It’s the Thought that Counts

Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo announced on Tuesday that he is considering a proposal to pay $1000 to poor people willing to undergo tubal ligation or vasectomy so they will not have any children in the future. (I heard about this on CNN, but found a link to the Times-Picayune article via Wonkette.) LaBruzzo says he is concerned that families on welfare have more children than families who aren’t, and thus sap the state’s resources in ever-increasing amounts.

This idea sounds revolting on face to most people. John LaBruzzo is surely not a politician I would trust to formulate reasonable policy, particularly after hearing him say on CNN that he didn’t expect Democrats to support this proposal because people on welfare are the Democratic base. Cute. More importantly, the statistics don’t support LaBruzzo’s fears. While I strongly suspect that LaBruzzo’s intentions are racist and/or classist in nature, and I acknowledge that there is no urgency of an out-of-control welfare budget, I don’t think that that visceral revulsion at the basic idea is really warranted.

The first thing I want to point out is that no one is being forced into this arrangement, unless your definition of “force” is incredibly broad. If a person would rather have $1000 than be able to have children in the future, I see no reason not to allow them to make that trade. Plenty of people seek vasectomies or tubal ligations on their own, so it’s clear they’re not inherently bad operations. No one else would be harmed by the fact of an individual receiving the surgery, so if that individual would prefer the money to their fertility, the trade makes everyone better off. Surely there are people out there who face both unwanted pregnancies and financial problems, and would find themselves killing two birds with one stone in a system of this sort. (I anticipate a claim that this is merely economic coercion, since some people really need the money — but this is a ridiculous argument. Is it coercive for a grocery store to charge you money for food? You need that to survive. Is it coercive for your employer to require you to work according to your contract before you get your paycheck? Clearly not.)

We can also think about the potential children that might have been conceived in the future by someone who signed up for this surgery. If $1000 is worth more to you than your own child, I’m going to hazard a guess that you either would not love and care for that child very much, or that you clearly do not have the financial resources necessary to raise a child in a healthy situation (I mean, with adequate food, clothing, shelter, etc.). In either case, the wisest choice would be to refrain from conceiving a child in the first place, which is what a program of this sort allows for.

I know any hint of eugenics makes everyone queasy, because of how easy it is to invoke a comparison to the Nazi regime. I am not contesting the badness of Hitler here. However — aside from the obvious differences in levels of violence and coercion — it is important to notice that while Nazi eugenics were based on ethnicity, religion, and other qualities having in reality nothing to do with one’s ability to raise a family, the eugenics in a program of this type are almost precisely equivalent to the sort we all employ if and when we look for someone to start our own families with. We ask, will this person be able to love and care for our children, putting their needs ahead of his or her own? Will this person take on the intense level of responsibility involved in raising a child? Will our combined salaries be enough to support a family of the size we want? It’s not exactly “eugenics” to choose to have children with someone you think would make a good parent, as opposed to someone you think would make a bad one — or, if it is, it’s not the hateful sort of eugenics that’s tantamount to genocide.

Claims of eugenics with respect to this program are based on the fact that the payments could only go to poor people. Either the goal is to end poverty by ending poor people, as the Wonkette headline read, or the goal is to diminish the numbers of ethnic minorities who are statistically more likely to be poor. These are legitimate complaints. I’d like to step back and look at the basic idea of paying someone not to have children, though, and ask: is it really necessary to restrict this program to poor people? Everyone’s children impose some burden on the state, since public schools must make room for them, they consume resources and contribute to scarcity, Social Security will (maybe…) make payments to them when they retire, and so on and so forth. Sure, wealthy people are probably less likely to take the government up an an offer like this (since $1000 has less marginal utility to someone with greater financial assets), but for the sake of fairness why not offer it to them as well? Would a plan structured in that way make you feel the same kind of revulsion? I doubt it.

My point is absolutely not that John LaBruzzo is a good guy, or that his particular proposal is a good idea. I simply believe that what I’ve been hearing and reading on this topic is missing a certain level of rational discourse. Of course, in the US we don’t suffer from such severe overpopulation as to make a policy like this worth enacting, and I definitely think we should steer away of programs with central and unavoidable discriminatory effects. If it became practically necessary, though, paying people not to have children would be a legitimate plan, not a reprehensible one.

Tags: discrimination, economics, ethics, welfare

Deborah Hellman began a series of guest posts on Balkinization today, on the subject of what discrimination means and when it is wrong. It seems a fitting thing to highlight here, since we’ve touched on those issues a couple times already (see this post on civil unions and this one on religion).

Lots of policies can be accurately described as “discrimination,” and it’s easy — if careless — to assume the normative implication from that description (that is, to assume that any differentiating between people is an immoral action). Hellman argues that the normative use of the word requires a much more specific definition than the descriptive use, specifically that “discrimination is wrong when it is demeaning and not wrong when it is not demeaning.” She goes on to explain that this definition does not exclude individuals who did not intend their discriminatory actions to be demeaning, nor does it except cases in which the affected person does not happen to personally feel demeaned or stigmatized.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with this standard Hellman lays out, but she’s not done explaining it yet. I’m looking forward to her subsequent posts elaborating on her position, and later, dissecting alternative constructions. Hopefully those will include a discussion of using as a criterion the relevance of the attribute being used for differentiation — the subject of my religious tolerance post. Discrimination on the basis of religion may be perceived as categorically demeaning, so I wonder if she would rule it immoral even in cases where it is arguably a relevant consideration.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this reminder from Tom Stoppard that sometimes differentiating between people is the only reasonable thing to do:

Guildenstern: Rosencrantz?
Rosencrantz: What?
Guildenstern: Guildenstern?
Rosencrantz: What?
Guildenstern: Don’t you discriminate at all?!

Tags: ethics

I spent a while today thinking about this recent post from Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog. It summarizes the story of a college student who felt she was discriminated against by her philosophy professor, who had asked her to critically examine her religious beliefs. Hemant quotes press releases from the American Center of Law and Justice, which acted on behalf of the student, and from the Center for Inquiry, which is on the side of the professor but doesn’t seem to have been directly involved. Each side tells a pretty different story of what happened, and I don’t claim to know who’s right, but the incident raises some interesting issues about the status of religion in American society.

In the interest of full (yet unsurprising) disclosure, I should say up front that I am an atheist myself. One of the reasons I don’t personally buy into religious doctrines is that, when viewed with a critical lens, I find they come out looking pretty unbelievable. That doesn’t mean I hate religion — just that I haven’t seen any compelling reason to ascribe to one at this time. I think the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment are of extreme importance, I support the idea of separation of church and state, and I generally try to live out these principles of religious tolerance in my everyday life. Just as the government shouldn’t get to tell me what to believe, I don’t think we should discriminate against each other because of religion.

That sort of platitude about tolerance sounds intuitively right and moral (to the extent that you aren’t caught up in ideas about heathens and/or eternal damnation). Yet the more I think about it, I wonder why exactly we tend to believe in this sort of tolerance in the first place. I mean, as a society we do also generally believe that education, knowledge, and critical thinking are virtuous things — it’s perceived as better to go to college than it is to drop out of high school, to vote based on informed political opinions rather than on the attractiveness of the candidates, and so on. If someone you were casually chatting with in a coffee shop happened to confess to you her belief in a host of invisible fairies who sprinkled fairy dust on her while she slept to make sure she remembered to pay her utility bills on time, you would presumably think less of her for this exact reason. She can’t possibly have her wits about her, you might think to yourself. Anyone who was the least bit rational would realize that idea was absurd. Change the line to one about bread and wine changing into a man’s (or a god’s) flesh and blood, though, and all of a sudden you have a religious belief that must be respected.

We shouldn’t discriminate against people on the basis of things they can’t change about themselves, like ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. It’s my understanding that that’s the basis for the immorality of discrimination like that — if the person can’t help having that characteristic, it’s unfair to treat them differently because of it. This isn’t true about what you believe about the world, though, and we as a society embrace the fact that it isn’t true. If you believe that aliens are bombarding your house with mind control rays and the only way to stop them is to cover everything in aluminum foil, your friends and family will intervene and get you at the very least some therapy, and the conventional wisdom will be that they did a good thing. Most of the time, if you think crazy, irrational things, we don’t have any problem treating you differently.

We also shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of personal decisions that have no bearing on others and no reflection on the merits of an individual. It would be silly if I refused to be friends with anyone who wore flip-flops, for example. That would be arbitrary and unfair. Let’s say I was conducting a job interview, though, and the applicant came in wearing flip-flops. Assuming I’m not trying to hire a lifeguard, flip-flops are generally considered too casual for business attire, so I might fairly make the assumption that the applicant didn’t have a serious enough attitude about the job and weigh this against her when making my hiring decision. Similarly, if the applicant came to my job interview with a fresh roll of aluminum foil for my office to protect me from the aliens, I’d weigh that against her as well.

How is it appropriate to respond, then, when your new friend in the coffeeshop — or your prospective hire, or your neighbor, or whoever — happens to believe that evil exists in the world because a woman ate a magic fruit given to her by a talking snake? I’m not talking about having some vague deist beliefs or a general sense of a benevolent spirit watching over us; I mean adhering literally to religious dogma that directly contradicts, or at least seems wholly absurd in the face of, observations we can make today. If you share my opinion that it’s best to approach life from a rational and logical viewpoint, you’ll probably also reach the conclusion that an atheist or agnostic perspective is the most sensible one. Given that, should I really respect someone who tells me he’s a young-earth creationist, even in the face of all the evidence astrophysicists have accumulated about our universe since the Big Bang and all the evidence biologists have found for evolution by natural selection?

It seems to me that the answer is no, at least in contexts where those specific beliefs are relevant. It’s still unfair to always choose the creationist last when you’re picking kickball teams. But I think it’s perfectly fine to pass over the creationist when you’re looking for a biology teacher (an opinion I’ve already made clear in an earlier post). What about cases where the specific belief isn’t relevant but, say, logical thinking is? We wouldn’t hire our aluminum-foil-crazed friend to be a lawyer or a hedge fund manager, because those occupations require the capability for rational, analytical thinking, and that whole alien issue seems like good evidence that she’s not the most rational, analytical person we can find. Is it unreasonable, then, to treat a dogmatically religious person in the same way? I’m not sure of the answer to this question, but I do think it’s much less obvious than we as a society generally assume.

Tags: culture, ethics, religion

The New York Times recently published an article on hymenoplasty, a surgery done to create the physical illusion of virginity in women. It has become increasingly common in Europe. Muslim women who have adopted a European attitude towards sex find when they move towards marriage that their intended husband or his family wants to see proof of virginity, and the only way to fake that in a sufficiently believable way is to get this surgery. This of course says a ton about Muslim populations in Europe and the assimilation (or lack thereof) that is occurring. That’s all very interesting to contemplate, and there is much to say about it, but what’s I’ve been thinking about more since reading the article is the decision the doctor faces. Is this a surgery doctors should be willing to perform? It’s clearly a controversial issue — as the article mentions, the French College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians thinks no, for “moral, cultural, and health” reasons. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to say it should be something doctors are willing to do.

I will assume, first of all, that the surgery has some risks, like any other surgery, but that it is not abnormally risky as far as cosmetic surgery goes. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it, and I am frankly just more interested in the moral issues.

It seems to me like the default response should be to perform the surgery, for basically libertarian reasons. These women want the surgery, it doesn’t do any direct harm to others, and it doesn’t seem so idiotic that wanting it is proof of irrationality, so they have a right to get it. Why should the doctor stand in the way? I don’t consider myself a libertarian, but I do have sympathy for the philosophy, and I feel like at the very least the burden of proof should be on those wanting to restrict individual choice.

What reasons might someone give for not performing the surgery? One is that the decision to have this done is coerced, rather than freely made. I agree that it is coerced in some sense, in that a substantial penalty is being attached to the alternative choice. However, we are usually upset in these sorts of circumstances at the coercive act, rather than the victim’s decision to give in. (This is why we punish muggers, but not people who give up their wallets when threatened with a gun.) In this case, the coercive act, while it seems dumb (or worse), is obviously not something that can be regulated. People can choose to marry or not marry someone else for whatever reason they want, even if idiotic. Extended family can choose not to talk to someone, to disinherit them, etc., for whatever stupid reason they want.

So let’s grant that the cultural practice is unfairly coercive. (I believe it’s reasonable for someone to want their spouse to have refrained from premarital sex, but I’d like to see that limited to an issue of trust and understanding between the couple. Extended family demanding the right to inspect the woman’s genitals seems a step too far.) I’m sure one of the common objections to the surgery is that it “cooperates with” or “condones” the underlying cultural expectation. Maybe we should ban people from giving their wallets to muggers — it might reduce the incentive to threaten people. A similar point can be made here. If within European Muslim communities, substantial portions of the female population became ineligible to wed, there would be a serious shortage of potential brides. It seems inevitable that in such a circumstance, in the long-term, more and more men (and their families) would become willing to accept non-virgin brides.

This is not an unreasonable argument, but it’s not an effect that will be incredibly quick. Banning the surgery means the ability to “get away with” premarital sex will be reduced, and so women will be more careful about maintaining virginity. If what you want is to undermine these cultural expectations, this is counterproductive. Even if you care less about the premarital sex prohibition, and just about the extreme inspection/punishment aspect, it will slow down cultural change. It is also a huge sacrifice to ask of the women in question in the name of longer-term progress. More importantly, if this surgery is widely available, women will no longer suffer from what is essentially a double standard with regard to premarital sex and will instead suffer from the need to have a minor cosmetic surgery done before marriage. I for one, think that smaller injustice is substantially better, even if it will take more time to completely get rid of than the larger injustice would.

At the very least, the case on moral/cultural grounds is inconclusive. Given that, I’d say this is a decision that women should make on their own. I don’t see why doctors (or their professional organizations) should be hesitant about performing it when it’s asked for.

Tags: culture, ethics, gender, religion