Computers & Technology, Politics & Culture

MMORPGs Make the Baby Jeebus Cry

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Having chortled a bit on some off-color commentary about the recent expansion toWorld of Warcraft,in which kung-fu pandas proliferate through Azeroth, it occurred to me that I’m not playing any games … because all the games seem to suck.

  • I don’t play WoW anymore because the game stopped being fun when Blizzard started dumbing it down. I miss vanilla WoW, from the days when we still had combat ranks and warlocks actually expended soul shards. Every subsequent change has done two things — dumbed down gameplay, and made the game increasingly inaccessible for solo players.
  • I haven’t seen anything fun lately. I dabbled with Everquest II, Tabula Rasa, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World, but none really caught my fancy enough to keep me playing … mostly because the mechanics weren’t quite right.
  • Eve Online might be fun, but the barrier to entry is so high as to be prohibitive.

Were I to counsel an MMORPG designer, I’d say stuff like this:

  1. Don’t penalize players for playing solo. One of my biggest gripes about WoW is that you only get good gear from being in a raiding guild. If you journey alone, you’re stuck with whatever crap you grab on a drop or at the Auction House. Not fair for those of us who lack the time or the desire to group frequently.
  2. Give us a world to explore and reasons to explore it.  Put stuff somewhere, even the items have no real purpose. Paint large maps — like Azeroth — and stick Easter eggs or stunning vistas or hidden treasures or something to reward players for looking beyond the beaten path.
  3. Enough, already, with FedEx and grind missions.  I will kill monsters; I don’t need to be tasked to kill 100 monsters just to advance to the next quest. Nor do I need a quest to go from Point A to Point B; if the quests need to prompt this, then there’s something wrong with the game design.
  4. Write quest lines take a choose-your-own-adventure path. Don’t just chain quests together blindly, or just make them available when you hit a level. The choices you make in what quests you choose, and how you choose to complete them, should make a noticeable difference. SWTOR came closest to making this work; you could end a quest by making a Light or Dark choice, but it didn’t really affect quest lines. The mid-game gameplay shouldn’t be exactly the same for every character at the same level.
  5. Don’t skimp on the UI. The most vexing thing about The Secret World? It had lovely cut scenes, but no voice talent for your character. Lame.
  6. Don’t skimp on the backstory. Create a lush narrative universe and put us in the middle of it. Give us a reason to invest emotionally in our character.
  7. De-emphasize levels. Perhaps Ultima Online got it right: Don’t treat Player A as more powerful than Player B just because Player B out-leveled him. Instead, focus on skill levels. And don’t make these level so rigid that you get locked into only one “optimal” build — because then you’re just grinding for points without any sense of adventure. I’d rather be able to allocate points across stats and skills in free-form style than being tied to a tree you already know. And give me points for earning them instead of when I grind to fill a progress bar — maybe for finishing a quest, or killing a difficult monster, or earning an in-game achievement. Leveling up because the spider you killed tipped your progress bar is just lame.
  8. Don’t be afraid to be risqué. One of the fun things about SWTOR was the flirting and even the possibility of same-sex romance with your companions. Many, many game players are adults. Give us adult content from time to time.
  9. Expand the customizability of players. Don’t bore me with a handful of default character builds; let me customize everything, exactly how I want. Heck, I’d spend hours in the character-design part of the game just to get my persona just right. And I’d invest more into him or her, too.
  10. For the love of all that’s holy, vary up gameplay for the earliest levels. I’m a tweaker; I roll a whole bunch of characters for the newbie zone to see what I like. If I have to play the exact same content the exact same way a dozen times … forget it.

There.

/rant

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Heterosexual Fecundity: A Coda to the Gay Marriage Argument

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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.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

A Comprehensive Case Against Gay Marriage

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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.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Thoughts on the Moral Permissibility of Abortion

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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.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Bioethicist Claims Embryonic Genetic Engineering Is “Moral Obligation”

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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.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Bioethicist Claims Embryonic Genetic Engineering Is "Moral Obligation"

No Comments

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.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology

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A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.

As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.

As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.

One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.

Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.

More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.

The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.

Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.

People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.

One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.

But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)

Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.

When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.

Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.

The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”

We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.

Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.

More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.

Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.

[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology

No Comments

A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.
As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.
As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.
One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.
Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.
More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.
The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.
Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.
People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.
One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.
But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)
Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.
When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.
Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.
The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”
We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.
Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.
More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.
Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.
[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Civility in Modern Discourse: A Brief Reflection

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In the foreword to her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman offers what at first blush feels like an out-of-place observation: Evils like domestic violence or child sexual assault persist because people are too polite to confront it. Thus, witnesses’ eyes avert and people adopt a not-my-business demeanor to rationalize their lack of courage to stand up for the helpless.

In a book about complex post-traumatic stress disorder, an introduction about evil — and how civility enables evil — represents a curious rhetorical strategy. Yet it fits. Stories abound about how no one intervened to help a battered wife or molested kid, but after the news became public friends and neighbors said there was something they coudn’t quite pin down that felt amiss.

Yeah. That something was their own moral cowardice, conveniently obscured under the color of civility.

Civility as a civic virtue has taken something of an odd turn in the last half-century. Whereas once it represented the mutual respect of citizens and the observance of polite manners, now it’s morphing into something less coherent. Consider:

  1. The new civility says we shouldn’t judge others, for anything, at any time. If you disapprove of the behavior of another, you’re socially obligated to keep your own counsel, even when you believe that the other person’s behavior is wrong or harmful. Civility and nonjudgmentalism are becoming increasingly synonymous.
  2. Civility applies only to people within the in-crowd. Social demonstration that you’re not in the in-crowd means you’re no longer worthy of civil treatment. This strategy of moral isolationism is particularly effective on the Left; if you don’t support certain policy goals like “marriage equality” or “environmental protection” then you’re not just wrong, you’re outside the scope of respectability and may therefore be treated cruelly, dismissively or unfairly as punishment for holding a contrary opinion. In a sense, civility is the social mark of tribalism: You extend it to fellow travelers and withhold it from the tribe’s enemies.
  3. Civility has become something of a scare word for political moderates, who seem to think “civility” requires everyone to accept half a loaf for comity’s sake. A good No Labels kind of moderate would look at an NRA member and a Brady Campaign member and decide that virtue meant banning only half the country’s guns. Perhaps those with an odd-numbered serial number. Whether the half-a-loaf strategy is even coherent never seems to matter; what matters is that the Civil Moderate gets to feel smug for playing a modern-day King Solomon.

The ties that bind us in community have been fraying for a long time. The idea that neighbors have a responsibility for each other, or that everyone deserves to be treated decently even when you disagree, seem to be derogating in favor of a civility-as-nonjudgmentalism that undermines the power of public expectation to maintain public morals.

Once upon a time, if a man backhanded his wife in public, everyone would know and he’d either have to reform or be ostracized. Now, people simply avert their gaze when they witness domestic violence — or at the least, decide it’s solely a police matter.

Thus does the new civility undermine the old community.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Reflections on a Friend’s Shift from Libertarianism to Progressivism

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A while back I lamented a trend in conventional political commentary — that as a general rule, conservatives tend toward syllogistic argumentation whereas progressives more often rely on emotive claims and ad hominem attacks.

A recent discussion with my friend Alaric proved most enlightening about why rhetorical strategy varies by ideology and how one’s political leanings can directly affect a person’s system of critical reasoning — as evidenced by his own significant ideological evolution.

But to get to that point, we must start a dozen years ago, when I joined the Herald as a new staff columnist and Rick was the paper’s Web editor. Before running the online desk, he ran the opinion desk, and he continued to contribute occasional opinion pieces even after shifting responsibilities. So I got to meet him through weekly opinion-staff meetings.

In those days, he was a fairly conventional libertarian, obsessing about negative liberty and chanting the “no force or fraud” mantra like a political Om. For example, he took the position in one of our point/counterpoint column pairings in favor of the legalization of prostitution because the transaction — including, as it does, solicitation and consent — doesn’t entail force/fraud/coercion. My counter was that poor women may well be effectively coerced by their pimps or by the consequences of their financial condition, but such was the dogmatism of his libertarian leanings that he dismissed that point by saying that the immediate transaction of solicitation+purchase+sex didn’t involve meaningful coercion by the john, so … nyeh nyeh. (I might be misremembering this slightly.)

Over the years we maintained our friendship; indeed, we still work together, but now for a hospital instead of a newspaper.

Starting around 2007-2008, I started to see a bit of an ideological shift from my dear old walking caricature of a libertarian. He began to eschew the concept of negative liberty. I understand he ended up as an Obama voter. Our recent political debates became unusually contentious and he is, at this point, probably firmly enmeshed in the progressive left.

So last week I invited him to Grand River Cigar for a tasty dram of Port Charlotte 7 and a Partagas 1845 to discuss (not debate) the nature of his ideological move. The two-hour session proved enlightening. Some conclusions worth highlighting:

  • Part of his move includes a religious component — his ongoing private study of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheism has emboldened him to reject arguments rooted in religious premises and to feel safe enough to stand up for atheist perspectives instead of apologizing for them or paying milquetoast obeisance to religion’s asserted right of privileged access to the public square.
  • His disillusionment with the dogmatic center/right started where mine did — the pre-surge collapse in Iraq coupled with GWB’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the silliness about Harriet Miers for SCOTUS.
  • His experience as a husband and as someone who budgets carefully has engendered a not-insubstantial cynicism about corporations and wealth. I won’t say he’s at the point of resentment but it’s clear that he’s more open to redistributivist policies than once he was and his trust in the integrity of large corporations isn’t very high.
  • And why is he more tolerant of radical egalitarianism? Because his big fear is social instability akin to the French riots a few years ago or the current breakdown in Greece, and his solution to this is to ensure that everyone has decent-paying jobs and a generous social welfare net. The theory is to remove the socioeconomic kindling today to avoid a broader conflagration down the road. The prospect of a violent class war genuinely scares him — I think because mass riots and social breakdown threatens the material safety he worked hard to achieve, and he’s developed a risk-averse, safety-oriented sensibility as a way of protecting his current position. (He is an avid reader of social history, so I wonder if there’s a latent influence here from his readings about the establishment of community regimes?)
  • As such, he no longer believes that negative liberty is sufficient. As best I understand it, I think he believes the deck is stacked against normal people by corporations and unresponsive government such that negative liberty, in itself, is a dead letter: Nice in principle, meaningless in execution. Since power, wealth and prestige are (so it’s claimed) a function of prior access to power, wealth and prestige, an ordinary person has little chance of substantial material success on his own right and by his own effort (c.f., Obama, B., “you didn’t build that”). Thus, a system that provides for a base level of economic security for all citizens — funded by the wealthy — addresses the disparity in opportunity between top and bottom and at least ensures that the bottom has enough to mitigate the risk of social instability.
  • Concurrently, his shift from coldly syllogistic reasoning to something more emotive pervades his thinking on all levels. He said, for example, that he now understands why “the personal is the political” and tends to agree. The human condition ought to trump all other considerations, so any argument that leads us away from giving everyone the resources they need to live happy and fulfilled lives may be rejected prima facie because the conclusion — no matter how logical — fails to respect the dignity of individual persons and their alleged right to a material safety net that preempts violent social disorder.
  • Because the political and the personal are so intertwined, the threshold for what constitutes an ad hominem shifts — arguments and arguers who don’t support the basic point about positive economic entitlements or communitarian sibboleths simply don’t enjoy the same right to be treated respectfully because their conclusions are, a priori, both wrong and immoral.
  • He is not a Kool-Aid drinker of the Left; he seems aware that his new ideological abode has foundations as shaky as the one he left, but nevertheless he seems more temperamentally comfortable in his new home. He admits that future experiences may well prompt additional movement and doesn’t seem to foreclose the chance that could well come back to conservatism later in life.

A few generalized observations:

  1. There’s a serious ethical problem at the heart of the Left’s willingness to dismiss or even demean opponents who don’t share their underlying sociopolitical conclusions. There’s very much a “purge the kulaks” sentiment in some quarters of the progressive movement, such that conservatives or center-left liberals who don’t toe the line aren’t merely wrong but morally defective. And thus not worthy of serious consideration or even civil treatment. The way that progressives treat people who disagree on global warming provides an illustrative case in point: If you disagree with the alleged consensus position, then you are a “denier” who should be shunned and not even allowed to articulate a contrary opinion or present divergent evidence.
  2. The growing divide between Left and Right feels less and less like policy disputes and more and more like irreconcilable worldview divergence. The trend toward shifting modes of discourse (emotive vs. syllogistic privilege in argumentation, for example) means that it’ll be harder to bridge the partisan divide for a middle-ground solution. The party that does the best job of capturing the independents, then, will probably do best at the ballot box. Unfortunately, both parties are polarizing and the activist wing on both sides is sufficiently loony that most clear-thinking folks will come to disdain politics even more than they currently do.
  3. The economic fault line of egalitarianism keeps rearing its head. Conservatives generally favor equality of access to opportunity; progressives generally favor equality of result even if that means redistributing from the successful to the unsuccessful. Basic ideas like what “fairness” means will keep throwing sand in the gears of government.
  4. Never underestimate the fear of instability or risk. The “bread and circuses” approach to buying off the poor to keep them compliant remains a core part of progressive ideology, even if they don’t see it those terms.

Watching Rick’s ongoing ideological shift provides some insight into why people shift their entire philosophical grounding. I’m glad he’s my friend and I appreciate the chance to talk about these issues with him.

The conclusions, though, about what brings people to the Left or to the Right do serve as giant signal fires about the possible social discord that lies ahead.

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