In 2010 I took a philosophy class on ethical issues at the Salt Lake Community College. The issues discussed in that class sparked the ideas of this section.
I first want to note that all of the issues covered in that course and discussed below are deeply wrapped in emotion rather than logic. One symptom of this is that they are all discussed using euphemisms. Killing criminals is supported as “capital punishment”. Even those against it don’t usually get more explicit than “imposing the death penalty”. The abortion issue is famously between the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” camps, each label naming an obvious good but neither being a helpful shortcut for reasoned thinking.
For that matter, “ethical issues” is itself something of a euphemism. These problems are unsolved emotional issues, with many ethical arguments being made in vigorous support of answers to emotional questions wonderfully framed by enthusiasts.
One indicator of weak logic and high emotion is presenting axioms: “Of course we all know that bletching is good (or bad).” A stronger indicator is the use of adjectives that assume a conclusion: “Naturally everyone must be against reckless, unjustifiable bletching—right?” “Surely everyone must favor necessary, patriotic bletching, don’t they?” Arguments framed in such terms tend to go round and round without ever producing an acceptable solution, one that all parties feel and believe is workable.
When all sides involved are willing to look carefully at what they have axiomized, they may recognize that everyone has been asking (and answering) the wrong questions. This may not lead to agreement on everything, but it may allow cooperation without agreement.
These are also all questions about how to use a technology appropriately: When if at all to use abortion technology, how to raise animals, how and if to kill people appropriately, and so on.
The wrong question in the abortion controversy is, “When does a new human life begin?”
It’s illuminating to put that question aside for a moment and instead consider, “When does life begin?” I would answer that life begins at creation—a few thousand or a few billion years ago depending on your religious and/or scientific inclinations. It doesn’t begin at conception because, like all other cells, egg and sperm cells are alive before conception happens, and conception itself is not an instantaneous event but a process that takes finite time. Even birth takes finite time, as anyone who has observed labor or any woman who has undergone it knows. Life is a flow, with conception and birth merely part of that flow.
Nevertheless, the wrong question gets quite specific though variable answers. For the “pro-life” side, at some point before birth a set of one or more cells become human, either by a supernatural action in which a soul flows into what was previously something other than human, or by naturally meeting some set of criteria for what is human. For the “pro-choice” side, there is usually an equally mystical point, birth! Even though immediately before birth just about any criteria for humanity apply as much as immediately after, for the choicers until birth there’s only a pregnant woman, and afterwards there are undeniably two people.
Once that wrong question is answered, or fails to be, we can get into other ethical and/or legal questions: When is ending a new human life murder, manslaughter, self-defense, justifiable defense of another (the various positions on when it’s ethical or moral to destroy the fetus / kill the child in favor of the mother’s life or of its quality), etc.
So recognizing that life is a continuous flow, and that we are unlikely to agree on the arbitrary chop point when it becomes human life, the question we should be asking is, “What are the ramifications of choosing a given point in the flow, or in defining how to do so, for legal purposes? Which is best for (choose your philosophic standard) the mother, the child, the family, the community, carrying out God’s will, instilling a sense of duty and/or other civic virtues, etc.?”
As you might guess from my previous discussions, my preference is, “How do we choose in ways that are best for the community?”
Mankind is a tool-using species. When we deny ourselves the use of tools, the primary virtue of our species, we don’t merely shoot ourselves in the foot so far as bettering the general human condition, we deny our humanity. Tools can be used for good or bad, and there may be some tools that should never be used. But I’d be hard pressed to name any.
I don’t see how categorically denying ourselves the right to use the tool of abortion promotes the community good. And I do believe that it makes sense to use it in some circumstances. Here’s why.
Rules of the road were originally designed when roads were simply dirt trails and people, horses, and cows walked them. Those rules have had to be updated each time new technology changes how we use roads. We now have cars in addition to walking, pavement in addition to dirt, superhighways in addition to sidewalks. Posting a “Speed Limit 35” sign on the Boston Post Road in 1812 would have been nonsensical (“35 what?” John Adams would have inquired); now it is quite practical.
Likewise, as our medical and health technology changes we need to update these rules of the road as well. One way to do that may be to add some more classes to the “human life” category. We now have the minor and full adult categories. Two other categories that come to mind as useful are “not yet a minor” and “never intended to become human”. Part of the goal of these new categories is to separate abortion issues from medical use issues. These should be seen as quite different.
So if it makes sense to choose an arbitrary cut-off point, how do we do it?
I believe that the best choice for the community would be declaring that, for legal purposes, humanity begins much later than is accepted in the US, at one year out of the womb. Yes, this is endorsing infanticide—or redefining the term.
At one year, we would have a much clearer picture of which experiments are working well, from the parental and community perspectives, and which should be discontinued.
Incidentally, killing an infant is not only much safer for the mother but cheaper (because it requires less skill) than a pre-birth abortion.
There is precedent for a post-birth choice. The Greco-Roman custom of exposing undesirable infants to the natural elements soon after birth let Romulus, Remus, and Oedipus survive, but usually succeeded. US life insurance contracts, presumably because of the high rates of infant mortality, often state that a baby cannot be covered until it reaches one month old, and in East Asia babies are given a “one-year birthday party” when they get to be three months old.
Avoiding the Curse of Unintended Consequences will of course take some doing. We can’t have people killing any infant they want to even though its parents want to keep it. And all the fathers’ rights arguments made against letting the mother alone make the decision apply far more forcefully once the child is out of her body. Other issues will also come up. Should trafficking in pre-minor humans count as human slave trafficking or organ trafficking? (It’s possible a “never intended to become human” category will be created, which would fit in with organs.) There will be lots of new rules of the road to be decided upon over the next couple of decades.
The need for new rules makes asking the right questions important. It won’t be any less controversial to ask, “What are the ramifications of this or that arbitrary choice as to when a new human being has been created?” But at least it’s the right question. And my proposal to add some new human life categories should certainly move some current pro-choicers to a different side of the split!
I have a Roman Catholic friend who takes a differently nuanced position. He firmly believes that although abortion is homicide—rarely or never murder, because that requires an unlikely mental posture—it should remain legal, because the harm to the community of recriminalizing it would be immoral. But he believes that trying to persuade the community of the pro-life position is also a moral imperative for those who share his belief.
The first thought I have on capital punishment is: Why is this a major issue?
The numbers involved in capital punishment make it small change: Fewer than 100 people per year are executed in the US and less than 3,000 worldwide. Compare this to the death count of other activities in which the US government intervenes, such as traffic deaths at 40,000 per year, airline fatalities at about 150 a year, and a guess of several thousands annually for drug trade–related violence.
It’s a major issue nevertheless, because it’s designed to come to public attention. Probably reaching back to prehistory, the community decides in some ritual fashion that a person has done something so wrong that they must be killed, and then kills them in a ritual fashion.
The crimes punished by death, the community’s decision making process, and the method of killing vary enormously from culture to culture and over time.
The list of crimes has shortened until in the huge majority of countries and in some US states there are currently none, and in the other US states and at its federal level only some kinds of murder qualify, along with espionage and treason. The last are almost never invoked.
Historically, the decision process can be as swift and private as a single empowered government official writing an order, or as leisurely and public as the often decades-long process of trial and appeal in modern America.
The ritual of killing can be up front and visceral, as in the stoning by the spectators in some ancient civilizations, or there can be beheading, hanging, electrocution, or lethal injection(s) by community employees. Before the later 19th century, capital punishment in Western societies almost always involved public execution. Even after community taste turned against the festival atmosphere of bringing the kids to see justice done along with a picnic lunch, community witnesses to the deed have been felt necessary and are generally provided for by custom or statute. There are also sometimes crowds of pro and anti demonstrators outside the prison waiting for the announcement that the execution has happened in a fairly private setting.
The whole process provides education and entertainment (catharsis), long predating the ancient Greeks. But like those Greeks’ theater and like the medieval morality plays, part of the purpose of capital punishment is teaching a lesson, and part is making the audience feel better—the retributive purpose. This impulse used to lead to leaving heads on spikes or bodies hanging from the gibbet, which also had the desirable effect of bringing shame on the criminal’s family, as a vivid reminder to the community of an important event in their recent family history.
Those against capital punishment argue that such retributive purposes are unworthy of modern civilized society. In particular, the official Catholic position acknowledges that the community has the right, as that church has taught for two millennia or so (backed up by thousands or millions of years of pre-Christian precedent), but claims that modern incarceration—life sentences without parole—are sufficient to protect the community … and, not incidentally, they allow more time for felons to repent their crimes and thus save their souls. Unsurprisingly, this teaching has not been universally accepted by US Catholics.
For me, the question of whether or not isn’t the big question. Which methods are “cruel and unusual” under the US Constitution is also a smokescreen question.
Instead, I ask, “Does killing criminals do sufficient community good to be worth the cost of the ritual attached?” Certainly, reducing the time and expense consumed by the ritual is desirable. At my most cynical, I wonder if trial lawyers haven’t anonymously backed a special interest group promoting capital punishment just because it’s so lucrative for them.
First, let’s again cut through the euphemism—it’s Greek for “good death”—to understand clearly what we are talking about. Euthanasia is “mercy killing”, killing someone or by neglect letting someone die, because that is considered more merciful than letting them live. Closely related is “assisted suicide”, the Latinate euphemism for helping people kill themselves.
This comes up most often in a health care context. The patient is in deep suffering and the cause of that suffering will kill them anyway, usually soon—euphemistically, they are terminally ill. The doctor attending such a patient faces euthanasia directly, and can face it repeatedly. Also facing euthanasia or assisted suicide is the patient, and close in on the choice are the patient’s family and loved ones. Surrounding these most interested parties is the community interest in the choice, reflected in the ethical statements and laws it crafts on this matter.
A similar circumstance is a newborn child with Down’s Syndrome and an intestinal defect that can be corrected with a usually-successful operation. Should the baby be operated on (and thus condemned to a subnormal life), not operated on and left to die slowly (because direct killing is always wrong, but torture can sometimes be unavoidable), or just killed quickly?
Some argue that while assisted suicide can be moral in an acute health crisis involving physical suffering, it is wrong when someone wants help to die in other circumstances. Others see no difference.
Unlike most who discuss this issue, I see moral similarities between the above and voluntarily engaging in the hazardous occupations, from bomb disposal specialist down through beat cop, that justify a “1*” t-shirt , and beyond that with being a social worker, parish priest, etc., in dangerous neighborhoods. The difference is only in the degree of certainty and the time table.
Let me start with some observations on life in general and move from those to the specifics of this issue.
We humans, like other multicellular animals and plants, are mortal for a good reason: Because life on Earth is a work in progress. All living organisms are high performance adaptations to current or recently past conditions on Earth, descendants of those who successfully passed the Mother Nature’s Grandchild Test. But she is still experimenting, and will never be finished as long as conditions on Earth remain changeable.
In organisms with sufficient consciousness, part of their success is a happy medium on risk-taking. The chances of having grandchildren are highest for those who are neither too willing to take risks nor so risk averse they cannot take advantage of opportunities.
However, exactly what that means has changed with our evolution.
It’s expensive in resources and human energy to raise a child into an adult. As we’ve evolved from our proto-human ancestors, we’ve invested a lot more in the process, making failed experiments (dead children) progressively more costly. So it has paid to develop an Instinct of remorse about failures, which adjusts our attitudes toward risk aversion.
We also Instinctively admire bravery, which adjusts us toward taking greater risks to bring home the bacon.
The challenge for each generation is to find the right mix.
Bravery tells you that, in the right circumstances, killing creatures is justified, even other humans, even within the community, … even yourself. This is tightly linked to, perhaps inseparable from, the benefits of the bravery thinking style.
Remorse thinking tells you that any human death is a damn shame, and a loss to the whole community. In short, “Don’t waste a human!”
Euthanasia is a dilemma where bravery and remorse thinking conflict.
My inclination is to support bravery. In a basically prosperous society, we can afford some expensive choices, and clearly we have already made some. Allowing responsible people to pick when and how they die, and those for whom they are responsible, using the people and tools of our civilization to help them in that choice, is something that the community can afford and that increases its happiness.
The three basic questions of the same sex marriage issue are: “Why does humanity have homosexuals?” “Why is the concept so scary to so many people?” and “What is a marriage?”
Over the years I’ve read now and again about homosexuality, and I did some refreshing for this section by reviewing the Wikipedia article on it. It appears homosexuality has been around since prehistoric times in humans, and it is widespread in other animals. This says to me that Mother Nature has found the feel-good thinking associated with sex to be valuable to apply to other circumstances than procreation. In other words, we have homosexuality because somehow it helps animal survival, including human survival.
In this it is like seeing beauty, providing quick and dirty solutions to unrelated problems. If having sex with each other lets animals think and act in cooperative ways (egalitarian or hierarchical) rather than fighting or being indifferent to each other, that’s good for species survival, whether it’s bonobos in the forest, sailors long at sea, or inmates of single-sex prisons.
There is also a way in which homosexuality actually supports procreation. When a child has adult uncles or aunts or cousins hunting or gathering for it, bound by shared genes but without children of their own, its support system is expanded.
There is no question that watching people show homosexual affection is deeply unpleasant, even frightening, for some people. Of course seeing heterosexual PDA—public display of affection—is also uncomfortable for some people, including some of the same people. This has been true since prehistoric times, so if it goes too far a person can get temporarily exiled—in modern times that means getting tossed in jail. Even simple nudity can be criminal, or revealing a lot less than that. In many Muslim cultures, a woman displaying her face in public can be punished—and in modern France, she can be punished for not displaying her face in public!
So clearly sexual display is linked to powerful emotional thinking, what used to be called the limbic system. There is scientific evidence that the same brain areas responding to it also respond to pain, non-sexual pleasure, and fear. No wonder we respond strongly to fictional or real-life romantic scenes we find acceptable or unacceptable , which includes children’s negative responses to “mushy stuff”, and to pornography that matches or does not match our preferences and fetishes. No wonder that even what would pleasurably stimulate many of us in private makes most of us uncomfortable when we see it in public. (Straight males’ enjoyment of lesbian displays is notorious in this respect.)
And no wonder there is community interest in limiting sexual display, probably since prehistoric times.
Most of you reading this start with an emotional belief that marriage is an unchanging institution—two people fall in love, get married, then produce and raise children, in that order. But the reality is that marriage evolves with time, just as language evolves with time. Both seem stable, feel stable, but in reality they are not.
Consider the goals of American or English marriage 100 years ago compared to those of today. For instance, in the 1997 movie Titanic, set in 1912, the heroine’s mother’s insistence that the girl marry a man she does not love in order to solve the family’s financial problems is quite conventional for the era.
Another example: Polygamy was a way of life for millennia, and still is in many cultures. Polyandry (multiple husbands for one woman) has been acceptable in some places and times, though much less often than polygyny (multiple wives for one patriarch).
In modern America we’ve experienced more and more cases of “serial monogamy” as the acceptability of divorce has grown over recent decades. And even more extreme, now 40% of US children are born “out of wedlock”.
It seems a bit unnatural in modern America, but historically and still in many cultures “arranged” marriages occur, with love moving to third or fourth priority in determining an attractive mate, after things such as family alliances, financial considerations, and the begetting of heirs.
Finally, we have the modern derivative of the arranged marriage—the trophy wife or husband. This is an arranged marriage where the bride and groom are doing the arranging, not the extended family.
And the evolution continues. In 2011 Kim Kardashian, a participant in her family’s “reality” show, dramatically raised the profile of the “trophy wedding” (my term) by conducting a high-profile, multi-million-dollar ceremony, then divorcing 72 days later.
I’m not a gay rights enthusiast, but I do think that it is not good to have discrimination and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered people (politely called the “LGBT community” even though not all those included may function as a single community). Nobody should be fired or denied housing just for being LGB or T. Inequality damages all of us when it is disenfranchising, as it is in modern civilized circumstances. Toleration, if not acceptance, gives us all greater freedom. We live in a prosperous society and can afford to indulge in a lot of things that were previously too expensive. Tolerance of homosexual PDA falls in that category.
And let me extend this platitude about freedom a bit further. We should not be legislating morality. Instead of having hate-crime laws, we should become even-handed in enforcing basic laws against violence, and diligent about teaching tolerance. We should be vigilant about protecting free speech, and not be thin-skinned sissies who feel they are suffering damage when they hear “bad” words.
In any case, it looks like such basic tolerance is the position of most Americans these days. With media depictions of gays having evolved from Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares and Bewitched, to Will on Will and Grace, to Cameron and Mitchell on Modern Family, it’s not surprising that there is now agitation for what many LGBT people consider the next step: Gay marriage.
The aforementioned financial considerations in old-time marriage—dowries and bride-prices—have their counterparts these days in spousal benefits from employers (including family leave for sickness or bereavement), insurance companies, schools, the taxing authorities, and even victim-compensation arrangements, during the marriage and after one partner dies. Those advocating same-sex marriage want these, along with such rights as visiting their partners in hospitals (which has sometimes been prevented by birth families who didn’t recognize the partnership), immigration considerations, and the right to adopt children. And they want to be recognized by the community as partners committed on the same level as straight couples.
Those who don’t want the sacred bond defiled by being extended to disgusting perverts naturally oppose same-sex marriage. (They’ll also say that including gays weakens marriage, but I’ve never seen how.)
Pretty clearly an apples-to-axes comparison, isn’t it?
I think a compromise is in order.
Let those who’re for gay marriage agree on some other term instead—call it a “civil union” or anything else, I don’t care—in return for the laws giving the arrangement every perk and obligation that heterosexual marriages get, down to couples’ discounts at the gym. This would not include requiring religious groups to go against their principles, any more than they now have to marry or recognize the marriage of any other couple they disapprove of (too young, civilly divorced, whatever).
Those who’re against it would agree to take comfort in it not being called marriage. Except probably by a lot of the more progressive religious sects, and many of the couples themselves, but that wouldn’t be forbidden by law, either.
I think we also need a new term that encompasses both those unions and any polygamous arrangement three or more adults want to set up. Those would also be legalized, because it seems to me the best way to avoid the undoubted evils committed by some polygamists is to shine the light of acceptance on all their unions.
That new term, whatever it is, would be the one officially zipped into current marriage laws and used in any revisions, whether for divorce (a term that could probably apply across the board), inheritance, adoption, or whatever. It would function something like “Ms.” has since a generation ago, to recognize that times and relationships have changed without scraping across all the raw moral feelings tied up with the word “marriage”.
Separate but equal. Since there wouldn’t be any invidious differences in funding, location, staffing, or other resources, as with the first use of that famous phrase, it just might work.
Note: This section has nothing whatever to do with the metaphorically named Wars on Drugs, Terrorism, Poverty, Disease, etc.
War is the marshaling of a community’s resources to engage in violence against another community. Since war is specifically about doing violence of a sort that is rightly condemned within communities, how can it be justified between communities? How can it ever be considered right and ethical?
Our Instinctive Us-vs-Them thinking supports this illogic. The prohibition against violence within the community transmutes into permission to use violence in order to protect the community “from those outsiders”, i.e., to conduct a war.
Even with the strong Us-vs-Them instinct we live with, most communities war only occasionally. Most communities have strong logical reasons not to be at war (such as profitable trading and not wanting to lose community members to conflict) so there is always an underlying anti-war sentiment in any community. For a popular war to happen this anti-war feeling must be overwhelmed.
There are multiple tomes written on “just war theory”. But the best examples of manipulating the root emotions of war are seen by looking at what might be called its weakened twin: Sports. Everybody knows what a fan means when he or she says that “we” won “our” last game against “them”. The same emotional thinking that creates committed fans for team sports powers war popularity.
Let’s consider war and sports together for a while, with the understanding that through most of the following we can substitute “national armed forces” for “home team”, “war” for “game”, and vice versa.
Playing by the rules is important in generating popular support. Clear rules and honest referees are valued, while cheaters are scorned. So a lot of effort is put into the ritual of getting a game started, and into convincing your side that the other side has earned its coming comeuppance. When there’s a traditional rivalry, this is easier.
There are some surprise gotchas in this process. For example, calling the other side cheaters has a mixed effect. It makes the other guys look bad, which should make the home team look better by contrast, but it also tarnishes the whole contest, which reduces public support for the conflict in general.
However, trashing the enemy’s leader(s)—their quarterback, führer, manager, whatever—as a bad guy is consistently successful in making the required effort more comfortable for the community.
Heroes who can give autographs, ride in parades, and receive awards are desirable to popularize the necessary expenditures (high salaries and new or improved stadiums, or the horrendously expensive war effort). Heroes in graves or hospital beds are next most effective.
Of course the parallels are not exact. For instance, hardly anybody ever asks if there’s a good reason for playing a game.
And then there’s war atrocities. Emotionally, atrocities are cheating. The sports equivalents are game-fixing and hooliganism. However, the most rabid and censorious fan would admit that there really is no equivalence.
Except that the results are disturbingly similar. Atrocities are important even though the amount of direct damage done is generally small, because they greatly sully both the perpetrator’s image and the whole contest’s image.
If it’s our side, as for the US at My Lai, South Vietnam, or in the Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, it erodes support. We’re no longer the pure, noble good guys.
If it’s their side, it supports the demonizing propaganda against the enemy and/or their leaders, but nevertheless detracts from general support for the effort, because the demonizing transforms the supporting emotion from enthusiasm to fear. Instead of being about winning a just and honorable contest, it becomes merely about keeping those cheap-shot-taking barbarians from multiplying and spreading their diseased ways.
Such a change in attitude becomes especially important when the contest is ending and peacetime is in sight. Two famous displays of different attitudes from America’s Civil War era are General Sheridan’s famous phrase, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”, and Robert E. Lee always referring to Northerners as “those people” during the Civil War. Notice the difference; Lee did not dehumanize his opponents.
To combat the demonizing instinct, many high school sports contests end with a ritual of giving a cheer for the other team and/or mixing and shaking hands with them. The Marshall Plan that ended World War II may have served a similar purpose—among others.
Finally, when it comes to the home community supporting sports winners and rarely more than sympathizing with losers, there really is no parallel at all to what happens in war. In a war, especially after the contest has started, a frightened community tends to pull together much more than a complacent one does, so terrorizing tactics unite it behind its leaders, even if they appear to be bad leaders. The mass bombings of cities in World War II by either side had some effect of swallowing enemy resources, human and material, but none were at all successful in demoralizing the other side.
In terms of making them popular to the public, the two Gulf Wars that the US has engaged in are textbook examples of being well and poorly done. The first was conducted in 1990 by President George H. W. Bush (hereinafter Bush Sr.) and the second in 2003 by President George W. Bush (Bush Jr.).
The first Gulf War was exceedingly well done in several ways:
All-in-all, it was a superb war. It was so good, it tends to be forgotten about … which is one of the best indicators of a really well-conducted war.
The second US Gulf War came out quite differently. Among the problems that surrounded it were:
The comparison of these two wars with the ongoing one in Afghanistan is left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: There are strong similarities to both.)
“I’ve got my rights!” gets said a lot when somebody isn’t getting what they want from their community. And for good reason, because granting rights is a tool of the community. It decides the rights of members as part of its governing function.
We can talk about “God-given rights” or “inalienable rights” or “natural rights”, but the adjectives are window-dressing. In reality, rights are granted by very human members of very human communities. This is a social tool that provides strategic guidance to law- and policy-making. “Should we enact this law or policy? How does it affect our rights?” And, like all tools humans use, its use can produce both good and bad results.
For instance, the good result of granting the “inalienable rights” referenced in the Declaration of Independence has been producing the American way of life. You can probably think of many others without prompting from me.
But in this section I want to consider rights that get granted based on too much emotion and not enough analysis. When this happens the tool is not being used well, and the result is waste. The most obvious form of waste is spending a lot with little result, but there are others. Another is spending that generates a lot of bitter thinking. Still another is paying for what I call a “social sleeping pill”.
Some of the examples below illustrate my conviction that granting rights is usually the weakest way to support any social justice position, for two reasons.
First, because most rights can be attacked—by those who don’t want them being handed out—as being actually privileges. I call this the DMV Defense, because it’s settled law that your cherished “right” to drive, earned back in your teens, is really only a privilege.
Second, because many calls for rights are pitched towards guilt thinking. When the recipient of a right appeals to its giver’s guilt feelings, you have what I think of as a Beggar’s Right.
Guilt is an emotion, a powerful one. Rights granted because of the granter’s guilt are often unsupportable from a cost/benefit point of view. Their biggest benefit is allowing the granter to sleep better at night. But the granter sleeps better at the cost of wasting community resources, and even worse, of changing recipients’ thinking in damaging ways. Further, when the granters’ guilt thinking moves on to other issues, the community’s material support for such rights diminishes, and the rights’ recipients likely become bitter at losing them.
I’ve mentioned above, as an example of guilt thinking that produced questionable results, the decades of massive NGO charity to Haiti. In spite of this steady outpouring of generosity it remains at the bottom of the per capita GDP heap in the Western Hemisphere. The earthquake of 2010 dramatized Haiti’s problems, but it did not create them.
Rights abuse has grown over recent decades because we now have more prosperous communities around the world. As a community grows richer, it has more discretionary resources. Some are used for improving material basics such as food, shelter, health, and transportation beyond the necessary minimums, some go into higher taxes to support more government intervention into the community’s activities—more rules and regulations. And some support more varied ways of thinking—new ways of doing things and new explanations for what’s happening in the world around us.
The truism I’ve come up with to express this is, “We live in a prosperous society. We can support a lot more variety.” Sadly, part of the variety we choose to support is cultivating rights abuse. Basing rights on warm, fuzzy gut feelings that don’t match harsh reality leads to excess spending, with little result beyond providing a social sleeping pill for the rights’ supporters and nourishing hypocrisy and corruption among the organizers of the spending.
What I outline in the next few sections are causes to which I think we as communities either are devoting disproportionate resources or are in danger of doing so.
The animal rights movement is an unsurprising case of the varied ways of thinking supported by a prosperous society. It is abetted as the community is divorced from the day-to-day harsh realities of food production. In the 18th century, intelligent readers could believe that butchers and doctors were excluded from English juries because their closeness to cutting up bodies desensitized them. If it were true, I’d call it being more practical about where we stand in the real world.
I see three basic moral grounds against respecting “animal rights”.
First off, more than humans are alive. Animals, plants, bacteria, algae, and all other members of the vast web of life on Earth are alive—all of them! I see no good reason to differentiate among life forms on the basis of saving some from suffering, but not others. Research shows that plants have reactions analogous to animal pain and fear. All us living Earth organisms are programmed to live in our different ways, and that involves killing and consuming other life forms.
All life forms kill and consume other life forms, even plants. Various plant species not only secrete the original organic pesticides against their predators but may poison the ground around them against competing plants. Moreover, just about any organic chemicals that a plant consumes, such as fixed nitrogen, are the product of some other creature’s life processes. In the case of nitrogen, the plant consumes the bacteria it symbiotes with to get the nitrogen they fix.
In short, we are all part of the Biological Cycle. If we didn’t all cycle, if we didn’t all heartily eat and breathe the products of the cycle, then our planet surface would be as sterile and life-free (or nearly life-free) as the moons and the other planets of our Solar System.
And quantity makes a difference. Ironically, it’s all that massive eating and breathing that brings the vibrant richness, diversity, and wondrous quality to the web of life on Earth. Without all the vigorous eating, we wouldn’t be here. What would be here in our place is something much smaller, simpler, and nearly inanimate, such as acres and acres of bacterial mats. Without the vigorous biological cycle, Earth’s carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements would just be sterile and inanimate compounds.
Given this situation, being a vegan is no more sensitive to life than being a Big Mac eater. To say “I’m causing less suffering by not eating animals” is illogical. In particular, the formulation of “I don’t eat anything with a face” is sentimental speciesism.
Of course people should be free to indulge whatever sentiments they can afford to. There is a problem only when they impose those sentiments on others.
The creatures we humans raise, whether wheat and chickens on a farm, roses in a garden, mink or sheep on a ranch, or algae in a lab, are symbiotes with us. They are the product of privilege, not right. Because we consider them valuable, humans spend a lot of time and resources on providing them with food, shelter, health care, and secure breeding.
The beings we symbiote the best with have been diligently selected and bred for their symbioting ability; cows can be fenced in and herded, gazelle cannot. In many cases, our symbiotes are no longer well adapted to living in the wild. Their wild-living counterparts have nasty (disease and predator-filled), brutish (constantly scrabbling for food), and short lives—if those counterparts even exist. For instance, the last wild-living cattle, the aurochs, went extinct in 1627.
Apple trees and grape vines are so dramatically adapted that those under cultivation are frequently one species on top grafted to a different species on the bottom, to help fight disease.
When many fewer of a species would be alive without human intervention, and those that did exist would live a lower quality of life, then arguing against the species’ “exploitation” by humans seems pretty hollow.
Non-human organisms have little respect for the rights of other organisms.
The mosquito who settles down for a tasty meal of your blood could be a vegetarian if you weren’t around. But you’re here, and if she gets a good suck out of you and lives, she will lay ten times the number of eggs that she would as a vegetarian and thus do her bit toward meeting Mother Nature’s Grandchild Test.
Why should we humans respect animal rights when animals—with very minor exceptions, including pets and the occasional helpful dolphin—don’t respect human rights?
The influence of women in American society has grown steadily during my lifetime, and this has been a good thing. Women have steadily moved into more fields of endeavor and gained more education—these days women college students outnumber men.
The effect of this has been powerfully beneficial for America and the world. Much of America’s increase in prosperity has been due to women’s greater participation in business and industry.
Mixed with all this shining brightness are a few steaks of dark, and those should be recognized. This is a cautionary, not a rejectionary, discussion.
Women’s rights have grown in large part because with mechanization and automation, women have become able to do the jobs men can do, which means if we lose prosperity to the point that the labor-saving tools we use are impacted, we lose a major support for women’s rights.
When productivity and household security literally depend on the strength of your back and the muscle in your arm, then the historic labor specializations make sense—a man being about in the fields and a woman being at home with the youngsters. Therefore, any women’s rights program, policy, or advocacy that chips away at a community’s Industrial Age–style productivity and prosperity will also be chipping away at women’s rights.
Where this is a contemporary issue is when people call for Industrial/ Information Age styles of women’s rights to be given to women living in Agricultural Age conditions—or vice versa! Calling for women to have lots of formal education in impoverished rural settings makes no sense. Likewise, asking women in prosperous urban settings to always cover themselves head to toe and be accompanied by a male relative whenever they leave the house is equally bizarre. In short, women’s rights should harmonize with the prosperity level of the woman’s community.
As I’ve argued above, disenfranchisement is the root of much crime in part because it liberates the deep mammalian Instinct for human males to become violently territorial and possessive of women. The classic movie scene of two men fighting over a dance-hall girl who might not recognize either with his clothes on is not unrealistic just because it is a cliché.
When men have a stake in their community and feel enfranchised the Sacred Masculine that I discussed earlier flourishes. The alternative, newer, Instinct to cooperate stays strong—“I’ll stick with this because I’m here to build a better future for me and my loved ones.”
Women’s rights efforts must stay sensitive to their effect on male enfranchisement. If a man feels that “his” woman is not in his life as he needs her to be, because she’s out being all that she can be somewhere else, and as a result becomes a disenfranchised drunken gangster or dropped out loner, there has been net social loss, not gain.
Again, this is a cautionary bit of advice. How to resolve this conflict of where to spend time and attention in the Information Age environment is something that still needs a lot of experimenting with.
Environmental concern has a long history. One could date it back to the first time a hunter-gatherer tribe protested a prehistoric farmer tribe’s slash-and-burning a nice foraging area to grow crops. Time and circumstances have changed a lot since that hypothetical day, but the argument over the rightness of altering the land has remained with us.
The newest element of the argument is anthropogenic (human caused) climate change, which I discussed in my section on “Guilt Thinking” above. If we engage in a worldwide trillion-dollar response that turns out not to be cost effective, we’re financing a scapegoat, a perverse entertainment form, not a scientific solution.
We’ll be fooling ourselves, not Mother Nature.
“You have to have faith,” the umpteenth proselytizer tells me for the umpteenth time. (I enjoy talking about religion, so I do spend some time with these people.)
For decades I was a skeptic, but these days I believe! And what I believe is that for some of these issues brought up in religious discussions you do have to have faith, and lots of it, because what you are being asked to believe in has no sufficient basis in either logic or demonstrable reality. If you don’t have faith, these kinds of beliefs seem just plain wacky. So, yes, we are talking about pure, undiluted faith. I now call these choices Pillar of Faith beliefs. Your accepting them shows you’re part of the religion because you are showing faith.
I don’t include as Pillars of Faith beliefs that have no apparent direct impact on believers’ behavior. So the Christian Trinity or the Xenu story that Scientology allegedly teaches aren’t Pillars.
Nevertheless, given the thousands of religions and belief systems, there must be thousands of Pillars. I can’t be sure every single system has at least one, but I don’t know of any that don’t. However, I’m going to discuss three to show the Pillar of Faith pattern.
The question of this section is: Why do we have Pillars of Faith? This must be a valuable human thinking trait because it is widespread and enduring.
Let’s first look at how these particular choices became Pillars, and see if that can help us answer the why.
All three of my chosen Pillars are practices that were originally embraced for practical reasons whose practicality later disappeared. As this happened the leaders and followers then had the choice of either giving up the practice or sustaining it by embracing it as a Pillar of Faith.
The Jews have a practical description of the situation for their own laws, in Hebrew mitzvot, as described in the Wikipedia article on kashrut, the kosher dietary laws:
Jewish philosophy divides the 613 mitzvot into three groups—laws that have a rational explanation and would probably be enacted by most orderly societies (mishpatim), laws that are understood after being explained but would not be legislated without the Torah’s command (edot), and laws that do not have a rational explanation (chukim). Some Jewish scholars say that kashrut should be categorized as laws for which there is no particular explanation, since the human mind is not always capable of understanding divine intentions. In this line of thinking, the dietary laws were given as a demonstration of God’s authority and man must obey without asking why. However, Maimonides believed that Jews were permitted to seek out reasons for the laws of the Torah.
The Maimonides cited was the 12th century Egyptian Jewish rabbi Moses Maimonides who was court physician to the Islamic emperor Saladin; I’ll follow up on his point below. But first, I want to observe that, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of emotion behind making a choice into a Pillar of Faith, and the decision can often split a religion. As we’ll see, two of the choices we’re discussing are examples.
Let’s look at the practical origins behind each of these choices.
Thanks to my anthropology teacher, Robin Chalhoub, I was introduced to Marvin Harris’s essay “The Abominable Pig”, which offers pragmatic ecological explanations for why the Israelites and after them the Muslims gave up on pig raising.
Harris notes but is not persuaded by Maimonides’s repulsion at pigs eating human feces. (The same reason is suggested for Muslims considering dogs to be unclean.) And he rejects the commonly heard claim that trichinosis is the basis of the prohibition, since the parasites involved are easily killed simply by cooking the pink out of pork. Moreover, he points out, all domestic animals are hazardous to human health, including the ritually clean cattle, sheep, and goats; for instance, those three carry anthrax, a much more immediately and spectacularly deadly disease that is uncommon in pigs.
Rather, Harris demonstrates, in hot, arid Judea, pig raising was nearly always expensive as an alternative to cattle, sheep, and goat raising, so it made economic sense to encourage the latter, forbidding the former even in the few niches where it was possible. Moreover, swine herding had been impossible during the Jewish nation’s formative nomadic years.
Of course, the above are not the only explanations ever offered for keeping kosher.
Some theologians have said that the laws of kashrut are symbolic in character: …
…
… Hasidism argues that the food laws are related to the way [certain] channels [connecting with Divinity], called sparks of holiness, interact with various animals.
…
According to Christian theologian Gordon J. Wenham, the purpose of kashrut was to help Jews maintain a distinct and separate existence from other peoples; he says that the effect of the laws was to prevent socialization and intermarriage with non-Jews, preventing Jewish identity from being diluted. Wenham argued that since the impact of the food laws was a public affair, this would have enhanced Jewish attachment to them as a reminder of the distinct status of Jews.
In other words, Wenham says that adherents’ maintaining a Pillar of Faith intrinsically helps sustain the faith. A man after my own heart! However, at least as applied to pork-eating, Harris argues against this interpretation, since at least three of the Israelites’ unfriendly neighbors, the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Babylonians, were as “disturbed by pigs” as they were.
Harris also notes that modern medical understanding led to Reform Judaism seeing kosher rules as inessential, appalling the Orthodox who equated such rejection to “the book of God’s law being relegated to the ‘class of a minor medical text’,” and clung to the dietary rules as a Pillar of Faith.
Mormons obey rules called the Word of Wisdom, in some ways similar to the Jewish dietary laws, prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea—the last originally listed as “hot drinks”.
From Brigham Young’s account of the origins of the prohibition in 1833:
When they assembled together in this room after breakfast, the first they did was to light their pipes, and, while smoking, talk about the great things of the kingdom, and spit all over the room, and as soon as the pipe was out of their mouths a large chew of tobacco would then be taken. Often when the Prophet [Joseph Smith] entered the room to give the school instructions he would find himself in a cloud of tobacco smoke. This, and the complaints of his wife at having to clean so filthy a floor, made the Prophet think upon the matter, and he inquired of the Lord relating to the conduct of the Elders in using tobacco, and the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom was the result of his inquiry.
In other words, the tobacco part of this Pillar started as a practical solution to a real world problem.
However, as late as 1842 there were still questions about what this really meant.
In 1842, Smith’s brother Hyrum, who was the Assistant President of the Church and its presiding patriarch, provided an interpretation of the Word of Wisdom’s proscription of “hot drinks”:
And again “hot drinks are not for the body, or belly;” there are many who wonder what this can mean; whether it refers to tea, or coffee, or not. I say it does refer to tea, and coffee.”
Fast forward to the 20th century and the question of what to consume now revolved around soft drinks with caffeine in them. They aren’t hot, but ...
The official interpretation is that only tea and coffee are prohibited, but many of the faithful also avoid all beverages containing caffeine. (Since neither side shows any sign of trying to force the other to adopt its position, no split is likely.)
Which demonstrates another pattern of Pillars of Faith. When they have become wholly or nearly arbitrary—no longer anything practical—the question of what it really means to follow them comes up constantly and must be decided arbitrarily by contemporary opinion makers. And even though the choice is arbitrary, those opinion makers are rarely comfortable with issuing a simple fiat, so they often offer a story and/or logic to support it, which may vary from one opinion maker to the next.
For fundamentalist Mormons, and in particular for Warren Jeffs’s Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the FLDS Church), whom we will meet again below, polygamy is a Pillar of Faith.
In January 2004, Jeffs expelled a group of 20 men from Colorado City, including the mayor, and reassigned their wives and children to other men in the community. Jeffs, like his predecessors, continued the standard FLDS and Mormon fundamentalist tenet that faithful men must follow what is known as the doctrine of “Celestial Marriage” or plural marriage in order to attain the highest degree of Exaltation in the afterlife. Jeffs specifically taught that a devoted church member is expected to have at least three wives in order to get into heaven, and the more wives a man has, the closer he is to heaven. Former church members claim that Jeffs himself has seventy wives.
The FLDS are the manifestation of another Pillar crisis that split a community.
Polygamy seems to have come into Mormonism by historic accident. Some of the earliest converts to Joseph Smith’s new religion were Cochranites—followers of a short-lived religious order founded by Jacob Cochran. His followers practiced a lifestyle comparable to 1960s hippie commune aspirations and are perhaps where the LDS ideas for both the United Order (sharing all a community’s wealth) and plural marriage came from.
I say “perhaps” because no one knows for sure now, and the leaders and followers may not have known for sure even in their own time. The US in the 1830s and ’40s was an exciting time for many things, including experimental religious ideas; think the crazier great-granddaddy of California in the 1950s and ’60s. Mormonism and the Cochranite “Society of Free Brethren and Sisters” were just two of hundreds of new religious forms, and both were quite exciting and chaotic in their beginnings. So despite the quantity of documentation from this period, the roots of many ideas and their patterns of cross-fertilization remain quite uncertain.
After moving several times around the Midwest during the 1830s and ’40s while making lots of enemies there, the Mormons finally emigrated to what eventually became Utah. As they settled down there in the 1850s, they became open about their previously secret polygamy. What would have been a liability Back East, because it would have increased their neighbors’ hostility even more, became an advantage in raising up a chosen people to rapidly populate a previously barren wilderness and make the desert bloom. (Although the Utes whose tribal name the state eventually used might have argued with the evaluation, that’s not our point of view here.)
But the 1880s saw a crisis. Believers and especially leaders were torn between allowing polygamy to become an increasingly impractical Pillar of the Mormon Faith and giving it up so they could integrate more with mainstream US culture, achieving the statehood that had been repeatedly denied them in the previous decades. In 1890 the Church mostly gave up polygamy and in 1904 ditched the Pillar entirely, excommunicating those who clung to it. Many of the latter split away and formed a cluster of fundamentalist groups who considered themselves Mormon despite no longer being mainstream Mormon.
Those of course included the FLDS. And as we saw above, Jeffs was the 2000s’ definer of what this Pillar of Faith meant for his sect, and he was going whole hog: The more wives the better.
The benefits of having Pillars of Faith are similar to those of having a kinship system. In both cases the goal is to help a person rapidly decide who they can trust and who they can’t. Any method that correctly makes that distinction will always be of great benefit.
Holding to a Pillar demonstrates that a person is willing to sacrifice in order to be part of a group, which assures other group members that the person will not betray them whereas an outsider might.
Of course that assurance may fail, so the method is far from perfect. But perfection has never been an important criterion for evolutionary success. If there’s only an increased chance that a fellow embracer of a Pillar is trustworthy, it’s enough for Mother Nature to endorse that way of thinking.
We have seen that all these ethical issues about how we should use our technologies are powered by deeply emotional thinking. Because they are swirling in emotion, we are looking at illusions. Opponents are not on two sides of each question but engaging in “skew thinking”, with arguments that are neither parallel nor intersecting, but missing each other entirely! No wonder solutions never appear.
If history is any guide, these burning questions will not be solved by opponents finding common ground based on reasoned arguments. Rather, they will be swept away by the changes in how we live, becoming irrelevant as they are replaced by other issues that fire the community’s emotions. They will join other controversies of yesteryear, like:
“What rights does a serf have?” How many reading this are feudal lords?
“What is the right way for me to slaughter an animal?” How many butcher their own food?
And even, “Is a woman’s place in the home raising kids?” At least for those growing up multi-tasking and college-bound.