Søren Holm sometimes jokes that, if you want your conference well-attended, you should have a paper on the ethics of circumcision.  I don’t know how well-attended the recent IAB satellite on the topic was – the first half clashed with Peter Singer doing his thing, which can’t have helped it, and I couldn’t go to the second because I was giving a paper of my own.

Anyway: though I mentioned the decision of the German court that ritual circumcision constituted assault, I’ve wanted to stay clear of saying more about it.  Partly it’s because I’ve been busy; but there’s another reason: it seemed too potentially toxic.  For example, Jonanthan Sacks’ column about the decision in the Jerusalem Post noted that many attempts to ban circumcision have been motivated by antisemitism; the not-so-subtly made claim is that there’s an undercurrent of antisemitism here.  (An appeal to human rights is, he claims “is the only form in which an assault on Jews can be stated today”.)  Of course, that won’t show that such attempts have to be motivated by antisemitism, or that thinking the court’s decision correct is an indication of latent antisemitism: they don’t, and it isn’t.  Even if it’s true that the only way to launch an assault on Jews is to use the language of human rights, it doesn’t follow that every human-rights claim is an assault on Jews – even when it touches on something that is associated with Judaism.  I didn’t want to open myself to an accusation of antisemitism, so thought it best to keep quiet.

But the debate is rumbling on (it was featured on the Today programme today, for example); and one of the notable things is the poor quality of most of the arguments brought against the decision.  This doesn’t in itself mean that the decision is correct – poor arguments might accidentally bring you to the correct answer – but if the general direction of the poor arguments is the same, and there haven’t been many decent arguments produced that go the same way, then that does raise questions about the conclusion in which they’re headed.  Having said that, there has been one better argument against the decision that I’ve come across; I’ll come to that later.  It’s some of the poor arguments, rather than the position in the service of which they’re advanced, that I have in my sights here. more…

I’m writing this while listening to Mary Warnock talking at the IAB, so it’ll be unusually short and to the point: a court in Germany has ruled that male circumcision for religious reasons “amounts to bodily harm”.

In a decision that has caused outrage among Jewish and Muslim groups, the court said that a child’s right to physical integrity trumps religious and parental rights.

The ruling doesn’t quite say that the procedure is illegal – but

the court’s judgement said the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents”.  Circumcision, it decided, contravenes “interests of the child to decide later in life on his religious beliefs”.

Predictably enough, this ruling has not been warmly welcomed by the Jewish and Muslim communities:

The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, called it “an unprecedented and dramatic intervention in the right of religious communities to self-determination”.

That’s telling.  The rights of the child give way to the right of a community to cut him.  Can communities have rights anyway?  I’m not at all sure.  If they can, and if self-determination is one of them, does that always have to come out trumps?  Again, I’m not at all sure.  It’s strange to see rights-talk brought to the table in defence of unconsented, irreversible, and non-therapeutic body modification.  If a boy decides that it’s important to get himself circumcised later in life, then that’s a different matter entirely: good for him.  But without any choice?  I may have missed something, but I don’t understand how the claim is supposed to work.  Can anyone help out?

There’s a satellite meeting on boys’ circumcision here at the IAB.  I’ll miss it: I’m speaking elsewhere at the time.  But if anyone reading this goes (or went), will (was) this case mentioned?

UPDATE: Contrarian-for-hire Brendan O’Neill ham-fistedly disagrees with the ruling in The Telegraph.  Ophelia tears him a new one at B&W.

Wow.

Steve Fouch has, on the Christian Medical Fellowship’s blog, offered advice on how to vote in the BMA ballot on industrial action.  Now, Fouch isn’t the same as the CMF, and I don’t suppose what he writes indicates the CMF’s position any more than what I write here represents the BMJ’s.  Even so, what he suggests is pretty remarkable; and, in keeping with a lot of stuff from the CMF, the general advice is that the solutions to all modern problems can be found in a set of writings edited and selected – highly selected – around 1900 years ago by men with beards.

Notably,

I would lay out the following biblical framework for thinking through the way we approach this dispute:

Firstly, industrial relations:

Col 3:22 ‘Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything’

1 Peter 2:18 ‘Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.’

1 Timothy 6:1 ‘Let all who are under a yoke as slaves regard their own masters as worthy of all honour, so that the name of God and the teachings may not be reviled’.

Philippians 2:14-16 also encourages us to not be grumblers and moaners in the workplace, but to be a positive influence.

It is clear that Paul and Peter, in writing these messages were urging slaves not just to do their jobs, but to be exemplary, going over and above the call of duty, and to have a positive attitude and spirit in so doing. While this is referring to the institution of slavery, the principles apply equally to modern employment.

Do they apply equally to modern employment?  There’s no obvious reason to suppose that they do – not least because modern employment practices don’t generally rely on slavery.  more…

This may be of interest to readers…

MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory – Ninth Annual Conference
Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), University of Manchester
5th – 7th September 2012

Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy: Call for Abstracts

David Cameron, in a recent speech on introducing national measures of well-being to inform public policy, claimed that the UK government is aiming to measure the progress of the nation, “not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life.” In short, the UK government is looking to measure the nation’s well-being in order to “help make a better life for people.” Other governments and international organizations are also increasingly focusing upon well-being as a policy goal.

This workshop will focus on whether, and how, public policy can and should be informed, in some way, by considerations of the public’s well-being. There will be up to 12 speakers in total, who will be invited to give a 30 minute presentation, followed by a discussion. Potential areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

• The role of well-being in public policy
• The limits of political utilitarianism
• Paternalism and well-being
• The implications of different theories of well-being for public policy
• The interaction between different measures of well-being and public policy

If you are interested to present during this workshop, please send to one or both of us an abstract of no more than 500 words with your full name and institutional affiliation before May 15th.

Convenors:
Sam Wren-Lewis (University of Leeds): samwrenlewis@gmail.com
Tim Taylor (visiting research fellow, University of Leeds): phltet@leeds.ac.uk

Further details about the conference available at
http://manceptworkshops2012.wordpress.com/.

The proposal that there should be a minimum 40p/ unit price for alcohol, announced last week, has been broadly welcomed.  Not universally, but broadly.  There has been some dissent – but, by and large, it doesn’t seem to have been particularly vocal.

From a ethicist’s perspective, the objection that we might expect to hear articulated most has to do with paternalism: if the move is designed to coerce people into a certain kind of behaviour, and the motivation for this is a concern with people’s own good, then that might be presented as undue interference.  However, the response to this is simply to deny that paternalism of this sort is always a bad thing.  ”Respect for autonomy” has become something of a dogma among many people working in bioethicists, but it’s not beyond question – and it’s certainly not enough simply to stamp your foot and say, “Yes, but AUTONOMY” to defeat a proposal.  At the very least, the idea that governments should not intervene to prevent self-harming behaviour needs argumentative backing.  (I know that this is a particular bugbear of Angus Dawson and a number of other people working in public health ethics.  I don’t agree with the suggestion in some quarters that the “rules” of PHE are different from the “rules” of the rest of bioethics, such that autonomy is not as important in PHE as it is in those other areas – I think that ethics is ethics is ethics; but this simply means that unquestioning deference to autonomy and liberty is philosophically bogus right across the board.)

But, actually, the minimum-pricing policy doesn’t have to be defended on public health grounds.   more…

Remember a little while ago there was a rash of proposals in the US that’d force women to see a sonogram of the foetus, or to listen to detailed descriptions of it, before having an abortion?

Yeah: them.  Well, via Ophelia, here’s an account of what really happens.

Halfway through my pregnancy, I learned that my baby was ill. Profoundly so. [...] “I’m worried about your baby’s head shape,” she said.  “I want you to see a specialist—now.”

[... B]efore I’d even known I was pregnant, a molecular flaw had determined that our son’s brain, spine and legs wouldn’t develop correctly.  If he were to make it to term—something our doctor couldn’t guarantee—he’d need a lifetime of medical care.  From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.

So, softly, haltingly, my husband asked about termination.  The doctor shot me a glance that said: Are you okay to hear this now?  I nodded, clenched my fists and focused on the cowboy boots beneath her scrubs.

She started with an apology[...]

That’s not a good start, is it?  An expression of sympathy, maybe.  But an apology?  It’s as if she knows that things are about to get worse.  And they are. more…

Note: There’s a couple of errors of interpretation in this post.  I’m not going to re-write it, because I wrote what I wrote, and it’s in the public domain, and I don’t think it’s all that dignified to pretend that one never makes blunders; it’s better to acknowledge them, take the hit, and move on.  But please do have a look at Rebecca Skloot’s response in the comments, and at my answer to her. – IB, 8.ii.12

*     *     *     *     *

Since I read it in the autumn, there’s been a few things nagging at the back of my mind about Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  A few things that don’t seem quite right somehow; and prompted by Pär Segerdahl’s post on The Ethics Blog, I’m tempted to see if I can put them into words.

For those who haven’t read the book, it deals with the story of how it was that an apparently immortal cell culture line, HeLa, was obtained.  The cells were taken from a cervical tumour that went on to kill one Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who lived near Baltimore.  During the course of her treatment, a sample of cancerous cells was taken for testing, as was a sample of healthy cells.  (“HeLa” gets its name from the convention of naming culture lines by contracting the name of the person from whom they’re derived.)  These biopsies were apparently unconsented.  But what’s important about them is that, whereas most cell lines at the time died fairly quickly, the cancer sample kept on dividing and dividing.  The HeLa strain proved to be important in all kinds of areas of research.  Doubtless, some of this research has made some people very wealthy.  Yet Henrietta’s descendents have seen none of this profit.  Indeed, many of them are not much more enfranchised today than a black woman would have been 60 years ago; they weren’t even aware that there was such a thing as HeLa.

So what’s the problem?

One of them is definitely stylistic.  I have problems with something that Skloot thinks is a virtue, which is that “dialogue appears in native dialects” (xi).  I don’t share the notion that it’s in any way dishonest to polish out people’s linguistic infelicities, just as one would polish out all the ums and ahs and placeholders in everyday speech.  And I can’t shake the feeling that the professionals who get speaking parts in the book have had their speech tidied; though it’s probably true that the higher your social status, the less susceptible you are to malapropisms, I don’t believe that the educated people directly quoted in the book were always grammatically perfect and never used colloquialisms.  But this is a minor quibble.

What’s more nagging – and potentially more interesting from an ethicist’s point of view – is a question about why any of this is particularly important. more…

A story that has had a little airtime on the news over the last 24 hours or so concerns requests by US officials that details of research into a bird flu variant be held back from publication on the grounds that it might be of use to terrorists:

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended that the “general conclusions” be published but that final manuscripts not include details that “could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm”.

The BBC’s health news blog reports that

Professor John Oxford from Barts and the London School of Medicine [says], “They should definitely publish. The biggest risk with bird flu is from the virus itself. We should forget about bio terrorism and concentrate on Mother Nature.”  [He and Prof Wendy Barclay from Imperial College London] agree that the influenza virus would make a pretty poor bioterrorist weapon, unless your aim was to spread the infection across the world. Influenza has no respect for borders, so introducing a virus in one country would inevitably spread it globally.

But Michael Parker, Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford, disagrees.  ”The position that everything should be published is not tenable. There must be some scientific information which contains an immediate threat to public safety if it fell into the wrong hands.”

Parker’s worries reflect those articulated by Tom Douglas and Julian Savulescu in the JME a little while ago; they argued that synthetic biology raises significant new ethical problems, not least because of the potential for “dual use”.

I have to admit that I have yet to be convinced by the biosecurity worries.   more…

You can tell libertarians from the sound they make: it’s the faint rattle of a tiny intellect untethered in an otherwise empty mind.  Cheap and all-too-easy insults aside, though, I’d been wondering how long it’d be, in the wake of the BMA’s recommendation that smoking be banned from cars, before we got a response from the libertarians.  The answer, it seems, is a couple of days.  The Libertarian Alliance, for example, has had a go (it’s a totalitarian tax ruse, I tells ya!  Thank goodness tax is low on tinfoil hats…); but the example that really caught my attention – by which I mean rendered me slack-jawed in amazement – was this piece by Rob Lyons in Spiked, the online journal of choice of the bewildered. more…

Phew, I thought, when I heard that Measure 26, the proposal to redefine “personhood” to cover the unborn, had been thrown out by the electorate of Mississippi.  To catch up: the prosaically-named piece of legislation would have

amend[ed] the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of the state constitution, to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.

(In the end, 58% of the electorate voted against it; it is, for now, dead.)

In the light of this, it’s a bit of a disappointment to learn that there’s still a live-and-kicking (if you’ll excuse the expression) attempt to achieve the same thing, only this time on a national level: H.R. 212 IH aims to protect all human life from the moment of conception.

A curious feature of such attempts is the weight they put on defining the moment at which life starts; thus HR 212 specifically states that

the life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent, irrespective of sex, health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological development, or condition of dependency, at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood

- a point that is singularly unimportant.  What counts is not when a (discrete) human life begins, but when that life becomes morally important enough to warrant legal protection.  But, still: let’s imagine a world in which one of these proposals, or one significantly like them, makes it on to the statute books.  Leaving aside, too, the difference between the meanings of the word “personhood” in the mouth of the lawyer, the philosopher, and the person on the street, would they make all that much of  a difference? more…