discussions we had no choice but to engage in.

Uncovering this atomic issue found in morality, we have to ask: “what makes X a more moral choice than Y?”

Deontology says that there are rules. Good consists of following the rules. This leads to the question “who made the rules?” which generally gets one of two answers:

1) God.

2) Shut up.

Utilitarianism says that we define good by outcomes and that we come up with “rules” based on what is most likely to end up with the best outcomes. There are a host of problems with this route as well: Who judges the outcomes? What about second-order outcomes? Third-order outcomes? Fourth-order outcomes? Umpteenth-order outcomes? So-and-so broke up with such-and-such and such-and-such’s ex married who-and-who and they gave birth to whom-and-whom, who went on to play Asa Trenchard in Our American Cousin the night that Lincon was shot (now you know the rest of the story). Once you get far enough away, surely you can say “well, that didn’t cause this”… but then, who gets to judge? The judge whose judgments lead to the best outcomes? Who is the judge of that?

Which brings us back to answer 2).

Now, one definition of morality I’ve seen is based on long-term good of society rather than the individual. The theory comes down to the closeness to the moral actor relative to society. If one picks immediate gratification (“I want to eat that bread, fuck that woman, take that candy”), one is generally considered “evil”.

People who think only of themselves but are longer-term in their thinking tend to get called “selfish”. People who consider only their immediate family are a little better. People who consider their extended family (but no further) tend to get classified as “tribal”. Up through “country” gets to another level of “morality”. The people who say “it’s all about the planet! It’s a brotherhood of man!” tend to be considered the most “moral”.

Some people see us as commonly descended from God (which, of course, ties us into more than just the planet but the universe) and some get there through the common ancestry from Lucy (or whomever) in Africa. Others yet make a claim to “the ecosystem” (and, sometimes, you see them making claim beyond it by pointing out that humans shouldn’t pollute Mars the way they did the Earth). The further the edge of one’s sphere is from one personally, the more “moral” society (or one’s sub-society) tends to categorize one.

But, in a nutshell, the further one says the edge of one’s sphere is from one, translates, generally, into how moral one is perceived to be… so long, of course, as one doesn’t go on to screw the proverbial pooch (or the literal one, depending on one’s proclivities). [Read more →]

~by sidereal

When I’m asked for my opinion on abortion (or when I give it unprompted) I have to decide how long a conversation I want to have.  If I want it over with, I use the crude political vernacular and say I’m a ‘progressive pro-lifer’.  If I don’t mind exploring the issue a little more I’ll say that in Seattle I’m pro-life but in South Dakota I’m pro-choice.  Which is to say that I believe a fetus has rights.  More rights than are generally acknowledged in more liberal circles, but fewer rights than are assumed in conservative country.

The fundamental weakness of America’s abortion debate is that an honest opinion is necessarily at least two dimensional.  Most voters agree — and current law requires — that a fetus’ rights increase over time.  And most voters agree that the rights of the mother depend on the circumstances of the pregnancy.  And yet our public discourse at its best relies on only one of these dimensions at a time, and at worst (and much more often) is 0-dimensional.  Are you ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’?  Pick a team.

To get a better picture of this problem, I’ve made a (crude) attempt at charting out a more complete picture of the competing rights of fetus and mother.  In an ideal world, when someone asked me my views on abortion, I’d pull a laminated copy out of my wallet and they could see the whole chart. [Read more →]

From hilzoy:

“I am strongly pro-choice, but I think it is perfectly possible to be opposed to abortion on principled grounds, and I think that it would be an enormous mistake to conflate all people who are opposed to abortions with either Dr. Tiller’s killer or the likes of Operation Rescue. That said, large elements of the anti-abortion movement have never done nearly enough to distance themselves from the violent and/or crazy parts of their movement. I hope they start to now.” [emphasis added]

Me too.

1 a: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings c: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction

~the definition of Life, from the Merriam Webster dictionary (online).

I cannot reconcile myself with the four pillars of the “culture of death.”   Each pillar finds its support at times by various proponents at many points across the political spectrum, making the discussion of life vs death very difficult to pin down politically.  To me, abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia and war are all acts which end the life of a person (or persons) – either a very young person (or fetus), a very bad (or perhaps tragically innocent) person, an enemy, or a person who is either very old or in a great deal of emotional or physical pain.  They are all living beings in possession of a soul, however damnably bad or temporarily interred to the womb that soul may be.  Soul aside, if you happen to not believe in it, they are still human beings possessed of a potentiality that death will snuff out entirely.

A fetus possesses the potentiality of full personhood.  Indeed, there is little else a fetus could become save a baby.  The point at which life begins, scientifically speaking, is the moment of conception.  Philosophically, of course, life is easily redefined.  The debate over abortion often falls on this point.  Ironically, outside of the abortion debate few arguments exist about say the beginning of life for a plant (germination) on either side of the political spectrum.

A criminal condemned to death possess the potentiality to change, to find remorse, salvation etc.  They are also, as I mentioned above, quite possibly innocent.  Beyond this, I oppose the death penalty because it oversteps the reasonable bounds of the state – and in a democracy in particular makes citizens complicit in the extinguishing of human life, whether or not they wish to be.

War, is of course, a difficult concept to grapple with because it is not (always) the decision of a powerful entity to take the life of a non-powerful entity (think: mother and fetus; state and condemned; etc.).  It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.  However preemptive, expansionary, or aggressive wars can rightly be called unjust.  They take the potentiality of peace away from another party – the invaded state or tribe or region.

Assisted suicide generally involves the will of an individual over themselves.  I can envision a state of affairs in which euthanasia becomes the accepted function of the state over people deemed incapable of choosing for themselves (as a matter of efficiency, perhaps), which is not a totally unreasonable fear.  (Read Lois Lowry’s The Giver)  Even without such insidious action by the state, is it possible that the act of assisting someone to end their life robs them of their potential future?  A future which could include breakthroughs in medical science to remove their pain, cure their disease, etc. or a future which might bring some unexpected happiness to assuage their depression?  Or for those simply too old to want to go on living, perhaps a natural death on their own without the need of an assistant to act as usher?

[Read more →]