'Tradition' doesn't constitute an argument in ethical conflicts

This weekend's column in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

I don’t know whether you had a chance to watch the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye, the main character of the musical, tries to explain tradition in the opening song. And so it goes, “You may ask: How did this tradition get started? I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But it’s a tradition. And because of our traditions everyone of us knows who he is, and what God expects him to do.”

Traditions -- we come across them all the time, those time-honoured arguments for continuing along a well-worn path. Catholic bishops in the United States tell us that euthanasia is wrong, because, among other reasons, it violates medical tradition. Even the Canadian Medical Association, in a booklet published on the issue in 1993 traces some beliefs that are held strongly by some medical doctors on euthanasia back to tradition. It doesn’t take opponents of assisted dying very long to hark back to the unfortunate Hippocratic Oath that most medical school graduates are forced to take in grand ceremonies in some form or shape. These ceremonies are really quasi-religious activities where senior doctors (typically the medical schools’ professors) demonstrate their faith in their students’ ability to carry on the medical tradition. In turn, and because it is tradition, the students make wild and quite frankly oftentimes silly public promises including not to participate in what we would describe today as surgery.

Not a big surprise really, considering that this Oath got started some 2,500 years ago, likely by a Pythagorean cult. Since then the oath has been issued in revised and modernised versions by various medical associations and other interested groups. Some of the original content of the oath survived though, namely content including prohibitions on abortion and euthanasia. As it is with such documents, no reason for this is given, beyond the exhortation on doctors not to provide such services to patients.

Of course, the oath really was a reflection of particular values held by a smallish cult in Greece a very long time ago. Why in today’s day and age medical doctors who are not Pythagorean (i.e. pretty much all of them) should abide by such values is unclear. This is particularly true for Christian students, if the history of battles between Christians and Pythagoreans is true, where reportedly Christians eventually burned the Pythagorean temple to the ground and destroyed the cult for good. It is also unclear why students who wish to practice medicine should have to take any such oaths to begin with.

A colleague of mine who teaches in a medical school introduced to his students a whole range of competing ethics codes for medical graduates and then asked them to pick the one they would be most comfortable taking their oath on. Not unexpectedly the whole gamut of ethical convictions unfolded. The students in that particular medical school hailed from all corners of the world, and so were the choice of oath they picked. At least they believed that there is value in taking such oaths to begin with. It’s probably a traditional thing. Today these oaths are frequently used by medical doctors to pick and choose ‘traditions’ they like and traditions they dislike. Surgery they might do, abortion – not so much, you get the drift. The randomness of it all is reason for concern, because their decisions are not actually derived from their traditional oath, but from other value systems that are then projected into the bits and pieces of the oath that are wheeled out to ‘justify’ this, such as the stance on abortion, euthanasia, IVF and any number of other ethically controversial medical issues. It turns out tradition isn’t even a justification for anything.

Exactly the same phenomenon crops up in debates on marriage equality. There is even a Facebook group ‘1,000,000 for traditional marriage’ which garnered support from less than 50,000 people worldwide. Traditionally marriage was a one-man-one-woman thing, ergo, so goes the argument, this is how it should be like today. Well, it doesn’t take much to realise that there is no ergo justifiable here either. Nothing follows at all from the fact that we do certain things today, or from the fact that we did certain things in certain ways in the past, for how we should do things from today onward. The point I am making here is that arguments from tradition have zero substance as arguments. They are non-arguments. Each time someone tells you that you should do a certain thing because of tradition, it’s best to tell them to go away and get a life. They merely describe what we have always done or what we have done over extensive periods of our history. If that was sufficient, we could justify slavery. After all, if we bought and sold other people for such a long time, surely it’s a tradition of sorts. The fact that there was such a tradition doesn’t provide us with any moral guidance with regard to what we should do in the future.

Now, to be fair, conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke pointed out why traditions might be valuable. He claimed that traditions provide societal stability and security. Clearly there is some usefulness in societal stability and security. That argument then isn’t any longer about whether there is a good reason to keep some tradition going. That argument simply warns us of ominous consequences if we don’t keep traditions going. The truth is, of course, that even conservatives need societal progress to occur, lest their societies would otherwise be frozen in time, eventually losing out to more agile competitors on the global stage. So they are back to square one so to speak. Even they need reasons to justify particular traditions if someone clamours for particular changes to how society goes about doing business, or how doctors go about doing medicine, etc. Unless there is a good reason beyond the fact that something is a tradition we should probably be prepared to abandon traditions more frequently if we are given good reasons for doing so.

Udo Schuklenk teaches ethics at Queen’s University, he tweets @schuklenk

Gay Marriage? - Whatever ...

I don't care much about the gay marriage activism, so the drama playing out in California kinda bores me to death. It's essentially a conservative agenda as most feminists have long realized. I also don't care much about the internal US politics on that issue as the country is stuffed so substantially that a small 'victory' on a by and large unimportant civil rights issue should not divert attention from how bad things really are over there.

Just to be clear, gay people as much as anyone else are perfectly entitled to see their relationships legally recognized (ie visitation rights in hospitals, retirement planning, access to partner's medical plans and so on and so forth). This, however, doesn't seem to be the activists' issue as they have claimed in many countries that civil partnerships that guarantee to same-sex couples the same legal rights and protections as to married couples (except the word 'marriage' won't be used to described those relationships) are insufficient and hugely discriminatory.

Well, here's my main problem with this: In my little universe, marriage as an institution has been an overwhelming failure. Roughly every second marriage today ends up in the divorce courts, and there is an even larger number of people who would get divorced but stick together in unhappy marriages due to religious or other cultural pressures. - And that's just for straight folks. Now, explain to me, why do gay folks clamor so hard for the 'right' of access to the same flawed institution? We do not seem - well, most of us anyway - to be hardwired to sustain marriages as the life-time type institutions that they're supposed to be.

To my mind, the state should not be in the business of sanctioning marriages. Leave it to religious organizations as a special membership benefit. So, queer churches such as the MCC - ignoring anything the bible ever said about homosexuality - can then offer to their gay flock marriages at a discount.

Beats me though, why there is this hysteria about marriage...

God week continued: Margaret Somerville wises up on polygamy

Margaret Somerville, the Vatican's permanent representative at McGill University in Montreal has published a piece titled 'If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy?' in today's Globe and Mail. She issues another dark warning that gay marriage (which as a Vatican emissary she doesn't like much) would lead to even worse stuff like polygamy. It's a truckload of bollocks, really, but it's fun to read, mostly because it is so badly argued that one wonders whether the newspaper just wants to get angry responses tearing her argument apart.

Anyway, keeping with the spirit of trying to entertain during the weekend, I wrote this tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor of that paper.

'Sir,

I read with great interest Professor Margaret Somerville's incisive
analysis on the vexing issue of gay marriage and polygamy (Sat Globe
'If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy?'). I am always amazed how
Professor Somerville manages to write brilliant treatises on ethical
issues, given her near-lack of professional training in the area. Not
only that, in a world of overpopulation, the destruction of the
environment, genocides and mass murder, she routinely addresses
ethical issues that really matter, such as polygamy.

Her analysis cannot be faulted. She realises that there is no need to
provide reasons in support of her basic premise. We all know, deep
deep in our souls, that the only and the true reason for why people
should get married is in order to breed. It's all nice and well that
those homosexuals go on about loving each other, but surely it is
self-evident that love is neither necessary nor sufficient for
marriage. It takes true intellectual leadership, such as that
displayed by Professor Somerville, to drive such obvious points home
to our by and large ignorant populace.

As a great admirer of Professor Somerville's leadership in a field
that in many, tragic ways ignores her, allow me to draw a few further
conclusions that seem to follow from her path-braking analysis. It
seems to me as if we need urgent legislation designed to dissolve all
marriages that have not been reproductively successful within a
certain period of time. It would make much more sense to enter
reproductive losers back into the pool of potential breeding partners
and let them marry again. So, may I suggest that, as a first step, we
agree on a time-limit on marriages. If there's no off-spring within,
say, a year, we issue a first warning, second and third warnings could
follow within a few months. If no pregnancy ensues there must be
compulsory divorces. There is no other way. We should not get swayed
by some overly romantic nonsense such as the couple's professed love
for each other. No breeding, no marriage. End of story. Furthermore,
we urgently need to introduce pre-wedding fertility tests. After all,
if they can't breed, they can't breed, they can't marry. Of course, we
must be very careful with folks trying to cheat the system by means of
artificial reproduction, surrogacy or (horror of horrors) adoption.
Just because there are a few million orphans on this planet doesn't
mean we should allow non-breeders to get away with such betrayal of
the primary function of marriage.

Prof Schuklenk is author of 'How He Did it in Seven Days', 'Why
Non-Breeders are Losers' and other essays, Flat Earth Press: Roma.'

More from the US of A

For what it's worth, the Royal Bank of S (see posting below) was never heard of again, and I am quietly preparing for another day at the corner of Market and Powell. At least I know which credit card to cancel the day I get back to Scotland. - Bunch of jokers.

So, while I have plenty of time to watch TV in-between begging stints necessitated by incompetent Royal Bank of Scotland staff, I thought I might as well keep you posted on the oddities of US political life. And yes, you guessed it, other than the Obama vs Clinton question (ie Blackish vs Womanish - two possible firsts for the US presidency), sex is high on the agenda. The US being the conservative country that it is, has long been preoccupied by sex (a fixation only matched by older guys working for the Catholic Church - you can spot them wearing funnily colourful robes, and usually talking non-stop about sex [mind you, something they claim they don't have]) . US gay campaigners' primary policy issue is access to 'gay marriage'. Typical, if there's a law saying only straight folks may burn their hands on glowing/hot oven plates, only gay folks would start a campaign to achieve the same right. I am AGAINST gay marriage. What exactly is progressive about extending access to a failed institution to gay people? It is - at best - intellectually dishonest for anyone (usually at very young age) to promise to someone they know only a little to stick together with him or her until 'death parts' them. Close to half of all marriages fail, and there is an even larger number of unhappy marriages, yet gay folks busily campaign for a 'right' to more of just that. I think the civil partnership idea put into action in the UK and many other countries is the most sensible way of going about this. If two (why not more?) people want to give each other particular rights of access to each other's assets, visitation privileges in case of illness and such things, the state should support those decisions in some form or other. Marriage is fundamentally a religious exercise and should be eliminated from the state's statute books altogether. If you want to get married, grab your local priest and take it from there. The state has no proper business in this thing called marriage.

What's interesting about the US debate that's currently on the TV is the take some gay activists have on a recent Washington Supreme Court ruling. The court argued in its majority opinion that the state has an interest in upholding the institution of marriage (and limiting access to it to straight folks) because of its procreative character. Well, leaving aside for a moment that it wasn't love that was foremost on the judges minds but baby production, a gay activist is now campaigning to limit marriage to only those couples that actually have produced children. The thing is that it's not only many gay folks who are reproductively challenged but also 1 out of 4 married couples. So, the gay guy, attempting to show the idiocy of the majority opinion, argues that these marriages should be disssolved. Well, good on him and good luck to his cause (not that it's one I would support, but surely his argument is ingenious).

Well, there's a few other funny stories in the national headlines, but this should do it for now. Gotta get back to my begging corner at Market/Powell.