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
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
Mother always said to tell the truth
But the truth doesn’t always make an interesting story
The biopic The Social Network opened on Friday. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, and people close to him convincingly dismiss the movie as more fiction than fact. Have David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin done us a disservice?
People have always applied artistic license to stories portraying events beyond living memory. Sometimes, fiction turns history completely on its head. Banquo from Shakespeare’s Macbeth was, according to Holinshed’s Chronicles (from which Shakespeare frequently drew inspiration), not Macbeth’s noble adversary but his accomplice in regicide. Read more
God Save the Queen (or President?)
Politics, religion, and “public reason”
Writing for The Washington Post, Damon Linker proposes a norm of questioning politicians about their religious beliefs.
Every religion is radically particular, with its own distinctive beliefs about God, human history and the world. These are specific, concrete claims — about the status of the religious community in relation to other groups and to the nation as a whole, about the character of political and divine authority, about the place of prophecy in religious and political life, about the scope of human knowledge, about the providential role of God in human history, and about the moral and legal status of sex. Depending on where believers come down on such issues, their faith may or may not clash with the requirements of democratic politics.
This is an interesting point I will not tackle directly. Instead, I want to examine a related question: if candidates are asked these questions, how should they respond? Or put another way, how can a religious candidate fail to pass this proposed religious test? Read more
Do ask, do tell –later, when you’re a little older
Last Thursday, a federal judge in California ruled Don’t Ask Don’t Tell unconstitutional on First and Fifth Amendment grounds for restricting the rights of gay service members to free speech, free association, and due process. The case put the Obama administration in a slightly awkward position, having to defend a standing law that it is already in the process of repealing.
It is clear that Obama, Chairman of the Join Chiefs Mullen, and Secretary of Defense Gates have little love for DADT. The public is not keen about it either. And yet, legal procedure is so important to our form of government that it sometimes means defending or accepting laws that we don’t support.
Procedure allows for consistency and predictability. It is the counterweight to the whim or discretion of leaders, the public, bureaucrats, and other parties – none of whom are everywhere and always right. For example, we have due process and the presumption of innocence to protect people from being punished hastily and wrongfully.
Whether to defend something you believe to be morally wrong because it is the law of the land is one of the most difficult moral quandaries in public philosophy.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user The U.S. Army used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Career of evil?
A continent’s past crimes and present guilt
A piece in The National Review commends an essay by Parisian intellectual Pascal Bruckner that diagnoses a type of European “self-hatred.” Europe apparently views its own history as a series of crimes for which it must repent. Bruckner thinks this guilt is responsible for the continent’s “decline.”
Do Europeans have reason to be remorseful? While denying that guilt can be transmitted from generation to generation — “As there is no hereditary transmission of victim status, so there is no transmission of oppressor status” — Bruckner acknowledges that European history is pockmarked with crimes: slavery, feudal oppression, colonialism, fascism, and Communism.
On one hand, I agree that there is no hereditary transmission of moral guilt – the son is not responsible for the sins of the father. However, there is a certain sense in which a feeling of guilt for a society’s past crimes can be both important and helpful. Read more
Sensitivity and principle
Last Friday, President Obama weighed in publicly on the mosque at ground zero. In doing so, he has joined Mayor Bloomberg as one of few major political figures who have openly voiced support for the project on the basis of freedom of religion.
However, polls indicate that Americans as well as New Yorkers overwhelmingly oppose the mosque’s construction to the tune of 68 percent. The poll reaffirms a truism that the writers of the Bill of Rights were grimly aware of: freedom often runs afoul of democracy. As one opponent of the mosque argues: ‘…[Obama]‘s lost sight of the germane issue, which is not about freedom of religion,” she said. “It’s about a gross lack of sensitivity to the 9/11 families and to the people who were lost.”’
Except the germane issue is exactly the balance between sensitivity and principle, and whether, as Jonathan asked yesterday, something can be “legally harmless but unpleasant enough for us to rightly or morally require legal intervention at the cost of others’ legal rights?” Namely, do people have a right not to be offended? Do they also have a right for their faith, beliefs, or values not to be challenged?
Greg Gutfeld of Fox News clearly believes not. In one of the most creative responses to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, Gutfeld argues for both supporting the mosque’s construction and opening a gay bar next door. Now that might take equal opportunity offending to an extreme. But in a society in which we value both the principles of religious freedom and the “marketplace of ideas,” should we want it any other way?
-Charles
Image from Flickr user Johnnie Utah used under a Creative Commons Attribution license
Ground Zero mosque
Morality vs. legality?
The debate over the Muslim mosque and community center near Ground Zero has resulted in a number of different, passionate reactions. Once the media took up the subject, politicians and leaders from all over the US weighed in rather quickly.
On Friday, even President Obama shared his view in favor of the mosque, stating “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.”
Not surprisingly, critics of the mosque pounced. And their response was strong enough to push the President and his staff to “recalibrate” his comments from Friday evening more than once. Although his remarks were initially received as a deliberate endorsement of the mosque construction, President Obama apparently meant only to speak in favor of the project’s legality—not in favor of “the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque [near Ground Zero].”
Regardless of how you interpret the President’s statements this weekend, his clarification here suggests a crucial distinction underlying this Ground Zero mosque debate: even in a society that emphasizes personal liberty and freedom of religion, there may be a difference between what is legally permissible and what is morally permissible. Read more
I have a proposition for you… never mind
The gay marriage debate in California and beyond
In a 136-page decision, Federal Judge Vaughn Walker has overturned California’s Proposition 8, which provided that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid.” A (temporary) triumph for supporters of gay marriage, the case will likely be appealed and eventually find its way to the Supreme Court.
The gay marriage debate is but one battle in a larger “culture war” between two diametrically opposed worldviews, with differing beliefs about human flourishing and the societal consequences of social liberation. Read more
The ethics of the House ethics committee
Who do they represent?
The most interesting ethical questions surrounding Charlie Rangel don’t concern him, his villas, or his rent controlled apartments. They are about the operation and purpose of the House ethics committee and what ethical perspective members of the House should bring to bear on the controversy.
Rangel, dethroned former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been charged by the ethics committee with 13 violations, including, among other sins, using his office to solicit donations to school to be named in his honor and failing to pay taxes on and report rental income from a house in the Dominican Republic. Settlement talks have stalled and Democrats are wringing their hands over the prospect of a public ethics trial for a fellow party member. It will not help their chances in the November elections.
A number of ethical perspectives in tension here, and for everyone involved. Here are a few.
First, there is the special obligation one has to himself, his life’s work, and his family. This means wanting to keep one’s job as a Congressman (or to regain one’s job as a chairman), and leads to asking the question: What process and outcome will be best for my election chances?
Second, there is obligation to one’s party, both as a matter of duties to an organization one has freely joined and also as a matter of personal integrity, in the sense of fealty to one’s political and philosophical ideology. This leads to question: What process and outcome will be best for my party’s election chances?
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