Inconceivable!
Is fertility a health issue or a lifestyle choice?
This month a health care refom advisory panel will meet to consider whether contraception should be offered free of charge as a form of preventative medicine, the AP reports. Healthcare reform of course poses many questions concerning how medical services are paid for and delivered. But, as the AP notes, social mores are at the heart of this latest question.
Contraception is a controversial tool for preventing pregnancy, with many religious movements banning it outright. At the heart of the argument against free contraception is that the use of contraception is a lifestyle choice, not a health issue. As the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center notes, “there are other ways to avoid having children than by ingesting chemicals.”
All other things equal, should the use of contraception be thought of as a health issue or a lifestyle choice? And should it matter for whether it is provided free as a form of preventative care? Read more
Play the game
Video games, value, and free speech
The Supreme Court will soon hear a case concerning the state of California’s right to regulate the sale of violent video games to minors. Writing for The Washington Post, game designer Daniel Greenberg thinks that the First Amendment should protect video games. His argument relies on the value of video games:
Gameplay is a dialogue between a player and a game. Reading a book or watching a film can also be considered a dialogue, but the ability of the audience to respond is far more limited. […]The exploration and self-discovery available through books and movies is magnified in video games by the power of interactivity. A new generation of games features real changes in the story based on the morality of a player’s decisions. Mature-rated games such as “BioShock,” “Fable 2″ and “Fallout 3″ go far beyond allowing players to engage in imaginary violent acts; they also give players meaningful consequences for the choices that they make.
Leaving aside the specific jurisprudence of the First Amendment, this raises a number of moral issues.
First, does speech have to be valuable in order for it to be protected? In order to answer this question, we should ask why we protect free speech at all. Read more
Throw your hatred down
Moral disagreement and demonization
Writing for The Washington Post, Robert Samuelson claims that dysfunction in American politics has reached a new low. Samuelson diagnoses several reasons for the surging dysfunction in politics, but one strikes a particular chord with me:
Second, politics has become more moralistic from both left and right. Idealistic ideologues campaign to “save the planet,” “protect the unborn,” “reclaim the Constitution.” When goals become moral imperatives, there’s no room for compromise. Opponents are not just mistaken; they’re immoral. They’re cast as evil, ignorant, dangerous, or all three.
Anybody who is familiar with the basic premise of this blog can probably guess I disagree with this statement. As I’ve written before, the solution to this problem is not to avoid moral philosophy – but to do better moral philosophy. Read more
Fear and loathing redux
Radley Balko at Reason magazine argues that the close association between democratic politics and crime policy results in a vicious cycle of fear-mongering, excessive incarceration, and intergenerational poverty. He cites a Boston Globe article that reveals a tendency for undue and irrational pessimism and fear among the population. I explored the problem of irrational fear in a previous post, where I noted that there is often a gap between realistic and imagined levels of danger. In the case of crime, it is extreme. Although crime has been declining since the mid-1990s, 74% of Americans insist that crime is getting worse.
Balko’s solution to the vicious cycle is to divorce crime policy from the political process. Today, many judges and prosecutors in America are elected officials and as a result have been hijacked by public demands for tough sentencing. In most other countries, these jobs, which are technical in nature, are held by more-or-less impartial civil servants.
In any fair legal system, judges are supposed to be impartial, and so there is an argument for taking direct democracy out of the legal system. But we should be leery of technocracy more generally. There is a danger to having too many degrees of separation between the public and its agents. While public sentiments can certainly hijack policy for the worse, so can interests that have no accountability whatsoever to the public, with the results being systematic corruption and abuse.
In a complex society, we will always have to tread a fine line between technocracy and democracy.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user bitzcelt used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Would you like a melting pot or a salad bowl?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” amidst growing anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany. In the Netherlands, anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders was recently acquitted of discrimination and hate speech. Both of these mark serious departures from what was formerly the European consensus on multiculturalism. Given that immigration is both necessary and inevitable in the modern world, how should a country deal with immigrants from radically different cultures?
There are two widely regarded approaches to cultural pluralism. The prevailing European approach consists of treating immigrant populations as distinct subcultures, with few efforts made to integrate them into the broader society. Originally, this idea was in part tied to an expectation that most of these migrants were to be temporary migrant workers only. The idea that cultural integration need not accompany immigration has persisted even though it has become clear that millions of (mostly Muslim) immigrants are in Europe to stay. Although dressed in the benign language of “multiculturalism,” it is effectively a policy of exclusion.
The other approach is the “melting pot” that is usually attributed to the United States. In a melting pot, disparate ingredients blend together, creating something new that is (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, immigration in the United States has been anything but smooth. Successive waves of immigrants faced tremendous hostility. But by and large immigrant populations assimilated within the space of a few generations, gradually assuming full participation in society and escaping the confines of ethnic ghettos. The same has not happened in Europe, with tragic consequences.
There are certainly merits to cultural diversity. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, a diversity of viewpoints in the marketplace of ideas is necessary to inform human flourishing. But diversity is a means and not an end in its own right. This is a crucial point that, until recently, the European approach to immigration has overlooked.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user SpreePix – Berlin used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
It’s a woman’s world –and much more- in Iceland
The BBC reports that the World Economic Forum has found Iceland to be the country with the greatest parity between the genders. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at Iceland’s fertility rates to see if gender equality came at the expense of large families. It does not. In fact, according to John Carlin at The Guardian, Iceland simultaneously has Europe’s highest birth, divorce, and female employment rates.
This would probably be a recipe for social disaster in most of the rest of the world. But Iceland has negligible levels of crime, strong family cohesion, and high levels of both subjective happiness and living standards. Is there something we can learn from the Icelandic experience?
The Guardian article gushes with enthusiasm for the Icelandic way. A taboo-free and open-minded culture allows unconventional family arrangements to thrive. The Icelandic approach to relationships, marriage and family is casual and eminently pragmatic. Instead of leading to distress, poverty and broken families, high rates of birth, divorce, and female employment accompany strong, though patchwork, families and hardy children.
Cultures are complicated. They evolve organically over the course of centuries and are sustained under highly specific circumstances. Most fundamentally, to live like Icelanders, people would have to amend time-cherished beliefs about marriage and family. They might also have to reconsider the role of the state in supporting motherhood.
There are certainly things to be said for living “free of cant and prejudice and taboo.” But to overcome basic notions of family values is no simple matter. Unfortunately for those of us who might consider moving, the language is notoriously difficult.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user Gunna used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
You know you’re right
Facts and opinion in a liberal democracy
A recent video produced for the “10:10” campaign, which seeks to cut carbon emissions by ten percent a year for the next ten years, has come under intense criticism. The video begins with an elementary school teacher explaining the 10:10 project to her class, and asking for her students to sign up. All but two students agree, and in response, the teacher presses a little red button that causes the dissenting students to explode in a torrent of blood and gore.
The work of British filmmaker Richard Curtis, the four minute spot has been called a “snuff film” by National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg writes:
This isn’t a joke for the benefit of you and me. No, this is a knee-slapper for those already committed to the cause. The subtext is, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just get rid of these tiresome, inconvenient people?” That’s why they’re blown up without anyone trying to change their minds. That’s the joke: “Enough with these idiots already.
Goldberg considers this to be part of a larger trend within the environmentalist movement, where opponents are regarded as somehow beneath the debate.
Frustrated with the perceived environmental threat of economic freedom and the inconvenience of political freedom, many environmentalists yearn for shortcuts. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wishes we could learn from China’s one-party system […] NASA scientist James Hansen wants to put corporate CEOs on trial for crimes against humanity. Al Gore compares his opponents to Holocaust deniers and insists that the time for democratic debate is over.
This raises interesting questions about the nature of democratic debate. Environmentalists’ frustration with their opponents, if it exists, is understandable to a degree. The scientific consensus firmly agrees that man-made climate change is happening. And in a debate that is heavily scientific and technical, environmentalists can do little more than cite the experts’ work.
This is similar, for example, to the debate over teaching evolution. Evolution is the central tenet of biology, and to any scientist, a biology course not focused on evolution is simply deficient. Yet, the public debate still goes on. Read more
Who are you, Israel?
The Israeli cabinet has approved a motion requiring new citizens to declare their loyalty to a “Jewish and democratic state.” The controversial amendment to the citizenship law has been denounced as discriminatory by some.
[…]Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi said that Israel is “discriminative in its policies and laws against all who are not Zionists.” Zoabi went on to say the law “not only discriminates between Jews and non Jews, it also discriminates between Zionist Jews and non Zionists Jews.”
Another Arab Knesset member Ahmed Tibi, from the Ra’am-Ta’al party, criticized the move as well, saying that “the values of Jewish and Democratic cannot be in the same definition because democracy is the equality of all the citizens.”
On the other hand, some writers see the law as a modest acknowledgement of that fact that Israel really is a Jewish state, a result of the self-determination of the Jewish people.
The goal of these laws is to maintain these states’ unique national identities. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a nation-state without a single dominant culture.
What else unifies human beings, provides them with identity and purpose, gives them a sense of belonging? How else can they better give expression to universalistic values such as the fight against world poverty if not through the particularistic framework of the nation state?
I think that the idea of a Jewish state is not necessarily anti-democratic, but there surely is some tension with the Western conception of a liberal democracy. A liberal democracy chooses some shared set of civic values as the framework upon which to build a state – the particularistic cultural or religious values (such as Judaism, or Zionism) are not to be enshrined within the government.
Of course, this is not to say Israel is wrong in this law, only that such a conception of Israel is no longer compatible with the liberal pluralism of the United States and other countries. Israel can be conceived of in a communitarian light, where the unique social and historical factors of the country are the foundations to the moral and political values. And this might be fine – communitarian nations may still be democratic, and if any modern country comes close to the communitarian ideal, Israel must be a prime candidate.
-Han
Photo by flickr user maxnathans used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Guest Post: The dignity of the prostitute
“Human dignity” demands that we must (never) legalize prostitution
Last week, a judge in Canada’s largest province struck down the country’s federal laws criminalizing prostitution. Judge Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court ruled that prohibitions on prostitution infringed Canadians’ constitutional rights to freedom of expression and to security of the person. If the decision is upheld at the federal level, Canada will join countries such as Germany and the Netherlands and states such as Nevada where prostitution is, to varying degrees, legal.
The legalization of prostitution is not currently a live issue in the United States, but a major policy change from our neighbour and largest trading partner could prompt a re-examination of the issue. Such a debate would likely pit progressive against progressive and conservative against conservative. In the prostitution debate, the camps are separated less by the traditional right versus left dividing lines, and more by a disagreement regarding the meaning of “human dignity.”
Although prevalent in Enlightenment thinking, the idea that states must respect human dignity entered the political and philosophical vernacular following the adaptation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Since then, liberal and constitutional theorists have struggled to define what, exactly, respect for human dignity by the state entails.
Liberal theory encompasses two different conceptions of what constitutes respect for human dignity, which point to two radically different conclusions in the debate over prostitution.
Ballad of an obese man
Liberalism, free choice, and Happy Meals
It has been reported that the city of San Francisco is considering an ordinance that would ban toys in kids meals unless the meals contain fruit and vegetable portions and limits calories. While the proposed ban applies to all restaurants, it is targeted specifically at McDonald’s and their infamous Happy Meals.
There is little doubt that childhood obesity is a serious problem in the United States, and that the government has an interest in fighting it. Furthermore, drawing on contemporary liberal theory, I think it is pretty easy to justify at least some laws aimed at regulating public health. However, it is far less clear how a law as harsh and direct as banning Happy Meals can be justified. Read more
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