'Race' and God people

Not only in Canada institutions of higher learning have long been sensitive to concerns that students, staff or faculty might be subjected to unfair discrimination by virtue of their 'race', sex, sexual orientation and any number of other features. These concerns are well justified. You don't want anyone discriminated against just because they are of a particular skin color, or because they're female, or gay. The only thing that should matter, surely, is whether someone is best qualified for a job.

Of course, as we all know, common sense as this view undoubtedly is, the reality is quite different in many parts of the world. To my biased mind, it's not entirely coincidental that violations of this common sense rule are most frequently committed in developing countries. Also not coincidentally, to my biased mind, these violations seem to occur most likely in countries where religious ideologies are more rather than less influential. No wonder then that Muslims and Christians happily engage in genocidal acts against each other in Nigeria, gay folks are routinely subjected to mob 'justice' in Jamaica, women reportedly lose their lives during pregnancy in Nicaragua because Catholicism reigns supreme in that neck of the woods, and the list goes on and on and on.

Anyhow, I digress, so there's this Ryerson University in Toronto. It duly commissioned its own racism report. True to international form the writers of this report embarrassingly conflate racism (ie someone goes after you because of the color of your skin and other arbitrary ethnicity related features that are beyond your control) and discrimination because of something you choose (in this case your religious ideology). To be clear: I am not suggesting here that it is acceptable to discriminate unfairly against someone because she or he is Muslim, Christian, Jewish or subscribes to any number of other monotheistic ideologies. Quite rightly so, in a free society people are entitled to make those sorts of choices. The nice thing though, is that in a free society (unlike those men's outfits like the Vatican or Iran) people like myself are also entitled to make fun out of folks buying into such religious claptrap. Many religious people and their leaders don't like this bit at all, hence their attempts to get the same types of anti-discrimination protections that people are entitled to because of who they are as opposed to what kind of religious ideology they choose to believe.

It is deeply offensive to conflate in a report on racism racism with discrimination against people who make the choice to believe such stuff, and who then go out of their way to let the world know that they do (eg by putting black cloth over their heads, or wearing any number of religious knickknack around their necks etc). If you belong to an ethnic minority and you have been subjected to racism you will be permanently scarred to some extent or other. You will continuously wonder when the next shoe's gonna drop. Well, compare that to people who choose to wear religious paraphernalia in order to identify themselves as adherents to an ideology they have chosen. Surely this doesn't exactly fall into the same ballpark. Again, my issue is not at all that unfair discrimination against people because of the ideologies they subscribe to is fair game. Quite to the contrary.

Anyhow, back to the racism report at that Ryerson place. Here are some of the highlights that the experts who drafted the document included. Evidence of racism... a student quote:

“I am Muslim, and once I was fasting and there was an exam and I had to do my prayers and I felt like the Professor was not very accommodating, that he/she seemed to make it look like this was something that was my problem and I should just pray after the exam is done and I didn’t feel like that was fair.”

Here then is the difference between racism (eg a professor saying 'you can't attend my seminar because your skin colour is a tad bit too dark'), and the accommodation this student is clamouring for. The student chose to adopt an ideology as her belief system that requires her to stop eating at a certain point in the calendar, and to talk at a certain time to a higher entity that no one has ever demonstrated actually exists. It is clear to me at least that this indeed is the student's problem and not the professor's. Nobody forced her to make the choices she made. The ideology that she chose is her own responsibility, and so is her private matter. It's a bit like me choosing a membership in a political party, the boy scouts, or wherever. In case I wish to attend a party meeting, or go and stuff party political materials into letter boxes I have no reason to assume that my line manager would have to accommodate me. Equally though, as long as I do my job, she has no reason to discriminate against me either. The idea though, that my membership in a voluntary association should kind of trigger a special dispensation - as the Ryerson student seems to think is her God given right - is patently absurd.

Here's another bit from the Ryerson racism report,

Some Muslim students complained about the number of times jokes about sex are used by the instructor and students in class, and how, especially when they seem irrelevant to the subject matter at hand, this makes them extremely uncomfortable. One professor, for example, told a class one day that journalism is all about lots of sex and beer. Another professor who was teaching students how to modulate their voices for radio told the class to pretend they were having sex and to imagine the voice they heard when they experience “pleasure.” Other students joined in and began making “very weird noises,” leaving some students very uncomfortable. They suggested that cultural sensitivity is important in the classroom.

So, the idea here is that as professors we should not talk about sex anymore because it might affect our adult students' sensibilities. I take it, talk of evolution might just have the same effect, so perhaps we should consider dumping that, too. I mention things like abortion in my bioethics classes. Another culturally sensitive issue (and seemingly now a proper topic for a report on racism) obviously. Potentially my Christian students could be upset by what I have to say, or even by some of the language I might choose to describe a few hundred fetal cells (ie the Christian person equivalent). Wow, I can see already that I will find myself quoted in some other insane racism report.

To my surprise the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente truly nailed the Ryerson report in an OpEd. I don't say this lightly. I have cancelled my subscription to the Globe and Mail because too many of its editorial writers (Wente being one of em) are so utterly below grade. Anyhow, to give credit where credit is due, she wrote a brilliant OpEd on this occasion. Here's bits and pieces from her piece:

“I pulled my hair when I saw the coverage,” says Kamal Al-Solaylee, an assistant professor at Ryerson's School of Journalism (and a former Globe theatre critic). “I've never worked in a more accommodating environment in my life.”

Mr. Al-Solaylee is a brown-skinned Muslim who is openly gay. He thinks the entire exercise is a frivolous diversion. “There are things that I need from the university, but this isn't one of them,” he says. “I need computers that don't crash all the time. I want students who don't have to hold bake sales to raise money for their graduate projects. There should be money for these things, not equity officers.”

Sensitivity to perceived discrimination is so acute these days that it can lead to perverse results. One instructor at the University of Toronto was told not to criticize foreign-born students for their poor language skills, even if they were unintelligible. Some aboriginal students say they shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards as everyone else, because they have different ways of knowing. Yet, as Mr. Al-Solaylee sensibly observes, his students will be working in an English-speaking, Eurocentric world. So they might as well get used to it.

The most bizarre revelation can be found in the report's fine print. Among the students, racism and discrimination scarcely register at all. Only 315 students (out of 28,000) bothered to respond to a task force questionnaire. Half the respondents were white, and half non-white. On the question of whether Ryerson treats students fairly regardless of race, the vast majority of both groups – more than 90 per cent – believed it did. Fewer than 30 of the non-white students said they had ever experienced discrimination. That's a 10th of 1 per cent of the student body.

Naturally, the task force has an explanation for this: People are too scared to speak out! That's the great thing about systemic racism. You don't need any evidence. Every negative proves a positive, and the absence of evidence just proves how bad things really are."

Go Margaret go! My qualm about this whole sad saga is not that it's unreasonable to have a conversation about reasonable accommodation of God folks, but please do not permit anyone to confuse this with racism. It's beyond pale, and, frankly, unworthy of a university.

Update on Catholic anti-life doctrine and sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church

Update: March 02, 2010. I have received further information on the issue discussed in this blog entry, from Catholics for a Free Choice in the USA.

Here's an excerpt from a report they published in 1998: 'The US bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which strongly prohibit abortion in Catholic hospitals, also say that "operation, treatment, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

"It may seem that this directive permits all life-saving abortions, but that is not the case. The language closely mirrors Catholic teaching on abortion, which forbids direct abortions in all circumstances, even to save the life of the mother. The word "direct" is critical. Indirect abortions are allowed - but there are only a few cases where this applies. In a case where a woman's life was threatened by pregnancy, abortion is directly intended and therefore not permitted.

"The full meaning of the directive played out in 1998 when a pregnant woman on Medicaid in need of an emergency abortion was denied services at a merged hospital in Manchester, N.H. The 35-year-old patient, who had miscarried in the last year, rushed to Elliot Hospital when her water broke at 14 weeks. When she arrived her physician determined she needed an emergency abortion in order to prevent a life threatening uterine infection and other complications. However, because Elliott had merged with Catholic Medical Center in 1994, abortions were banned in 1997 from Elliot at the insistence of its Catholic partner.'

It would appear as if the article in The Interim - Canada's Life and Family Newspaper has been as widely off the mark as I suggested in my initial entry... oh well, now there's a revelation!

In other news, German media report today on the ever growing scandal indicating widespread sexual abuse of pupils in Catholic monasteries and denominational schools in Germany. Also, in what's probably a first, there's been a police raid of a Jesuit monastery in Germany related to the scandal. It is well time that this organisation is being treated like any other organisation that has its hands seriously dirty! I never understood why shouting 'God' would somehow justify putting guys in skirts above the law... The number of victims that has come forward is running into the hundreds and more are coming forward each day. Quite naturally, the church hierarchy does not at all think that celibacy might have something to do with this. Well, I hope you like Il Papa's red Prada shoes... -

What surely is amusing is that these guys still have the nerve to tell us about morality!

Wow, you can buy digital content from our book and individual chapters

That is interesting... I discovered by chance today that Wiley-Blackwell is selling individual chapters from our book 50 Voices of Disbelief - Why We Are Atheists online. So, if you want any given chapter as a file... feel free :-). I wonder whether this is the future of book publishing? indistinguishable from a journal compilation.

Animal abuse

-RANT BEGIN-

Seriously, what's wrong with people going to places like Seaworld? So, a day or two ago this 'trainer' is dragged by an orca wale under the water and killed in the process. CNN offered two experts on the matter, a bloke looking like Indiana Jones and on the opposing side a Captain Ahab lookalike. As good experts are wont to do they disagree on who's 'fault' this was. Indiana Jones insisted that it was the 'trainer's' fault (her pony tail supposedly triggered the wale's response), vs Ahab who insisted that it was wrong for Seaworld to have a wale amongst its animals that has killed twice before. And so it went forth and back in typical CNN/FOX/MSNBC style.

My questions are these: isn't it obvious that you don't keep such massive animals in the smallish ponds where Seaworld is keeping them? It's a clear case of animal abuse (whatever Indiana Jones thinks). And what is it with these people going to these shows? Why are so many people running to see these shows to begin with? Is our only way to show affection or admiration for huge wild animals to put them into small prisons and make them do stupid things to entertain us? Pretty much in line with why many people go to watch Formula 1 races folks queued forever to watch the first Orca show after the killing of the 'trainer'. Someone hoping for a repeat of the disaster there??

Here's the LA Times reporting on this: 'Hundreds of patrons packed into Shamu Stadium on Saturday for the return of SeaWorld Orlando's "Believe" show, three days after a killer whale dragged a veteran animal trainer underwater to her death. Despite a morning drizzle, visitors stood in line for two hours beginning at 9 a.m. to see the first performance.'

The obvious lessons to be learned from this event should have been:

• It's wrong to keep animals for entertainment purposes.
• We should not support businesses such as Seaworld because they rely on animal abuse to make profits.'

What really happened is that the killing boosted visitor numbers. Sickening! People queued for hours to have a look at the Orca that killed three folks. How annoying is that? It seems that PETA at least got the response to this one right. Close down outfits like Seaworld and release the captive wales back into the sea. In case you really need to have a look at Orcas, watch a nature documentary!

-RANT END-

The things that are

Update: March 02, 2010. I have received further information on the issue discussed in the middle part of this blog, from Catholics for a Free Choice in the USA.

Here's an excerpt from a report they published in 1998: 'The US bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which strongly prohibit abortion in Catholic hospitals, also say that "operation, treatment, and medications that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman are permitted when they cannot be safely postponed until the unborn child is viable, even if they will result in the death of the unborn child."

"It may seem that this directive permits all life-saving abortions, but that is not the case. The language closely mirrors Catholic teaching on abortion, which forbids direct abortions in all circumstances, even to save the life of the mother. The word "direct" is critical. Indirect abortions are allowed - but there are only a few cases where this applies. In a case where a woman's life was threatened by pregnancy, abortion is directly intended and therefore not permitted.

"The full meaning of the directive played out in 1998 when a pregnant woman on Medicaid in need of an emergency abortion was denied services at a merged hospital in Manchester, N.H. The 35-year-old patient, who had miscarried in the last year, rushed to Elliot Hospital when her water broke at 14 weeks. When she arrived her physician determined she needed an emergency abortion in order to prevent a life threatening uterine infection and other complications. However, because Elliott had merged with Catholic Medical Center in 1994, abortions were banned in 1997 from Elliot at the insistence of its Catholic partner.'

This week I had a look at how our collection of atheist thought, 50 Voices of Disbelief, is doing on amazon. I was delighted to see that it has received a reasonable 4.5 rating (out of 5) on amazon.com and some 11 or so reviews. Check out the comments some of the readers left behind, here. I thought the most critical review (aka 3*** out of 5) is still quite complimentary. Glad the volume is holding up nicely in terms of sales!

In other news: I have been attacked as 'puerile' by an anti-choice organization in Canada for suggesting in said volume that there are Catholic hospitals where pregnant women are sacrificed for the sake of rescuing the fetus in case there is a conflict between the two. I have not, of course, suggested that this is a standard operating procedure in every single Catholic hospital (if it were, we surely would have heard about it). The anti-choice writer wheeled out that lovely Catholic concept of the Doctrine of the Double Effect (DDE) to explain why I am puerily (I made that word up) off the mark. This Doctrine, in turn, depends on your buying into another distinction, namely that of intention-foresight.

Here's what this argument is all about: The DDE holds essentially that we should distinguish between the intended outcome of actions and outcomes that we are able to predict (or foresee) but that we do not intend. The DDE, historically, goes back to an argument advanced by St Thomas Aquinas. He used the example of permissible homicide in self-defense. Aquinas imagined a situation where someone’s intention is to fend off an attacker. However, while he succeeds in fending off the attacker the attacker dies as a result of the defender’s actions. The attacker’s death was unintentional here, and, according to Aquinas is permissible ‘because self-preservation is a legitimate aim and a person who is unjustly attacked has a greater duty to preserve his own life than he has to preserve the life of the attacker.’ The morally important claim here is that the person who is attacked permits the death of the attacker to occur but does not intend for it to happen. The implicit understanding is that the death of the attacker is something that is undesirable and if possible ought to be avoided. One assumption here is that our victim (ie the attacked person) is acting from good motives. The argument from the DDE relies on us accepting a further concept, namely that of the Intention-Foresight Distinction (IFD). This distinction upholds the view that there is a moral difference between intending a patient’s death and foreseeing that it might or will happen, but not intending it. So, in the case of the conflict that I started of with, the doctor who rescues the pregnant woman and foresees but doesn't intend the death of the fetus could be in the clear, according to this Doctrine. The idea, that there is more to the evaluation of a person’s actions than the consequences that that person’s actions produced, is based on a modus of moral theorizing that is best described as deontological. Consequentialists will maintain that both the DDE as well as the IFD are irrelevant consideration in our evaluation of the morality of actions. However, for many health care professionals, as well as in law, the IFD matters a great deal. In homicide investigations, for instance, the determination of the intention of the assailant will make a significant difference in terms of making a deciding on whether she will be prosecuted under a murder or manslaughter charge. I doubt that this is ethically defensible, but there you go. To my mind outcomes are the only thing that matters.

While it is possible to draw this distinction (it is perfectly possible to say that I foresee that A is going to happen as a result of my intending to achieve B, but that I do not intend for A to occur), I cannot see why I should be any less responsible for the foreseen consequences of my actions. What makes A an acceptable cost to incur is surely the greater benefit derived from achieving B, as opposed to anything to do with my intentions.

In any case, the other question is whether or not there is evidence that Catholic hospitals sacrifice the lives of pregnant women in order to rescue fetuses. The answer to this is unequivocally 'yes'. In Catholic Nicaragua, for instance this position is even government policy (law in this case). As I write this, a cancer stricken pregnant woman is not given access to life preserving chemotherapy in that country, because this would risk the fetus' well-being. Just check out recent amnesty international reports on this matter. There have also been bona fide reports of health care professionals working in Catholic hospitals in the USA transporting pregnant women on to secular hospitals, so they could have access to life-preserving (life of the pregnant woman that is) abortions.

While I understand where the anti-choice position is coming from on this issue, I am surprised that anyone from that political corner would deny that these sorts of things are happening in the Catholicism controlled parts of our little universe. These sorts of policy positions do not come cost neutral no matter how hard they might intend (pun intended) for them to be.

There is more in the anti-choice site's article, in particular a rant on the conscientious objection issue. It is noticeable that the defense advanced there is essentially a legal response to an ethical/political argument I made. I did not argue that conscientious objection is illegal currently, I lamented that it is not. Oh well...

Hey, on to one last thing. I worked yesterday busily with the audio/video folks at Queen's University on a virtual presentation (I just couldn't be persuaded it's worth flying/traveling for more than 30 hours in economy class to do a 30 min presentation). The topic was a bit dicy as I am not really an expert in chronic disease issues, but it's been great fun doing this. Check the video out here. I am looking forward to discussing this with the conference participants in about a fortnight!

Nice one from Britain

Christian campaigners' evaporating evidence - news you won't hear on CNN

You might recall the case of the Belgian patient who after 23 years in a locked-in kind of state, and who had been reportedly misdiagnosed as being in persistent vegetative state (PVS), suddenly began 'communicating'. In case you don't remember, here's my report (and take) on the case. The odds are that the patient in question has indeed been misdiagnosed for years as being in PVS. The thing is also, unfortunately, that the case was quickly hijacked by Christian campaigners to further their own ideological agenda. Understandably, every misdiagnosed patient is a cause of concern in the context of ongoing arguments about the question of whether or not it is acceptable to dehydrate PVS patients and let them die. A true PVS patient would not suffer due to his/her brain condition. A patient in a locked-in state would note that this is happening and might well suffer. The Christian campaigners are presumably aware of the fact that public opinion ain't on their side with regard to true PVS patients. One reason for this is that a PVS patient can't truly benefit in any meaningful way from his/her continued existence.

My own view on the issue is that the lack of benefit to the patient in its own right would not be a good reason to discontinue his/her existence, especially if - as is the case in PVS patients - there is no pain or suffering involved in their continued existence. While there are people about who care about such patients' ongoing existence and who would find the patients' discontinuation distressing, we have a good reason to keep them alive. The only counter argument I can see on this front is that resource allocation concerns might tilt the scales toward discontinuation.

In any case, back to the Belgian man. Imagine the excitement of our Christian campaigners when the Belgian doctor of the patient demonstrated that the locked-in man was even able to 'talk' to us. He 'talked' to us by means of a helper who assisted him typing his words (aka answers to the questions asked by the attending physicians) onto a touchscreen computer. I was skeptical in my original blog entry that this widely discredited method of communication was to be trusted this time around. I mean, how likely is it that a guy who hadn't moved for more than two decades would suddenly engage in (albeit assisted) small-talk. Well, it turns out that I was right. An investigation of the matter by the German weekly newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL confirmed that it wasn't the patient who said anything but his assistant (thanks to Art Caplan for bringing this to my attention!). So, now we know what his assistant thought the patient would have answered if he hadn't actually been unable to answer. Here's what the magazine reports:

'The staff at Houben's care center first tried an on-screen keyboard that he could operate using his right index finger, which is not fully paralyzed. For a while, it seemed like a good idea and, after some practice, Houben was able to type rather quickly. He made many mistakes, but his messages were understandable. Still, using that method required the assistance of a speech therapist, who stood behind him to support his hand. At one point, Laureys, the neurologist, claimed that he had ruled out the possibility that it was actually the speech therapist doing the writing. But it turns out that his checks weren't quite thorough enough. Obtaining reliable results requires a rather protracted procedure. Patients with serious traumatic brain injuries are not always capable of following difficult instructions. They also sleep a great deal, and sometimes they sink into extended periods of delirium. In order to rule out false negative results, repeated tests need to be conducted over the course of several weeks.

Laureys has now carried out those tests, and his results hold that it wasn't Houben doing the writing after all. The tests determined that he doesn't have enough strength and muscle control in his right arm to operate the keyboard. In her effort to help the patient express himself, it would seem that the speech therapist had unwittingly assumed control. This kind of self-deception happens all the time when this method -- known as "facilitated communication" -- is used. (As a result, the things that Houben was attributed as saying to SPIEGEL for an article printed in November 2009 were also not authentic.) In the more recent test, Houben was shown or told a series of 15 objects and words, without a speech therapist being present. Afterward, he was supposed to type the correct word -- but he didn't succeed a single time.

This doesn't necessarily discredit facilitated communication altogether. Laureys analyzed another paralyzed test subject who answered all 15 control questions correctly despite having a comparable brain-damage diagnosis. "That means it is really necessary to verify every single case," Laureys says. Now the work with Houben will have to start all over again. But there is one thing for sure -- images taken of his brain activity reveal that it is behaving only slightly differently from that of a healthy brain. As a result, researchers are fairly certain that Houben is conscious -- and they find themselves in the desperate position of a rescue team trying to dig out a person from under the rubble.'

It is troublesome that no major news organisation has picked up on this revelation, so their flawed initial reporting about the ongoing communications from this patient remains uncorrected.

The Week

It's difficult for me to pick my 'favourite' news item this week to blog about. Two stand out, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the latest news from spokespeople of the cult of misery as my good friend Russell Blackford likes to call the Roman Catholic Church. The study in the NEJM was mistaken by large media organisations to further substantiate the claim that folks diagnosed to be in persistent vegetative state (PVS) or minimally conscious state (MCS) actually are not in such states, but rather that they're fully conscious persons trapped in a completely unresponsive body. Researchers in Belgium and France measured brain reactions in 54 such people in both countries and discovered to their surprise that some of them had the same brain regions light up that did light up in the healthy control group. This does indeed suggest that there's a possibility that in those folks a functional brain capable of understanding and responding to questions is kind of stuck in an unresponsive body. That is scientifically truly interesting and deserves further research. However, it's worth noting that despite the media hype (and hype by 'pro-life' activists) of the 54 PVS participants only a 5 responded in the manner I have just described, and 'in three of these patients, additional bedside testing revealed some sign of awareness, but in the other two patients, no voluntary behavior could be detected by means of clinical assessment.' The researchers sadly failed to ask how these 'responsive' people felt about being stuck in an unresponsive body, whether they wanted to continue living, questions that have been for a long time central in ethical and policy debates about the proper treatment of people in such states.

Stan Terman, MD, PhD of Caring Advocates commented (sensibly): "The finding that while bedside behavioral testing detected NO awareness (the hallmark needed for the diagnosis of Permanent Vegetative State), a high tech scan (fMRI) allowed one patient (out of 23) [not 4] to answer five simple Yes-or-No questions such as, “Is your brother’s name Alex?” Sensational news reports claimed that technology allowed this patient “to communicate for the first time since [the accident].” This may be an overstatement in terms of what we mean by “communication.” While the authors intend to ask patients about pain in the future, they did not suggest posing the ultimate existential Yes-or-No question, “Do you want to live in this state?” Surveys indicate that most people answer “No,” but there are still some who may this limited finding as a reason to never give up hope. Family members of patients with severe disorders of consciousness, especially if they are people of faith may use this finding to bolster their argument to continue to provide aggressive medical care and tube feeding when physicians consider such medical treatment to be futile. In addition, powerful faith-based health organizations, that determine their institutions’ policies regarding refusal of medically administrated food and water, may cite this result from one patient to continue tube feeding, indefinitely. Yet there is something I do not hear: So far, no professional has proposed, based on the finding that fMRI could help NONE of the patients whose PVS resulted from loss of oxygen (as opposed to physical trauma), it is therefore now both morally and ethically correct to withdraw feeding tubes from those PVS patients. I suppose the news media would prefer to report findings as providing hope—that’s what people want to hear. Unfortunately, bolstering false hope could lead to an inappropriate allocation of scarce medical resources." Stay tuned for more to come on this issue. I suspect the debate is far from over!

Well, then there are my friends from the Roman Catholic Church. Reeling from - by now - substantial numbers of (sexual) abuse cases involving children in their care across the globe, the organisation is being hit with the same scandal in Germany, where the number of abuse cases has reached more than one hundred (and counting). Of course, this ain't really newsworthy, we're used by now to the fact that some of its celibate staff are anything but celibate, particularly so when kids are about. Since 1995 about 100 of them were investigated in the context of child abuse allegations in Germany alone. Quite a number! As usual senior management tried as long as possible to protect its staff from prosecution - while busy preaching to the rest of society what proper sex and morals are all about. It is this bit that annoys me ever more. I do not understand why anyone in this day and age would even bother listening to representatives of this organisation the moment they say 'ethics' or 'morality'. Routinely historical truth is being mutilated in the name of the ideological cause, when bishops declared at one point or other that the holocaust is abused as a propaganda instrument by Jewish people, and, of course, that abortion is akin to genocide (tell that to the folks who were slaughtered in Rwanda, for instance). Incidentally, Christians fanatics from a southern state of the USA have been on the road again, in good colonial style, to grab kids in third world countries. It looks like in Haiti a whole bunch of them will be prosecuted for kidnapping kids (whose parents and/or relatives are alive and kicking). The official version is that they planned to hand them over to adoptive parents in the USA. It goes without saying that it all was a misunderstanding now. I pray to the non-existing Gods that they will be sentenced and put in Haitian jails and won't be simply extradited to the USA. There got to be some justice in this world every now and then.

US Army managed farce at Haiti airport continues

There we go again... despite complaints by medical NGOs like Doctors without Borders the US military in charge of the airport in Haiti still prioritizes oddballs over serious aid organizations. This time round its John Travolta and his fellow Scientology Church morons that were prioritised with their 'aid mission' over aid professionals. Travolta flew his own little Boeing 707 with a few tons of supplies and Scientologist (a nuttish money making cult, it's neither a church nor have they got anything to do with science) doctors over to Haiti. I suspect, like other religious or quasi-religious organizations they will abuse the desperation of the locals to recruit to their ideological cause.

What's wrong with the US military that such people's planes are prioritized over professional aid organizations?

On Haiti

An OpE I did for a local student paper... on Haiti

Here is the good news, this commentary won't be accompanied by photos of a crying black baby or a maimed granny. I'm sure those few who have watched TV programs other than ET or TMZ will have noticed that an earthquake hit Haiti a week or so ago, killing scores of people and destroying much of what was left of the dilapidated infrastructure of the country. I don't know whether you cried while helplessly watching the tragedy unfold. I did.

And yet, much of the mayhem that ensued outside Haiti sickened me in equal proportion. There we had aid agencies vying desperately for our hard earned cash. It goes without saying that they were all 'leading' or 'spearheading' the efforts in Haiti – when clearly there wasn't much leadership to be seen for about a week. It seems their TV commercials were faster produced than the actual humanitarian response. What's news? The aid industry is immensely lucrative. The monies donated in the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia have still not been spend. Do-gooders are still living off the interest generated from our (well, mea culpa, I did actually donate at the time) donations. Worse still, a lot of the donations will go this time around to ideologically motivated do-gooders. Religious organizations trying their best to convert Haitians to their particular ideology rightly see a unique growth opportunity. And yes, before you ask, they will donate rice and build a well. Their multi-colour brochures will show you that much, just in case you had any doubts. There will also be a generous amount of images of black babies randomly splashed across their fund-raising literature. The cash you're going to send will to a significant extent be utilized to grow their infrastructure and ideological power-base in Haiti, including for instance the building of schools aimed at indoctrinating Haitian kids in their particular religious beliefs. You can see how successful they have been, when you watch Haitian folks on the telly, who have lost EVERYTHING, and who thank their 'creator' for being alive, as opposed to BLAMING their 'creator' for inflicting that much pointless suffering even on innocent babies. The 'creator' inexplicably even managed to sink the local Cathedral together with his local CEO, it seems. So, here's my first message to you: Do NOT donate to aid organizations that also have an ideological agenda that goes beyond providing aid, unless you also happen to believe that abusing the desperation of the Haitian people in this manner is fair game. Be more discerning with regard to who gets your hard earned money.

Well, from what I gather from the news today, the gazilion $$ international effort aimed at rescuing people from the rubble translated into 150 or so people rescued. Good for those who were rescued. However, it is worth pointing out that the same $$ amounts could have preserved many more lives – even in Haiti – if they had been used differently. There is another important lesson in this and my second message to you: Ask yourself – before you donate – whether, in catastrophic circumstances and in terms of lives preserved, your particular donation, no matter how large or small it is, is likely to make the largest possible impact. Not every aid program is as good as any other (e.g. an US based aid organization's request that we donate for solar powered audio bibles seems frivolous). The same do-gooders cashing now in on Haiti have withdrawn any assistance from Somalia, a desperate and hugely violent country with about the same population size as Haiti. Darfur slipped off the do-good radar, and the list goes on and on and on. Shame Anderson Cooper couldn't make it there. I wonder whether we REALLY need a natural disaster a year to spur us into humanitarian action? What does this tells us about our common humanity? Nothing too confidence-inspiring, this much is certain.

Last but by no means least, do not loose sight of the bigger picture here. The same earthquake in Japan would not have led to tens of thousands of deaths (possibly many more than that). The reasons for the large number of deaths are directly linked to the poverty in that country. Building standards have been low to non-existent. The last hurricane that destroyed large parts of Haiti led to negligible international aid efforts. Nobody cared. And yet, a simple case for reparations can be made in favour of Haiti. Countries like its former colonial masters as well as the USA have interfered with the country's governance throughout its history. Surely this wretched nation is owed compensation for the damage the colonial powers' policies have caused. Compensation that is morally owed as opposed to a result of Bono type do-gooding. It will be interesting to see whether those countries that are largely responsible for the plight of the Haitian people will step up to the plate and do what needs to be done in order to repair the damage their policies have caused. Or will 'aid' be all that is left, organized by window-dressing organizations such as the UN (and its fleet of Toyota land-cruisers) and of course the international do-good industry.

On blogging

To whom it may concern (yes, YOU :-):

It seems there's quite some people out there who have decided for some reason or other that I am 'important' in one context or another. So they have taken to monitoring this blog and going after me whenever I say something they find offensive, outrageous, unpalatable, name it. Indeed, bits and pieces from this blog are being used to brief 'higher up' authorities about me. Who are you trying to kid people?

Let me be clear once and for all then about what the purpose of this blog is: It is my personal soap box. I step onto it, wave my hands and rave about XYZ and the universe. Some of the views expressed are reflective and mirror views I also hold professionally. Other views expressed on this blog are kinds of gut reactions to something that irritated me. There is no pretense that every single post is the result of deep philosophical or ethical analysis. Indeed, there's plenty of posts that got nothing to do with my area of expertise (bioethics), such as comments on airport security. In fact, you will even be able to find me fly kinds of test balloons to see how a particular argument goes, and dump it subsequently when I discover that someone shot it down with good reasons.

So, please, you lurkers out there (you know who you are): This is my blog soap box, not a peer reviewed locus of intellectual content. Treat it as such! In case of doubt, check whether I have provided substantive analysis on a given issue in my peer reviewed publications (hey, for crying out loud, even in book chapters!). If I have, go after me (the professional) for what I have said there. If all you can find is a ranting on this blog, take it for what it is, and no more.

Getting off my soap box now.

Maia Caron interviews Udo Schuklenk

Grin, here's a nice interview by Maia Caron with myself. Enjoy (or not, as the case might be). In case you are interested or can be bothered, here and here are discussions of the views expressed in the interview. I have not corrected the few mistakes that can be found in the original text below. You might want to note that I am not author of the volumes mentioned, but usually a co-editor. In case you want to know what it is that I have written or edited during the last 10 years or so, go here.

Interview with Udo Schuklenk

Posted By Maia Caron on January 14, 2010

I’m hosting an interview series with prominent atheist and skeptic authors called Conversations with Freethinking Authors.

Today, I’m talking to Udo Schuklenk, co-editor with Russell Blackford of 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Atheists. Udo is also author of The Power of Pills: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Drug Development and The Bioethics Reader.

MAIA: Welcome Udo, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk about your and Russell Blackford’s book. I very much enjoyed reading these essays. Not only was it an opportunity to hear favorite atheist authors air recent thoughts on their personal realizations on what it means to be an atheist, but it also introduced me to other areligious authors and their books. It’s a compelling read and a powerful argument for atheism. Thank you for compiling so many excellent essays.

In the introduction to 50 Voices of Disbelief, you and Russell Blackford write that, “Religious dogmas and organizations are legitimate targets for fearless criticism and satire” and “There must not be special treatment for religious ideas of any kind.” I couldn’t agree more. You also mention the importance of Voices of Reason being heard at this point in our history. Why now more than ever?

UDO: I think there are several good but also quite varied reasons for this. One reason is that the religious backlash against humanist thinking is becoming ever more virulent. The UN Human Rights Council has decided to encourage the organisation’s member states to introduce blasphemy laws. I have argued in THE ECONOMIST magazine, ‘freedom of speech “must include the right to ‘defame’ religions” (“The meaning of freedom”, April 4th). The UN Human Rights Council, which adopted a resolution decrying religious defamation as an affront to human dignity, is controlled mostly by countries that are among the most prolific violators of civil rights, including the right to speak one’s mind.

The blasphemy document itself is remarkable in its scope and deliberate vagueness. Notorious civil-rights violators like Iran and Saudi Arabia will now be able to claim with some confidence that the UN is on their side when they clamp down on liberal-minded or secular Muslims. Western countries will also be happy to note that the council thinks the human right to free speech is not violated when they enforce their own, less draconian, blasphemy laws. The UN has firmly established itself as a body that is not even prepared to defend the basic principles enshrined in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights.' This then is the first answer to your question: Religious institutions and the states they control move ever more viciously against freedom of speech to protect themselves from legitimate criticism. We must not allow this to stand. Religious beliefs, ultimately, can only survive if our right to question and criticize them can be efficiently curtailed. If I am right, and we are at some kind of strategic inflection point as far as the influence of organized religions in the Western world is concerned, their fight to maintain their special rights and status will become ever more vicious. Hence, it is important right now for us to speak out and not leave that to very few atheist cheer leaders.

I also happen to think that it is important to demonstrate to the wider public that atheists can think for themselves and that our views about many issues are very diverse. We don’t do ourselves any favors at all by leaving people with the impression that our capacity to think independently is reducible to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. We are not a hierarchical religious outfit after all. Our book, the 50 Voices of Disbelief demonstrates just that beautifully.

MAIA: I couldn’t agree more that atheists and anyone who cares about freedom of speech and human rights must act rather than remain silent. In your introduction, you reference contributing essayists, saying: “… some are even wary of the words atheism and atheist words that can carry unwanted connotations in many social contexts.” This is a theme also picked up in Michael Shermer’s essay in the book. He wrote, “Words matter and labels carry baggage,” going on to say that people associate atheism with “… communism, socialism, or extreme liberalism,” and that “… we can try redefining the word in a more positive direction.” There’s an ongoing debate among atheists/skeptics/agnostics/freethinkers/rationalists as to what an unbeliever should be called. Do you think the word “atheist” is a viable term? Or should a new name be coined that would more accurately represent the areligious?

UDO: That’s a very good question. I hold it with Karl Popper on labels really. It’s unimportant to me what label we use as long as it is clearly defined (and packs a punch in the public arena). To me it matters not at all what label it is, but it would be nice to have not too many competing such labels about as they only distract from the main messages and are indicative of sectarian scheming and territory marking. You might recall in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, there is this scene where our would-be liberationists sit in an arena introducing themselves to each other. They all follow pretty much closely aligned (albeit not exactly aligned) agendas and have nearly all the same name bar some small difference in labeling. They go on arguing forever about their small differences and miss the bigger picture as a result of that. I think we would be well advised to go about this more professionally by surveying which label the wider public would be most comfortable with, take that label and move on from there. A good example of how successful this is is the self-labeling of anti-choice campaigners in the context of reproductive rights. They call themselves ‘pro-life’ which clearly sounds much better than ‘we-don’t-care-about women’, or ‘we decide for pregnant women’ or ‘anti-choice’, which is what they really are. Marketing in this context clearly matters, unless we think that our agenda is entirely theoretical and inconsequential.

MAIA: I’ll have to watch Life of Brian again for that scene you descsribe. Good analogy for what goes on in the many-labelled freethinking/atheist community. In your introduction you also write, “It is high time we took charge of, and responsibility for, our own destinies without God, or God’s priestly interpreters, coming between us and our decision-making.” It’s a theme that Ophelia Benson picks up in her essay when she writes: “I refuse to consider a God ‘good’ that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties.” Do you see more people taking responsibility for their own destinies? And what is the danger when they do not?

UDO: The fact that the number of people clearly affiliated with mainstream religions has been decreasing in the West for more than a decade by now indicates that more and more people have begun thinking for themselves. I suspect, ironically, this is even true for many religious people who confronted the atheist challenge, and on reflection decided to remain with their God. Reflecting on these issues is a good thing. We can only truly live our own lives if we make a considered choice as to the values (and basis of those values) that guide our lives. If we don’t, if we follow religious (or other authority) blindly, we live an other-directed life, and in that sense we don’t actually live our own lives. The ongoing public exchanges between non-religious people and people believing in some kind of higher being actually serve that purpose.

MAIA: “Other-directed life” is an excellent way of putting it. I couldn’t agree more that ”otherness” is a foundational problem, and many individuals don’t realize how thoroughly they are plugged into “they” and “we.” In 50 Voices of Disbelief, a common recurring theme among the atheist contributors (yourself included) is an early questioning of the status quo of the religion you were brought up believing. Why do you think some people believe willingly, accepting without question their entire lives, and others question early, and reject the façade of belief?

UDO: You are asking an empirical as opposed to a philosophical or ethical question. I’m not trained to address this question as a professional. I can think of only one good reason for why someone might decide (unconsciously, if there is such a thing as an unconscious decision), and that is that there is quite a lot of comfort one can take from believing in a higher being. This comfort might be mistaken if there is no such being, as we atheists happen to think, but surely one got to acknowledge that confidence in an afterlife will make it easier for many religious people to cope with miserable lives. This is especially true for miserable lives that seem to have no end. I have always thought, call it arrogant, that those who are stronger willed or stronger minded are more likely to question this comfort and its pseudo-answers than people who are psychologically weaker. Surely there is comfort in knowing that a good, all-knowing entity is watching over you. It’s delusional, no doubt, but believing this must give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, and possibly the strength to deal with life’s adversity.

MAIA: In your own contribution to the book, an essay titled Human Self-Determination, Biomedical Progress, and God, you raise what I think is a very important issue, writing, “Political correctness today seems to demand that progressive intellectuals pretend that the barbarism that pervades many Islamic countries is not happening.” Political Correctness has become pervasive. Do you think that in general, atheists should be more aggressive in criticizing Islam?and exposing harmful religious ideologies?

UDO: Oh, absolutely. As writers like Henryk Broder have rightly pointed out, what we see across the Western world is the political left and political liberals continuing their arguments with Christians, but not with the arguably much greater threat to secular multi-cultural societies, that is conservative Islam. The UN Human Rights Council has already decided to deliberately muddy the waters by claiming that Islamophobia is a form of racism. How offensive is that to anyone who has ever been attacked or otherwise discriminated against because of their ethnicity? People choose these religious ideologies, you don’t choose the color of your skin. – As an aside, if these people argue that they have not even consciously made the choice to be Muslim (or Christian, or Scientologist or Aquarian for that matter), there is even less reason to take their religious convictions seriously, because they’re not meaningfully their own. – I think the conflation of such issues is deliberate.

There is also this continuing stuff about how peace loving Islam and its adherents are, yet most acts of religiously motivated violence we have seen across the world during the last decade or two were motivated by the ideology of Islam. We have all seen time and again on TV how adherents to this ideology have burned effigies of leaders of Western countries where cartoonists ridicule their God. What makes them think that their strongly held beliefs, baseless as they clearly are, deserve special respect? What makes them think that there is some divine right of Muslims not to be offended by people who disagree with their beliefs? I am offended all the time by their views on a lot of normative issues. Do I go out and burn effigies of Islamic countries’ leaders or prominent religious figures? No. Do I bomb Iran’s airline? No. There is no special moral entitlement of Muslim or other religious folks not to be offended by someone who disagrees with the ideology they hold dear to their heart. Protecting religious ideologies from the same acerbic wit that other ideologies (communism, capitalism, liberalism etc etc) have to endure is mistaken. This is what the rough and tumble of liberal democracies is all about. It is important for us as atheists to protect these freedoms against the onslaught of religious (and other) ideologies.

MAIA: I agree with you whole-heartedly on that. In your essay, you also bring up a very important point about the special rights that health care professionals have under “conscientious objection,” that if they “strongly hold personal religious beliefs that are in conflict with what would normally be required of them as a health care professional, they can “legitimately object to providing such professional services on grounds of personal conscience.” This practice is reprehensible and as you write, “It is arguable that, if individuals abuse that privilege by discriminating against particular patients because of their personal convictions, they violate basic standards of professional conduct.” This sort of thing goes on, and yet atheism is considered the unethical force. As you say, “religious consciences are reaching arbitrary conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.” Do you see the need for atheists to organize a more united front and demand that this kind of unfair practice be controlled by government legislation?

UDO: I have written on this issue on my blog and various articles during the last few years. I do believe we should do away with the right to conscientious objection in medicine altogether. Here are my reasons for this: Usually in the context of the abortion controversy, religiously motivated health care professionals claim the moral (and often legal) right to conscientious objection to the provision of certain health care services. The basic idea is that if, say, Christian doctors and nurses object for religious (conscience) reasons to abortion they should not be forced to provide such services. On the face of it this seems uncontroversial. I think both accepting such conscience based refusals to provide health care services as well as assuming that such decisions are uncontroversial is mistaken. Let me explain why.

First things first: health care professionals such as doctors and nurses are first and foremost called upon by us as members of society as professionals and not as members of the Communist Party, the Klu Klux Clan, the local chess club, or a particular church. They provide a public service. In return for this we as society grant them a monopoly on the provision of such services (eg doctors have a monopoly on the provision of many health delivery services, including the prescription of drugs). We as society also invest substantial amounts of public funds into their training.

In many countries abortion is legal to some extent or other. In other words, societies have decided that it is ethically acceptable for women to make such choices (usually within certain well-defined limits). In societies providing public health care, women are entitled to receive abortion services through health care professionals that are publicly funded. These professionals are seen by pregnant women for the purpose of having an abortion. They are sought out as professionals and not at all as private individuals with their own private views on the morality or otherwise of abortion. I think it is preposterous to suggest that such professionals could kind of opt-out of the provision of some services because they feel strongly about such services. Religious provisions are more or less arbitrary. Some make sense, others don’t, and among religions there is little consensus on what is and isn’t ethical. To permit the delivery of health care to be controlled by what amounts essentially to a lottery is unacceptable.

Patients treated by a public sector doctor belonging to Jehova’s Witnesses wouldn’t get blood transfusions, those falling into the hands of an adherent to the Scientology Church won’t receive antidepressants, the list is endless. It’s easily imaginable that a racist doctor belonging to a suitably racist church could refuse to provide life-preserving services to patients from ethnicities other than her own. The conscientious objection to abortion crowd might not like to hear this, but there is no in-principle difference between their objection and that of the medic belonging to the Aryan Nation Church of Jesus Christ Christian. They will, of course, claim that they have ‘better’ reasons and that the competing church (ie the smallish racist outfit) is either not a ‘real’ church or that the racists are ‘wrong’ etc. The thing is, strictly speaking, none of this can be shown to be true, because, as it happens all monotheistic religions depend on untestable claims about the existence of ‘God’.

A reliable delivery of health services (and this includes equitable access) depends on guaranteeing timely access based on health need. Conscientious objections are a serious threat to precisely that. If you are a pregnant woman living in a rural area with a limited number of predominantly conservative Christian or Muslim doctors you might well not be able to execute your legal right to have an abortion at a certain point in time, if respect for conscientious objections was considered to be of greater importance than your access to services.

This argument is very powerful indeed, when you consider the dearth of health care professionals serving the public sector in developing countries. So, the sooner we get rid of the right to conscientious objection, the better for us, the public. And to be clear, if health care professionals feel strongly enough about this matter, they should be invited to leave the profession and do something else with their lives. We cannot reasonably permit a pick-and-choose type interpretation of professionalism to become the norm. As someone who has taught for many years in medical schools, I can testify to quite a number of people who have chosen dentistry over medicine, for instance, because they did not wish to ever have to face the moral conflicts that come into play in the abortion controversy or end-of-life decision-making. In all honesty, these professionals deserve our respect for what I think is a grown-up understanding of what it means to be a professional. I think a strong case can be made for atheists targeting this serious problem policy wise.

MAIA: In Michael Tooley’s essay, he writes, “Most people in the world accept the religious beliefs of their parents with relatively minor changes, and never think critically about those beliefs.” He asks an important question: “Can anything be done to enable ordinary people to step back from their religious beliefs and to consider whether those beliefs are really true?” This question is echoed by many other atheist contributors, among them: Julian Baggini: “Why do intelligent people continue to believe?” Susan Blackmore: “God and the paranormal …. inspire deeply held beliefs and have spawned highly evolved memeplexes that are very infectious and difficult to root out once they are installed in the human mind,” Dale McGowan: “How do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system so self-evidently false and self-contradictory?” and Ophelia Benson: “A lot of people think they know things about God which seem to be contradicted by everything we see around us. It’s odd that the discrepancies don’t interfere with the knowledge.” Because the theme of questioning is prevalent in my own book, I’d like to hear what you think can be done to turn the penchant of humans to believe rather than question. Is it possible?

UDO: Another empirical question. I suspect as atheists we probably need to offer an alternative to the needs ‘God’ satisfies (well, doesn’t satisfy in reality, but psychologically – you know, the afterlife, redemption for wrong-doing, some good all powerful big guy watching over you, that kinda stuff). We need to show that a life without ‘God’ can be meaningful and satisfying. I think humanist groups presiding over non-religious weddings and funerals have made a good and quite successful start in many countries on this front. Beyond that, it’s up to each of us individually to provoke believers into explaining themselves and their beliefs. After all, as Dawkins (yes, Dawkins) said once, ‘There is more to vicars than giving tea parties, there are evil consequences.’ US evangelicals were by and large behind attempts to introduce the death penalty for certain homosexual sex acts in Uganda.

I think it might well be worth re-focusing humanist efforts, like the religious organizations have done for many many decades, on developing countries, supporting free speech and liberal causes and their supporters there more pro-actively. The fights humanists have on their hands in places like Nigeria, India and other such countries is arguably of much greater significance than the skirmishing we engage in with Christians in the developed world.

MAIA: Thanks for joining me today, Udo. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to address these topics. If you’d like to know more about Udo Schuklenk, please visit his website. And if you haven’t read 50 Voices of Disbelief, I highly recommend it. Let’s raise our disbelieving voices and be heard.

Airport security

I'm sure I am missing something here. We've had the shoe bomber, trying to set alight an explosive substance hidden in his shoe, some 8 or so years ago. The bloke travels without luggage and on a one-way ticket. Ever since we have been terrorised by security experts taking away our perfumes (ie perfumes bought prior to entering the duty free area), water (yes, water!), coke, fruit juices and any number of other substances that are utterly safe. Hectoliters of these fluids were destroyed for no good reason at all. Then, 8 years later comes an explosives laden guy who flies on a one-way ticket, without luggage from Yemen to Europe to the USA. Nobody notices anything. His water they might have taken away from him, but not his explosives!

Rightly so comedians such as Jon Stewart made light of the fact that the most recent case mimicks more or less the case we've had 8 years ago. What fascinates me, however, is that we have screening mechanisms in place that manage to succeed in finding a bottle of water on me, but that fail (8 years later) to find explosives. Makes you surely wonder what those gazillions of $$ were spent on during those years. I can't help but think that the primary objective was psychological, namely to hope that actual terrorists wouldn't call the security agencies' bluff (ie their continuing inability to reliably identify oddball travelers like our would-be terrorist and, most bizarre to my mind, their continuing inability to identify explosives on the traveling public). There we queue for all those hours, are unable to take toothpaste onto planes, yet would have no serious difficulty taking explosives along. Is it just me who thinks 'incompetent'?

No doubt we will soon be terrorized by ever more inane procedures. I've heard that I won't be able to go to the loo an hour before landing, there won't be blankets (on those bloody cold overnight flights). There will be never-ending security this-n-that's on flights to the USA (could please the rest of the world retaliate and ask the same of US travellers, so they must also wait forever), and that's about that. Oh well, when you thought things couldn't get much worse in terms of international air travel.

Creationist 'Discovery Institute' caught red-handed

The creationist 'think' tank Discovery Institute (bankrolling such intellectual luminaries as WJ Smith) has been caught red-handed. Check out this youtube video. It's self-explanatory. Enjoy.

Dignity's 'wooly uplift'

I have been sufficiently concerned for awhile about the more or less random deployment of terms such as 'human dignity' for and against any and all kinds of normative positions that I have done a bit of research on it while I was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London's Graduate School last term. Here's a pre-print of an Editorial I jointly wrote with Anna Pacholczyk, a graduate student at Manchester University for the journal BIOETHICS (2010; 24(2): ii. There's also a longer article forthcoming in the first issue of the JOURNAL OF BIOETHICAL INQUIRY in 2010 that I wrote on my own. Check it out and let me know what you think about it.

DIGNITY'S WOOLY UPLIFT

A. J. Ayer was famously and predictably dismissive of terms such as 'human dignity', referring to them as a kind of 'wooly uplift'.¹ Despite the pervasive presence of appeals to dignity in medical ethics and the common use of this term in professional codes, constitutional texts and various human rights instruments², both the moral basis as well as the meaning of this term continue to remain nebulous at best. Ruth Macklin suggested that we can do without dignity.³ Christian anti-choice campaigners, worried that a term as hegemonic as 'dignity' might be used by their opponents in the context of arguments about assisted dying, are staking their claims as to the true meanings of the term.⁴

Recent empirical research focuses on the importance and meaning of dignity to terminally ill patients. Dignity here, however is little other than an umbrella term for various patient needs being satisfied.⁵ This place-holder function offers us nothing by way of addressing the crucial normative questions that usually give rise to the deployment of 'dignity' in bioethics and biopolicy, such as for instance the moral permissibility or otherwise of assisted dying.

Given that the concept of dignity is not a primitive term of ethics, despite vague noises to the contrary⁶, invoking dignity without clarifying its basis and reach is mere sloganism – an ethical conversation stopper of a kind.⁷

Ethics is commonly and quite rightly so understood as having two primary functions: to guide our actions as moral agents and to provide us with justifications for the guidance provided. Can a hydra-like notion of dignity serve this purpose? In the context of assisted dying, appeals to dignity are used on the both sides of the fence. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church considers euthanasia to be a 'violation of the divine law, an offence against the dignity of the human person.’⁸ On the other hand, organizations campaigning in favour of the decriminalization of assisted dying in its varying forms do not hesitate to campaign in the name of 'human dignity', too.⁹ The situation in the legal context is not much better. When in September 1993 the Canadian Supreme Court issued a ruling on the terminally ill Sue Rodriguez's petition to declare invalid s 241 (b) of the Criminal Code¹⁰ - which criminalizes assisting people to commit suicide – both the majority and minority opinions employed the argument from ‘human dignity’ to support their views. ¹¹

Some scholars accept that we cannot reasonably 'expect dignity to have only one, clearly delineated meaning.'¹² Doris Schroeder argues that this is no reason to get rid of the concept altogether. She maintains that 'dignity is a slippery idea, but also a very powerful one and the demand to purge it from ethical discourse amounts to whispering in the wind.'¹³ A recent defense of the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights against its critics, asserts that 'human dignity' and other such principles could 'function as guidelines for reviewing or reorganising research practices'.¹⁴ That is a troubling proposition.

The current state of affairs seems to be that, notwithstanding the dubious normative merits of 'human dignity', the fact that it is commonly used is sufficient reason to continue using it. This proposition is evidently flawed. We surely can do better than this.

1 A. J. Ayer. (1947) Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor Gollancz.

2 C. McCrudden. Human dignity and judicial interpretation of human rights. European Journal of International Law 2008; 19: 655-724.

3 R. Macklin. Dignity is a useless concept. BMJ 2003; 327: 1419-1420.

4M. Somerville, “Defining human dignity”, 22 November 2009, The Gazette (Montreal), online: . Accessed 29 November 2009.

5 H.M. Chochinov. Dignity and the essence of medicine: the A, B, C, and D of dignity conserving care. BMJ 2007; 335: 184-187.

6R. Goddin, “The political theories of choice and dignity” (1981) 18:2 American Philosophical Quarterly 96.

7 R. Van Der Graaf & J.J.M. van Delden, “Clarifying Appeals to Dignity in Medical Ethics from an Historical Perspective” (2009) 23:3 Bioethics 151.

8 F. Cardinal Seper. Declaration on Euthanasia. Acta Apostolicae Sedis 1980; 72: 542. Available at: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19800505_euthanasia_en.html [Accessed 29 Nov 2009].

9 D. Hillyard & J. Dombrink. 2001. Dying Right: The Death With Dignity Movement. New York: Routledge.

10 R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46.

11 Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney General), [1993] 3 S.C.R. 519.

12 D. Schroeder. Dignity: Two riddles and four concepts. Camb Q Healthc Ethics 2008; 17: 230-238: 237.

13Ibid: 237.

14 M. Levitt & H. Zwart. Bioethics: An export product? Reflections on hands-on involvement in exploring the “external” validity of international bioethical declarations. J Bioeth Inq 2009; 6: 367–377:370.