Why can't men shut up about abortion?

(Republished from Talking Philosophy (2012).)

Why won’t men just shut up about political issues to do with women’s reproductive rights, particularly about the legality of abortion? After all, we (us blokes) are not directly affected by a ban on having an abortion, so why should we get a say in whether someone else gets to have an abortion or not? Furthermore, we are not epistemically qualified to have an opinion on the matter – how can I, as a man, imagine what a woman goes through when confronted by the prospect of becoming a mother against her will? How can I understand the responsibility, the anxiety, even the fear with which the woman – perhaps a confused and terrified teenage girl, or perhaps a traumatised rape victim – may be faced?

And if I can’t understand it, really, viscerally understand it, what gives me the right to open my big mouth about it?

So the arguments seem to go. This has become a popular meme: I’m confronted on a daily basis with claims, whether in the social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, or in the mainstream media, such as newspapers, with the claim that men should simply shut up about these issues and leave it to women to make the decisions. I don’t know how this would work, but I suppose we might imagine a world where men make no arguments one way or the other about the goodness, badness, rights and wrongs, or political tolerability of abortion. Perhaps laws would be enacted only by female legislators, with men abstaining from all votes in houses of parliament and the like.

As it happens, though, I don’t plan to shut up. One reason for that is that I am actually pro-abortion, so I don’t see why I should shut up unless all those anti-abortion men reach a deal with me to do likewise, and there’s not much prospect of that. In fact, any man who took the arguments seriously as to why men ought to shut up about abortion would probably be one who is already inclined to favour legal abortion, so the argument, if it persuaded anyone at all, would probably have a perverse effect, shushing exactly the wrong men – as seen from the likely viewpoint of the argument’s proponents.

I suppose the argument does accomplish one thing. It problematises whether or not men have the experience or imagination to understand why it is so important for women to have abortion rights; and that might, I suppose, make some anti-abortion men hesitate. While it is not likely to shut them up entirely, some of them might ask whether they are, in fact, imaginatively restricted, and whether they are, therefore, not properly weighing the interests at stake. Some might even attempt to stretch their imaginations to try to get a better concept of what it might be like to be confronted with the sorts of choices that women frequently encounter.

As it happens, men often do have pretty good imaginations (with rich experiences of anxiety, fear, inner turmoil, crushing responsibility, and so on, to draw upon), and I’m not at all convinced that we’re unable to imagine something of what it must be like, if we genuinely try. Indeed, some men may be better able to imagine it than many women who have never encountered the situation and perhaps are not sympathetic. If we are prompted to stretch our imaginations, I submit that that’s a good thing.

At the same time, the argument may (here is a second thing) serve the cause of feminist solidarity, encouraging resentment at unimaginative and unsympathetic men who pay little attention to the interests of women. While the argument cannot be taken literally, we might think, it plays a useful role in expressing resentments, attracting solidarity and participation, and rallying women to the political cause.

That’s all fine, but the fact remains that the argument can’t be taken literally. Anti-abortion men are likely to be driven by convictions that will keep them talking no matter how much we tell them to shut up. After all, some may believe that they are carrying out the will of God in opposing abortion. Now, if they’ve read some books about secularism (such as mine!) they just might be persuadable that this does not provide a proper basis for the state to act, but whether they’re persuadable will depend on their deeper theological views. Secularist arguments may appeal to many believers (I certainly hope so, and I think there is a fair bit of historical and sociological evidence that they can), but surely not to all. And even if Mr. Believer thinks that certain arguments should not support action by the state to prohibit, say, abortion, he might still think that they support social or moral condemnation of some kind. In that case, he can take a secularist approach to law-making, but it won’t shut him up about his moral convictions.

Furthermore, many opponents of abortion, irrespective of their sex, can imagine the highest level of anxiety, fear, difficulty, inner turmoil, and so on, for someone who is forced to become a mother against her will, but still oppose abortion. These opponents of abortion are likely to think that abortion is equivalent to murder, or at least something very like murder, in which case they will say that none of the interests of the woman can justify it. However bleak my future may be if I fail to murder someone, that does not usually give me the legal right to do so. There are exceptions for self-defence, but analogies between abortion and self-defence are notoriously tricky and contested.

As it happens, I don’t think that abortion is anything remotely like murder. The trouble is that I don’t see why someone who disagrees with me ought to shut up about it. If he or she holds a contrary position in good faith, and is prepared to back it with arguments, then s/he not only has the legal right to do so, but perhaps also has some legitimate claim on the rest of us to listen (at least if we haven’t heard and considered it all before). And if this (let’s say male) person is truly convinced that abortion somehow harms a fetus much as our deaths would harm us, surely it’s unreasonable for me to expect him to hold his tongue about it. It might be relevant to try to get him to imagine what is at stake for women who contemplate abortions, but even if he tries and succeeds it might not shake his conviction (even though he might, I suppose, come to feel a bit more sympathy and speak with more compassion).

In the upshot, the argument that men should go quiet about abortion may have a role to play if it is not taken literally. That is, if it is used as a challenge to men to use our imaginations or recognise our imaginative limits, and/or if it is used as a way to rally supporters and encourage feminist solidarity. If taken literally, however, it does not have much merit. Anti-abortion men can’t reasonably be expected to shut up, given their likely reasons for the positions that they take and the religious, moral, and/or metaphysical beliefs that their reasons draw upon.

I think there are other problems, too. I doubt that any serious thinker about contemporary politics can avoid taking positions that then entail views on the abortion debate. Keeping entirely silent may not be a practical possibility once you start thinking and talking about almost any other set of fraught political issues. In any event, I won’t go quiet about abortion any time soon. I am one man – obviously one among many – who will go on defending women’s reproductive rights, most certainly including robust abortion rights.

Sam Harris on the Innocence of Muslims Affair

(Reposted from Talking Philosophy (2012).)

I see that Sam Harris has published a post on the violent responses to what he calls “an unwatchable Internet video titled ‘Innocence of Muslims.'”

There is much in the post to agree with. For a start, I agree that Innocence of Muslims, or the trailer for it, or selection from it, or whatever the hell that was, is (pretty much) unwatchable. I did actually force myself to watch the damn thing (you can find it easily if you really must), but it is atrocious in every possible respect – bigoted, scurrilous, disjointed, and suffering from the most abyssmal production values since Plan 9 from Outer Space (I know I’m not the first to make the comparison, so apologies to whoever was).

Harris dismisses as “obscene” such questions as, “What exactly was in the film? Who made it? What were their motives? Was Muhammad really depicted? Was that a Qur’an burning, or some other book?” I think that’s going too far. It does appear that the film was deliberately created to express hatred for Muslims and to provoke a violent backlash. In the circumstances, we can ask these questions about it, especially when we add in further issues such as (apparently credible) claims of actors being conned into thinking they were involved in a very different project. There is much to discuss about the film itself and the circumstances of its production, even if, at the end of the day we agree with Harris that:

Here is where the line must be drawn and defended without apology: We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.

Yes, that’s right. We do get to express our repudiation of belief systems, including Islam, without being constrained by the power of the state, or so I want to argue (and have done in the past). We can go on to criticise prophets or anyone else. Harris is pretty much correct when he says:

The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost. And the only forces on earth that can recover it are strong, secular governments that will face down charges of blasphemy with scorn. No apologies necessary. Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance.

Yes, pretty much right. Only “pretty much” because there’s an element of exaggeration to quibble about, the way it’s been worded. The problem is not so much that we can’t “think aloud” on certain topics as that we cannot publish those thoughts widely, once we’ve sorted them out, should we take certain strong stances. But even when the point is expressed in a less rhetorical way, it’s true that an important freedom has been lost, not through the actions of the state but through the willingness of some Muslims to resort to murder in response to what they see as insults to Islam or their prophet.

How should the state and its officials respond – and how should we request that they do so? They may be tempted to suppress some kinds of anti-religious speech and to demonise the speakers as racists and criminals … and in some cases they may even be correct that they are dealing with racists or something very similar. Even leaving aside basic concerns about freedom of speech, however, this response can be counterproductive. If an impression is created that political power is being used to silence opposition to Islam, this will merely add to the resentments against Islam that are already present in Western societies, and which have now been fueled by the violent, in some cases murderous, responses to Innocence of Muslims. More generally, when religious leaders and organisations try to prevent certain speech from being heard or certain images from being seen, this adds to the layers of distrust and resentment. The effect is exacerbated if governments get in on the act, actually assisting to suppress speech and images.

We would all do well to scrutinise ourselves as individuals, and to be alert to possible racism, even unconscious, somewhere within our motivations. It is best, however, if the state adopts a strong stance of insisting on freedom of speech. As I say in Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, a liberal attitude might permit some ugly speech, and Innocence of Muslims is a very good example, but the long-term effect will be salutary:

…the long-term effect would be to reinforce a valuable lesson: ideologically opposed groups of whatever kind — religious, political, or philosophical — must make their own way, enduring criticism, and even satire, from their opponents, without asking the state to interfere.

But will that just make extremist more likely to resort to self-help in the form of violence? I doubt it. As Kenan Malik has argued, a political culture that defends freedom of expression removes some of the resources that extremists draw upon. If we seriously maintain a highly liberal political culture, we make it more difficult for extremists to take, much less justify, violent offence and react with violent action. We deny the extremists the false moral legitimacy that they claim.

Yes, Innocence of Muslims is pretty much as bad as you can imagine it to be, and that is worth discussing – along with whatever fraud may have been involved in the production of the film. We should feel free to say all that, but then move on. It in no way justifies violence, and nor does it justify any withdrawal by the state from a strong emphasis on freedom of speech.

Is Nice Nihilism Enough?

(Again, republished from Talking Philosophy (2102).)

In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg suggests that norms like the following constitute a universal human morality:

Don’t cause gratuitous pain to a newborn baby, especially your own.

Protect your children

If someone does something nice to you, then, other things being equal, you should return the favor if you can.

Other things being equal, people should be treated the same way.

On the whole, people’s being better off is morally preferable to their being worse off.

Beyond a certain point, self-interest becomes selfishness.

If you earn something, you have a right to it.

It’s permissible to restrict complete strangers’ access to your personal possessions.

It’s okay to punish people who intentionally do wrong.

It’s wrong to punish the innocent.

Rosenberg does not, however, think that any of these are morally binding or (insofar as they are truth-apt) actually true. Nor, apparently, does he think they reduce to something deeper (such as utilitarianism). Rather, they are more-or-less separate behavioural norms that have become universal among human beings because conforming to them has tended to maximise reproductive fitness.

Although he is a metaethical nihilist, Rosenberg reassures us that we needn’t worry – most people are inclined to conform to these norms whether or not they regard them as true or objectively binding. Those individuals who fail to conform do so out of psychological peculiarity, or perhaps from having false beliefs about factual matters, rather than because of any recondite metaethical views such as moral error theory (or, presumably, relativism, non-cognitivism, or something else that might loosely be considered anti-realist).

You might ask whether Rosenberg is correct about this last point. My own suspicion, though it would take a lot of arguing to be confident, is that he’s probably right: metaethical nihilists are (I suspect) no more likely than the average person to steal the family silver.

But there’s a problem, at least a possible one, and I’ll get to it.

First, though, the norms that I’ve listed might have contributed to reproductive fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. It’s possible that they did so, in part, by contributing to the viability of small bands of hunter-gatherers, and this might have been linked closely to the flourishing of individual members of the group. The individual’s success was the group’s success, and vice versa – and both contributed to the replicative “success” of the relevant strands of DNA. Mybe.

It doesn’t seem too much of stretch that the health, longevity, and happiness of the individual, the individual’s (inclusive) reproductive fitness, and the viability of the hunter-gatherer band as a collective might all have tended to reinforce each other. Some behaviours could contribute to all this simultaneously. We could have certain behavioral norms genetically hardwired into us, as a result. In principle, they might continue to contribute to individual flourishing (in some basic sense such as health, longevity, and happiness), reproductive fitness, and the viability of modern societies. How far they do so will depend, in part, on how far modern environments resemble evolutionary ones in relevant respects.

Perhaps a more plausible picture is that these norms are not actually hardwired (and we can always question what that even means, given that genes can be expressed in different ways in different environments). Nonetheless, under a wide variety of environmental circumstances, societies tend to converge on norms like these and to teach them to children, and perhaps children tend to be primed to learn them. That could be because norms much like these fit in well with whatever more minimalist universal human psychology exists (perhaps this includes certain kinds of responsiveness and sympathy that actually are pretty much hardwired). This might be more the sort of picture that Rosenberg is thinking of – I’m not sure of that.

Either way, let’s take it that psychologically usual people are likely to internalise these sorts of listed norms, and are unlikely to be shaken from them by any kind of meta-ethical anti-realism about moral norms and judgments. Fine so far. There still seems to be a question as to whether, under current circumstances, a hodgepodge of norms like this is really adequate for whatever it is we might want from a system of moral norms. It might help us to get by, and even flourish, when interacting within small groups of people, but is it enough to help us meet our larger goals in a highly complex social world?

Consider an issue like climate change. Assuming that we should, or actually do, care about the conditions under which future generations of human beings, and perhaps other creatures, will live on this strained planet. If so, we should seek to minimise the current process of anthropogenic global warming. Do the norms that Rosenberg lists, which he thinks (perhaps rightly) come easily to us, help us with that? A couple of the very vague norms that he lists might give some guidance, but presumably not a lot. The sorts of political decisions needed to address an issue such as climate change might not come “naturally” or easily to us at all.

Perhaps that’s not news. Perhaps any credible moral theory will predict that the sorts of political changes we need to accomplish various large goals will be counter-intuitive to most people. Still, the counter-intuitiveness can be accounted for on Rosenberg’s view of the world, which may be a point in favour of his view. Furthermore, metaethical nihilists may have no more difficulty than anyone else buying into whatever political initiatives are required to deal with an issue such as climate change. So none of this should count against Rosenberg’s metaethical nihilism.

All the same, I don’t think we can be confident that the morality that comes easily to us is good (i.e. effective) enough, these days, for what we probably want a moral system (viewed as social technology) to deliver. If that is right, Rosenberg appears too complacent. It may be that no moral system is true or objectively binding, but some moral norms might come to us easily and might still do the job that we (most of us) want on small scales. But they won’t necessarily scale up. That’s where I think we have a problem.

What is a sexual image?

(Again, this is a post that I'm republishing from Talking Philosophy (2012). I've used a different Vallejo image, as I couldn't find the more anodyne one that I originally used, and I've slightly altered the text relating to it. I'm always a sucker for a good picture of a dragon. I've made a couple of other minor rewordings for clarity. The post originally ended by saying "discuss away", but I am not opening it to discussion here. We did have some good discussion at the time.)

I frequently encounter complaints that public spaces are being “sexualized”, filled with “sexual images”, and so on, as if this is a serious problem. My first thought is to wonder why the spaces where mammals like us interact publicly would not contain much sexual imagery, given our interest in sex, being sexually attractive to others, etc., but let that pass. A further thought is to wonder what even counts as a “sexual image”. How erotic or suggestive does an image have to be before we regard it as a “sexual” one?

In Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, I argue that (subject to countervailing values) it is legitimate for the state to regulate the public display of images that cause a large proportion of the population high-impact offense. That might apply to hardcore pornographic images, but it applies equally to, say, graphic images of feces, medical procedures, and exit wounds.

 
Not all high-impact images are sexual and I doubt that all images that most of us would classify as “sexual” are high-impact (in the sense of causing ordinary people shock, psychological disturbance, nausea, and so on). When we’re talking about what images should be regulated in public spaces, you’d think that concepts such as “sexualization” or just “sexual” would be almost irrelevant. These simply do not provide the test.

 
But perhaps that depends on what people mean by a “sexual image” – if it means certain kinds of images that are high-impact and which most of us would classify as pornography, then perhaps it’s fair enough to object to such images in public spaces. However, I never see images of that description on, say, billboards.

 
Ever since I became sensitized to the issue some years ago, I’ve amused myself now and then by looking for such an image on the billboards, or in shop windows, of large cities that I visit – whether it’s Sydney (just down the road from where I live), New York City, or wherever. I have yet to see an image that meets at least my understanding of high-impact pornographic imagery. So presumably images of much lower impact (but with some erotic charge) are being objected to.

 
So, what counts as a “sexual image”? I’m going to offer some images that have undoubted sexual suggestiveness or erotic charge. In each case, I probably would therefore classify them as “sexual”, but that is not a pejorative term. I see nothing terribly wrong with any of these images (some may be kitsch, some may be open to some sort of political criticism for their possible messages, but I don’t think any are sufficiently egregious to keep out of public places).

 
First, consider this pic of tennis player Rafael Nadal, from a jeans advertisement.

Surely this contains plenty of erotic charge and I don’t need to elaborate on the composition, the way Nadal’s undoubtedly beautiful body is further idealized, or the significance of the jeans that are not quite on. Is this a sexual image?

 
How about Steve Pearson’s famous “Wings of Love”?

This is often regarded as kitsch. Perhaps so, or perhaps that is just snobbery. I'm not interested in the debate about its aesthetic characteristics, much as that might be interesting.

I do want to ask whether it is a sexual image.

If not, why not? It has plenty of erotic charge  – surely it is, in part, a celebration of the erotic beauty (sometimes) of the human body, and of sexual love. The message is pretty clear, and the nude human figures are themselves erotically charged.

 

How about this Boris Vallejo image (a tame one by Vallejo’s standards)?

Again, I’m not interested so much in its aesthetics (you might consider it kitsch, or whatever) or its politics (you might find a lurking, if unintended, message of some kind – perhaps it valorizes some socially unfortunate view of women).

In fact, I am not defending the aesthetic or political characteristics of any of these images. I simply want to know whether they count as sexual images or not, because I’m trying to get a handle on what that actually means. Surely this one – Vallejo’s – is a sexual image, if not heading slightly in the direction of pornography? Right? I would not, however, think of it as the sort of high-impact image that it is the concern of the state to regulate under a strict application of the offense principle.

Finally, a bit of high art. Let’s consider Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”.

I’m no art critic, so I won’t go into the composition or aesthetics of this. My question, yet again, is simply whether Titian’s painting counts as a sexual image.

I imagine that, with a lot of research, we could find how the expression “sexual image” has been understood by various censorship boards and similar authorities. But I would like to see what a general educated audience thinks about the phrase.

Do the images above count? And it not, what more would you require? Actual depiction of people having sex? Close ups of human genitals? Less emphasis on aesthetic qualities? Clearly, all these images are heavily focused on visions of beauty, however unrealistic they might be, or even oppressive to people who think they have to live up to them. They are meant to give aesthetic pleasure, not merely sexual arousal, even if they aim at the latter as well.