Is abortion a greater evil than sex abuse?

Is abortion a greater evil than child abuse? Of course it isn't! Indeed, I don't generally regard abortion as an evil at all. We could doubtless get into hypothetical cases of late-term abortions carried out on a mere whim, but are there many, or any, such cases in the real world? In the real world I think you must either suffer from a distorted moral sense or be in the grip of a theory if you regard abortion as the real evil (as opposed, say, to denying an abortion to a desperate woman or teenage girl).

And yet, we see statements made from time to time that abortion is a worse evil than, say, the sexual abuse of children, or that the widespread occurrence of abortions in modern societies constitutes an evil akin to black slavery or the Nazi Holocaust.

Frankly, these sorts of statements are repugnant. What is especially repugnant, and to many people unintelligible, is how something that has great benefits in reducing or avoiding suffering - the ready availability of abortion to desperate women and girls - is being compared to sources of terrible suffering, such as slavery, sex abuse, and the Holocaust. Surely someone who makes these comparisons must be crazy or evil... right? Wrong.

I don't think that Catholic moralists, for example, are crazy or evil. Nor do I think that they are hypocritically rationalising what is really a hatred of women or a wish to keep women in subjection. Yes, there may be an element of that if we delve back far enough into Catholic (say) sexual morality. The Catholic moral system may fossilise ancient attitudes of misogyny, and particularly fears of women's sexual power and freedom.

But I think we should take people like Cardinal George Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, at their word. They really do accept a moral system that, as a matter of fact, rationalises many ancient moral attitudes and ideas on a false basis ... and ends up producing totally different results from a moral system based on amelioration of suffering (or, if you are a moral abolitionist like Richard Garner or Joel Marks, from a settled attitude of simply being opposed to suffering).

People like Cardinal Pell are not crazy or evil. In many circumstances, they will think and feel and act much as I (for example) would. They will show people respect and compassion.

But when it comes to thinking about anything to do with sexuality, they are in the grip of a cruel moral theory. They have been indoctrinated into it, and they actually believe it. From inside that theory, it is all consistent and makes sense, even if you are otherwise a decent person.

If you don't understand that point, you'll find much of the behaviour of your opponents simply incomprehensible, and you'll be dumbfounded when your own expressions of moral repugnance have no impact on them. Your opponents will appear to be monstrous. From their viewpoint, however, whatever you say is ill-informed and essentially irrelevant. They will dismiss it, but not because they are monsters or even because, as individuals, they are arrogant. Mainly, they are deeply mistaken about reality (which makes them the exact opposite of moral leaders or moral authorities).

Seen from the outside, of course, Catholic (and similar) sexual morality appears ridiculous and repugnant. All the more reason to continue the fight against it.

What do the New Atheists really say?

While we're talking about the New Atheists, what do they really say? You'd think, from the various denunciations, etc., that they just come out with long, unstructured, uncivil rants against religion. Who would think that the core New Atheist books contain detailed, thoughtful arguments and that they actually make out cases for certain ideas? You may disagree with those ideas, but surely they are worth rational discussion.

At the risk of being reductive, I think the following is a reasonable starting point to identify what they are really on about.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith. What people believe will actually motivate their actions. Therefore, we cannot simply be tolerant of all beliefs. At least some level of pushback against extreme religious beliefs is justified, and moderate religious people are not assisting with this.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Orthodox or popular theism can be seen as a persistent false belief, one that survives in the absence of evidence and even against our best evidence of how the universe works. Furthermore, it causes actual, identifiable harms.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell. We ought to devote a lot more time and energy to the study of religion as a natural phenomenon. This will be more useful than the current deference to religion and assumption that it is at least socially valuable (if not actually true).

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great. The big problem with religion, especially with Christianity, is not so much that it's false as that it comprehensively denigrates human nature and valuable human experience. In that sense, it "poisons everything".

Doubtless all four (well all three, plus Hitchens before his untimely death) would tend to support the main ideas of the others. But they have different specific concerns and different emphases, and they do put actual arguments for their positions. Importantly, while they don't mince words they do remain within broadly accepted standards for civility.

They deserve to be engaged in detail, with appropriate arguments, qualified agreement where that is appropriate, and so on. Instead, the response is often merely an attempt to demonise them and thus try to neutralise them as contributors to debate in the public sphere. That's not good enough.

A study of the effects of abortion ... and denying abortions

Here's an interesting article by Annalee Newitz, over at io9, about the social and psychological effects on women of having abortions ... compared with being denied an abortion that you want.

The question here is whether anti-abortion laws can be justified on paternalistic grounds, presumably because women who want abortions, but are prevented from having them, will end up being better off than they would be if they actually had the abortions. Before I go on, there is something offensive about the state enacting laws on this basis... telling you what to do in relation to very important decisions in your life on the basis that it knows your own good better than you do. This is a significant use of coercive power to override your autonomy. But even if we waive that point, are women likely to be better off if denied abortions?

Well, the study (as reported) doesn't seem to support that proposition. On the contrary, it appears more likely that someone who has been "turned away" from having an abortion will be stuck in an abusive relationship and/or trapped in poverty. Moreover, the medical risk of carrying a baby to term is greater than that of having an abortion. Finally, there is no sign of any greater risk of psychiatric illness such as clinical depression. Statistically speaking, there doesn't seem to be any downside to abortion.

Even if we accept the idea of paternalistic laws far more readily than I do, this looks like a weak case.

On Chris Stedman's Faitheist

I'm currently reading this book, and am writing a fairly lengthy piece on it (maybe a couple of thousand words) that I'll be submitting to Free Inquiry.

Just a few quick thoughts here, though. I've enjoyed Faitheist as the memoir of a life that has been interesting so far (though, alas, with its share of pain during the author's adolescence), and Stedman can certainly write lucid, concise, enjoyable prose. There are some small (seeming?) oddities, as when John Berryman is referred to as "a deceased gay Minnesotan poet". I don't know what that's all about, since Berryman was well-known for being heterosexually predacious. Even if it turns out he was bisexual (which would be news to me!), he seems an odd person to refer to as Stedman does. Could someone please enlighten me about this? Does Stedman know something I don't? Anyway, the memoir parts of the book make for a solid read ... sometimes even a poignant one.

I'm less impressed by Stedman's analysis of how we should talk about religion and the religious. I actually agree with him that some more civility might be in order as the default. But that's because we see some material on the internet (in particular) that is totally undiscriminating and unnuanced, mindlessly hostile, and even vilifying. This is not something we should aspire to. The atheist blogosphere is not always a pretty sight.

But Stedman goes too far in his denunciations of authors such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and to a lesser extent of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. In my opinion, none of these authors violates ordinary standards of civility that are accepted in, say, political debate. Perhaps they could be argued to have "given permission" (as they say) to others to be more offensive and less nuanced. Really, though, I encourage my readers to go and read any of these people carefully. See for yourself how they develop their critiques of religion. You'll see that their styles are calm, rational, and suitably varied to the topic. These are all fine writers with skilled control, in each case, of the "voice" that comes through.

None of that is to deny an element of moral indignation in some of what they write (some engage in this more than others). But we do not see incivility for its own sake.

In the past, I've disagreed with Harris, in particular, about some issues, but it is all too easy to demonise people. Unfortunately, there's that tendency in Faitheist. I wish the author had torn out a few pages on reflection (or rather, deleted them from the manuscript). The strength of his argument in favour of more civility will tend to be lost on many people because he overreaches. Yet, surely he has a point,and it's unfortunate that it might get lost in the inevitable kerfuffle.

[Edit: One sentence above is badly worded and conveys something rather different from what I actually had in mind: it's the sentence beginning, "But Stedman goes too far...". See comments below for explanation of what I was trying to convey.]

Big Brother is going to be watching you

While we're celebrating a reasonable outcome to the political debate in Australia about internet censorship, let's pause to note that the next debate will be about internet surveillance. It seems that the government now wants to go ahead with this scary proposal, whereby telcos/ISPs will be required to retain your online data for two years. I.e. the police will be able to find out exactly where you've been and what you've done on the internet over the last couple of years, so you'd better worry about what you might have said or looked at that you don't want grandma or the public to know about.

Doubtless there would have to be safeguards with something like this, and it will be interesting to see what is proposed, but this is a degree of intrusiveness into our privacy that is not to be taken lightly. We're in for another messy but necessary debate before this one gets resolved.

More sex when drunk

Okay, I need to get more people reading this blog - it lost some traffic during its recent semi-hiatus in October.

So allow me to point out Jeremy Stangroom's post at Talking Philosophy, entitled "More Sex When Drunk". It's a perfectly good post, making a point of some importance, and I must get around to commenting on it. But my interest for the moment is that I notice when I check TP's stats that it's pulled in an unusually large number of views. I guess that's the internet for you.

So that's my interesting sociological datum of the day.

And now to see whether the same effect is achieved here. :)

Australian government backtracks on internet censorship

The Australian government has apparently abandoned its clean feed/mandatory filtering proposal, contenting itself with requiring ISPs to block Interpol's list of the most severely abusive child pornography sites.

I doubt that anyone who has been opposing mandatory filtering wants to defend those sites or access to them, even if a requirement imposed on ISPs causes them some inconvenience (too bad: for most of us, that was never what the argument was about). The sort of material that makes it to Interpol's list is obviously abusive.

Meanwhile, this outcome is an example of what I often argue for on this blog and elsewhere - we have ended up with a narrowly tailored law that deals with the worst aspects of a social problem, without an overreaching and clumsy attempt to micromanage things. The latter often sounds fine in theory, but it too easily creates systems that are over-inclusive and, in any event, ripe for scope creep. Wherever important freedoms are at stake - such as freedom of speech - that is not acceptable.

In this case, the public opposition to overreaching legislative proposals was successful. All the same, we need to be vigilant against this sort of thing whenever we see it.

Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that those moral watchdogs at the Australian Christian Lobby still want a wide-ranging scheme of censorship of sexual material on internet, based on "think of the children" grounds.

Steve Zara on Faitheist by Chris Stedman

Steve Zara gives a (surprisingly?) positive review to Chris Stedman's book, Faitheist. I'll be reading this book, and writing about it, myself. At this point, let me just say that I welcome the book, even though I am almost sure to find a great deal to disagree with.

I'm known, I suppose, as one of the more prominent anti-accommodationist thinkers/writers ... but anti-accommodationism in this sense just means that I don't think that religious doctrines can be accommodated straightforwardly within a scientific view of the world (for example, using Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA principle).

I also think that there is a place for stark, dramatic expressions of our problems with religion, as with the title of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I think there is a place for reductio ad absurdum arguments against religious views, showing how bizarre they can seem when their implications are examined, or how ridiculous they can appear in total when you step out of them. And religious views, like everything else, can be fair game for mockery and satire. That especially applies when the adherents of these views seek to wield power or political influence.

I guess this means that I am no "faitheist", which I take to be an atheist who considers religion a good thing, wants to say nothing against it, considers it beyond satire, etc. For a start ...generally speaking, I don't think religion is a good thing.

All that said, there are limits. I don't think that we should go after good, moderate religious people without restraint. I don't think that incivility, dismissiveness, and mere abuse are often appropriate. On the contrary, I think it's worthwhile striking a few blows for thoughtfulness, fairness, kindness, and civility. Satire is often justified, and even outright anger and mockery can be justified in some circumstances, but surely we can be a bit discriminating and careful about when.

If that is part of what Stedman wants to argue, I'm fine with it, and that's the way I'd hope to treat his book.

The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2011

This beautiful book contains a selection of the best fantasy and horror stories published in 2011, as chosen by Liz Grzyb and Talie Helene. Among the stories is "The Head in the Goatskin Bag" by Jenny Blackford (originally published in Kaleidotrope #13). Jenny's author's copy has turned up in the mail, and of course she's thrilled to have it in her hand - and I'm just about as thrilled.

Free will and moral responsibility

I'm reading Against Moral Responsibility by Bruce N. Waller (MIT Press 2011). There's much to say about it, but the book is notable for challenging the tight connection that analytic philosophers make between ideas of free will and ideas of moral responsibility. Indeed, there is a near consensus among recent and current philosophers (at least those in the analytic tradition) that we possess free will just insofar as we possess the capacity to act with moral responsibility.

However, it's possible to find exceptions, philosophers who've questioned the consensus. There do seem to be other conceptions of free will - whether in philosophical writings, popular culture, or elsewhere - and I question whether the anxieties that ordinary people have in mind when they worry about having free will actually do track so closely with the idea of moral responsibility (whatever this might amount to).

Waller takes an unusual position in arguing that we possess a form of compatibilist free will (and he seems to think that this is a good answer to much of what we are concerned about with free will talk), while at the same time denying that we ever have moral responsibility. If that combination of ideas sounds untenable, bizarre, or plain heretical, you might like to check out his book and the arguments he offers. I'm not really persuaded, but it's possible that he's hit on a position which does better justice than outright hard determinism to the intuitions and concerns of people like Sam Harris who want to deny the existence of free will. He certainly develops his position with much detail and care.