[Karen (Georgetown, Philosophy) sent this e-mail message to Richard, Rob, and me. The conversation continues ...]
Richard, I appreciate your thoughful reply [here], but as you might guess, I am not
satisfied. I think we actually largely agree about this: "It seems a much too facile way of just "redescribing" the actions of the doctor."
It
*is* facile (or at least, arbitrary) unless it is accompanied by an
action theory that justifies sorting the descriptions that way. The
same, however, applies to the way you want to to sort out action
descriptions. You and others suggest sorting them this way:
"It doesn't focus adequately on the physical act that is being undertaken."
But
I don't see how this helps. Indeed, I think it obscures the very issues
that need to be settled within action theory. For what exactly is the
physical act in question? What grounds are you using for saying that
the craniotonomy/salpingostomy constitutes the physical act of killing
the baby, whereas a hysterectomy/salpingectomy does not? Both, of
course, are physical acts of some sort, and obviously they have the
same result. In order to argue that the one constitutes killing whereas
the other does not, you need to have a theory of action individuation
that allows us to identify all and only cases of killing.
But
let us suppose that we have such a theory and agree that craniotomies
and salpingostomies constitute killings, whereas hysterectomies and
salpingectomies do not. In order to argue that the former are grave
moral wrongs, you would *also* need to argue that they are intentional
killings, that death is the aim. And this is what I do not think that
the physical description alone can get you. (After all, the cardiac
surgeon and the knife-wielding murderer may be doing exactly the same
physical act, but the one is attempting heart surgery and the other is
attempting murder.)
In sum, there are two steps in the
argument that still need justification in order for the
salpingectomy/salpingostomy distinction to succeed. First, it needs to
be argued that the salpingostomy is properly described as killing at
all, and then it also needs to be argued that it is intentional
killing. Pointing to the physical act gets you only to the first of
those, if even that. But you need something more to get to the second
part of the claim, and that something more will have to involve a
theory of intention.
Those defending the Grisez-Boyle-Finnis
line have an equal burden of argumentation. I do think that position
has better philosophical grounding than the one you defend, but this
could certainly be disputed. And this again is why the application of
double effect troubles me so much, as it can amount to holding real
people hostage to shaky philosophical distinctions.
Best,
Karen
From today's New York Times:
Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. . . .
At the final public hearing for the birth certificate proposal last week, a string of advocates and transsexuals suggested that common definitions of gender, especially its reliance on medical assessments, should be abandoned. They generally praised the city for revisiting its 25-year-old policy that lets people remove the sex designation from their birth certificate if they have had sexual reassignment surgery. Then they demanded more freedom to choose.
Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, said transgender people should not have to rely on affidavits from a health care system that tends to be biased against them.
In case you're confused by all this, allow Joann Prinzivalli of the New York Transgender Rights Organization to clear things up. She hails the "move away from American culture’s misguided fixation on genitals as the basis for one’s gender identity," a fixation that is "based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes." In reality, she explains, "the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.”
Rob
I wanted to mention a new book on double effect. The book is Double-Effect Reasoning: Doing Good and Avoiding Evil by Thomas A. Cavanaugh. It is available in the UK and is scheduled to be published in the US very soon by Oxford University Press. Tom Cavanaugh is the chair of the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and has written several noteworthy articles on this issue. I haven't yet read the book but I expect that it will make an important contribution to the discussion of double effect.
Richard M.
A group of economists has posted a new paper, Abortion and Selection. Here is the abstract:
The introduction of legalized abortion in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility behavior. Some research has suggested as well that there were important impacts on cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the mechanisms through which abortion access affects cohort outcomes, and use that framework to both address inconsistent past methodological approaches, and provide evidence on the long-run impact on cohort characteristics. Our results provide convincing evidence that abortion legalization altered young adult outcomes through selection. In particular, we find evidence that lower costs of abortion led to improved outcomes in the birth cohort in the form of an increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent. We also find that our empirical innovations do not substantially alter earlier results regarding the relationship between abortion and crime, although most of that relationship appears to reflect cohort size effects rather than selection.
Rob
Monday, November 6, 2006
I am just back from a roundtable conference -- the third annual meeting of a five-year project on Christian Jurisprudence -- at Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. It was a great time. In a nutshell, the project convenes two dozen or so scholars (including MOJ-ers Michael Perry and Kathy Brady) -- lawyers, historians, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists -- from the Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Christian traditions for meetings and workshops aimed at, eventually, producting two dozen or so new monographs on "the contributions of modern Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox figures to fundamental questions of law, politics, and society."
Emory's John Witte is the ringleader for the project. He is, of course, a force of nature.
I presented this paper, on the Freedom of the Church, which will -- I hope -- eventually be part of a book about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, properly understood. It received a helpfully, but quite forcefully, critical response.
