In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to enter the Boston Marathon as an official participant. She didn’t get very far through the race, before she was attacked physically by the race organiser, Jock Semple. She tells the story here:

If you’re tired of much that passes for feminism in the blogosphere – you know, identity politics, endless banging on incoherently about privilege, elevatorgate, banalities about sexual epithets, worries about the trolley problem, etc, etc, – then have a listen to this interview with Switzer (starting about 45 minutes in). Even if you’re not interested in sport, it is kind of inspirational if you’re interested in the history of feminism.

Seriously, listen to it – it’s a very cool story.

I’ve put together a new interactive activity at Philosophy Experiments. It’s here:

A Million Dollar Puzzle

If you follow me on Twitter, then you’ll probably already have played through it. Thing is, I find it genuinely baffling, so I’m not sure I have much to say about it, other than see what you think.

You’ll see at the end that people simply don’t agree about the best answer – there is nothing like a crowd-sourced consensus here.

The activity is a version of Newcomb’s Paradox, which you can read about here. Apparently, Robert Nozick once said of the puzzle, "To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly."

For what it’s worth, I’m inclined towards the response that is slightly the more popular (see final analysis page).

This is the second in my very occasional series about amusing Prefaces (the first is here). I came across this one while browsing John Walker’s 1847 translation of and commentary on Murray’s Compendium of Logic. It seems he wasn’t a happy bunny about his involvement in the project:

It is the misfortune of some Authors, that they are rather obliged to write what they can as they can; than allowed by circumstances to write what they might, and as they would.

[…]

[T]he manner in which I treat the subject, has been determined rather by necessity, than choice. Were I at liberty to pursue it according to the dictates of my own judgment, I certainly should not have taken for the basis of my work that piece, on which I offer a comment. I have briefly described, in the Appendix, the kind of treatise which I would gladly have attempted, if time and other circumstances had permitted me.

Fantastic.

There has of late been some discussion of free will and determinism, and particularly the relative merits of compatibilism versus incompatibilism, at various blogs. (See, for example, here, here and here.)

I must confess that I’ve not followed these discussions closely, despite having a longstanding interest in this issue (see here and here, for instance), so I don’t really have anything substantive to say about the debate, except, I guess, that I’m inclined towards the sort of incompatibilism espoused by Jerry Coyne (my hands were strangely reluctant to type that).

However, this does seem like an opportune moment to ask the readers of Talking Philosophy for their advice and opinions about an interactive activity that I put together at Philosophy Experiments, which explored some of these issues through a look at a Frankfurt Case and some other stuff. It’s here:

Get That Chip Out of My Brain!

Thing is, I programmed the activity about six months ago now, but I was never happy with it, and haven’t added it to the front page of the site (it’s been played quite a lot because of traffic that comes in via Google, etc).

Basically, my view is that most people will find the stuff about “Transfer NR” (John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza) confusing and philosophically suspect – it seems tricksy – and I tend to think that I ought to rewrite the whole activity, focussing on the Harry Frankfurt stuff, which I think works much better.

If anybody felt inclined to play through the activity (it’ll only take a few minutes), and let me know if they agree, disagree, or have any other thoughts, that would be really helpful. If it turns out that even a few people think it doesn’t work, then I’ll almost certainly rewrite the thing (because I think there is a good interactive exercise in there somewhere, but I’m not sure this is it).

This doesn’t have a lot to do with philosophy, but it’s a curious thing, so what the hell, I thought.

I’ve been having a mid-life crisis for about the last fifteen years. Obviously, chasing girls, oops, sorry, women, is a large part of the story, but I’ve also become pretty interested in the link between ageing and physical decline.

Anyway, I’ve just noticed that a new piece of research has been published in the BMJ, which shows that cognitive decline is already evident by the time people hit middle age. Basically, they looked at tests of memory, reasoning, vocabulary, etc., and found that

all cognitive scores, except vocabulary, declined in all five age categories (age 45-49, 50-54, 55-59, 60-64, and 65-70 at baseline), with evidence of faster decline in older people.

So that’s pretty depressing, but perhaps not all that surprising. I remember Norman Levitt once telling me something to that effect about the career path of mathematicians:

You do slow down. Not everybody, but there is a tendency to be really bright when you’re twenty-two, and then it becomes more of a slog as you get older. People’s really brilliant stuff tends to happen when they’re younger. There are exceptions, but you can look at people’s career paths and you find that whilst they might be brilliant at twenty-four this eases off as they get older. It comes with the territory.

But here’s the thing, and perhaps somebody who knows this field, might be able to shed some light on this matter. If you’re doing that sort of longitudinal study, how do you control for motivation? If I had ever taken an IQ test in my 20s, or perhaps even my 30s, I’d have been pretty keen to do well. But now, well I wouldn’t give a bugger. Even if I told myself I had to perform to the best of my ability, I’m pretty sure it’d be futile, because I just don’t care enough. Possibly I’m unusual in this respect, but I doubt it, and certainly it’s an open possibility that motivation will decline with age (which might have a physiological component, of course, but which might not generalize – in other words, it’s possible that if one was doing some task that one considered important, then motivation levels would stay high, with concomitant improvements in concentration, and thereby performance).

So that’s my question. How do you control for motivation in these sorts of longitudinal studies?

There’s a tired old argument that seems to have gained a new lease of life in these less exacting times (bad internet!), which holds that privilege functions as an epistemological barrier when it comes to understanding sexism, racism, inequality, etc; and, conversely, that being part of a group that is in various ways marginalized, oppressed or subordinated confers a sort of epistemological privilege when it comes to understanding the nature and reality of that situation.

Obviously, there is a kernel of truth to this argument, but it is also highly problematic (especially for people committed to the importance of reason, evidence, etc., as mechanisms for assessing truth-claims). Here are some of the things you need to get straight about if you’re tempted to deploy this argument.

1. If you think that one’s lived experience has systematic and predictable epistemic consequences, then you have to accept that this might flow in the opposite direction to the one suggested by the argument above. In other words, it is entirely possible that structural privilege confers epistemological privilege even when it comes to understanding the nature and reality of the situations of the subordinated, marginalized, etc. This is not a particularly counterintuitive thought (indeed, one could argue that it underpins most of our ideas about education). It’s easy enough to find examples of precisely this sort of argument from amongst even those who champion the cause of the underprivileged. So, for example, you’ll find that Marxists bang on about false class consciousness, ideological state apparatuses, hegemonic projects, etc., to explain how the marginalization and powerlessness of the proletariat messes with its head so it can’t see the reality of its true situation.

2. Yes, yes, I know, it’s one thing to know something in principle, but that’s not the same as experiencing it – there’s a sort of knowledge that comes with experience (some might claim). Well, there’s certainly a sort of something that comes with experience, but whether it is knowledge, and what sort of knowledge, is a difficult issue to sort out. Consider, for example: (a) that people disagree about the nature of their experience as members of purportedly marginalized groups (and some get called “gender traitors” for their trouble); (b) that there’s a wealth of data that suggests we’re actually pretty bad at correctly understanding the situations we inhabit (and indeed, even our thoughts about these situations); and (c) that people do not necessarily experience what most us would take to be marginalized situations as being problematic (check out, for example, some of the literature on FGM; or ask yourself whether slaves in the ancient world would have accepted the legitimacy of the institution of slavery).

3. The annoying tendency of (some of) the marginalized and subordinated not to see or experience their own marginalization and subordination in quite the same terms as those of us who are less marginalized and subordinated would have it is a problem of individual differences (i.e., the fact that individuals cannot be reduced to group characteristics). This comes up in a different guise in a row that played out between socialist and radical feminists in the 1970s, and which is still relevant today. In essence, the problem is that it is… implausible to suppose that there is enough that unites all women, or the working class, for example, so that it makes sense to think mere “membership” of these groups means a common identity or interests. So, for example, the idea that the Queen of England has more in common with a working-class woman than does a working-class man, and is consequently better qualified to talk about their shared lived experience as women is… well, problematic, to say the least. (Similarly, one might consider how working-class politics in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by endless rows over pay differentials).

4. There’s an epistemological problem with the argument to epistemological privilege. Specifically, it’s not easy to see that it is possible to substantiate the claim that epistemological privilege necessarily flows from certain kinds of marginalized experience without falling into contradiction. This is because the moment you appeal to evidence, argument, etc., you are operating precisely on the terrain of epistemic equality. The trouble is if you deny that this evidence is generally accessible – if you really are committed to the view that there are certain privileged ways of knowing (and that you can’t know this to be the case unless you’re in a position of privilege) – then your position is simply an article of faith (in fact, it’s disconcertingly similar to the proof of god from religious experience).

5. Finally, there’s a rather subtle point about how you can know that some particular belief you have about your experience as a marginalized person is genuinely flowing from your epistemological privilege, rather than just being a possibly flawed everyday sort of belief. Or, to put this crudely, if you’re committed to the idea of epistemological privilege, it’s hard to see that you can ever be sure you’ve got it. Basically, the problem here is that if epistemological privilege (about certain sorts of things) belongs uniquely to the marginalized, then it seems to be required that the beliefs that are acquired via this privilege are valid even if they do not stand up to scrutiny in the court of universal reason (because if they do have to pass this test, then it seems there’s nothing in principle privileged about the epistemological situation of being marginalized – albeit de facto it might still be true that it’ll be easier to come by particular beliefs that turn out to be true if one is marginalized). However, if the court of universal reason has no jurisdiction here, it’s not clear you can subject your own beliefs to any sort of test. This is because it seems to be the case that even the most minimal of tests – for example, determining whether your beliefs are in accord with your experiences – requires that one makes use of the normal rules of rationality, evidential warrant, etc., all of which would also be available to the court of universal reason.

Okay, that’ll do for now. If you can sort that lot out, then good luck to you, you should carry on using the privilege argument. But the really cool thing here is that if you can’t sort any of it out, no problem, you can just tell yourself that these arguments are themselves a function of privilege. How lovely it must be to have recourse to a hermetically sealed argument that means you get to be right even if you have no idea why you’re right.

A little while ago I started to write a book for Continuum called, Identity Crisis: Against Multiculturalism. Its basic thesis is – or would have been – that the sort of multiculturalism practised in the UK is misguided and dangerous because it inevitably exacerbates the all too human tendency to divide the world into “people like us” and “people like them”.

I say “would have been” because it is now very unlikely I’m going to complete it. There are a number of reasons for my (almost a) decision to abandon the project, but the main one has to do with the rise of the EDL in the UK. Basically, I think the emergence of the EDL has changed the moral calculus here: it is one thing to write a book that is critical of multiculturalism when multiculturalism is getting a free pass, it is quite a different thing to write such a book when minority groups are under systematic and concerted attack by a bunch of racist, football hooligans. Of course, this is a judgement call, and I can quite see how somebody else might come to a different determination: a reasonable person could easily think that I’m wrong to abandon the project for this reason.

Okay, so why is this of any interest? Well, imagine a world in which I’m a blogger at Socialist Unity (okay, that’s a stretch even for a thought experiment), and in this world “Jeremy” has decided to go ahead with the book. In this situation, if I found out about “Jeremy’s” decision, would I be justified in publicly urging him not to write the book (assuming I agree with the real-world Jeremy that the book is a bad idea in the current political climate)? In other words, if I thought he wasn’t helping in going after multiculturalism, would I be justified in telling him to shut up?

My view is that it isn’t at all clear that I wouldn’t be justified. It doesn’t seem implausible to think that any justification of a speech act has to take into account its perlocutionary effects (which is part of the reason why this whole tone troll meme is so absurd). It would seem to follow from this that if there were reasonable grounds for supposing that some particular speech act – or a book length variant – is likely to have bad effects, then I have a prima facie moral reason at least for urging silence. This is pretty obvious stuff: if I know that somebody is about to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, and I think a stampede will likely be the result, then I am surely justified in urging the person to keep their trap shut.

Obviously there is complexity here. There are freedom of speech implications, for example: so, for instance, if one takes the naive act utilitarian view that every speech act must be justified by its particular consequences, then an individual or group can shut down all criticism just by making the consequences of such criticism sufficiently bad. And, of course, there are also complications to do with the absence of perfect knowledge: we can’t know with certainty what the outcome of any particular speech act is likely to be, etc.

But, in a way, the complexity is precisely the point. Reasonable people can disagree in good faith about the wisdom of writing a book, employing a particular rhetorical style, or articulating a particular speech act. They can do a proper moral calculus, and come to a different conclusion. They can be attentive to the same evidence, worry about the same moral issues, and come to a different determination.

If one accepts this point, how should one react if somebody else suggests that perhaps one ought not to write a book, or that one ought to tone down some rhetoric, or go easy with some criticism?

Well, at least one answer, which in my more pious moments I’m inclined to favour, is that one should ask whether their request – or even demand – has any merit. Are their concerns legitimate – can you see what they’re worrying about? Is their position held in good faith (since even if you think they’re mistaken, this is a relevant datum in terms of how one should view their character, etc)? Does their position have at least some evidential merit? In other words, one should react in a spirit of rational enquiry – after all, it’s possible they’ve got a point, and it’s possible that a lot is riding on getting things right.

How one should not react is simply to assume that they are beyond the moral pale because they make the request or demand. Sometimes, shutting up is the best option. And sometimes telling people to shut up is morally justified (and perhaps even obligated).

I’ve blogged elsewhere about a little trick that is embedded within the Morality Play interactive activity.

Very quickly, one of the questions asks whether there is a moral obligation to help a person who is in severe need.

You see a charity advertisement in a newspaper about a person in severe need in India/Australia. There is no state welfare available to this person, but you can help them at little cost to yourself. You have good reason to believe that any help you offer will make a difference. Are you morally obliged to help the person?

Half the people undertaking the activity are told that the person lives in India; the other half that the person lives in Australia. They are then asked to state whether they think we are “Strongly Obliged”, “Weakly Obliged” or “Not Obliged” to help the person.

After nearly 1000 responses, this is what the results are showing us.

The thing that has really caught my attention is the results for people who self-identify as Christians and atheists, respectively (more precisely, the atheist group self-identify as having “No Religion”, so they could be agnostics, or perhaps even deists of some sort, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going to call them atheists).

The headline news is that atheists are twice as likely as Christians to think we’re “Not Obliged” to help the person in need in India (currently, 43% as opposed to 21%).

I actually find that quite shocking. But perhaps even more shocking is the fact the atheist group are much less likely to respond that way when asked about the person in Australia. Here (only) 35% think we’re not morally obliged to help. There are two further points here: (1) this gap is four times as large as the average gap across all respondents (and it’s easily statistically significant – I checked!); and (2) if you look at the Christian group, in complete contrast to the atheist group, you find that they are more likely to think we’re not obliged to help the person in Australia.

My first reaction to these figures was to think I had messed up the programming somewhere. But I have double and triple-checked, and I’m almost certain that I haven’t. Plus, I’ve checked the numbers manually (so to speak); and the figures in the charts correctly add up to 100, so I think this really is what the numbers are saying.

My second reaction, of course, was to think about confounding variables and systematic biases. (Note to any stray new atheists reading this: I am fully aware of the dangers of a non-randomised, self-selecting sample, and that it is not possible to generalize these results, but the fact remains that these results are curious, and rather shocking, in and of themselves – we’re not talking about tiny numbers of people here).

So what’s going on? I don’t really know, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s possible there is some correlation between youth and irreligiosity specific to these activities (because they tend to get picked up by European schools and colleges), and that it might be that young people are less likely to think in terms of moral obligation than older people; it also seems possible that various stripes of moral nihilism might result in non-religious people denying that one is morally obliged to help others (even if they would in fact help others).

But the difference between the atheist response to the India and Australia conditions is… well, harder to explain (and, as I said, it’s a little disturbing). Anybody got any ideas?

Since it’s Christmas, here’s a little quiz. Which philosopher is responsible for the following, and to whom was he or she writing? No Googling, and marks will only be awarded if you offer an explanation for your guess… deduction.

I prefer this situation to that even of your delicious villa… One is not alone so frequently in the country as one could wish: a number of impertinent visitors are continually besieging you. Here, as all the world, except myself, is occupied in commerce, it depends merely on myself to live unknown to the world. I walk every day amongst immense ranks of people, with as much tranquility as you do in your green alleys. The men I meet with make the same impression on my mind as would the trees of your forests, or the flocks of sheep grazing on your common. The busy hum too of these merchants does not disturb one more than the purling of your brooks. If sometimes I amuse myself in contemplating their anxious motions, I receive the same pleasure which you do in observing those men who cultivate your land; for I reflect that the end of all their labours is to embellish the city which I inhabit, and to anticipate my wants.

Remember, no cheating. And the decision of the judge – that’s me – is final. Your prize for winning will be to have your name up in lights on Twitter. Now, who could resist such an inducement, right…?

I mentioned here that I was working on a new interactive activity at my Philosophy Experiments web site. Well, here it is:

Should You Kill the Backpacker?

It looks at some of the complications arising out of the Trolley Problem. More specifically, it largely relies on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article, “The Trolley Problem”,  which appeared in The Yale Law Journal.

As yet, the activity hasn’t been subject to public scrutiny, so there are bound to be lacunae and errors in logic. Any feedback, therefore, would be much appreciated.

It’s probably worth mentioning that it’s sort of a f0llow up to another activity on the web site that deals with the same issues – but in a less sophisticated way – so if you haven’t yet seen that one, you might want to work through it first:

Should You Kill the Fat Man?

A Million Dollar Puzzle: The Newcomb Paradox

If you can sort this one out, then you’re a genius. Mind you, most people think they know the right answer, it’s just they don’t tend to agree what that answer is.

A Murder Puzzle

It examines our intuitions about a particular class of killings – namely, those which are also instances of “letting die”. Once again, it’s based on the work of Judith Jarvis Thomson, and in particular a section of her article, “The Trolley Problem”.

The activity hasn’t earned its stripes in the court of public reason yet, so it’s possible it has lacunae and glitches. If so, let me know here!

Very quickly, one of the questions asks whether there is a moral obligation to help a person who is in severe need.

You see a charity advertisement in a newspaper about a person in severe need in India/Australia. There is no state welfare available to this person, but you can help them at little cost to yourself. You have good reason to believe that any help you offer will make a difference. Are you morally obliged to help the person?

Half the people undertaking the activity are told that the person lives in India; the other half that the person lives in Australia. They are then asked to state whether they think we are “Strongly Obliged”, “Weakly Obliged” or “Not Obliged” to help the person.

After nearly 1200 responses, this is what the results are showing us

The thing that has really caught my attention is the results for people who self-identify as Christians and atheists, respectively (more precisely, the atheist group self-identify as having “No Religion”, so they could be agnostics, or perhaps even deists of some sort, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going to call them atheists).

The headline news is that atheists are coming on towards twice as likely as Christians to think we’re “Not Obliged” to help the person in need in India (currently, 43% as opposed to 24%).

I actually find that quite shocking. But perhaps even more shocking is the fact the atheist group are much less likely to respond that way when asked about the person in Australia. Here (only) 36% think we’re not morally obliged to help. There are two further points here: (1) this gap is more than twice as large as the average gap across all respondents (and it’s easily statistically significant – I checked!); and (2) if you look at the Christian group, in complete contrast to the atheist group, you find that they are more likely to think we’re not obliged to help the person in Australia.

My first reaction to these figures was to think I had messed up the programming somewhere. But I have double and triple-checked, and I’m almost certain that I haven’t. Plus, I’ve checked the numbers manually (so to speak); and the figures in the charts correctly add up to 100, so I think this really is what the numbers are saying.

My second reaction, of course, was to think about confounding variables and systematic biases. (Note to any stray new atheists reading this: I am fully aware of the dangers of a non-randomised, self-selecting sample, and that it is not possible to generalize these results, but the fact remains that these results are curious, and rather shocking, in and of themselves – we’re not talking about tiny numbers of people here).

So what’s going on? I don’t really know, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s possible there is some correlation between youth and irreligiosity specific to these activities (because they tend to get picked up by European schools and colleges), and that it might be that young people are less likely to think in terms of moral obligation than older people; it also seems possible that various stripes of moral nihilism might result in non-religious people denying that one is morally obliged to help others (even if they would in fact help others).

But the difference between the atheist response to the India and Australia conditions is… well, harder to explain (and, as I said, it’s a little disturbing). Anybody got any ideas?

Updated crosspost from Talking Philosophy

You see a charity advertisement in a newspaper about a person in severe need in India/Australia. There is no state welfare available to this person, but you can help them at little cost to yourself. You have good reason to believe that any help you offer will make a difference. Are you morally obliged to help the person?

Half the people undertaking the activity are told that the person lives in India; the other half that the person lives in Australia. They are then asked to state whether they think we are “Strongly Obliged”, “Weakly Obliged” or “Not Obliged” to help the person.

This is what the results are showing us so far.

There are a couple of things worth remarking upon. The first is that if you look at the overall results, you find that 4% more people respond there is no obligation to help the person in India than they do about the person in Australia (39% to 35%). However, although suggestive, these results are not yet statistically significant, so it’s not yet clear that this is a real pattern rather than just an artefact.

The second interesting thing is that if you exclude everybody who does not live in either the United States, United Kingdom or Canada from the result set, then this pattern disappears. In this instance, 37% of people think we’re not obliged to help the person in India compared to 36% who think the same thing about the person in Australia.

As yet, these results are merely suggestive, but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Crosspost from JeremyStangroom.com

Anyway, as some of you might already have seen, I’ve put together a new activity at the Philosophy Experiments web site.

Should you Kill the Backpacker?

It looks at some of the complications arising out of the Trolley Problem. More specifically, it largely relies on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article, “The Trolley Problem”,  which appeared in The Yale Law Journal.

It’s already been completed more than a 1000 times, and the average “tension quotient” across all these players is 23% (lower is better). See if you can beat this score.

They were at sea for something like a week before the decision was even made, delirious from hunger, thirst, lack of shelter from the elements…it’s beyond comprehension how far removed from the day to day way we have of dealing with all of these situations. And they were the only ones who could deal with the situation. No appeal to anyone except those they were sharing the boat with.

All this is absolutely right: the situation with the transplant doctor doesn’t have these features. However, there are a couple of points to make here which undermine the argument that the two situations are not parallel in the required way.

The first is that the transplant scenario does have its own element of extremity (which was added in precisely to handle the point Michael makes here): one of the patients the transplant doctor is trying to save is her own child. It is true, of course, that this is a different sort of thing than being stranded in the middle of the ocean without food and water, but nevertheless one should not underestimate just how desperate people will become if the life of their child is under threat. Certainly, I’d warrant that many mothers would happily trade places with the shipwrecked sailors if it meant their own child had a chance to live.

The second point is that there is a difference between factors that justify a particular course of action and factors which mitigate against culpability given the immorality of a particular course of action. It is true that the extremity of the situation faced by the shipwrecked sailors could reasonably be seen to mitigate against their culpability (assuming that one thinks it was morally wrong to kill the cabin boy). It is a much harder argument to make that it justifies their actions. To put it simply, we don’t tend to think that the antecedent pressures and temptations that people are under are part of the story of the rightness or wrongness of the actions they take (albeit they are part of the story of how we judge their culpability).

There is an interesting datum here: in their judgement of the case brought against Thomas Dudley and Edward Stephens for the murder of the cabin boy, Richard Parker, the Queen’s Bench Division under Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, did not accept that the extremity of the situation was even a mitigating factor:

It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime. It is therefore our duty to declare that the prisoners’ act in this case was wilful murder, that the facts as stated in the verdict are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion the prisoners are upon this special verdict guilty of murder.

Of course, this is not to argue that the Queen’s Bench Division necessarily got this right (albeit one suspects they probably knew what they were talking about when it came to legal culpability). But nevertheless it does illustrate that it isn’t at all obvious one can argue straightforwardly from pressures and temptations to justification.

It has just been announced that a Symposium on Moral Philosophy in honour of her memory is taking place in March. Full details here.

TPM (The Philosophers’ Magazine) interviewed Philippa Foot back in 2003. You can read the interview here.

The activity complains if you state that the shipwrecked sailors were morally justified in killing the cabin boy, but the transplant surgeon was not morally justified in ending your own life.

An objection that has come up a couple of times is that the transplant surgeon behaves badly not so much because she takes your life, but because she takes your life having undertaken, as a doctor, not to “play God” in this sort of situation. So, for example, here’s an extract from a modern version of the Hippocratic oath:

Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

There are a number of things to be said about this objection.

1. Although, all other things being equal, it is (probably) true we don’t behave well if we break our undertakings, it is hard to think this is true in all situations. This is easily demonstrated: if a doctor can save the lives of a million of her patients, by killing one patient, then it is a brave person who’d claim she’d be wrong to do so (the television series House featured an interesting examination of this issue).

2. It follows, then, that whether “playing God” is justified in any particular situation depends on the nature of the situation. But, in terms of the scenario we’re dealing with here, that just seems to put us back where we started: were the shipwrecked sailors justified in killing the cabin boy versus was the transplant surgeon justified in killing you (and thereby playing God)?

3. Given these two situations, it is hard to think that what is morally decisive is the fact the doctor’s behaviour violated her previous undertaking not to play God. In other words, it is hard to think that what turned a “right” action into a “wrong” action was the fact that she had previously made certain undertakings.

4. Part of the thought here has to do with the extremeness of the acts we’re talking about. Taking a life seems to be a big deal, morally speaking. In comparison, breaking an oath seems like a much smaller deal. Therefore, it is counterintuitive to suppose that the latter can be decisive when looking at the morality of the former.

5. Having said this, it is also true there is no knock down argument here. If somebody insists that as far as they’re concerned the fact the transplant surgeon violated the Hippocratic oath is morally decisive, then probably it isn’t possible to do much more than to show why the claim is counterintuitive. It is in the nature of moral arguments that sometimes all one can hope to do is to pump intuitions in a certain direction.

Christopher Carr has put forward the following argument which aims to show that given a particular sort of view there might actually be nothing odd about this asymmetricality:

if the value is a potential value, then miscarriage may not mean anything, or it may mean a literal fraction of what it would mean were the fetus further along in development or already born. For example, for a particular individual moral framework perhaps a human fetus is worth “one”, a human infant is worth “two”, a human baby is worth “three”, and thereafter all have reached full personhood of “four”. We would still consider miscarriage to be the destruction of valuable human entities, but we may be allowed to think that an eight-year-old child dying of leukemia represents a greater destruction of value. How we assign respective values depending on cause of death and degree of personhood could give us radically different results as to how we evaluate the medical seriousness of miscarriage in relation to other causes of death.

Okay, so the first thing to say is there is no doubt this is true: we can think the value attached to human life is incremental in this way (though I think Christopher inadvertently switched around baby and infant in his schema). However, the question is how does this view match up against people’s attitudes towards abortion.

There are a number of points to make here.

1. It’s worth starting off by saying that although it is a common view that the value of human life increases as the human entity develops from embryo through to full personhood, it is a very uncommon view amongst people who are opposed to all abortion (the overwhelming majority of whom think an embryo has equal intrinsic value to a human adult just by virtue of being biologically human); indeed, if you read the anti-abortion literature, you’ll find that many people deny that things such as sentience and personhood are the measure of value, precisely because this opens up the possibility that an embryo/foetus does not have the  value of a human adult;

2. Setting this point aside, the question remains as to whether it makes sense to see the value of human lives as being incremental, and yet to be resolutely opposed to abortion. This is actually quite a difficult question to answer, since it means weighing up the value attached to the embryo/foetus against the right to self-determination. However, to put Christopher’s argument in its best light, let’s say there isn’t a problem here: that it is possible to think that even the relatively low value attached to the embryo/foetus in the early stages of pregnancy trumps our right to self-determination (this isn’t an incoherent view, by any means, it’s just it runs into difficulties when held up against the way that de facto we tend to treat the right to self-determination);

3. So how should this person view miscarriage? Well, it is true that they should not see any individual miscarriage as being as great a tragedy as the death of a human person (because embryos/foetuses don’t have the value of a fully developed human being). But equally, it is true that they can’t see any individual miscarriage as being morally neutral (even if we’re focussing only on the death of the embryo/foetus): they are required to think that miscarriage is a bad thing, in and of itself, because it means the ending of the life of something of value (albeit relatively low value);

4. More than that, though, given that the right to self-determination is not trivial, and given that they think the value attached to the embryo/foetus trumps our right to self-determination, then it follows that they can’t think the value attached to the embryo/foetus is merely trivial. We can’t quantify this value, obviously, but we know it’s enough to rule out abortion, even though this means denying the right we have to self-determination. (The counter-argument here that the right to self-determination is trivial or unimportant isn’t persuasive because de facto we don’t think it is trivial or unimportant.)

5. At this point, it becomes (partly) a numbers game. The sheer volume of miscarriages has to be factored into the argument. Okay, it’s true that one might think the numbers of people suffering cancer and heart disease means that these diseases/conditions are a more serious issue than miscarriage (given the fact that these conditions affect human persons to whom there is a higher value attached than to embryos/foetuses). But it is much less plausible if we’re talking about conditions such as kidney failure, Parkinson’s, ALS, etc., all of which we do consider to be serious medical issues. (There is a complication here to do with the possibility that one might attach arbitrary levels of value to the foetus, human person, etc., so that it turns out that just one human death is a greater tragedy than the deaths of say a million foetuses even though the value of a foetus is enough to rule out abortion. If this comes up in the comments, I might deal with it in another post.)

So if somebody is opposed to abortion (in all, or nearly all, circumstances), then it remains true that they should consider miscarriage to be a serious medical issue. Christopher’s argument here is relevant in that it does impact on how serious an issue some people should view miscarriage to be. But, of course, as we already noted, the number of people opposed to abortion who have this sort of incremental view of the value of human life is very small (precisely because it does allow the possibility that the value of an embryo/foetus might not be great enough to rule out abortion given that we think the right to self-determination is important).

Some of the results are entirely predictable. For example, by far the biggest predictor of whether a person is going to be opposed to abortion is religious belief. So, for instance, 83% of people with no religion support the right of a woman to have an abortion, compared to only 37% of Christians

However, there are some surprises. The comparison between Christians and Muslims, for example, is interesting. This shows that a bigger percentage of Muslims than Christians support the right of a woman to have abortion (42% to 37%), though it should be said that this figure is only statistically significant at p < 0.10.

I’ve discussed what is perhaps the most curious piece of data here. It seems that young women of no religion are much more likely to be opposed to abortion than young men of no religion (which I still think is bizarre).