The Academic Merit of "What I Did on my Holidays"

There are no frequent or regular readers of this blog, because it is updated so infrequently and irregularly.  It takes a lot to get me to add anything.  Quite often, a longish thread on Twitter is as close as I get to blogging these days.  But sometimes, things need a bit more working-out.  Things such as this paper, "I am not Alone – We are all Alone: Using Masturbation as an Ethnographic Method in Research on Shota Subculture in Japan" by Karl Andersson, published in the journal Qualitative Research, which has attracted a fair bit of attention on social media in the past few days on the basis of a tweet from the Tory MP and culture warrior Neil O'Brien - a tweet that led a number of equal-but-opposite culture warriors to decide that since he'd condemned it, it must be worth defending (and then, at least sometimes, walking it back, as here and here; others have simply deleted their tweets in defence, presumably in the hope that we'll forget them.)

But Twitter is a notoriously more-heat-than-light sort of place, and so I decided to read the paper for myself, and to put myself in something like the position of a peer-reviewer.  Is the paper actually any good?  Does it have academic merit?

I don't think it does, and I'll explain why in a moment.  But first, a few things should be noted.

He's Done a Course

Back in my days editing the JME blog, we used to get the occasional unsolicited post sent to us.  Almost always, they went unpublished; this was overwhelmingly because they weren't very good.  The one person who did sometimes get his unsolicited work published was the ethicist-turned-barrister Daniel Sokol.  There was a number of reasons why we were a little more forgiving of him: he was someone we knew, and a reasonably well-known person in the field - he had a fairly regular column in the BMJ; his submissions, while sometimes a bit self-congratulatory, were often fairly inconsequential - but they were by the same token pretty harmless, so could tide us over during those periods when we had little to say of our own; and, finally, if we did reject his submissions, we could more or less guaratee that they'd appear on the BMJ's own blog anyway, so there wasn't much point our trying to act as gatekeeper.

A post by him appeared on the JME blog a few days ago, detailing the help he had been able to give a doctor, one Tarek Seda, who had found himself in professional trouble and facing a hearing from the Medical Practitioners' Tribunal Service in 2019.  This post purported to be a brief account by Dr Seda of how Sokol was tremendously helpful, andit was supplemented by an account by Sokol himself of how Sokol was... er... tremendously helpful.

Now, I do not know whose idea the post was - in the comments, Sokol writes that

[a]fter the outcome of the MPTS hearing, Dr Seda selflessly asked how he could help other doctors in a similar situation.   One suggestion was to write an article, giving a dual perspective on the process of ethics remediation: the doctor’s and the ethicist’s.   This blog is the product of that idea.

This tells us little about whose idea the post was, although I do have my suspicions - and I'll come back to that in a moment.  But it will not have escaped anyone's attention that the post as a whole does come across rather as an advertorial.  Evidence for this can be produced from the final sentence of the post proper, and the supplementary text that follows it:

Racial Self-Awareness?

A quick query for philosophers and bioethicists.

I've just had cause to revisit Mary Anne Warren's "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion", which is where she sets out her five criteria for recognising a creature as a person:

I suggest that the traits which are most central to the concept of personhood, or humanity in the moral sense, are, very roughly, the following:
(1) consciousness (of objects and events external and/or in ternal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain;
(2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems);
(3) self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control);
(4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics;
(5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both.

That final six words is bugging me.  What does she mean by "racial"?  It's not used anywhere else in the essay.

That said, the word "race" does appear - again, just the once.  A little earlier, setting out her stall, she had asked us to

[i]magine a space traveler who lands on an unknown planet and encounters a race of beings utterly unlike any he has ever seen or heard of. If he wants to be sure of behaving morally toward these beings, he has to somehow decide whether they are people, and hence have full moral rights, or whether they are the sort of thing which he need not feel guilty about treating as, for example, a source of food.

The emphasis is mine.  So maybe that's it: the word "race" here is used in the same sort of way that we might use it in phrases like "human race".  That being so, the word "racial" would presumably have to be taken to be used in the same sort of way.  Warren isn't being weird about ethnicity.

No ethnicity, no.  But weird all the same.  What on Earth does she mean by "self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both"?

I can tell what individual self-awareness would be.  It's self-awareness in the everyday sense of the term.  But what would "racial self-awareness" be?  Whether we're talking about species or ethnicity, I'm equally mystified.  Inasmuch as that it's not individual, what is the "self" of which one is supposed to be aware?

It can't be a pervasive sense of being human: that would be a bonkers thing to suggest as a criterion for personhood.  Partly, that's because it's not something that'd be apparent to the visitor from another world, so not something that could help decide whether we're persons or not.  Then again, consciousness (of pain) isn't visible to outsiders.  But we can report things like that to people who ask the right questions.  But "racial self-awareness" is not obviously the sort of thing about which our visitor could ask us, or about which we could provide an answer.  If someone asked me if I had racial/ species self-awareness, I'd have to say not, because it's not something I understand.  I don't have a pervasive sense of belonging to the human race, and I don't think that anyone has.  Such a thing seems impossible to pin down, and so adds nothing to our descriptions of our mental state.  How would I distinguish the bit of my self awareness that was human from the bit that was just me?  I don't think I could.  I don't think there is anything; and even if there is, it's not something about which we can say anything, which amounts to the same in this case.

And so there we are.  I don't think it's a big thing; it doesn't really make any difference to Warren's argument.  But I'm curious.  What's she on about?

Feeling my Age

My last post here was a reply to a paper by Joona Räsänen in the Journal of Medical Ethics that had argued that there was a case for allowing people to change their legal ages.  I... wasn't convinced.  And, encouraged by people on Facebook, I submitted a slightly tweaked version of the reply to the JME; it's now published, and available here.  I was not the only critic - and it's notable that the criticisms that have been published raise very similar points.  For his part, Räsänen has provided a reply to some of the criticisms.

Readers: it's not convincing.  I'll be brief.

"Iain Brassington and William Simkulet both raise the following objection against legal age change," he says, paraphrasing us thus:

Ageism is not a reason to allow age change but a reason to require that age is not asked while recruiting employees.  Age change should not, therefore, be allowed because there is an easier way to solve the problem of discrimination: restricting access to one’s birthdate.

OK.  That seems like a reasonable précis, and it attracts a twofold response from him.  First, if recruiters are allowed to ask but applicants allowed to withhold age, that is a sign that there is something to hide, and so it would not solve the problem.  This is possibly correct, as far as it goes - but that's a symptom of ageism, and so it's not quite clear where we should go next.

The second option, Räsänen continues,

is to prohibit everyone from revealing their ages in job applications to ensure that no-one can be discriminated against because of age.

(This is the position towards which I lean, by the way.)  But, he objects,

[t]his option might reduce discrimination but the cost is too high. Age is an important part of people’s identities. If we do not allow people to reveal their ages to others, we are committing a serious moral wrong because we are restricting their freedom on something that matters to them greatly.

I have real problems with this.  Bluntly, I don't know what it means, and I can't even speculate about what it's supposed to mean.  What are we supposed to make about a claim that "age is an important part of people's identities"?  What work is being done by "identity"?  Indeed, is any work being done by it at all?  In what sense is age important to whatever it is that "identity" is supposed to mean?

What a Drag it is Getting Old

There is an ongoing argument across social media and some areas of academia that sometimes gets very, very nasty indeed, and I'm not going to dip my toes into it here, or even name it.  If you know what it is, you know, and if you don't, it won't matter much to what I'm about to consider.  One of the areas of dispute has to do with the intersection between "identity" and - for want of a better phrase - material reality (or facticity, if you're so inclined).  A lot of people take it as clear that the two are very different; hence one cannot identify or stipulate certain facts about the world into being other than they are.  Age is a paradigmatic example of that.  Having been on this planet a shade over 42 years, I can't be anything other than 42, for the simple reason that that's what I am.

Not so fast, says Joona Räsänen in the JME, in what appears not actually to be meant as a reductio ad absurdum.  There is, he thinks, a case to be made for legally changing one's age.

Unfortunately, as we'll see, it's not a very strong case.  (If I'm so sure of my position, why not write it up as a paper in its own right?  Well, because I don't think it takes long enough to dismiss the argument to generate a paper, even for a journal with as low a word limit as the JME.)

Academics Anonymous

The launch of a new academic journal doesn't normally attract much attention; but the launch of a journal that promises anonymity to authors who need protection, who who feel that they need it, because of the nature of their ideas has caused a bit of a stir.

I don't know most of the people involved; but I know some, and others are friends of friends.  No particular alarm bells are ringing.  (Francesca Minerva's name has been mentioned.  I'm not bessie mates with her, but I do know her professionally; she's whip-smart, as well as being a nice person.  On the other hand, she does have form when it comes to pressing for anonymity, and I articulated my concerns about her position at the other place... crikey.  Five years ago.)

I also know, and know of, a fair number of people who have faced appalling treatment for holding certain intellectual positions or advancing particular arguments.  Sometimes, those are positions and arguments that appear in peer-reviewed journals; I would be curious to know how much of the treatment comes from people who've read carefully the peer-reviewed papers about which they're protesting, as opposed to people who are outraged by proxy.  (Francesca wrote what I jokingly call The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak and faced all kinds of abuse for it - much of it, I think, by proxy, after the Daily Mail and then Glenn Beck got hold of it.)  Sometimes they aren't positions articulated in journals; several academics that I know and respect have found themselves attacked for what seems to me to be the crime of being insufficiently woke on questions of gender and the law.

Either way, more often than not, as far as I can see, this treatment has come not from universities, but from civil - no: uncivil - society.  Universities have, at least sometimes, done the right thing in sticking up for academics.  This matters, because people receiving abuse for their positions are obviously people who have not been silenced and who - presumably - count as evidence against the case for anonymity.  Still, I can see how people might think that anonymity would be desirable, at least sometimes.  And there are anecdotes about people's academic careers suffering because of their intellectual commitments.

And yet I'm unconvinced by this journal, and for a number of reasons.

Edwards, Fuller and the Rule of Law

Phil Edwards posted a short essay on The Conversation a few days ago in which he articulates his concerns with the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill, the latest piece of counter-terrorism legislation to be brought before Parliament.  This Bill, says Phil, was "justified" by Sajid Javid "as a way of ensuring that 'the police have the powers they need to protect us'".  Now, my hackles are already raised here because of the use of the word "justified" - Javid didn't justify the legislation thus, though he may well have attempted to do so.  To say that he justified it is to concede that his attempt was successful, and since Phil goes on to imply that the thinks that the Bill is open to serious criticism, Javid can't have justified it.  I know that a lot of lawyers use "justify" to mean "attempt to justify", or "defend", as well as... well "justify", but I do think that the distinction is important and worth maintaining.  I think that the lawyer's use of the word opens the door to a whole load of trouble.  After all, if you can't distinguish attempt from success in any enterprise, you're probably screwed.

But I digress... already.  Despite being less than a thousand words long, there's a lot crammed into Phil's piece.  Distilling the essence of the essay, I think that we'd end up with something like this:

1. There are certain "precursor" activities that, though not terroristic in themselves, might nevertheless be subject to prosecution on the basis that they are precursors to terrorist activity.
2. Laws that criminalise precursor activities may be worthy of our disapprobation in their own right.
3. Such laws may be worthy of "second order" disapprobation, on the basis that they are (likely to be) inconsistently applied.
4. This is because inconsistent application of a law is a violation of the Rule of Law.
5. An appeal to Lon Fuller can help us understand the move from (3) to (4).

I want to concentrate here on one aspect - the final one - though there'll be the original shoutout to others.  But, in the spirit of being as candid as possible about my commitments, I suppose it's worth laying out a couple of responses to the parts Phil's argument that I'm going to bracket for now.  Thus, for example, I don't have any problem in principle with the idea of precursor crimes.  There're times when it seems to me perfectly proper to intervene to prevent a risk being realised.  While it's true that there's always a chance that a person planning to commit a crime might stop short of doing so even though fully prepared, it seems reasonable for the law to be concerned about that preparation.  Now, quite how prepared one would have to be in order to be the proper object of legal concern is a further question, and I'm not sure how the law ought to draw the line here.  I'm also not sure that it necessarily has to; setting out too rigid a list of criteria might force juries to convict the plain fantasist, and to acquit the genuine danger, simply because of the way the law has been drafted.

With that said, it is likely that we ought to worry about inconsistent application.  Whether that worry can be soothed, granted the idea that it's desirable to avoid rigid criteria for prosecution and conviction is uncertain.  It might be that the price we pay for desirable flexibility is the risk of inconsistency.  Whether or not that's a price we should pay is not immediately obvious; it needs more in-depth consideration than I can give it here.  Maybe we have to pay attention to the distinction between apparent and actual inconsistency, on the understanding that instances of the former may not be instances of the latter.

One thing that would seem to make the price too high would be an erosion of the Rule of Law tout court.  A world in which nobody can be certain whether and how the law will respond to their actions is a world in which the Rule of Law seems not to obtain: rather, we'd have the Rule of Agents of Law, or Rule of Prosecutors, or Rule of Judges, or something like that.  And this is where Fuller comes in.

A Limited Defence of Toby Young

(Originally posted as a two-parter at the other place, here and here.  Admittedly, events have moved on a bit since yesterday, but the point about eugenics stands.)

The response to Toby Young's appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from "He's not the best person for the job" to "He's the worst person for the job".  Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his general lack of qualification.  Writing in The Times, Janice Turner is - I think - balanced in her assessment of his qualities, but still finds him to be (to say the least) wanting.  But the thing that's of interest to me here, on what is a bioethics-related blog, is one of the other sources of controversy: his public support for (a kind of) eugenics.  The mere fact that he could be associated with eugenics has had some people in paroxysms.  Taken more or less at random here's a tweet from Vince Cable:

Theresa May stood by Toby Young when she should be firing him. This is a man who has a record of misogyny and backs eugenics. His appointment shows poor judgement and, as May admitted, a lack of due diligence. It seems all you need to survive is be a friend of Boris Johnson #Marr

— Vince Cable (@vincecable) January 7, 2018

Note that "backs eugenics" is offered as being a reason in itself to object to Young's appointment.  Cable is not, by a long way, the only person to make this sort of comment.

Is it justified, though?  Well, the article that's generated the ire is this one, called "The Fall of the Meritocracy", published in 2015 in Quadrant.  It's a long piece, and the eugenics bit only comes about 80% of the way through, and for that reason I'll only home in on a few details.  But it is worth looking in a bit more depth at some of those details.  I think that what he's arguing is, in many ways, fairly unremarkable.  It's mistaken in important ways, too; I'll come to those in the next post.  But whatever problems there are with the piece do not flow from the use of the "E-word".  And so, to the greatest extent possible, I'll try to talk about it without mentioning eugenics.

"Top of the Lake" may Sink as a Procedural, but Look Beneath the Surface

A couple of weeks ago, BioNews invited me to review Top of the Lake; this is the version I submitted there, free - for better or worse - of editorial cuts.

There's a moment in the final episode of this second series of Jane Campion's Top of the Lake where Nicole Kidman's character Julia reminds Elizabeth Moss's character Robin, a policewoman and our protagonist, that she, Julia, is the 'real mother' of Mary (Alice Englert), the troubled and endangered young woman at the centre of the drama. Mary is adopted: Julia raised her, whereas Robin merely gestated her. An argument about exactly what it means to be a mother is not only important in the relationship between Robin and Julia: it is key to the main plot of the drama.

A body has been found washed up on a Sydney beach, and is discovered to be that of a Thai woman working in one of Sydney's legal brothels. The dead woman was pregnant when she died, but the baby is not genetically related to her; episode 2 ends with Robin's realisation that the dead woman was acting as a surrogate. What follows is a story that weaves together the rather murky worlds of the legalised sex trade and commercial surrogacy, which is illegal under New South Wales law.

Hands up if you shouldn't be working this case!

Now, it’s worth interjecting at this stage with the observation that, if there’s one thing we learn from Top of the Lake, it’s that Australian police have some very sloppy procedures and conflict-of-interest regulations. Gwendoline Christie plays Miranda, with whom Robin is partnered in the investigation; Miranda is not only having an affair with her boss, but is also trying to have a baby by surrogacy with him. Worried that the foetus taken from the dead woman might be her own, Miranda has a bit of a barney at the office of the clinic that she patronised (matronised?). This strikes me as the sort of thing that might see a real police officer removed from a case, at the very least; but nothing at all is mentioned about it. Police officers having affairs with each other? I’m sure that happens. Police officers engaging surrogacy services? Likewise. Police officers investigating a case that straddles the boundary between legal and illegal surrogacy, at the behest of a commanding officer with whom they are trying to start a family by means of a legally-iffy surrogacy service? Is there no oversight here? At the same time, via Puss, the none-more-sleazy pimp played by David Dencik who has something to do with the illegal surrogacy racket and with whom Mary is besotted, the story is also very personal for Robin – just as was the story in the first series of Top of the Lake. Again: should she really be working on this case?

Maybe there is method in writer/ director Jane Campion’s plotting. There is a good point to be made about how our attempts to separate the private/ personal and the public/ political can only ever be partial, and that it’s often in women’s lives that we see the intersection most clearly. But there’s also a risk here of Robin becoming a slightly rough-at-the-edges Miss Marple: someone around whom Bad Things keep happening, and with whom you probably wouldn’t want to spend too long in a country house. Whether a third series of TotL would be possible without characters becoming mere ciphers for political points is unclear.

Admittedly, it’s a bit early to worry about the plausibility of a programme that might not ever be made; and the implausibilities of this series (or what one hopes, for the sake of effective policing in Australia, are implausibilities) ought not to detain us too long. For there are deep and troubling questions that the series raises.

Charlie Gard: An Ethical Analysis of a Legal non-Problem

(This is an extended version of a post that originally appeared at EJIL: Talk!)

For those with an internet connection and an interest in current affairs, the story of Charlie Gard been hard to avoid recently. A decent précis is available here; but it’s worth rehearsing.

Shortly after his birth, Charlie’s health began to deteriorate, and he was diagnosed with a terminal and incurable mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome. By March 2017, Charlie needed artificial ventilation, and doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH) applied to the High Court for confirmation that removing that ventilation would be lawful, having judged that it was not in his best interests. This was contested by his parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates; the High Court ruled in favour of GOSH. This was confirmed by the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. During all this time, Charlie remained ventilated.

In the High Court, Mr Justice Francis said that his decision was subject to revision should new evidence emerge favouring continued treatment; in July, Charlie’s parents returned to the High Court, claiming that Charlie might benefit from an experimental treatment being offered by Professor Michio Hirano of Columbia University. However, as proceedings advanced, it became clear that Hirano’s proposed treatment had never been used on patients like Charlie, that he had neither seen Charlie nor read his notes when he offered the treatment, and that he had a financial interest in that treatment. The position statement issued by GOSH on the 24th July barely hides the hospital’s legal team’s exasperation. On the 24th July, Charlie’s parents dropped their request for continued treatment. The details of Charlie’s palliative care were still disputed; his parents wanted it to be provided at home, with ventilation maintained for a few days. The High Court ruled against this on the 27th July. Charlie was moved to a hospice; his ventilator was removed, and he died on the 28th July, a few days before his first birthday.

The way this case has played out has not been pretty. Elements of the American media (this piece is one among many) and the political right wing used it to launch attacks on single-payer healthcare systems:

Our hearts weep for #CharlieGard Our prayers are w/ him. Pls read & ask WHY govt should have power to decide who lives & dies. It's wrong. https://t.co/MsvoJBqJyO

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 24, 2017

Nigel Farage weighed in, complaining about the state taking away parental rights:

UK medical establishment closed ranks on #CharlieGard's parents & the state took away their rights. Change required. What a total disgrace. pic.twitter.com/TRBWWYTwJb

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 24, 2017

From the left, Giles Fraser wrote that the case was being dealt with too rationally. None of these claims is justified, and many left-leaning people have been surprised to find themselves in agreement with Melanie Phillips on this matter.

Legally, the case was very straightforward.

Law Changes and Slippery Slopes

(Cross-posted from the other place)

Apparently, there was a TV programme in Australia the other day in which a there was a discussion of assisted dying.  It got reported in The Guardian, largely on the basis that an 81-year-old audience member kept calling Margaret Somerville "darling" and then got mildly sweary.  I've only seen those clips from the programme that are linked in the Graun's report, so I'm not going to comment on the tone of the debate in particular.  Rather, I'm interested in one of the responses to the programme, from Xavier Symons, writing in The Conversation.

Symons takes the opportunity to unpick the idea of a slippery slope argument - in this case, the claim that allowing some forms of assisted dying will commit us to allowing... well, that's open-ended, but it's sufficient to say that it'd be terrible.  We'd want to avoid terrible things; therefore, the argument goes, we shouldn't allow any of it.  This is well-worn stuff in the seminar room, but it's a mode of argument that refuses to die.  Quite correctly, Symons points out that

there is a need for empirical evidence or sound inferential reasoning to support the claim that event B will necessarily (or probably) follow on from event A.  Without this evidence, the argument is invalid. I can’t just claim, for example, that the legalisation of medicinal marijuana leads to the legalisation of ice - I need to show some empirical or logical connection between the two.

So far, so standard.  (I'd say "unsound" rather than "invalid", because the validity of an argument doesn't depend on its evidence - or, at least, not in the same way; but that's a small matter.)  He then makes another move, which is a bit more interesting:

But (and it’s a big but) there is such a thing as a good and valid slippery slope argument.  A good slippery slope argument demonstrates a causal or probable relationship between event A and B, such that event B can legitimately be expected to occur if event A is allowed to occur. [...] There are, nevertheless, compelling empirical and logical slippery slope arguments available to defend more modest claims about the “normalisation” of assisted dying.

Is this correct?

"Denial" and Disinterest

Having taken myself off to see Denial the other night, I've been thinking about its portrayal of law - specifically, how it's done in the English courtroom.

The film that tells the story of Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt.  His complaint was, basically, that she shouldn't have called him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian, and that in doing so she was a big meanie, and booooo!  And, of course, as everyone knows, he lost.  This is why I can call him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian here with impunity.  (Well, under the terms of the 2013 Defamation Act, I probably could anyway: the requirement for serious harm would mean that a blog with a readership as low as this would slip through the net.  But the point stands.  English law was satisfied that David Irving is a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian.)

One of the plot points - can one talk about a plot when one is aiming to represent reality?  I suppose you can: you can't distill a dispute that lasted years into a couple of hours without (a) deciding that there's a story worth telling there, (b) where the main parts of that story are to be found, and (c) weaving them into a plot - Anyway: one of the plot points concerns the way that English libel laws worked at the time.  These laws famously made it very hard to defend a libel action; the burden of proof would be on Lipstadt to show that she was correct, rather than on Irving to show her incorrect.  In a reversal of the normal order of legal proceedings, she'd have to prove her innocence; in effect, she'd have to show that the Holocaust happened.  Rachel Weisz' Lipstadt is clearly flummoxed by all this; and the film is plainly sympathetic to her confusion.  The English defamation laws were a mess.  (Whether they still are is for another post.)  Lipstadt is also baffled by the distinction between solicitors and barristers, meaning that it's a surprise to her that the lawyer she'd hired to take her case, and who'd be doing the donkey-work to put it together, would not be the lawyer who presented it in court.

I mean, you can see why someone not brought up on the system would think it weird.

Hate Thy Neighbour

Over at the other place, I've written a couple of times over the years in response to posts on the Christian Medical Fellowship's blog.  (Now I look, it's more than a couple.)  I have a strange fascination with it, you see.  But the fact that the other blog is associated with an august academic body means that I have to restrain myself.  I don't think I have to do that here.

First, though, why do I have it on my RSS to begin with?  Well, there's something about the combination of utter bewilderment by the world, the staggering poverty of the reasoning, the ability to misunderstand things that're really quite straightforward, and a compulsion to crowbar a Biblical verse into every second paragraph that I find compelling.  But the fundamentalism does sometimes grate; some of the attitudes there are - to use a word that the contributors there almost certainly think relates to actual historical fact - antediluvian.  And they stop the posts being quite as funny as they might be.

Peter Saunders' latest is a grotesque example of all that's wrong with the CMF.  "We live in times when the very foundations of our civilisation are being destroyed," he begins.

[T]he NHS with its burgeoning needs and shrinking budgets, mounting national debt, political and economic uncertainty following ‘Brexit’, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, creeping atheism and secular humanism.

See the problem here?  The utter lack of perspective?  Even if you think that these things are bad - on which, more anon - I'd wager that the very foundations of our civilisation are not being destroyed.  At most, they're changing.  Saunders has form when it comes to secularism, though.  It's one of the things he simply doesn't understand.  He's used the phrase "secular fundamentalism" as though it actually exists, for example (in a piece that offers a defence of the pointless genital mutilation of male children, to boot).  He thinks that Britain is "slid[ing] into secularism".  He doesn't seem to notice (a) that secularism is perfectly compatible with Christianity - and arguably draws some of its intellectual strength from the Christian idea that one should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's: a doctrine that is quite possibly an early call for a separation between religion and politics; (b) that, as such, a commitment to secularism is precisely the thing that guarantees his right to publish this gibberish irrespective of prevailing religious views; and (c) he is in no way representative of what most Christians think anyway.  (Maybe he's a bit takfiri when the mood takes him.)

But then again, I've thought for a while that there's the whiff of the theocrat about Peter.  I thought I'd written something to that effect elsewhere, though I can't seem to find it right now.

Why India? Why Brits?

Cross-posted from the other blog.

Julie Bindel had a piece in The Guardian the other day about India's surrogate mothers.  It makes for pretty grim reading.  Even if the surrogates are paid, and are paid more than they might otherwise have earned, there's still a range of problems that the piece makes clear.

For one thing, the background of the surrogates is an important factor.  Bindel writes that

[s]urrogates are paid about £4,500 to rent their wombs at this particular clinic, a huge amount in a country where, in 2012, average monthly earnings stood at $215.

It's tempting, at first glance, to look at the opportunity to be a surrogate as a good thing in this context: these women are earning, by comparative standards, good money.  But, of course, you have to keep in mind that the standard is comparative.  If your choice is between doing something you wouldn't otherwise do and penury, doing the thing you wouldn't otherwise do looks like the better option.  But "better option" doesn't imply "good option".  So there's more to be said there; more questions to be asked.  Choosing x over y because y is more awful doesn't mean that x isn't.  It might be a good thing; but it might not be.  There might be economic - structural - coercion.  Choosing to become a surrogate might be a symptom of there being no better alternative.

A related question is this: are the women really making a free choice in offering their reproductive labour even assuming that the terms are economically just?  Possibly not:

I have heard several stories of women being forced or coerced into surrogacy by husbands or even pimps, and ask Mehta if she is aware of this happening.  “Without the husbands’ [of the surrogates] consent we don’t do surrogacy."

Note (a) the non-denial, and (b) the tacit acceptance that it's the husband's decision anyway.  That's not good.

(In a wholly different context, I've recently been reading David Luban's Lawyers and Justice, and - in a discussion about lawyers cross-examining complainants in rape cases, he makes this point:

([H]ere we have two people who are confronted by powerful institutions from which protection is needed.  The defendant is confronted by the state [that is: in any criminal trial, the defendant does need protection from the power of the state - IB], but the victim is confronted by the millennia-long cultural tradition of patriarchy, which makes the cliché that the victim is on trial true.  From the point of view of classical liberalism, according to which the significant enemy is the state, this cannot matter. But from the point of view of the progressive correction of classical liberalism, any powerful social institution is a threat, including diffuse yet tangible institutions such as patriarchy. (p 151)

(The sentiment would seem to apply here.  A view of human agency that sees liberty as being mainly or only about avoiding state interference is likely to miss all kinds of much more subtle, insidious pressures that are liberty-limiting.  Economic factors are such pressures.  The idea of the wife as property is another.)

I do wonder if readers of this blog might help out with answering one more question, though. One of the startling claims is that

[a]pproximately 12,000 foreigners come to India each year to hire surrogates, many of them from the UK.

I don't know how many "many" is, but let's take as read that it's more than none.  It's a statistic that raises a question for Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels:

Why India? Why not hire surrogates at home?
Because India has a lot of poor people, that’s why. Because the price is a fifth of what it would be at home. Because it’s a perfect setup for rich pale people to exploit very poor brown women.

I don't think that that's quite got it.  As I commented on Ophelia's piece, this wouldn’t easily explain the UK factor.  As the article makes clear, commercial surrogacy is illegal here; surrogates are allowed only to recoup reasonable expenses.  Surrogacyuk.org suggests £7000 – £15000 as a guide for the “price” (I know I shouldn't use that word, but you know what I mean) in the UK; but if Indian surrogates are paid £4500, and the clinic is still making up to £18000 on the transaction (assuming I’ve not misread the article), the Indian market is likely to be more expensive for commissioners, even without the cost of travelling to India to begin with.

So why do Brits use Indian surrogates?

Here's a hypothesis.  In the UK, surrogacy arrangements aren’t enforceable, the woman who gives birth is automatically recognised as the mother, and a Parental Order is required for the commissioning mother/ couple to be legally recognised as having parental status.  I don’t know what the legal niceties are in India, but my guess is that that side of things is probably a bit easier to deal with.  After all, if the procedure there is as free-wheeling as Bindel suggests, keeping track of exactly who gave birth to whom and with whose eggs isn’t going to be foolproof.

Is that it?  Is there any other reason why people from the UK might commission an Indian surrogate mother?

Autism, Mental Illness, Euthanasia and the WaPo

(Cross-posted from the other blog.)

There was a piece in the Washington Post the other day with a striking headline: Where the Prescription for Autism can be Death.

Normally, if we're saying that the prescription for x is y, we mean to say that y is being suggested as a treatment for x. Painkillers are the prescription for a bad back, a steroid cream the prescription for eczema, and so on. Even if you find that phrasing a bit clunky, "prescription" implies the recommendation of a medical expert. On that basis, the implication here is that somewhere in the world, doctors are seeing patients, diagnosing autism, and saying, "I wonder if the best thing would be to kill you". That would be Quite a Big Deal.

The place in question is Holland. But a quick look at the article shows - surprise, surprise - nothing of what's hinted at in the headline. Here's the opening few sentences, edited slightly for formatting:

In early childhood, the Dutch psychiatric patient known as 2014-77 suffered neglect and abuse. When he was about 10, doctors diagnosed him with autism. For approximately two decades thereafter, he was in and out of treatment and made repeated suicide attempts. He suffered terribly, doctors later observed, from his inability to form relationships: “He responded to matters in a spontaneous and intense, sometimes even extreme, way. This led to problems.”
A few years ago, 2014-77 asked a psychiatrist to end his life. In the Netherlands, doctors may perform euthanasia — not only for terminal physical illness but also upon the “voluntary and well-considered” request of those suffering “unbearably” from incurable mental conditions.
The doctor declined, citing his belief that the case was treatable, as well as his own moral qualms. But he did transmit the request to colleagues, as Dutch norms require. They treated 2014-77 for one more year, determined his case was, indeed, hopeless and, in due course, administered a fatal dose of drugs. Thus did a man in his 30s whose only diagnosis was autism become one of 110 people to be euthanized for mental disorders in the Netherlands between 2011 and 2014.

So, then, it's a story about a man, who happened to be autistic, and who asked a psychiatrist for euthanasia. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, that request was granted. There is no reason to believe that this was a case of death being prescribed for autism. It's just that he happened to be autistic and to want to die, and a prescription for assistance was provided. Phrasing is important.
Dutch law on assisted dying is famously liberal; in considering the permissibility of euthanasia for psychiatric as well as somatic illnesses, it is in the minority of the minority of jurisdictions that consider the permissibility of any euthanasia. I have addressed the question of psychological suffering in relation to euthanasia elsewhere, and shan't rehearse the details here; suffice it to say, I don't see any reason in particular to think that mental illness and physical illness should be treated all that differently in principle:

Rhodes to Palmyra

There are many things that look to be superficially alike, but that careful examination shows to be very different.  Sharks and dolphins are both grey-ish aquatic predators with a prominent dorsal fin.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone unfamiliar with them to suppose that they are closely related: a child, or - less plausibly - a marine biologist visiting from another planet might make that mistake.  But closer inspection would reveal significant differences; and one would hope that the child or alien biologist would move away from thinking them the same sort of thing.  One would hope that a tolerably well-informed adult would have stopped making that kind of mistake a long time before, and would not get a newspaper column asserting that dolphins and sharks are very similar indeed.

This serves as a sort of preamble to a rumination on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago: that Oriel, Oxford, was considering removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes after coming under pressure from student protestors.  These protests echo similar protests in South Africa.

The rationale for getting shot of the guy is straightforward enough: that he was racist, imperialist, and not the sort of person whom modern academia should be honouring if it's ever going to stand a chance of becoming the post-racist, post-imperial community to which it aspires.  I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view - particularly in respect of the South African protests; after all, the colonial and post-colonial history of that country has been particularly bitter for the majority of the population.  Having a monument to him at Oriel strikes me as being slightly morally different, though I can't put my finger on why - so maybe it isn't that different after all.

On the other hand, there are counterarguments.  Rhodes was a man of his time; it is naive to pretend that we can, or should, whitewash history; if we want to understand where we are and to control where we're going, it pays to remember whence we came; and, anyway, Rhodes' personal legacy has enabled students from all around the world, of all races, to study at Oxford.  His reputation may be tarnished, but it is not without burnished bits as well.

The point is that the arguments about whether Rhodes must fall are complex, and worth hearing from both sides.

Not everyone seems to think this.

You Ain't No True Scotsman, Bruv!

Maybe I've missed it, or blocked it out, but we seem to have been spared the regular pieties in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks - the ones trotted out by all mainstream politicians about how the true Islam is tolerant and peaceful, and terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  That line doesn't seem to have had much of an airing.

For this, I am grateful.

Let's be honest: it's not true that jihadi or Islamist* terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.  It plainly does have something to do with it.  This in no way means that Islam is, or has to be, a violent religion; and I do believe that most Muslims are horrified by what's being done in the name of their religion.  There's a #notinmyname hashtag that testifies to this.  I don't think that people using it are liars, and I think also that the overwhelming majority of Muslims who haven't used it are likely to be in agreement with it.  But, howsoever tenuously, it is something to do with Islam.

In just the same way, witch-burnings have something to do with Christianity.  The Westboro Baptist Church has something to do with Christianity.  Neither is not the whole of Christianity, by any means.  Not even most, or a significant part of it.  But it is there.

It does noone any good in the long term to pretend otherwise, and denying this seems to be a version of the No-True-Scotsman fallacy:

N claims to be a Muslim
N commits some crime in the name of Islam
N turns out not to have been a true Muslim after all.

So when a witness shouted at the attacker in Leytonstone that "You ain't no Muslim, bruv", and it became a slogan for showing opposition to religiously-informed violence: well, it's an admirable sentiment, but... behaving violently in the name of a religion doesn't disqualify one from membership thereof.  A bad Muslim is still a Muslim, and its disingenuous to insist that Islam can be separated from reprehensible acts as a matter of principle in something like the way that being a Scot can be separated from taking sugar on your porridge in principle.

Actually, it's more than that.  It's empty dogmatism to insist that Islam as a matter of principle must be beyond criticism, and therefore anything that is liable to criticism must have nothing to do with Islam.

But I don't want this to be a post about Islam; my concern is more general, and it has to do with the rhetoric of being a "true" adherent to whatever the creed under consideration is.  Let's talk about it in terms of Pastafarianism, just to be as neutral as possible.

What is it to be a "true" Pastafarian?