Time Travel, Prenatal Ethics and other Miscellania

Random thoughts, mostly things I have posted online elsewhere:

Wow, this is simply HORRIBLE journalism. There are so many things wrong with this article - it's simply sensationalism. A text from hundreds of years after Jesus' death, written in the area from which we get all Gnostic writings which mixed up Jesus and Christianity with the mystery religions, has Jesus mention a "wife", a fact that even the person working on the text admits has nothing to do with whether Jesus was ever married, and what does the journalist say? "A small fragment of faded papyrus contains a suggestion that Jesus may have been married...The discovery, if it is validated, could have major implications for the Christian faith. The belief that Jesus was not married is one reason priests in the Catholic Church must remain celibate and are not allowed to marry. It could also have implications for women's roles in the church, as it would mean Jesus had a female disciple." Ugh. Then the journalist proceeds to undermine everything they just said. Way to go.

The real title of this article should be "I Like Incoherent, Logically Inconsistent Stories because I cannot Understand the Concept of Time Travel", but I think that would've been too long. It's because of writers like this that we have all the incoherent time travel stories that we do (and which I therefore despise, though I tend to give Doctor Who and Back to the Future a pass since criticizing them for lack of logic is like criticizing the Hitchhiker's Guide for letting Arthur turn into an infinite number of penguins). Seriously, this is horrible. Not all of the 4 options are even KINDS of time travel at all, nor even necessarily incompatible options. Number 3 is simply incoherent, 4 isn't really time travel but universe-hopping. Number 2, which is how non-contradictory time travel would work, has nothing to do with predestination, pre-ordination of events, or lack of any agency.

(1) New-born infants have a right to live;
(2) If there is no relevant intrinsic difference between the members of two sets, then the members of one set will have the same rights as the other;
(3) There is no relevant intrinsic difference between new-born infants and late-term, un-born fetuses;
(4) Therefore, late-term, un-born fetuses have a right to live.
This is a deductively valid argument, which means the only way to avoid the conclusion would be to reject at least one of the premises 1-3. But 2 seems to be a basic principle about rights and 3 is a scientific fact. 1 is therefore the most vulnerable, but few, I think, would be able to stomach the idea that infants have no right to live - to accept that would be pretty implausible. Since 1-3 are fairly certain and the argument is valid, then, we have to accept 4 as well.

Obama seems to deny 4, though, which makes me wonder which of 1-3 he would reject. But I'm sure he hasn't really thought about it (remember the "above my paygrade" remark?). This is just one of the reasons why I cannot understand people's enthusiasm for Obama (his unprecedented rolling back of various freedoms including religion and conscience are some of the other reasons). I understand people really liking some things about him or liking him more than Romney or liking him in general, but the unqualified enthusiasm some people have I cannot relate to. (Almost no one has any kind of enthusiasm for Romney (I certainly don't), so that's not an issue on his side!)

Since I did a potshot at Obama, here's one aimed at Romney: I think the rich should be taxed a lot more than the poor sheerly as a matter of fairness. Suppose we tax everyone 10% - then the person making 20,000 a year will be forced to pay 2000 - a chunk of their income they would be much better off holding onto. For them, missing that money is going to make a noticeable difference in their life. But suppose then we have someone making 100 million - 10 million is just a drop in the bucket and won't affect the quality of their lives in any noticeable way. Money has a diminishing marginal value as income goes up - 10% for a rich person, say, is an entirely different beast from 10% for a poor person. Suppose we actually scaled taxes according to the actual value money has for the individuals concerned (our tax brackets go some way towards this), then the rich person would be paying a much higher percentage of their income then the poor person and the two would be equally affected (or not affected) by the tax. And that's not even taking into account arguments you might make concerning the increased debt the rich have towards society for creating the possibility and infrastructure for such wealth in the first place. Those are just my own opinions, though.

 I don't always agree with him or think he's always fair to conservatives, but Jon Stewart is reliably hilarious. Apropos the above on taxation, this is pretty entertaining (be sure to click to watch on part two too).


I don't agree with all of this, but some interesting thoughts from a Christian philosopher on reforming higher education.

Teleological Personhood

I take it as fairly obvious that in some sense we ought to be egalitarians about moral status - we (I'll leave the 'we' vague for now) ought all to be treated with the same respect and consideration and ought to be thought of as being moral equals in this sense (note that this doesn't mean, of course, that we are moral equals in the sense that one of isn't of better or worse character than another or doesn't do better or worse things). But what is the scope of this 'we' here that we ought to be egalitarians about? Most would say, inuitively, that the 'we' of which we can say "we are all of equal moral worth" is specificly the class of persons. Various theories then try to give accounts of what grounds the moral status of persons.

Unfortunately, most theories of moral personhood are themselves immoral and fail to be egalitarian enough. I take it that it would be positively immoral not to give children, infants or the severely mentally handicapped the same moral status as a normally-abled adult. Not to do so would be simply chauvinistic towards the well-developed, intelligent human being over against those who fall short. This is not a surprising thing coming from philosophers, who tend themselves to be of the very intelligent sort and tend to value such intelligence and rational thought very highly. Aristotle, for instance, seems to have thought women of lesser worth than men partly because he thought that men were more able to engage in rational thought than they were (and, indeed, held that the most valuable life was in fact the contemplative one). This, of course, is not an uncommon phenomenon - it can be seen all throughout history where human beings who do not have the particular valued qualities of the society or elites are thought of as being of less worth or consideration.

But I think as moral thinkers we ought to resist this sort of trajectory and stick up for those who cannot stick up for themselves - not only in practice but in our theories of moral status and personhood as well. Our values concerning qualities that we hold dear for ourselves ought not to blind us to the inherent value in others who unfortunately lack those qualities to the same degree as we. And this is not just for others' sakes - if we live long enough, it is more or less likely (depending on the particular quality in question) that we too will experience a diminishing of some of those qualities we value in ourselves.

Against a utilitarian conception of personhood - where the only personal moral status one has is as an experiencer of pleasure and pain - we can give the example of a person in a temporary coma who is at this time - and will for a while be - unable to experience pleasure or pain. I take it that such a person does have full moral status, despite the fact that they are in a coma and (let us suppose) experience nothing. Perhaps someone here might say that the moral status of the person here is dependent on their future status as an experiencer - that future status counts, as it were, retroactively. But if that's all there is to it, one could kill the person now, thereby preventing them from having such a future status, and one would not have violated the comatose's moral status as a person since by killing them one has prevented the comatose's having the requisite future status in the first place.

Perhaps what is meant here is that, despite the coma, the human has moral status because they are alive and existing and could experience pain or pleasure - and, indeed, do have the capacity to do so - it is only that they are temporarily blocked due to some biological damage (or drug-induced state, etc.) from actualizing this capacity. Or maybe what is meant is that, left unhindered, this human being will in fact be able to do the requisite experiencing in the future. But both of these last things goes beyond the utilitarian conception noted above - we no longer are interested purely in the actual occurent and actualizable capacities for pleasure and pain. But going beyond this conception, I think we have come up with some plausible diagnoses for why, among other things, we might be inclined to grant this person full moral status. In neither case, we must note, does this moral status depend on the ability to currently activate the qualities said to be required for moral personhood. We could say similar things about theories which make personhood depend on rationality or other mental traits. In metaphysical terms, we might say that 'being a person' is not a phase sortal.

How about grounding the personhood of those who do not share the qualities we think necessary for equal moral status in the shared interests of the community or particular segments or members of the community (a kind of contractarian approach)? I take this to be wrong too. Consider the case of a small community of adult persons out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, the community consists of only one adult person - a mother, who also has in her care an infant. Does the infant here have full moral status or not? Would the mother not caring about and then killing the infant count as murder just as much as killing an adult or be just as wrong as if it were done in a community that cared for infants? I take it that the answers to these questions ought to be yes. But what is relevant here? Well, if we take a cue from the above paragraph, we might think it has something to do with future capacities in something like the ways noted above. How about if the infant is severely retarded or if we replace the infant with a severely retarded adult? Such an individual will have no future ability to reason or do whatever the other adult does that gets them personhood on many views. Instead, it seems reasonable to ascribe their moral personhood to something like a blocked capacity for such qualities - blocked by, say, physiological defects of the brain. Again, this is similar to one of the things we said in favor of the comatose person above.

In all of these sorts of cases, personal moral status is not about having an active current capacity to do or have the qualities thought to be important for personhood. Infants, the mentally handicapped and the temporarily comatose all still have personhood. And yet their personhood is still somehow closely connected with those qualities - after all, there is strong intuitive force that personhood is somehow connected with things like experience or rationality. The common thread in these cases of those on the margins of the society of persons is that in each case we have a being which is the kind of thing that has these special qualities. They have, in teleological terms, the acquisition and activation of such qualities as a proper function of themselves. An infant, for instance, even a severely handicapped one which will never be capable of rational thought, is still the kind of thing that has rational thought as its function. In its proper environment and with all obstacles or malfunctions taken away, a person will exhibit such characteristics as are characteristic of a person. Putting it in a blatantly trivial way, to be a person is to belong to a personal kind.

We might call this a teleological conception of personhood and it seems to have important ramifications for other areas of ethics. If we accept this conception and give full moral status to the mentally handicapped and infants, we would be very hard pressed not to do the same for unborn fetuses. And if we are forced to do this, I think we would then be very hard pressed not to admit that in almost all cases aborting a fetus is morally wrong and simply a special instance of murder - a case of violence against an intrinsically valuable person of great moral status.

Politics Trumps Facts In Editorial Hostile To Administration

The title of this post is meant to poke a bit of fun at an editorial by one Cynthia Tucker you can find here on Yahoo! News, which is entitled "POLITICS TRUMPS FACTS IN ADMINISTRATION HOSTILE TO SCIENCE". I don't often post on things like this, but I just saw this and these kinds of things really annoy me, whether it's coming from the Left or the Right. Now, granted, some of the stuff she says here is, if true, probably damaging and might be a case of politics "trumping facts" or "trumping the hard facts of science", whatever that's supposed to mean. But by no means all. In fact, the stuff that does seem damaging might even be seen as cases of "facts" of science trumping "facts" of science - opinions of some scientists (those who dissent from the views of others on global warming, for instance) trumping those of others. In such a case, it might even be charitable to interpret the administration as shaping its political views to the views of those scientists it treats as more trustworthy or shapes it with the idea in mind that issue X is indeed controversial despite protestations to the contrary by the vocal majority. Not that that's probable, but it's at least conceivable - and this editorial does nothing to rule out such explanations but automatically demonizes the admistration.

"Unpersuaded by the broad scientific consensus that endorses evolution, the president has argued for teaching the phony science of so-called intelligent design, arguing that "both sides ought to be properly taught ... so people can understand what the debate is about." "

That intelligent design is "phony science" is disputable and the fact that something has a broad scientific consensus does not make it true or beliefworthy. That something scientific enjoys a majority assent among scientists working in that field means that, all else being equal and in the absence of other relevant considerations, we are justified in believing it (though even with this, many philophers of science would disagree). But where all else is not equal and where there are many scientific and extra-scientific considerations to take into account, the fact that some theory enjoys such wide assent no longer means it can be treated as automatically justified or true. It may be science (and opposing theories might not count as "science" even) but it doesn't follow that that is what ought to be believed. This editor seems to be falling into a blind scientism where all truth is mediated by "science" and "science" alone and where all authority over fact and truth is governed by the majority opinion of scientists, scientism's infallible priests and prophets.

The rest of the editorial is typical rhetoric - it's not even about science at all, yet it's implied that it is and that if you disagree you're being unscientific or "going against science". It says,

"And he has stood firm against the advance of embryonic stem cell research, a promising avenue that might eventually lead to cures for such maladies as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. Stingy with his veto pen, the president has exercised it only three times -- two of those to block measures to broaden federal research on embryonic stem cells.
Last month, the president clung to a dubious rationale that values the "lives" of embryos, about the size of a pencil-point, over the lives of full-fledged children suffering with juvenile diabetes. His argument is even less rational if you consider the fate of the vast majority of leftover embryos: They will eventually be destroyed. Apparently, it's perfectly acceptable to dump those blastocysts in the trash. But using them to cure hideous diseases? That's unacceptable, according to Bush's moral principles. "

These issues are about ethics, not science - it's one ethical or political view versus another. To use it as an example of politics trumping science is simply dishonest, though unfortunately often effective at persuading people. Yes, embryonic cell research might lead to cures, but it might not - it's not a sure thing (in an example of the other side really putting scientific fact to one side, it's often spoken of as if it was certain that this research is going to save thousands of lives and improve the quality of everyone's lives). Nor is it mentioned that there has been success with adult stem cell research and, even though it is not quite as promising as embryonic stem cell research, it still has a chance of doing the same sort of stuff but without the ethical costs or controversy. Instead, the picture is painted thusly: those against embryonic stem cell research are against curing people of disease. If that was what is really going on, that would indeed be awful. But, again, it's incredibly dishonest when people, predictably, put things that way. Those against the research are not against curing disease - they're against killing or causing harm, no matter who it might be, including embryos.

As for the last argument that embryos aren't important, it's a nonstarter. For one thing, what does size have to do with moral importance? Are we to treat babies or small children (or midgets or dwarfs for that matter) as of less importance simply because they are smaller? To treat all people equally and refuse to kill one innocent person for the sake of another is about human decency and rights - it has nothing to do with valuing one life over another as the editorial indicates. That's just incredibly wrong-headed - equality and respecting of human rights does not mean valuing one life over another!

When the editorial talks about the fate of the embryos, that is indeed unfortunate and is an issue that has been sorely neglected by the pro-life movement. But why does she talk as if the administration or people against embryonic stem cell research are okay with that? So far as I know none of them have expressed such a view and I think they would all be against such a waste of human life. The fact that something is going on and I haven't tried to stop it yet doesn't mean that I approve of it or that that thing is acceptable. Perhaps the argument is that the embryos are going in the trash anyway, so we might as well use them for research. But that's not a very good argument either. That's like being in Nazi Germany and approving of the execution of Jews and other undesirables for medical experiments since "they're all going to die anyway" in the gas chambers. That's a morally abhorrent argument to make and if that's what's being claimed here, I can't see much of a relevant difference.

Ultimately, this editorial is a prime example of what happens when partisan politics trumps clear thinking. It's an example of waving around the word "science" as a kind of magic word to get people to join your own side and hate the other - all without actually dealing with real science or the issues actually involved in it or really stopping to consider whether any of this has much of anything to do with science in the first place.