{"id":238,"date":"2010-01-25T21:23:07","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T20:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=238"},"modified":"2010-01-25T21:23:07","modified_gmt":"2010-01-25T20:23:07","slug":"questions-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/25\/questions-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Questions, questions…"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to the post below about circumcision, “IntactByDefault” asked a number of questions.\u00a0 I think that they merit a thread of their own, although I’ve touched on some of the issues before.<\/p>\n

Is it not the case that, short of legislation, the role of bioethicists is to put a check on the potentially unethical behaviors of those who practice medicine on humans?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why have the rights of male children been subordinated to such issues as cultural habit and medically superfluous parental preference or belief?<\/p>\n

Why aren\u2019t bioethicists, including yourself, relentlessly shaming and using any other tool at your disposal to correct the behavior of medical practitioners who modify the genitals of children without meeting the ethical standards developed to protect the rights of minors?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For context, I suppose I ought to say why I made the post I did: it’s not because circumcision is something that interests me in particular, but I do know that it is an area of interest for some bioethicists and people in related fields, and the Freethinker<\/em> article caught my eye.\u00a0 More generally, I’m interested in it insofar as it’s something that’s always controversial, and I quite like watching the debates from the sidelines.<\/p>\n

So: to IBD’s questions.\u00a0 The second question is one for the anthropologists, and I’ll leave it unanswered.\u00a0 In respect of the others, I think that he\/ she\/ it\/ they are probably starting from the wrong premise, confusing the role of the bioethicist with that of the campaigner.\u00a0 qua<\/em> bioethicist, I don’t think that my (or our) role is really to campaign at all – it’s to analyse.\u00a0 The point of this analysis is to get rid of misapprehensions and poor arguments, but the process is, I think, ideologically neutral; we go – or aspire to go – where the arguments take us.\u00a0 That’s why we aren’t “relentlessly shaming” anyone: that’s not what we’re about.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the questions take it as read that ritual circumcision is obviously indefensible, and I don’t accept that.\u00a0 There’s a number of reasons why.\u00a0 If it was as clear-cut an issue as that, noone would do it.\u00a0 Indeed, I find it hard to make sense of the idea of a moral agent who acts for reasons other than those he thinks right, good, or justified – call this my justification thesis<\/em>.\u00a0 The fact that it does happen indicates that at least some people think that, whatever the reasons not to circumcise, there are also reasons to do so; they might accept that circumcision is bad in its own terms, but justified by some larger consideration.\u00a0 Now, the argument to be had here is twofold: first, are they correct to identify a larger justification?\u00a0 Second, have they located the pivot between the reasons for and the reasons against in the right place?\u00a0 (And, I suppose, second-and-a-halfth, have those who take an opposite view identified the correct reasons in the correct place?)<\/p>\n

For those bioethicists who are doing work on circumcision, these will be the major questions.\u00a0 The most that anyone could say, I suspect, is that they hold ritual circumcision to be acceptable or unacceptable based on this<\/em> evaluation of the reasons why it’s performed.\u00a0 But – and this is worth repeating – even this strong line really has to take account of there being, at the very least, some reason to go through with the procedure.\u00a0 mutatis mutandis<\/em>, the same will apply to any other procedure as well.\u00a0 When we say that someone is behaving in a morally problematic manner, we aren’t\u00a0– I don’t think – saying that they’ve woken up and chosen the obviously wrong in preference to the obviously right; we’re saying that they’ve misidentified the right.<\/p>\n

And, of course, it works the other way: when someone says that p<\/em>is a clear violation of someone’s rights, can we be sure that those rights have been correctly identified?\u00a0 Either way: the interesting moral questions are precisely those where matters are not as clear as they seem at first.\u00a0 And, granted the justification thesis above, it strikes me that almost all situations will be ones in which much is unclear.<\/p>\n

That’s why the question of “correcting” behaviour is a tricky one.\u00a0 That’s why I think that IBD’s questions are, perhaps, starting from the wrong assumptions.\u00a0 Indeed, rather too big an assumption\u00a0about the moral clarity of the world seems to be what motivates the question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to the post below about circumcision, “IntactByDefault” asked a number of questions.\u00a0 I think that they merit a thread of their own, although I’ve touched on some of the issues before. Is it not the case that, short of legislation, the role of bioethicists is to put a check on the potentially unethical […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[479,328,472],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing","category-philosophy","category-thinking-aloud"],"yoast_head":"\nQuestions, questions... - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/01\/25\/questions-questions\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Questions, questions... - Journal of Medical Ethics blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In response to the post below about circumcision, “IntactByDefault” asked a number of questions.\u00a0 I think that they merit a thread of their own, although I’ve touched on some of the issues before. 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