So in my neverending quest to read about things that make me deeply disheartened with this world, I came across this article in the LA Times (unfortunately subscribers-only, but I'll sum it up for you):
A New Generation of Anti-Abortionists. Young people, women, in their teens and twenties, who would like to ban abortion entirely. My particular favorite is a now 20-year-old woman who has campaigned to emend the Colorado state constitution such that a fertilized egg is now defined as a person. A fertilized egg. (That couldn't work legally in America, because fetuses would either have to get visas or be declared illegal immigrants because, after all, they wouldn't have been born here).
Now, putting aside all the traditional pro-choice arguments I keep handy in my back pocket, I think that history has something very important to teach us on this subject.
First, 'abortion' (by which I mean an intended miscarriage of a fetus) has always been practiced by humans. Always. There is no point in history where one could say that no one on earth had an intended miscarriage. Abortion has as true and universal a history as religion, government, and war.
I was originally going to write a long explanation of the legal murder and enslavement of children in ancient Greece and Rome (about 1000 years' worth of Western civilization's 3000-year lifespan), but instead I would like to posit some of the legal ramifications of defining fetuses as persons today.
The Funny ones: being able to drive in the carpool lane while pregnant; filing tax reports for your fetus (and claiming them as a dependent?); ordering off the kids' menu at any restaurant; parking in handicapped spots (since the 'person' inside you is unable to walk); preboarding on airplanes (since the 'person' inside you requires assistance to get down the jetway).
The Scary ones: getting arrested and prosecuted for endangering the life/liberty/happiness of your fetus if you do any of the following while pregnant: drinking alcohol or caffeine, smoking, being near other people who are smoking, eating basil or pesto (or any number of other miscarriage-inducing herbs), taking antacids, being near paint fumes or mercury, dyeing your hair, running, jogging, jumping rope, other strenuous exercise (including sex?), petting or owning a cat, working overtime, getting stressed out, reaching upwards, lifting heavy things, etc.
My point is this: there's a lot of stuff out there that can kill a fetus, and many women miscarry for completely unexplainable reasons. Are we going to have to investigate every single miscarriage as a possible homicide? Are we going to police the movements and decisions of pregnant women? Will you be prosecuted if you fail to report witnessing a pregnant woman eat chocolate or walk past fresh paint? (After all, you may have witnessed an involuntary manslaughter or attempted assault!)
It's absurd.
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
read this.
So in case y'all are not boingboing readers, you should really read this guy's tale of a trip on a conservative cruise ship. It is alternately hilarious and deeply disturbing.
I was in England when the Glasgow airport thing happened, and when the London car bombs almost went off. One of the frequent topics of conversation after these events was: how could doctors, who had sworn the Hippocratic oath, feel ethically able to kill innocent people? While none of my rationalizations seemed to satisfy the family I was staying with, I think, reading Hari's post, that it is easy to see how someone could see themselves as ethical and humane people and still justify the murder of innocents.
Oh, and I saw SiCKO yesterday. Excellent movie. Depressing movie. Another instance of unethical treatment of people for monetary gain. Makes me more convinced that I do not want to spend my life in this country, for fear of falling through the supposed net of social welfare. My favorite moments of the film were where the doctors of other countries were interviewed, when they could say that they were happy to be able to treat people without worrying about how much their services would cost, or whether the person was insured. I would be intrigued to know why the AMA doesn't support universal health care. Surely the doctors could do better jobs if they weren't worried about the financial damage they were doing to their patients.
I was in England when the Glasgow airport thing happened, and when the London car bombs almost went off. One of the frequent topics of conversation after these events was: how could doctors, who had sworn the Hippocratic oath, feel ethically able to kill innocent people? While none of my rationalizations seemed to satisfy the family I was staying with, I think, reading Hari's post, that it is easy to see how someone could see themselves as ethical and humane people and still justify the murder of innocents.
Oh, and I saw SiCKO yesterday. Excellent movie. Depressing movie. Another instance of unethical treatment of people for monetary gain. Makes me more convinced that I do not want to spend my life in this country, for fear of falling through the supposed net of social welfare. My favorite moments of the film were where the doctors of other countries were interviewed, when they could say that they were happy to be able to treat people without worrying about how much their services would cost, or whether the person was insured. I would be intrigued to know why the AMA doesn't support universal health care. Surely the doctors could do better jobs if they weren't worried about the financial damage they were doing to their patients.
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
an individual dealing with american culture
So I've been reading a lot about Seneca lately (you know, the old Roman philosopher dude) and the innovations he had made in the formulation of selfhood, behavioral modification, and happiness of Roman Stoic philosophy.
Prior to Seneca, a person who wanted to live a "virtuous" life would turn, inevitably, toward the opinion of the society. One would formulate their decisions, self-presentation, and attitude based on the reaction and expectations of the society. So a senator could know that he was living virtuously because he would gain the approval of the people around him. Even when alone, moreover, the guiding voice of virtue in his head would be the voice of public opinion - the expectations of the society were internalized as his model of behavior.
When Seneca began his theorizing, the Empire was in a sorry state: emperors with unlimited power (and often abusive of that power), aristocrats out for money or brown-nosing their way into power, afraid to criticize the emperor even for the most atrocious of deeds. In short, "public opinion" was fucked. Seneca therefore tweaked the guiding model of Stoic philosophy, encouraging people to turn inwards rather than outwards for their models of behavior. There were no living icons to follow - he had to create one and follow it, even when it encouraged his behavior to go against what had become the cultural norm.
Which brought me to think about American culture. I think American culture is very much screwed up, and (at least for those of us who are not blessed with kabillions of dollars in family wealth) moderating one's behavior by the cultural expectations of our day will likely result in depression, eating/exercise disorders (anorexia, bullimia, bingeing, or obesity), ill health, exhaustion, and happiness generated only by our children and our material goods. My initial thoughts focused on our obesity problem and restaurant portion sizes, but I suppose it applies to any one of our many cultural standards.
In simple terms, we have two levels of decision-making. The first level, a basic level, is our conditioned instinct. Freud called it an "id," it has been seen as our "bestial" or "appetitive" part, and it is our baseline for decision-making - what we want. There exists a second level of decision-making - as Bartsch terms it, "what we want ourselves to want." This level of thought is where we have a sense of right and wrong, what we ought to be doing, what we idealize for ourselves as the "correct" mode of behavior. Now, it is this second level of decision-making that often coincides with conditioned cultural norms - we know that a bright red dress will stand out at a cocktail party, so, however much we like the red dress, we choose the black one because it is more fitting to the social expectation.
So what can we do when our culture tells us that it is appropriate to gorge ourselves on unhealthy food, exploit others for the sake of personal gain, pimp out our giant rides (using up our savings), take up space, bomb other countries under false pretense, work overtime, rub antibacterial gel all over ourselves five times a day, etc.? The results of conforming to this, as I've said above, are not good for us individually or for the rest of our citizens. It could also be argued (but this is a topic for another time) that our conformity without questioning the norm only perpetuates these unhealthy and unethical cultural practices and beliefs.
We need, therefore, to divorce ourselves from public expectation. We need to reject the large restaurant portions, the giant cars, the antibacterial gel, popcorn at the movie theatre, guns in our houses, the pedestrian-bereft suburbs, and mom's apple pie. We need to sit and imagine actual ethical behavior and create our own interlocutor to guide us toward virtuous living. Wow, and maybe that's why evangelical Christianity has taken up so easily as of late - a set of guiding principles alternative to (and more ethical, in some senses, than) those capitalist and exploitative secularities that have gotten our country into its current state. I suppose Jesus is a better interlocutor than Colonel Sanders.
Of course, modern Christianity has its own problems (a huge topic, but for starters, the believers should think more about modelling their own decisions after Jesus; he seems to have been a pretty ethical individual), and for the non-believers, we need to do a little bit more legwork to come up with our own standards for ourselves, standards that will help us be happy and ethical people.
Which brings me back to Seneca. Aside from philosophy, he also wrote a bunch of tragic plays, in which (as Bartsch has argued in The Mirror of the Self) characters who have created their own set of guiding principles, against the expectations of their societies, commit horrible atrocities that make perfect logical sense in their own heads. By breaking ourselves from societal expectation, we also risk losing all sense of ethical behavior and guiding ourselves by a faulty set of beliefs (like those bloody misled Objectivists). Nevertheless, we must rethink our formation of self if we hope to save ourselves from the harm our culture currently inflicts on us.
Prior to Seneca, a person who wanted to live a "virtuous" life would turn, inevitably, toward the opinion of the society. One would formulate their decisions, self-presentation, and attitude based on the reaction and expectations of the society. So a senator could know that he was living virtuously because he would gain the approval of the people around him. Even when alone, moreover, the guiding voice of virtue in his head would be the voice of public opinion - the expectations of the society were internalized as his model of behavior.
When Seneca began his theorizing, the Empire was in a sorry state: emperors with unlimited power (and often abusive of that power), aristocrats out for money or brown-nosing their way into power, afraid to criticize the emperor even for the most atrocious of deeds. In short, "public opinion" was fucked. Seneca therefore tweaked the guiding model of Stoic philosophy, encouraging people to turn inwards rather than outwards for their models of behavior. There were no living icons to follow - he had to create one and follow it, even when it encouraged his behavior to go against what had become the cultural norm.
Which brought me to think about American culture. I think American culture is very much screwed up, and (at least for those of us who are not blessed with kabillions of dollars in family wealth) moderating one's behavior by the cultural expectations of our day will likely result in depression, eating/exercise disorders (anorexia, bullimia, bingeing, or obesity), ill health, exhaustion, and happiness generated only by our children and our material goods. My initial thoughts focused on our obesity problem and restaurant portion sizes, but I suppose it applies to any one of our many cultural standards.
In simple terms, we have two levels of decision-making. The first level, a basic level, is our conditioned instinct. Freud called it an "id," it has been seen as our "bestial" or "appetitive" part, and it is our baseline for decision-making - what we want. There exists a second level of decision-making - as Bartsch terms it, "what we want ourselves to want." This level of thought is where we have a sense of right and wrong, what we ought to be doing, what we idealize for ourselves as the "correct" mode of behavior. Now, it is this second level of decision-making that often coincides with conditioned cultural norms - we know that a bright red dress will stand out at a cocktail party, so, however much we like the red dress, we choose the black one because it is more fitting to the social expectation.
So what can we do when our culture tells us that it is appropriate to gorge ourselves on unhealthy food, exploit others for the sake of personal gain, pimp out our giant rides (using up our savings), take up space, bomb other countries under false pretense, work overtime, rub antibacterial gel all over ourselves five times a day, etc.? The results of conforming to this, as I've said above, are not good for us individually or for the rest of our citizens. It could also be argued (but this is a topic for another time) that our conformity without questioning the norm only perpetuates these unhealthy and unethical cultural practices and beliefs.
We need, therefore, to divorce ourselves from public expectation. We need to reject the large restaurant portions, the giant cars, the antibacterial gel, popcorn at the movie theatre, guns in our houses, the pedestrian-bereft suburbs, and mom's apple pie. We need to sit and imagine actual ethical behavior and create our own interlocutor to guide us toward virtuous living. Wow, and maybe that's why evangelical Christianity has taken up so easily as of late - a set of guiding principles alternative to (and more ethical, in some senses, than) those capitalist and exploitative secularities that have gotten our country into its current state. I suppose Jesus is a better interlocutor than Colonel Sanders.
Of course, modern Christianity has its own problems (a huge topic, but for starters, the believers should think more about modelling their own decisions after Jesus; he seems to have been a pretty ethical individual), and for the non-believers, we need to do a little bit more legwork to come up with our own standards for ourselves, standards that will help us be happy and ethical people.
Which brings me back to Seneca. Aside from philosophy, he also wrote a bunch of tragic plays, in which (as Bartsch has argued in The Mirror of the Self) characters who have created their own set of guiding principles, against the expectations of their societies, commit horrible atrocities that make perfect logical sense in their own heads. By breaking ourselves from societal expectation, we also risk losing all sense of ethical behavior and guiding ourselves by a faulty set of beliefs (like those bloody misled Objectivists). Nevertheless, we must rethink our formation of self if we hope to save ourselves from the harm our culture currently inflicts on us.
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