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
Are firemen like doctors?
How deep does the analogy go? Not deep enough to justify universal health care.
At the Washington Post blog, Ezra Klein discusses the parallel between firefighters letting someone’s house burn because he didn’t pay $75 for fire insurance—which happened a few weeks ago in a rural area of Tennessee that doesn’t guarantee fire protection—and letting a person die because they didn’t purchase health care insurance.
When liberals explain why health care needs an individual mandate, the traditional metaphor is firefighting: Everyone needs to buy insurance for the same reason that everyone needs to buy fire protection. But if you leave the market unregulated, some people won’t buy — or won’t be able to afford — fire protection. And we’re not comfortable letting their houses burn down. Similarly, if you leave health coverage to the market, some people won’t buy it, and others won’t be able to afford it, and then, when they get sick and need it, insurers won’t sell it to them. But we’re not comfortable letting them die in the streets. Hence, the health-care law.
Klein argues that fire protection and health care are both “collective goods” which the government must guarantee.
Sam and I discussed a similar question over a year ago, when I attempted to parallel the government’s obligation to protect its citizens against Swine Flu (remember that?) with its obligation to protect citizens against other serious illnesses like cancer.
The parallel between fires and non-epidemic diseases, generally following Sam’s post, does not work perfectly. Fires spread. Non-epidemic diseases, like cancer, do not. If one person isn’t protected against fires, we are all thereby threatened, because those flames can jump from his house to our houses.
When a person is ill with a non-epidemic disease, we are not thereby threatened ourselves, or at least not enough of us to say that the community is endangered. This is why fire insurance is a real “collective good” and health care is not. Health care may be (and I think to a degree is) an individual right, of course, but that’s a different argument.
How to buy an election
What does it mean that it’s possible?
With the November elections looming, campaign donations are heating up. Sharron Angle, Republican Senatorial candidate for Nevada, received $14 million in the last quarter alone, to give one example. The topic of money in politics always raises the worry that a politician will “buy an election,” or that the richer candidate will win by virtue of the size of his war chest. But how can someone “buy” a free and fair election where people aren’t bribed to vote for a candidate?
Well, it costs money to get people’s attention (e.g. to buy television ads). And the more attention a candidate can afford, the more time he will have to explain why he’s the best person for the job. This makes sense to a degree, certainly at the edges, where one candidate has 100 times more money and 100 times more opportunities to present his arguments, or where one candidate doesn’t have enough money to even communicate his core views effectively.
But what does it mean that a candidate has a huge advantage when he has only 2 times as much money? It such circumstances, let’s assume that the poorer candidate can still afford to present his most important policy proposals, personality, political and personal values, and personal affiliations, and that there is a stark contrast between the two candidates. That’s what really matters; and shouldn’t that be enough? It clearly isn’t.
This means that, in many cases, democratic citizens are not strong or engaged enough deliberators to withstand unimportant, trivial arguments and attacks. Because beyond that core pitch, that’s what’s going on for the most part.
Clotheslined!
Should people be allowed to hang their laundry out to dry?
The BBC has an amusing perspective on a trend in the United States toward foregoing the use of mechanical driers in favor of drying clothes on the line. Outdoor clothesline drying is prohibited by many landlords and community associations on the basis that it that detracts from property values. Advocates of clothesline drying argue that it is less costly, friendlier to the environment, and has therapeutic benefits as well.
There are a couple of possible approaches to this issue. One approach is a consequentialist one, wherein we are faced with the costs and benefits preserving the property values and well-being of neighbors on the one hand and protecting the environment as well as peoples’ enjoyment of their own property on the other.
Some economists have tried to address problems of “social cost,” namely costs that people impose upon others as secondary consequences of their actions. But such analyses are only reasonable when we can make precise and commensurable measurements of the costs and benefits involved. How do we compare environmental degradation per ton of carbon emissions to property value loss, or the enjoyment and therapeutic value of hanging laundry? Many of these costs and benefits are subjective and vary wildly on a personal basis. 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.
I don’t sanction that
The BBC reports that the United States has imposed sanctions on key Iranian officials for human rights abuses dating from the crackdown on anti-government protesters in the summer of 2009. The sanctions consist of travel bans and asset freezes. As far as diplomatic tools go, sanctions like these –small, targeted ones- are mostly symbolic in nature and morally uncontroversial. They will at least inconvenience the miscreants in question a little, and likely will not hurt any innocents.
But the same cannot be said of sanctions in general as diplomatic tools. Without so much as a shot fired, economic sanctions can be just as destructive as wars and just as capable of harming the innocent. More than that, they rarely accomplish policy goals in their own right, although they might make some goals easier to attain in at least the short run.
When we discuss sanctions of the kind that target whole nations, we are really weighing the morality of collective punishment against the desirability of certain policy goals. Maybe the price will be worth it. Maybe not.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user ajagendorf25 used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
The death penalty may be constitutional, but is it justified?
The United States Supreme Court has refused to overturn the execution of a Virginia woman who conspired with two accomplices to murder her husband and stepson. The legal debate that has emerged around the case concentrates mostly on whether the woman, who is borderline mentally disabled, deserves a harsher sentence than her accomplices, who each received life sentences.
But there is a broader issue at stake here. Recall the justifications for punishment – incapacitation, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. The death penalty does incapacitate criminals – terminally – but so does a secure prison. It is certainly an expression of society’s disgust and vengeance (retribution).
But does it deter? Deterrence depends in part on the probability and severity of punishment. The death penalty is so seldom exercised in the United States that the case for its deterrence effect is a questionable one.
Perhaps the deterrence effect would be more meaningful if people were executed more often. But there is a very dark undertone to this suggestion: the justice system is by no means infallible, and entrusting matters of life or death to it does carry real risks.
And even if we sincerely believe that there are monsters among us that don’t belong among the living, we must seriously consider whether the danger of wrongfully executing the innocent is outweighed by the benefit of ensuring the guilty get their just deserts. The cost of retribution and deterrence may not be worth the benefit.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user johnmuk used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Should identity and politics ever mix?
The BBC reports that France’s Senate has overwhelmingly approved banning Islamic full-body coverings. The heart of the issue is the integration of Muslim immigrants, who have been arriving in France and other European countries in large numbers for the last three decades but have often visibly failed to assimilate. Undoubtedly, the Paris riots of 2005 and the terror attacks in Madrid and London weigh heavily on the minds of French voters and parliamentarians.
France is not the only European country to move in this direction. Belgium and Spain are considering similar laws, and Switzerland recently outlawed minarets.
It is not surprising that secular Europeans react with visceral hostility and disgust to what they see as trappings of archaic, patriarchal and oppressive religiosity. The values that Muslim immigrants bring to Europe are often at odds with those of the modern Western human rights culture. But is it appropriate for the heavy hand of the law to secularize by force?
Forcible secularization as a form of social engineering has a mixed record. In Turkey, the fervently nationalist and secular governments since the time of Ataturk have outlawed headscarves and generally repressed religious expression. Islamic radicalism was forcibly stamped out (although the ruling AKP bills itself as a moderate Islamist party). But many rights that Americans would take for granted were trampled in the process. And religious identity politics in Turkey have by no means been resolved for good.
Banning articles of clothing might give the illusion of assimilation, while violating basic rights to religious expression. If Europeans want to address the challenges posed by immigrants from radically different cultures, they should probably think of other ways to bring their immigrants into the economic and social mainstream. Assimilation and religious freedom need not butt heads.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user BBC World Service used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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