Wisdom and The Law

Many moons ago, I half-justified to a friend a particular deviation from Catholic moral theology by arguing that as long as he understood the rationale behind the Church’s prohibition, he could live according to the real moral truth (imperfectly encapsulated by a behavioral norm) despite his superficial non-conformance with the letter of the law. The subtext of that somewhat Gnostic argument? That much of the thou-shalt-not discipline of Scripture and Tradition was intended to provide concrete guidance to the great unwashed masses who lack the intellectual wherewithal to properly adjudicate complex ethical problems.

We, the wise, however, ought not to labor under such crude restrictions, better suited to toddlers than adults. Ergo, as long as we could tease out a logical superstructure of principle beneath those crusty old rubrics, we could live as enlightened souls who didn’t obsess over compliance with rules intended to shepherd the children around us.

Interesting, then, to read Aaron Rothstein’s review of Steven Weitzman’s Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom published in the current issue of The Weekly Standard. Rothstein — a medical student at Wake Forest — offers a refreshing insight into the interplay of wisdom and spiritual humility:

The rabbis conceived of gezeirah, alternatively known as building a fence around the Torah. One places certain restrictions on lifestyle in order to (in Rabban Gamliel’s words) “keep a man far from transgression.” … In other words, if we understand the secrets of why we do certain things or why certain laws exist, we remove the barriers that prevent us from breaking more serious laws. Solomon’s downfall, then, demonstrates the danger of too much understanding — a biblical version of the Faustian tale.

Put differently: Laws, both secular and religious, serve as markers that delimit acceptable behavior. In many cases, those markers sit very far away from grey zones, in order to protect people from the confusion reigning at morality’s twilight. When we, the wise, treat those markers as rules for the unenlightened — when we decide that our own wisdom is sufficient to light our way through that twilight — we risk missing the next set of markers, hidden in the darkness, roping off the point of no return. Ethics becomes tautology: A given act is acceptable because I believe it’s acceptable. QED. And the wisdom inherent in the original placement of those universal markers fades from public consciousness.

Having decided that I have ascertained the real lesson of the rules that govern everyone else, I can then presume to know when those rules may safely be broken. And what’s true of one’s private life — e.g., out-thinking biblical dietary norms — works in one’s public life, too. Anyone want to wager whether all the best and brightest at the National Security Agency will always elect to follow domestic-surveillance laws, enacted in messy and haphazard fashion by a dysfunctional Congress, when the intelligence analysts think they’ve got a compelling case to skirt them in service to their version of the public good?

We break laws with impunity when we think we understand the law’s purpose and decide that some other, higher, purpose ought to trump.

Therein lies the risk. Humility — a trait that often comes easier to men of intellectually modest means — helps us to acknowledge that the law’s markers serve a valuable purpose and were erected with foresight. When we lack that humility, we treat those markers as speed bumps, yet we rarely acknowledge that some wisdom superior to our own may have played a part in setting them.

Solomon fell because he out-thought the Torah and God decided to remind him that mere wisdom isn’t a license to disobedience. Today, we see case after case after case of men out-thinking both statutory and natural law, and we must ask: Are we really that wise, after all?

Inching Toward Cynicism

Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn’t the faintest idea what the heck is really going on.”  — Mike Royko

Cynicism gets a rough knock these days — it seems trendy to dismiss as merely sarcastic world-weariness the disposition to express the truth without varnish. Read up on quotes about cynicism; overwhelmingly, the aphorists seem opposed to it. Apparently everyone wants to seem positive, as if mere positivity were some sort of enlightened state of consciousness that allows its adherents to pierce the dark mist of bad attitude and thereby chart a pothole-free course to happiness, love and success.

Yet dismissing cynicism out-of-hand may be more irony than prudence. Royko probably captured it best: Relentless optimism in the face of experience isn’t virtue, it’s ignorance. Of course, a “been there, done that, doesn’t work” demeanor — the core of caricatured cynicism — may be taken to extremes. To bitterness, even. Such should be avoided. Nevertheless, an authentic cynicism that views the world as it is, without the artificial flavor of either saccharine or bitters, proves more helpful than harmful.

Cynicism, I think, is experience with (and acknowledgement of) the negative. When you’re working on a project that consistently fails, for example, merely being positive isn’t going to fix the problem. When the problem’s roots draw nourishment from politics, or other barriers sourced from human behavior, the temptation to overlook those barriers and instead find some external problem that can be wished away with magically happy thoughts isn’t going to affect the real world.

Cheerleaders for positivity frequently overlook human psychology as a contributor to failure or conflict. The optimist sees nothing but good intentions and assumes that problems relate to poor communication. Never is the possibility acknowledged that the public pronouncements and private motivations of others may not be in sync. Never is the possibility acknowledged that pre-rational conflicts in long-term goals or ethical paradigms affect people’s behavior. Never is the possibility acknowledged that things that are hard may well prove not worth doing.

Instead, we must always smile, be cheerful and remain optimistic. Even when experience screams for an alternate course.

I’m not a negative person by disposition, but when I see the same people making the same mistakes and pretending that happy thoughts will conquer all, then … I’m left to doubt whether they really understand what the heck is really going on.

Wisdom, Properly Understood

Someone who’s “book smart” might be able to prattle off many different facts and ideas about, say, theoretical physics — but remain utterly incapable of plugging in his DVR. A person who can single-handedly repair giant marine diesel engines may nevertheless not know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat. And we’ve all met folks who advance because of their charm, not their competence.

Aristotle taught that wisdom falls into two categories — theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom. The former addresses principles and facts and abstract knowledge; the latter real-world techniques for getting things done. Neither is better than the other — the world needs both. A person who excels at one isn’t better or worse than someone who excels at the other.

Modern psychologists suggest another distinction: The idea of emotional intelligence. Someone with a high EI knows how to work with people to achieve a goal even if he lacks both theoretical knowledge and practical good-sense. Which, I guess, explains Congress.

The world’s a funny place. When you take the three three major realms of wisdom — book smarts, street smarts, people smarts — and push them against each other, it’s tempting to rank-order them. Usually, this sequence is self-referential: You tend to either over-value what you have, or over-value what you think you lack and therefore feel bad about your perceived lack of self-worth.

A perfect person might have high scores in all three categories. No one’s perfect, though — not even me. (Hard to believe, I know.) Instead we all have varying skill levels in each category. Each person’s mix tells the story of who he is — and this story is neither good nor bad. Only a jackass thinks himself better than someone else because he’s got more book smarts or better practical skills or is more suave in a social setting.

The world needs a mix of wisdom levels. And people need to be pared with people who fall at different wisdom levels. The whole is stronger than its parts, so a couple or a group that offers different levels of wisdom is stronger than a group that consists of two or more of the same thing.

Wisdom seeks its compliment, not its mirror image.

Of Bread, Circuses and Ovaries

The 99 percent. The 47 percent. Sandra Fluke. Cardinal Dolan versus Secretary Sebelius. Single women giving 68 percent of their vote to Barack Obama. Each of these talking points waltzes around a thorny problem for American governance: The challenge of entitlement reform in a culture with far too many fallen soldiers in its “little platoons.”

The GOP consultant class, diving into the post-election crosstabs, are trying to make rain for themselves by noting “unexpected” electoral trends, like the rate of single women going for the Democrats. Although I certainly applaud their zeal to keep themselves employed, their potential future employers ought to ask, How did you clowns not see coming a trend as old as the Roman Empire and as evergreen as Tocqueville?

It’s a commonplace for economists to claim that people are fundamentally rational. In the aggregate, people tend to make prudent short- and long-term choices that redound to their own advantage. That’s why economics works fairly well as a predictive theory.

Concurrently, sociologists have lamented since the Moynihan Report the fracturing of the American family. The two-parent family, with a working father and a homemaking mother and a typical family size above the population-replenishment rate, is transitioning. Single parenthood, divorce, the sociocultural legitimization of same-sex attraction — these pressures have modified the political and economic calculus that the average citizen must factor. Cultural conservatives have done much to decry these shifts but precious little to change them apart from sitting on the sidelines offering boos and hisses.

Thus, the question: If it’s culturally and economically viable for a single female to thrive on her own terms — as promiscuous or as chaste as she wishes; married or unmarried; barren or fecund; straight or gay; obligated to her family or not — then what’s her Plan B when family and network support aren’t up to the task?

I’m not talking about the morning-after pill. Human society has always emphasized intergenerational support as a mechanism for protecting against illness, injury or old age. Within kin networks, in your youth you relied on your parents and grandparents, and in your old age you relied on your children. Extended family helped, too, and in many places affinity groups — churches, benevolent associations, labor unions — pitched in to cover gaps. Once upon a time we called these institutions “civil society.”

The atomization of the family and the turn toward more robust and unhindered individualism turned this model on its head. For many, many people — and most especially, single females — Plan B isn’t family or a social network, but the promise of baseline support from the government.

Yes, many Republicans mouth their outrage at this turn of events. Yet whether the sound bite is Romney’s 47 percent remark or Rush Limbaugh’s idea of a “nation of takers,” the reality is that a sizeable proportion of the population has no other reliable catastrophic fallback. No savings, no spouse, too small of a family. Only Big Government is positioned to fill the gap, and without that backstop, a person’s just one step away from the abyss with no safety net at the bottom.

And you know what? This trust in providential government is rational. Trusting the government to care for you, when you have no one else who will, provides psychological comfort. It’s also economically rational. Thus, voters will support politicians who protect their Plan B.

The conservative talking-points on Big Government ring hollow with folks who trust Uncle Sam to catch them if they fall. Part of this disconnect might be simple cognitive dissonance: People support “caring government” for others as a sign of enlightened social compassion without acknowledging that their support is partially selfish. Sometimes — look, for example, at the Occupy nonsense — a trust in government is a convenient outlet for envy.

In any case, a message of “smaller government” that “gets out of your life” appeals to people who follow the older life plan of larger families, connected local networks and wealth-building thrift. If you don’t have that infrastructure behind you, all you’re hearing is “we’re taking away your safety net, you leeches.” Appeals to fiscal restraint become too academic, too coldly calculating to resonate — especially when the “other side” argues that that the cost savings will simply revert to the wealthy.

The Republicans have a real rhetorical deficit on this point. I worry, though, that the Democrats have an even worse problem: Eventually, someone’s going to have to pay the bill. When you offer bread and circuses on the public dime, the public is going to demand that you get the dimes from somewhere. When the sources dry up, so also does the public benefit. When that happens ….

Democrats have been disingenuous about entitlement reform. It’s as if they believe they can find ways to fund a generous welfare state indefinitely, contrary to the experience of social democracies across Europe. Raising taxes on the wealthy won’t cut it, and they know it, but just like the Republican refuse to concede that that they’ve lost the culture war, the Democrats refuse to concede … math.

We’re therefore facing the odd problem of two major political parties cum ideologies that could be positioned to take up a reform mantle within their scope of interest, but instead pick incoherent fights with straw men.Republicans should probably lay off the moralizing about the shift away from the Eisenhower-style family. Democrats should probably stop lying about entitlement spending.

Either way, the next few decades will prove fascinating. The premise of American government rests on intermediary institutions and federalism to check the popular excesses that appear at the federal level. The more we take knock down those barriers, the more likely it is that our worst impulses will be unimpeded by our best instincts.

Post-Election Reflection: 10 Ideas for Conservative Renewal

Another election, another set of mixed messages from the electorate at large. And another round of self-flagellation by the Conservative Commentariat coupled with ill-advised gloating from the Left.

Core message: No cause for alarm, but there’s clearly opportunity to ponder course corrections and work on infrastructure. We need to get past the “America’s a center-right Reaganesque country” wishful thinking and take seriously the challenges presented by contemporary progressive ideology. We also must heed John Paul II’s sage counsel at his own election: Be not afraid. For with John Boehner in the House, the relative risk of untrammeled liberalism remains low. We didn’t get the win we wanted, but we did get status quo.

The comments that follow are shaped, in large part, from reading the last few days’ commentary from sources as diverse as FireDogLake, NRO, RedState, Salon, Talking Points Memo and Weekly Standard. The two Jays — Cost and Nordlinger — and The Three Wise Elders of Moe Lane, Peggy Noonan and George Will have contributed disproportionately to the analysis that follows.

  1. Don’t blame Romney.  Mitt Romney wasn’t a bad candidate. He ran a decent campaign. Some on the Right didn’t like him — such is an inevitability — but his campaign wasn’t a disaster. So don’t blame the Romney/Ryan ticket for losing. They ran a solid and honorable race. The GOP cannot move forward if scapegoating the nominee substitutes for genuine soul-searching.
  2. State-level organizations need fresh blood and a healthy dose of pragmatism. The GOP’s U.S. Senate holding in 2013 will consist of 45 seats. Conventional wisdom is that had Lugar not been successfully primaried by Mourdock, Indiana would have been a safe Republican seat. Had Akin not put his foot in his mouth, he probably would have easily trumped McCaskill. In 2010, the GOP put forth exceptionally weak candidates in Sharron Angle, Ken Buck and Christine O’Donnell. With better candidates, the GOP could easily have tied or even eked out a slender majority in the Senate by this point. The problem in these races isn’t the alleged “Establishment Republicans” intervening but rather of weak conveyors of candidates at the state level. For every satisfactory challenger to the status quo like Marco Rubio, you get the self-proclaimed witch that’s Christine O’Donnell. Worse, there’s every sign that that Tea Party has simply tried to insert itself into local politics at the precinct level, working their folks into the GOP’s base, so the GOP will continue to field subpar candidates as long as seasoned veterans and neophyte firebrands continue to battle in a way that leaves the Buckley Rule in tatters. State leadership really needs to recruit strong candidates and get them on a pathway to nomination victory early. Internecine warfare at the state level gives us a candidate-selection system that’s basically a giant Roulette wheel: You might get good, you might get bad, but no one knows until the primary’s over. (And like any game of Roulette, the House — the DNC — has an edge.)
  3. Nurture local volunteers. GOP efforts on election day, frankly, sucked — for the second presidential cycle in a row. The GOTV effort was dwarfed by the Obama campaign. This problem starts at the precinct and county levels. Too many Republicans prefer faux grassroots office over actually doing the hard work of building coalitions. When my own county GOP organization refuses to return phone calls and emails, and campaigns that do call (thank you, Pete Hoekstra) nevertheless don’t seem to align skills/experience with the nature of their requests, the question is: WTF? Maybe it’s a West Michigan thing, but it really seems like we have a substantial barrier at the grassroots level, with local GOP potentates acting complacent in their self-importance while the Dems run organizational circles around them. Case in point: My paperwork to be a precinct delegate this year “didn’t get filed” because I’m in the same precinct as the county chairman and he wanted to cast a ballot for his wife for some nominated office or something. But in our precinct, there was no effective GOP presence. No flyers, no door-to-door, no one to challenge Democrat yard signs in public easements. You’d think the precinct with the county chair could at least maintain a degree of visibility despite our overwhelming +D territory.
  4. The consultants deserve the boot. The scandal over Project ORCA and dumbfounded reaction of the RNC and the Romney campaign over actual voting results — when the Dems were basically dead-on accurate — suggests that the Republicans need to set aside the self-proclaimed smarter-than-thou campaign consultants and assemble leadership teams more nimble and less prone to score-settling. The performance of folks like Rick Beeson and Zach Moffatt this cycle, and Rick Davis and John Weaver for McCain, is beyond shameful. We don’t need consultants, we need candidates who know what it takes to win.
  5. The GOP needs better data scientists.  I pity Neil Newhouse, the veteran GOP pollster; he seems like a sharp fellow but he hasn’t kept up with the times. Polling science isn’t what it used to be, and the GOP has clearly fallen far behind — they can’t even gauge the nature of the electorate, let alone its behavior. Mike Flynn argues that the institutional blindness of the Romney campaign came from its focus on metrics irrespective of the world behind those numbers. I find his point persuasive. Team Obama put its data scientists at the heart of the campaign and built everything else around them; Team Romney put the consultants at the heart and they cherry-picked the polls to meet their metrics and in so doing, lost sight of the real dynamic within the campaign.
  6. Conservatism needs to move beyond binary policy preferences. The very chaos of the Democratic coalition is, in a sense, also its biggest strength: You can deviate more from the party platform and still be a “good Democrat” to much greater degree than within the GOP. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than on gay marriage: The Dems favor it, by and large, but opposition isn’t a disqualifier (q.v., black preachers); on the GOP side, vocal opposition seems to be something of a litmus test, especially among the cultural conservatives. What galls about this is that “strengthening marriage” as a campaign slogan is exclusively about gay marriage — whereas in truth, the problems with marriage as a sociocultural institution run far deeper than that and are rooted in shifting norms among heterosexual youth such that gay marriage isn’t even a dot on the radar screen. Or take environmentalism: Many like to dismiss global warming as a “hoax” but why bother picking a fight about science when you could follow Roger Scruton’s brilliant advice about promoting conservation rooted in loving where you live? If the GOP adopted Scruton’s advice wholesale, we’d probably neutralize “environment” as a political issue within a fortnight. Policy positions should not be distilled into a false binary-choice slogan about about some isolated aspect of a larger and more complex issue.
  7. Think carefully about turnout in light of state and local ballot proposals.  People who are less inclined to vote for individual politicians may nevertheless be induced to vote because of specific ballot initiatives and referenda. In Michigan, for example, we had six significant proposals that drew voters, and Grand Rapids — the state’s second-largest city — included a controversial marijuana-decriminalization proposal that ended up passing. Gay marriage won at the ballot in four states. Guess who showed up to vote? Republicans really need to get ahead of ballot initiatives.
  8. Articulate a coherent, positive message. It feels like the GOP is the party of “no” — no new ideas, no bold policy innovations, no willingness to work for the best interest of the common treasury. Conservatism in the Goldwater-Reagan era, bolstered by National Review and Firing Line, rose to the defense of a conservative movement that articulated bold visions and the polices to execute them: Defeat the Soviet Union, lower taxes from 70-percent highs, deregulate massive investments like telecoms and the airlines. Yay for us, we did it: The Soviet Union has been consigned to the ash heap of history, many industries have deregulated and tax rates are relatively low. So what’s next? No one knows. A vision that’s “smaller and smarter” doesn’t actually mean anything in the real world. A vision to defeat America’s enemies abroad in 2012 doesn’t mean staring down Brezhnev, it means fighting dozens of terrorist movements across the globe, but no one wants to do the work that such an effort would entail. Lowering taxes incessantly does have a minimal ceiling given that we can’t effect a zero-percent rate. So, what’s the vision? What’s the reason to vote for Republican’s that isn’t, fundamentally, a reaction against a progressive initiative? When will Republicans define their own platform instead of defining it against the opposition? The GOP can’t win when it’s presenting to the electorate nothing more than a referendum on progressivism without any real, substantive, positive alternative.
  9. Evacuate the bubble. Having despaired of the left-leaning influence of major cultural institutions like the mainstream media and Hollywood and the Ivory Tower, conservatives opted to erect something of an opposite number. Instead of moderating the left-wing pull of these institutions, we built our own in opposition. Thus, instead of pulling the major news networks and newspapers more toward the center, we relied on Fox News and The Washington Times and the WSJ editorial board to serve as balance. Instead of fighting for conservatism within the classroom, we built Ave Maria University and Liberty University. Instead of mainstreaming Republican sensibilities within Hollywood, we get 2016: Obama’s America. The inevitable outcome is that too many conservatives don’t need to fight for their beliefs anymore — they can just sit in the echo chamber. Of course, the rest of the country still gets left-leaning content, so we really haven’t solved the problem. I’d rather see MSNBC and Fox News both go away if it meant that the mainstream press operated from a more fundamentally balanced perspective.
  10. Stop giving shade to irrational policy preferences under the Tree of Conservatism. I’m still at a loss to understand why some particular policy preferences are considered conservative. It seems like certain groups — like evangelicals — have had their beliefs canonized, despite the very legitimate problems that these beliefs incur vis-a-vis pure conservative principles. For example, it’s more conservative to reform the institution of marriage (possibly, to include same-sex marriage) than to hold to a sectarian vision from the Eisenhower years that clearly doesn’t hold any longer. It’s more conservative to focus on fair-use conservation than to reject all environmental policy. It’s more conservative to tax at the “right” rates than to play a screwy game of tax tiers and sundry credits and deductions. It’s more conservative to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of immigration through smart regulation than to demonize “illegals” with a broad brush. It’s more conservative to bolster federalism and local control than to consent to the federalization of policies that some conservatives favor. The GOP, as the conservative party, must elevate conservative principles — but those principles shouldn’t be retrofitted to legitimize policy preferences that aren’t authentically conservative just because coalition members favor them for non-ideological reasons.

Ten theses. Ten ideas for course correction for the GOP and the conservative movement. I make no claim to being a Wise Guy who knows what’s best. I do pay attention to many different sources and see too much sophomoric reasoning substituting for informed policy-making and too much inside-the-bubble wishful thinking substitute for honest analysis.

I don’t think the GOP is in decline. I don’t think the Dems are on a long upswing. I think right now, the GOP has ample opportunity to fine-tune its operations and re-think some pernicious policy preferences that don’t really belong to conservatism.

More than anything, I think John Paul the Great was right: Be not afraid.

Heterosexual Fecundity: A Coda to the Gay Marriage Argument

Of all the reactions I’ve seen to my recent blog post against gay marriage, the one that surprises me the most (besides Frankie Machine’s half-assed non sequitur) is the curious counter-claim that homosexual marriage should be permissible because straight people who cannot or will not reproduce can also get married.

I think people who raise the “sterile heterosexual” rebuttal believe they’ve advanced an intellectually serious counterfactual to my central claim, but I don’t think their logic holds.

Let’s begin by assuming that my central argument is correct and we all concede that by definition, marriage is no more and no less than a legally and culturally respected contractual framework that provides for the rearing of children and offers a socially useful infrastructure for protecting and privileging close-kin relationships while legitimizing the intergenerational transfer of property.

The state’s compelling interest in supporting child rearing — augmented by a series of tax benefits and an inheritance mechanism — confers publicly financed incentives, some of which are conditioned on the actual production of children and some which are latent in the structure of the marriage institution itself. People who take advantage of those financial benefits without producing offspring are functioning as free riders: They’re being unfairly enriched by participating within a system for which they aren’t entitled to membership, draining the state’s resources without upholding their end of the baby-making bargain.

A few observations:

  1. That heterosexual free riders unfairly benefit from marriage doesn’t mean that homosexuals also deserve a free ride. It’s illogical to claim that one abuse of a system justifies a second abuse; the logical solution is to limit heterosexual free ridership, instead of opening the floodgates to homosexuals. This counterpoint highlights the most significant deficiency with the “sterile heterosexual” rebuttal.
  2. In a practical sense, it’s very easy to see that homosexual couples are biologically incapable of procreation. Heterosexual couples, by contrast, are almost never obviously sterile; the only way to tell for sure whether a heterosexual couple is capable of procreating is to subject both parties to invasive and expensive fertility testing. Were the state to require fertility testing as a prerequisite to obtaining a marriage license, the result is either a very steep bill for the state (and almost surely, in the aggregate, failing a cost/benefit analysis) or the effective restriction of marriage only to the wealthy (which contradicts the purpose of marriage as the optimal family structure for child rearing). The least-worst outcome is probably something very similar to what we have today: Marriage open to heterosexuals on the belief that enough will procreate to justify the public expenditure on tax benefits without incurring extra costs assocated with new barriers to entry.
  3. In a cultural sense, admitting non-fecund heterosexuals into the institution of marriage serves a secondary purpose of reinforcing the desirability of marriage as a normative family structure. Socializing children to look to marriage as a bedrock social arrangement serves a useful public purpose in itself — enough, I think, to partially mitigate the free rider problem for sterile couples.

Thus, although sterile heterosexuals are certainly a problem, they’re not the problem that gay-marriage advocates think. The free-rider nature of non-fecund heterosexual unions is a defect that requires amelioration, not a systemic defect that therefore justifies gay marriage.

Indeed, it’d be more rational to exclude known sterile heterosexuals (e.g., the elderly) than to include homosexuals within the marriage institution, because as long as the state provides taxpayer-funded benefits to married couples, then the state incurs a cognate obligation to ensure that those tax dollars are expended for that purpose with as little “leakage” as possible. Free riders constitute a “leak” in the system — one that should be plugged, not enlarged.

From a purely public perspective, the only way to get around the free rider problem is to create an institution (e.g., civil unions) that don’t confer the same family-raising economic benefits as marriage.

If, and only if, the state removes all child-rearing economic benefits from the institution of marriage, does it make sense for the state to sanction marriage among the homosexual sterile or deliberately non-fecund.

Until then, no number of childless married couples will ever justify opening floodgates to even more free riders.

A Comprehensive Case Against Gay Marriage

Few subjects prompt acrimonious ideological warfare as effectively and as swiftly as gay marriage. In one corner, social conservatives and some libertarians offer a host of religious and secular arguments against the idea; in the other corner, progressives and activists pile on their mostly emotive counter-arguments. The scene evokes an 18th-century gunship battle, with both combatants firing their broadsides yet despite barrage after barrage, both miss more often than they hit.

Introductory Points

No intellectually honest discussion of gay marriage can proceed without a few ground rules:

  1. Rational discussion requires the concession that local communities have the right to set normative standards that circumscribe the outer bounds of individual behavior. If you believe that “society” (defined variously as the government, or a local cultural group, or local community) lacks the right to set authoritative cultural standards that can bind individuals within that polity, then there’s no possibility of reasonable discussion on the subject of gay marriage.  There is simply no way around this barrier: Either you accept that the community can set the boundaries of acceptable social behavior, or you don’t.  If you don’t, then your radical individualism — however laudable in principle — sets you in a sociopolitical framework too far removed from mainstream thought and too absolutist in its inclinations to accommodate your views in the context of a pro/con debate. But be careful: Lots of people think “society” has no right to legislate against what they favor, but does have the right to legislate against what they oppose.
  2. Opposition to gay marriage does not imply anti-gay prejudice.  Claims that gay-marriage opposition necessarily constitutes bigotry or homophobia are intellectually dishonest at best and morally grotesque at worst. For the record, this writer is a practicing bisexual who has had relationships with both men and women. My opposition to gay marriage is based on principle, not a disdain for The Other, and I’m perfectly comfortable on a personal level with gay marriage (including participating in one).
  3. However, prejudice is real and it does play into the debate on a pre-rational level.  There’s plenty of disdain for gay folk out there; to pretend that anti-gay sentiment doesn’t color opposition to gay marriage in at least some contexts is to stake a position ridiculous to the point of irrationality.
  4. Homosexuality occurs naturally. It’s OK to be gay or lesbian, and homosexuals and bisesxuals should enjoy the full scope of their rights and liberties under the law. Adopting a contrary position changes the nature of the debate.
  5. Marriage as an institution has a purpose that isn’t subject to individual, personal redefinition. Some people choose to view marriage as meaning one particular thing instead of accepting its full definitional context — a situation rather like someone looking up a word in a dictionary, discovering that the word has five different lexical entries then deciding that the word can only mean entry No. 2. Preferential emphasis is one thing; willful blindness to the full scope of the subject is quite another.
  6. The definition of marriage has both secular and religious characteristics. Sectarian arguments won’t persuade unbelievers, so they won’t be emphasized in this discussion. Sectarian arguments often prove powerful but they only persuade people who are sympathetic to the sect’s epistemological framework. In the context of a broad public debate about gay marriage it’s preferable to set aside sectarian rationale so as to maximize one’s argumentative reach.

Six starting principles. Let’s explore, next, the outer boundaries of the subject matter.

What Marriage Is

In its most fundamental sense, marriage is no more and no less than a legally and culturally respected contractual framework that provides for the rearing of children and offers a socially useful infrastructure for protecting and privileging close-kin relationships while legitimizing the intergenerational transfer of property.

In almost every known civilization, marriage’s first function was to support child rearing. Plenty of evidence suggests that children flourish best in a stable two-mixed-sex-parent household; the evidence is sufficiently compelling that the best study to date, the New Family Structures Survey recently compiled by Texas researcher Mark Regnerus, prompted a violent reaction from sociologists and gay-rights activists, who attacked the conclusions but could not successfully counter the research.

Because of the central role marriage plays in the formation of stable environments for child-rearing, the state has a compelling interest in developing a robust marriage framework.

Marriage’s roots draw nourishment from two separate springs. First, from a biological perspective, traditional marriage marks the social manifestation of pair-bonding for the purpose of mating. Evolutionary biologists suggest that the long-term survivability of offspring is highest with both parents supporting the child during infancy; both parents have a vested interest in their offspring surviving to adulthood. Because a woman always knows that she’s the mother of her child, whereas a man has to take it on faith that the resources he’s expending to raise a child are in fact supporting his child, human pair-bonding keeps men around to support the woman and child and gives the men reasonable assurance that the children they’re raising are their own. Perhaps the best treatment I’ve seen on this point comes from noted scholar Jared Diamond’s short but powerful book, Why Is Sex Fun? — his overview addresses the principles of evolutionary biology that lead to enjoyable sex, pair bonding and child rearing.

Second, marriage provides a legally binding infrastructure to help determine legitimacy (e.g., inheritances and other forms of intergenerational wealth gransfer) and provide for kin support (e.g., a widow’s maintenance or the guardianship of minor children). Without the web of relationships that attend to marriage, chaos would result in any human settlement that wasn’t already comprised of pure-blood kin. Imagine life in an early Iron Age village of 100 people — without universal respect for marriage, any man’s woman is fair game for rape. If parents die, children may simply have their parents’ assets seized by the strongest neighbor and in general authority would flow solely by force of will without being circumscribed by culturally endorsed networks of relationships. In addition, marriage to an “outsider” becomes legitimate, improving the genetic diversity of the local community and building networks among micro-communities.  Marriage as a child-rearing institution, then, has proven necessary for human flourishing.

Clear-headed understanding of marriage requires careful delineation of purpose against possible use. Consider the case of a simple hickory hiking staff. The purpose of the staff is to stabilize a hiker’s gait and provide additional support while crossing uncertain terrain. The staff may well permit ancillary uses like serving as a tarp pole, rattlesnake mover or makeshift camera stabilizer, but the purpose of the staff isn’t to do any of those extra things. A thing — a cultural institution as well as a simple material object — has a purpose (a teleology or final cause), but it also admits to ancillary uses that may or may not be related to its purpose. Likewise with marriage: Its purpose is child rearing in a social setting, but its ancillary benefits include nurturing love and helping your mate in old age. Too many conflate “ancillary benefit” and “purpose” in ways that make a clear understanding of marriage more difficult to share across ideological lines.

Over time, marriage as an institution has changed and different cultures have embellished the institution in different ways. Among the wealthy throughout history, for example, marriage rarely dealt with love — parents arranged marriages among their offspring for political or economic advantage. In some places, plural marriage took off; in other places, divorce is illegal. Inheritance laws differ widely, with the British aristocracy adopting an “everything to the firstborn male heir” custom and the French often diluting an inheritance among sons. In some places, marriage is a state affair; in other places, marriage is foremost a religious event that receives civil recognition.

Although the specific forms of the institution change, its purpose — to create a cultural and legal framework for child rearing and intergenerational property transfer — remains constant. And throughout history, there are very few recorded instances of socially acceptable same-sex marriage. Why? Because same-sex couples don’t participate in the purpose of marriage and therefore have no claim to its ancillary benefits.

What Marriage Isn’t

Jonathan Rauch argues, in a book-length treatment, that marriage is merely a culturally and legally recognized relationship for long-term aid and mutual support.  As such, its primary goal is to encourage pair bonding, not child rearing. For Rauch, marriage protects against loneliness; child-rearing isn’t a primary focus, and gay marriage in particular provides assorted social benefits like “civilizing” young gay men into less risky relationships.  His line of reasoning provides a philosophical framework for much of the pro-gay-marriage argument. The problem with it, though, is that by cutting out child rearing from his definition, he’s made the case for an institution that isn’t marriage. As we’ve noted earlier, you cannot decide that a word with five dictionary entries really only has one, two or three. You cannot write child-rearing and intergenerational property transfer out of the picture simply to re-define the term in a way that fits your latent political preferences and their attendant arguments. Marriage is what marriage is; what Rauch describes is a different institution altogether. (Perhaps, I’d respectfully suggest, civil unions.) In a very real sense, what Rauch did has all the semantic value of pointing at a pitchfork and calling it a “pointy thing” and then suggesting you can use that pointy thing as a shovel because, well, it’s long and has a point at the end.

It’s common among the hipster crowd — the oh-so-trendy folks whose knowledge of complex social issues is no deeper than the smarmy slogans distilled into a bumper sticker or a button — to support gay marriage “until love is equal.” This sentiment confuses the purpose of marriage with its ancillary benefits. The purpose of marriage isn’t to legitimize love. Indeed, if you require the state to affirmatively recognize your emotional attachment to someone else, then you might have a self-esteem problem.  Marriage and love aren’t synonyms. The state has no compelling interest in splitting apart or de-legitimizing same-sex love nor does the state have a compelling interest in recognizing it. The state does have a compelling interest in creating a web of legal and financial relationships — that thing we call marriage — to nurture the next generation of citizens. In Michigan, for example, the state is blind to whether two people love each other but pays very close attention to those who enter into marriage, because the state’s interest in raising that next generation is expressed in part through a system of tax credits, tax rates and related benefits intended to support family growth. Because same-sex couples do not raise children except in fleetingly rare instances, the state obtains no greater good from conferring the benefits of child-rearing upon those who don’t procreate — indeed, the state loses dollars in the long run. Thus, from a governmental perspective, supporting same-sex marriage with the financial benefits intended for child rearing constitutes a waste of tax dollars by the state and unjust enrichment by those who receive those benefits.

Finally, many gay-marriage activists claim they’re advocating “equality” but what they’re really fighting for is a very specific lifestyle. They want the social benefit and prestige of marriage and condemn as “haters” any who oppose the goal. Yet it’s instructive to see that the fight for gay marriage is very much a cause célèbre of the wealthy Left — the folks who already have access to money and prestige and power. There’s very little activism among the poor and among minorities for gay marriage. In fact, African Americans constitute the biggest block against it in the U.S., a point that’s making Democratic Party mechanics increasingly strained.  Marriage isn’t a marker of social status, a thing to be acquired like a Porsche or a midtown condo or a Pomeranian. That the activism in favor of gay marriage hails mostly from wealthy elites is … curious.

Bad Arguments, Rebutted or Refuted

Many bad arguments muddy the waters:

  1. Gay marriage will “civilize” gay men. In fact, 75 percent of same-sex marriage licenses in San Francisco and Massachusetts were issued to lesbians. Current statistics on gay men raise real questions about whether marriage will do them more harm than good. There’s ample survey data to note that gay men who’ve been together for one year as a couple nevertheless have an average of eight different sexual partners, and that of gay men in a relationship when surveyed, 42 percent of them have been together for three years or fewer. In addition, in jurisdictions that have authorized same-sex marriage or legally equivalent unions, less than five percent of eligible couples pursue marriage in the first place. When you add the social, legal and cultural costs of such marriage-related problems as divorce, property splits, alimony and child custody, it’s not altogether clear that the permanence implied by marriage (despite the impermanence of so many recent heterosexual marriages) is a good fit with current gay culture.
  2. You can’t exclude gays from marriage unless you exclude sterile heterosexuals. It’s a common, sophomoric retort that limiting marriage to those who can naturally reproduce is a farce because sterile heterosexuals, or heterosexuals who don’t intend to procreate, can still get married. Such statements constitute a red herring. No social institution paints with a fine brush; in any case, the institutional cost of testing each and every heterosexual couple for their capacity to procreate would impose significant costs that aren’t offset by avoiding the provision of benefits to non-reproductive hetero couples. Simple cost-benefit arithmetic says it’s expensive to test hetero couples for their fecundity, whereas you can just eyeball same-sex couples for free to know that they are incapable (as a couple) of procreating. Regardless, from a cultural perspective, admitting sterile heterosexuals into marriage reinforces the validity of marriage as both an ideal outcome and a normative institution for mixed-sex couples — a point worth celebrating as an object lesson in cultural success during a child’s socialization.
  3. Objections to gay marriage hail from religious bigotry.  The insinuation that the only reason to oppose gay marriage is because one’s pastor wills it constitutes a flimsy straw man. Although it’s true that many faith traditions oppose gay marriage, not all opposition to gay marriage arises from within organized religion. The suggestion that all opposition to gay marriage secretly hails from the pulpit, and therefore may be dismissed, is merely a bald attempt at de-legitimizing the integrity of those who oppose gay marriage.
  4. There won’t be a slippery slope for the redefinition of marriage and families. Some breathless social conservatives complain wistfully about all sorts of potential future redefinitions of marriage along a very slippery slope. While slippery-slope arguments, in themselves, are inherently weak, there’s some evidence that the logic of same-sex marriage doesn’t create the firewall between same-sex marriage and many other sorts of legally sanctioned relationships that proponents claim. For example, the California legislature is debating a bill that would authorize judges to find that some children have more than two legal parents and Brazil recently recognized a civil union consisting of a man and two women. Decrying the slippery-slope argument is harder when you’ve already begun the slalom.
  5. Same-sex partners deserve equal treatment under the law. This point is freely conceded, and any legal impairment ought to be dismantled. However, it’s worth pointing out that marriage in itself, because it excludes homosexuals on a purely functional basis, doesn’t provide a silver bullet. For example, there’s no effective difference in joint ownership of property or banking accounts between married and unmarried couples — in both cases, the paperwork to add a name is exactly the same.  Even the lament about visiting a same-sex partner in the hospital is a bit of a diversion, since any patient can allow any visitor at any time, and even things like end-of-life choices are governed by advanced directives, living wills and such — documents that could specify a spouse, or anyone else. Other goods, like retirement benefits, are trickier in that there’s a presumption of intergenerational wealth transfer at stake, and most employers are free to set survivability policies on their benefit plans.
  6. Marriage equality.”  There’s been an astonishingly effective turn of phrase of late, that instead of calling it “gay marriage” we call it “marriage equality,” ostensibly to evoke a parallel to the civil-rights era. The trouble is, the homosexual cause isn’t analogous to the civil-rights movement, insofar as gays can hide their minority status at will whereas a black man or a Hispanic woman cannot hide his or her physiology. You cannot identify a gay person by sight unless that gay person presents himself in a manner that deliberately evokes homosexual stereotypes — for example, by wearing that lovely T-shirt that asks, “Does this cock in my mouth make me look gay?”  (Yes, hon. Yes it does.)  In any case, the “marriage equality” construct presupposes that barring gays and lesbians from the institution of marriage is, ipso facto, an act of overt discrimination. If you accept, however, that marriage properly understood cannot admit homosexuals, then “marriage equality” becomes a slogan that obscures more than it illuminates. Gay marriage simply isn’t a civil-rights issue in any standard sense of the idea.
  7. Heterosexuals have already messed up marriage.  While it’s undoubtedly true that a divorce rate above 50 percent, the trend of “starter marriages” and longer periods of cohabitation have undermined a traditional cultural conception of marriage, no amount of hetero misbehavior serves to change the qualitative definition of marriage such that the child-rearing aspect is removed. It’s unfortunate that straight people have screwed up a good thing, but their behavior doesn’t thereby legitimize further violence against the institution of marriage.

Critical Questions

As a means of arriving at a deeper understanding of the relevant issues, it’s worth both sides asking a few questions:
  • Does it make sense to impose a costly legal framework upon a complex web of interpersonal relationships — including divorce, alimony, property splits, child custody — for a gay population that (statistics show!) is likely to demonstrate a higher relationship churn rate than heterosexuals?
  • Should states that recognize common-law marriage recognize common-law same-sex marriage? What might common-law same-sex marriage mean for child custody?
  • Is the benefit of a stable, two-parent (male/female) household upon a child’s long-term success vector sufficient in itself to justify opposition to gay parenting?
  • If future medical advances allow two same-sex couples to procreate without the use of a surrogate, should the law recognize the couples’ parenthood? If so, must conservatives re-evaluate whether parents so situated have overcome the child-rearing barrier and thus are candidates for civil marriage?
  • Can homosexuals obtain the effective benefits of marriage without entering into the institution of marriage? If so, then why push the issue?
  • If homosexuals really respected the institution of marriage in the first place, why are so many activists working so hard to tear it down and replace it with something it isn’t?

An Ideal Outcome?

Compromise is the art of the possible. Remaining affixed to a point in the distant past and clinging to some prior time’s specific implementation of a social institution may feel natural for conservatives, but if conservatives want to “conserve” the institution, they must allow the minimally necessary changes that arise as a given society matures. Liberals, for their part, cannot continue to foster a radical individualism that paints today’s pleasures as the highest good — sacrificing a child (through abortion on demand) or a child’s long-term success (through sub-optimal family structures) simply because adult liberals want to have their cake and eat it, too.

In other words: In this particular ideological debate, I declare a pox on both houses.

Perhaps the best solution is to pull out Solomon’s sword to give each side their half of the baby:

  • All must accept that marriage exists as the union of one man and one woman oriented toward child rearing, with socioeconomic benefits that reflect the state’s interest in raising new citizens and a body of supporting regulations that protect the intergenerational transfer of wealth and recognize close-kin lineage for the purpose of successor guardianship, etc.
  • All must support easier access to civil unions. Note that these unions need not be limited to same-sex partners nor be exclusive, nor limited even two people; it’s reasonable that a mother and son who live together to save on expenses could have a civil union that recognizes their shared financial arrangement. Or, the members of a frat house could engage in a group civil union that acknowledges their shared liability or property interest. People could engage in several “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships” at once and these legally recognized relationships could be created or broken with ease. In short, it’s an extension of standard contract law — but one that explicitly identifies social relationships instead of the transfer of goods or services.
  • Religious marriage should retain its religious character; faith traditions that decline to honor same-sex unions should face no discrimination penalty.
  • Same-sex marriage warrants further review if and when same-sex couples can routinely procreate without the use of a donor or surrogate.

Concluding Thoughts

Inasmuch as I loathe the self-righteous posturing of someone like Rick Santorum, who tells Chicken Little stories about the collapsing sanctity of marriage, I cannot bring myself to support the disestablishment of a cultural institution that has served human flourishing so well for so long. Especially when the argument in favor is so distressingly weak.

You cannot remove child-rearing from the definition of marriage without turning the institution into something that’s different from marriage. And if you do that, then what’s the whole point behind the original redefinition? More than anything, this is a fight over what a word means, and semantic arguments usually aren’t worth the bother.

I am pro-gay. I very strongly desire that gays, lesbians and bisexuals should have equal access to happiness and personal fulfillment. I just don’t think that the argument in favor of gay marriage is persuasive enough; what’s more, I think the motivation behind the push for gay marriage isn’t as pure as it seems. Too many wealthy Progressives are pushing for it as if it were a fashion accessory, with almost no concern about the damage they’re inflicting on institution per se or acknowledgement of their access to alternative options (like civil unions) that are just as effective at rendering the economic and legal framework they need to facilitate long-term loving relationships. And how many urban poor or lower-middle-class minorities are clamoring for gay marriage?

The real solution rests in a different understanding of contract law — one that makes it easier to establish or dis-establish legally recognized and lawfully binding interpersonal relationships.

The rest is merely sound and fury.

[EDIT 9/9 … several post-publish language tweaks.]

Thoughts on the Moral Permissibility of Abortion

An extended coffee-shop conversation with Abbi yesterday prompted the observation that I haven’t bothered to put to writing an extended treatment about the moral permissibility of abortion.

The most intriguing aspect of yesterday’s discussion was Abbi’s claim that she hasn’t encountered many substantial, thoughtful defenses of a pro-life agenda. Although she’s still a bit of a young little whippersnapper, she demonstrates clarity and charity of thought and seems, intellectually, to outrank most of her peers. So an idiot, she’s not — but smothered by an environment of hyper-reflexive progressivism at art school? Quite possibly.

But I digress.

Any solid treatment of abortion intended to apply outside of a particular faith tradition must not be rooted in explicitly sectarian terms. Thus, despite my Catholicism, I cannot appeal to formal Catholic doctrine if I wish to convince an atheist of my position. So this treatment will, by necessity, skip over the religious arguments and rely instead on pure philosophy.

First things first. The problems of rape, incest, fatal fetal deformities and maternal risk constitute special forms of the question and will be addressed later. For the bulk of this treatment, assume that the fetus is healthy and the conception was voluntary.

Now …

Continuum of Life

Human life exists as a pure and unbroken continuum, from a four-cell embryonic cluster to a 115-year-old woman on her deathbed. From conception until death, the organism is, and can only be, human. There is no point where you can draw a line and say “human here, not-human there.” At least not until cyborgs become common.

The organism is capable of varying degrees of autonomous action at certain, well-defined stages of that continuum. A 6-week-old embryo cannot survive outside the womb, for example, whereas a 30-week fetus could survive with external support. And a 40-year-old adult who suffered a traumatic brain injury in an auto accident and now exists in a persistent vegetative state would die of asphyxiation or dehydration within minutes or days without life-support equipment. A spry 90-year-old, however, might well outrun and out-think a morbidly obese teenager. The organism has periods of absolute or moderate dependence at various stages of its life cycle, and sometimes the natural arc of capability, autonomy and dependency breaks down, favorably or unfavorably, from injury, illness or life choices.

Because the organism is purely, wholly and unambiguously human from conception to death, we are logically compelled to accept the humanity of the organism at all phases of its life’s journey. And because it’s human, it enjoys basic rights — including the right to life.

Philosophers invoke a thought experiment called “The Ship of Theseus” to illustrate the point. Picture it: The Greek hero Theseus has a ship. As the ship sets sail from harbor, the crew mutinies and throws him overboard. He swims after his pirated vessel. Meanwhile a second ship, filled with lumber, accompanies his hijacked command. Every day, the crew tosses a plank from Theseus’s original ship into the water and replaces it with a new board from the supply vessel. Theseus collects these cast-offs and reassembles them. By the time everyone reaches a foreign port, every single plank in the original ship has been cast off and reassembled. The question: Which ship, of the two that arrive in the foreign port, is the original ship of Theseus? Is it the reconstructed one or the one that evolved through the voyage? It’s an interesting question because it highlights the serious philosophical problem of identity persistence over time.

Every seven years or so, every cell in the human body has been replaced. Are you the same person today that you were eight years ago? In a purely material sense, no. All the constituent pieces have been replaced, like those of the ship of Theseus. The “you” of eight years ago may be wholly gone, biologically, but your personal identity (your inner, mental Theseus, if you will) persists. Is that enough to say that you’re the same person you were eight years ago?

The question of personal identity undergirds the logic behind extending full personhood to the four-cell embryo, the full-grown adult and the senile senior. In a material sense, each phase of the organism’s life is radically different; in a mental sense, there’s an unbroken chain of memory and identity that stretch forward and backward in time, from creation to destruction.

Some philosophers — including, most notoriously, Peter Singer — argue that moral rights including a right to life apply only to whose who can act as autonomous moral agents. A person so situated is capable of making choices and responding to choices made about him, with memory and reason unaided by external support. Thus, adults and even children enjoy moral rights. Fetuses, infants younger than roughly six months old, the senile elderly and people in a persistent vegetative state cannot act as autonomous moral agents, thus they do not have the same intrinsic right to life that others enjoy. They may be, it’s argued, destroyed at will by their guardians with no moral penalty whatsoever.

Despite the efforts of many to split hairs, the pro-life argument presents as a pair of interrelated judgments:

  • Humans exist in a mental, moral and physical continuum of development from fertilized egg to elderly adult. Any attempt to deprive an embryo or fetus of the same rights one would extend to an adult must therefore plausibly argue that the pre-natal are qualitatively different (e.g., not definitively human) from post-natal people. If no such argument is forthcoming, then the moral permissibility of abortion becomes much more difficult to justify.
  • The pro-life position asserts that all humans regardless of condition obtain moral rights, including a fundamental right to life. If one concedes that there’s no qualitative difference between fetus and adult in terms of its intrinsic humanity, but nevertheless assert that some aspect of the organism’s condition at a specific point in its developmental continuum lets us deprive it of some or all of its rights at that phase, then we need to settle two questions. First, what are the specific markers that delineate that period of impaired moral status? Is it fetal viability, birth, or the onset of self-awareness as an infant? Second, what are the conditions that serve as toggle switches in a person’s moral status? Is it truly moral self-awareness? If so, then what’s the moral justification that allows abortion but not euthanasia, infanticide or the summary execution of people in a persistent vegetative or senile state?

It’s logically possible to deny that there’s an inherent right to life, for anyone. Some governments (notably, China) follow this tack. If you deny that there’s a basic human right to life, then congratulations — you’ve won the pro-abortion debate … but it’s not clear that many in the West would agree with you, and certainly this position is inconsistent with the foundational governing documents of the United States of America.

Accepting that a fetus is human but alleging that abortion is permissible because the fetus hasn’t yet been born presupposes that the condition of birth imparts moral rights upon the fetus. There’s no getting around the point that if you do believe this, then you necessarily accept that the fetus’s lack of autonomy (either its inability to act autonomously, or its dependency on some other person or device for its sustenance) is the condition that justifies its denial of basic human rights. To therefore hold that abortion is permissible for a fetus but infants, the brain damaged or the senile/infirm elderly do enjoy moral rights is to simultaneously hold two logically inconsistent beliefs. In addition, people who make this type of claim also incur a tighter logical standard for opposing the death penalty, since they’ve already opened the door to killing humans because of an aspect of condition.

Abortion, Considered

One of the most common arguments made in favor of a permissive abortion regime rests on the inconvenience of pregnancy upon the mother. You know the drill: That pregnancy is too disruptive to a woman’s body, or that bearing a child could put the woman’s economic standing in jeopardy. A woman therefore should have an absolute right to terminate any unwanted pregnancy.

If we accept the premise that human life is an unbroken continuum during which human rights always apply, then the fact that a woman is pregnant means that the woman’s not the only one with skin in the game. The child within her womb has a right to exist, and that right outweighs a mere argument from convenience.

The Sexual Revolution fundamentally altered our sexual norms and the cultural consequences of sexual behavior. Access to contraception, the disambiguation of sex from marriage and changing gender roles means that sex, today, is a fairly casual affair.

But sex, from a purely biological perspective, is an act with one purpose and one outcome: Procreation. All of the other stuff — the physical thrill, the feeling of emotional connectedness — is evolution’s way of making sex fun so we’ll have more of it and therefore expand the human population. After all, if sex were painful and boring, we would have gone extinct as a species many moons ago. It’s a serious error in judgment to confuse the purpose of sex with its side benefits — a problem not unlike the concern that people who dine on sweet, calorie-rich foods and thereby become morbidly obese have flip-flopped the purpose of eating (getting enough calories to function) with the enjoyment of taste sensations and the foodie culture.

We treat sex like a form of entertainment. Doing so entails a degree of risk: The “risk” that the biological function of copulation will, in fact, result in the biologically intended pregnancy despite all of our attempts to prevent it.

At that point of improperly prevented conception, there’s a fetus and therefore another moral being whose existence isn’t just a matter of convenience, but an actor in the moral calculus who enjoys a privileged, rights-based claim to continued existence.

A woman who seeks to avoid pregnancy should either abstain from sexual behavior or seek sterilization through tubal ligation or some other method. It’s OK to have sex for fun, even with various forms of contraception, but if recreational sex yields a fetus, then the fetus has a right to life. Period. The woman’s “choice” comes not in deciding to abort, but in deciding to procreate (i.e., to use sex for an entertainment purpose inconsistent with biology); after she assumes the risk, she must bear the consequences. Such a position isn’t a cold-hearted, patriarchal exercise in religious conservatism, but rather the conclusion of dispassionate syllogism that understands that the purpose of sex isn’t orgasm but conception.

Abortion as birth control, in other words, is motivated by a sense of entitlement that sex may be misused beyond its biological purpose without consequence even if a human life should be destroyed in the process. Such a position isn’t morally serious.

Men’s Rights

If it’s generally accepted that a woman has absolute discretion to abort a fetus, then the right of the male half to influence the decision — to “abort” his legal or financial stake in the pregnancy, or to force the woman to carry his child to term or to abort it if he doesn’t want to be a father — must be addressed. It’s fundamentally irrational to deprive fathers of the “choice” of parenthood that woman get, when the man and the woman were equal partners in assuming the risk of sexual activity that ended in pregnancy.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Women’s Rights

It’s supremely ironic that feminists remain the loudest proponents of unlimited abortion-on-demand, because a culture that treats pregnancy like an illness that can be cured with a pill or a brief outpatient procedure reinforces the commodification of the female body. The social role of women as mothers — a culture that enforces stability and helps rein in male behavior — erodes when motherhood itself loses its meaning.

In addition, the culture of predatory male behavior that treats women like another piece of meat to warm their beds for a night becomes significantly easier to perpetuate when sexual behavior has little or no consequence. Although “liberated” women — often wealthy white liberals — may enjoy the freedom of no-cost sex with largely non-threatening metrosexual males, the reality on the ground for minority or low-income women is markedly different. Because abortion absolves men of their fatherhood requirements, it’s more likely that men will play the field and resist commitment; they’ll mate with the women most likely to accept their sociocultural posturing. And if a woman does get pregnant and he doesn’t want it, the odds increase that she’ll be the victim of domestic violence as he tries to compel her to abort even if she doesn’t want to. The cycle of violence continues with the only clear winner being the aggressive, misogynist male.

It’s easy to pretend that contraceptive abortion will lead women to glorious, liberated lives like those on display in Sex in the City. More likely, that city is Compton and the result of carefree sex is more abuse, rape and unwanted pregnancies.

Problems

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned several special cases of the argument.

  1. Rape.  The idea of choice is a powerful one. A woman’s voluntary assent to sexual activity resulting in pregnancy is the very choice that privileges the fetal claim to life, on the grounds that pregnancy is the consequence of a choice and not a “choice” in itself. But what happens when the pregnancy was forced upon the woman involuntarily? Not just through the obvious crime of forcible rape, but through cases of “drunk sex” when the woman was not in a position to give clear-headed consent to the sexual activity? U.S. politics tends to favor abortion exceptions related to rape. Although the fetus does not suffer a diminished moral standing based merely on the circumstances of its creation, people (myself included) have a natural sympathy toward the victims of forcible rape. In a perfect world, an “unwanted” fetus conceived with an unwilling partner would nevertheless be born and perhaps given for adoption. The world being far from perfect, the prudent course may well include the routine administration of a drug to interdict uterine implantation in the first 24 hours after a forcible rape to prevent pregnancy.
  2. Incest.  The incest exception is odd; if the incest was forced, then it’s rape and the question moves along that track. If the incest was voluntary, then what characteristics about incest justify abortion that non-incestuous unions don’t enjoy? It’s true that there’s a marginally higher risk of birth defects related to close-kin interbreeding, but if those defects are serious enough, they’re treated as a special case of fetal deformity. If there aren’t any serious birth defects, then it’s not clear why incest justifies abortion. Don’t misunderstand; I am as strongly affected by the incest taboo as any, but the argument for voluntary incest as an automatic justification of abortion seems to be less a matter of reason and more a matter of “Eeew, gross.” Which, alas, isn’t sufficient in itself to override fetal right to life.
  3. Fatal Fetal Deformities. Not all fetuses are capable of natural life — e.g., anencephalic fetuses, or fetuses subject to intense trauma in the second trimester. In cases where there’s almost no chance that the fetus will survive birth, it must be recognized that nature misfired; there’s no moral duty to carry a fatally deformed fetus to term.
  4. Maternal Life. In some cases, a woman may learn that a pregnancy will put her own life at substantial risk. The classic example is the case of a woman who gets pregnant and then discovers she has serious cancer that requires a regime of radiation or chemotherapy that would kill the fetus. If she delays treatment until after the child is born, then her own survivability plummets. In situations like this, there’s a competition between two moral absolutes: The right to life of the fetus, and the right to life of the mother. In such difficult circumstances, there’s no possibility of rote guidance. Factors like fetal risk to treatment, the mother’s long-term prognosis, the odds that the mother would die in labor, etc. all complexify the situation and create a true moral dilemma that requires case-by-case adjudication. But in such a case, abortion — being the resolution to an equally strong counter-claim of maternal life — at the least becomes morally justifiable. (Note, however, that general claims about the psychological well-being of a woman do not rise to the level of a “life of the mother” exception.)

Concluding Thoughts

Abortion has ravaged American politics for two generations. The tension seems to fall ideologically; people who follow strongly feminist politics or who elevate their own convenience and sexual satisfaction above the consequences of their sexual activity tend to favor lenient abortion regimes; people who adhere to a strongly religious morality, or who remain more sensitive to duty and rights, favor restrictive abortion regimes.

From a moral perspective, abortion is difficult to justify except in rare cases if one accepts the idea that human life exists in a continuum from conception to natural death and that human rights — including a right to life — exist at all phases of that continuum. If one does accept the continuum-of-life argument, then there are very few ways to justify abortion without denying the existence of a universal human right to life. Although the continuum-of-life argument may be open to criticism, abortion-rights activists have generally not articulated a clear and convincing counter-argument rooted in biology and sound philosophy that withstands logical debate and doesn’t lead to either internal contradictions or very slippery slopes.

Alas, too many people engage the abortion debate at the level of bumper-sticker sloganeering; advocates and opponents alike, in too large of numbers, mindlessly shout pro-choice or pro-life sentiments without undertaking a logical inquiry into the arguments supporting their positions. And that’s too bad — because there are many sharp people, like Abbi, who might be open to persuasion or at least moderation if the full arguments pro et contra were thoroughly and dispassionately discussed in the public square.

Bioethicist Claims Embryonic Genetic Engineering Is “Moral Obligation”

With this writer’s hat tip to Slashdot, now comes The Telegraph to report that Oxford professor Julian Savulescu — who is also editor-in-chief of Journal of Medical Ethics — argues that it’s a “moral obligation” to use genetic engineering on embryos to screen out “genetic flaws” that contribute to lower intelligence, higher aggression or sociopathic behaviors.

Attentive readers will no doubt recall that this isn’t the first time that our friends in the bioethics discipline have articulated positions that fall significantly far afield of mainstream thought; just this past February, a brief editorial in (surprise) the Journal of Medical Ethics suggested that there’s a right to after-birth abortion until the time the infant is capable of higher forms of self-awareness, because newborns — being incapable of true moral agency — have no moral standing and therefore enjoy no moral rights.

Outrage over the conclusions advanced by the high priests of bioethics is easy to muster; less simple is fixing the underlying problem. The most significant hurdle with bioethics is that it’s not a discipline of philosophy — it’s simply a normative subdiscipline of biology. Thus, the scope and methods of “pure” moral philosophy rarely seem to rate. The goal of the bioethicists, by and large, is to advance the industry, not to advance clear thinking about difficult subjects. Indeed, as I opined last week, it’s a shame that the real philosophers spend so much time playng language and logic games that the practical questions about what to do and why get outsourced to industry experts who add “ethics” to their title but otherwise espouse an industry- or ideology-specific worldview that feels no different than a press release.

Bioethics isn’t ethics. Bioethics is the practice of making value judgments about controversial or disputed behaviors, using knowledge and principles and assumptions that come from within the life sciences. Many bioethicists receive training in abstract moral philosophy, but their bread and butter comes from within medicine or biology or zoology or a cognate discipline. And it shows in what moral principles they espouse: Much of what passes as high-level, peer-reviewed bioethical thought uses the same simplistic tools taught to undergrad philosophy majors. When you set aside moral psychology, faith-based reasoning and alternative moral paradigms in favor of a set-piece analysis that focuses on “agency” and “autonomy” and “paternalism” and treats human life in any form as an instrumental rather than intrisnsic good, you arrive at a default position that’s a better fit for an undergrad term paper than a serious piece of moral reasoning.

Despite Savulescu’s claims to the contrary, you cannot assume that a human person — even in embryonic form — may be tinkered with on the genetic level unless you first articulate an ironclad ethical argument that justifies what he presupposes from the outset. When you look at human life and assume you can change it without its consent, simply because you increase the odds of a good outcome for other people, you are committing an egregious error in reasoning. You’re assuming the validity of the input based on the desirability of the output.

A good philosopher would know this. Unfortuantely, on bioethics questions, many of them are distressingly AWOL.

The rest of us, then, can and should reject the instrumentalism of contemporary bioethics and assert as a first principle that a person is a person and the integrity of one’s genetic code should be privileged — unless, of course, someone arrives at a thoughtful argument that justifies, rather than merely asserts, a contrary position.

[EDIT 2012-09-02 18:20 EDT: Slight phrasing edits; recast last sentence to include missing clause.]

Bioethicist Claims Embryonic Genetic Engineering Is "Moral Obligation"

With this writer’s hat tip to Slashdot, now comes The Telegraph to report that Oxford professor Julian Savulescu — who is also editor-in-chief of Journal of Medical Ethics — argues that it’s a “moral obligation” to use genetic engineering on embryos to screen out “genetic flaws” that contribute to lower intelligence, higher aggression or sociopathic behaviors.
Attentive readers will no doubt recall that this isn’t the first time that our friends in the bioethics discipline have articulated positions that fall significantly far afield of mainstream thought; just this past February, a brief editorial in (surprise) the Journal of Medical Ethics suggested that there’s a right to after-birth abortion until the time the infant is capable of higher forms of self-awareness, because newborns — being incapable of true moral agency — have no moral standing and therefore enjoy no moral rights.
Outrage over the conclusions advanced by the high priests of bioethics is easy to muster; less simple is fixing the underlying problem. The most significant hurdle with bioethics is that it’s not a discipline of philosophy — it’s simply a normative subdiscipline of biology. Thus, the scope and methods of “pure” moral philosophy rarely seem to rate. The goal of the bioethicists, by and large, is to advance the industry, not to advance clear thinking about difficult subjects. Indeed, as I opined last week, it’s a shame that the real philosophers spend so much time playng language and logic games that the practical questions about what to do and why get outsourced to industry experts who add “ethics” to their title but otherwise espouse an industry- or ideology-specific worldview that feels no different than a press release.
Bioethics isn’t ethics. Bioethics is the practice of making value judgments about controversial or disputed behaviors, using knowledge and principles and assumptions that come from within the life sciences. Many bioethicists receive training in abstract moral philosophy, but their bread and butter comes from within medicine or biology or zoology or a cognate discipline. And it shows in what moral principles they espouse: Much of what passes as high-level, peer-reviewed bioethical thought uses the same simplistic tools taught to undergrad philosophy majors. When you set aside moral psychology, faith-based reasoning and alternative moral paradigms in favor of a set-piece analysis that focuses on “agency” and “autonomy” and “paternalism” and treats human life in any form as an instrumental rather than intrisnsic good, you arrive at a default position that’s a better fit for an undergrad term paper than a serious piece of moral reasoning.
Despite Savulescu’s claims to the contrary, you cannot assume that a human person — even in embryonic form — may be tinkered with on the genetic level unless you first articulate an ironclad ethical argument that justifies what he presupposes from the outset. When you look at human life and assume you can change it without its consent, simply because you increase the odds of a good outcome for other people, you are committing an egregious error in reasoning. You’re assuming the validity of the input based on the desirability of the output.
A good philosopher would know this. Unfortuantely, on bioethics questions, many of them are distressingly AWOL.
The rest of us, then, can and should reject the instrumentalism of contemporary bioethics and assert as a first principle that a person is a person and the integrity of one’s genetic code should be privileged — unless, of course, someone arrives at a thoughtful argument that justifies, rather than merely asserts, a contrary position.
[EDIT 2012-09-02 18:20 EDT: Slight phrasing edits; recast last sentence to include missing clause.]