Here's the latest from Tony Perkins and the
Family Research Council:
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is urging that decisions on vaccines to prevent HPV (a sexually transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer) be "based on science not politics," and she warns ominously that "recent press reports indicate that certain organizations are beginning to mobilize against the vaccine." The senator shouldn't believe everything she reads. Despite the apparent determination of the media to paint FRC as "anti-vaccine," we have declared clearly that FRC "welcomes the news that vaccines are in development" for human papillomavirus (HPV).
Let me paraphrase the dialectic, as represented here:
Scientists: We can maybe prevent HPV.
Some groups: No, if we prevent HPV, then teenagers will have sex!
Hillary Clinton: Some groups are against this vaccine. That's bad.
Tony Perkins: I never said I was against the vaccine!
Perkins is
speaking truthfully here, but wouldn't the sensible thing to do be to interpret Hillary as referring to the horrific and deplorable right-wing groups who
are opposed to administering the vaccine to all girls?
Is it necessarily deplorable for a parent to object to a child being given a vaccination for a disease transmitted by an activity that the child should not be engaged in? Presumably, there are a tremendous number of people in the U.S. who belong to cultural traditions in which casual sexual activity is discouraged or prohibited. It's true, of course, that some people who belong to some of these cultural traditions do a fairly poor job with it, and their children end up having plenty of sex though they're almost completely ignorant about it. Yet the decision not to administer a vaccination to a young girl is not like the decision not to educate her about sex; whatever is in dispute, it is not the propriety of sexual education (this is not, of course, to deny that plenty of the folks disputing this would dispute the propriety of sex education; my point is that the two positions can be separated). Nor is the objection to mandatory vaccination an objection to the availability of the vaccination, or even an objection to the potential availability of the vaccination to girls under the age of 18 who would seek it against their parent's wishes. If the objection is merely to mandatory vaccination for a disease which is transmitted through activity which, according to one's cultural ideals, ought not to be pursued, then why is it so 'deplorable'?
ReplyDeleteWhat seems more likely to be deplorable to me is the possibility that we would, as a government, compel people to receive a vaccination that they do not want for a disease which they need not get. It does seem to involve the state in claiming to young girls that, regardless of what their traditions say, they can go ahead and have sex if they like, and they'll be safe from at least one form of disease that they might otherwise get in the process. Why not simply avoid the problem by making the vaccinations easily available to all, making information on why they are important available to all, and letting people decide for themselves what vaccinations they need?
One answer might be that people and their traditions are stupid, or don't know what's in their best interests, or something along those lines. That may be true. But it's hardly an appropriate thing for an ostensibly democratic, liberalist government to say to its citizens. Mandatory vaccinations for PHV are not like science education, where the disagreements that any particular cultural tradition might have with contemporary science have no place determining the curriculum in a school. They are not like vaccinations for a disease which can be transmitted through the air or through everyday contact. In those cases, the ideals of a cultural tradition are irrelevant. The case of mandatory vaccinations for diseases transmitted only through sexual activity (is this not the case with HPV? Maybe I'm mistaken) does seem to be one in which the ideals of the people involved are relevant.
It may in fact be the most prudent thing for all girls to receive the vaccination. Yet objecting to mandatory vaccinations hardly seems 'deplorable' and 'horrific' to me. I'm sure that you can replace your emotive rhetoric with reasoned argument, though, and I look forward to it. Even if you put forth compelling reasons to accept mandatory vaccinations, though, I doubt you'll be able to show me exactly why the objection is 'horrific' and 'deplorable.' Those words seem best reserved for more serious things.
Here's a sketch of a reply to anon. Jonathan, if you think it doesn't work, lemme know.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is necessarily deplorable for a parent to deprive their children of the vaccination. Why?
Suppose you are a 'virtuous' parent and you aim to instill in your children all manor of Victorian beliefs about sex. One of two things will happen: you will succeed or you will fail.
Let's suppose things go well. Not only do you succeed, their attitudes and actions are perfectly in line and they save themselves for marriage. No harm done. Added bonus: they are less likely to contract an STD prevelant even amongst people who are married in this country, is notoriously hard to detect, and is linked with cervical cancer. Think of the shot as an early wedding present.
Let's suppose things go badly. You try but fail to convince your children to abstain and they have sex before they are married. On this scenario, the shot works as a backup plan. It doesn't stop up the child's ears to prevent them from considering the things you tell them, it rather works as a fail safe so that if they sin, they aren't stuck with an incurable STD that might prevent them from entering into the kind of relationship you want for your child. Consider two states of affairs:
S1: My child sins and suffers an incurable disease that stands in the way of her living without cervical cancer and stands in the way of living in the kind of marriage I'd want for her.
S2: My child sins but is less likely to suffer from cancer or be excluded from the kinds of marriages I'd want for her.
No minimally decent parent would prefer S1 to S2. Parents who prefer S1 to S2 are precisely the sort of parents children should be protected from by the state as child protection is a legitimate state interest. Anyone who would use their enormous political power to prevent children from the protection they should receive from minimally decent people are horrific and deplorable.
That sounds pretty close to right, Clayton, but there's a complication -- the way you've set up the argument just now might be an instance of the King Henry fallacy: the following is in general not valid:
ReplyDeleteA or B.
If A, then p is best.
If B, then p is best.
Therefore, p is best.
This is clear when A is vastly preferable to B, and P(B|p) is much higher than P(A|p). And this is the situation that is alleged by the groups in question. One response, which would probably be a very good response, I think, would be to dispute that this is the situation. It does not seem at all plausible to me that the threat of HPV is a major deterrant sex among young people, or that many young people would consider the vaccine to provide a reason to have sex. So I doubt that the vaccine would result in more sex. But if this is my response, then my commentor has a point -- I'm just disagreeing with these groups on factual grounds, and it might be unfair of me to use the strong language I do about people whose failing is having false sociological beliefs.
I might focus instead on the moral claim: I could insist that even if the vaccine would increase sex in young women, this doesn't provide a reason to withhold the vaccine. I could accuse the groups of placing the value of chastity at an unrealistically, and indeed, offensively, high level (even such that it sometimes is more important than saving lives); this is a more plausible candidate for deplorability. I think that this would probably be an adequate response. There are moves that might be made, but none of them seem plausible.
But actually, let's see what happens if we're really, really charitable. Suppose, with the groups in question, that the vaccine would increase premarital sex and that premarital sex is pretty bad -- that there's substantial value in preventing premarital sex. Now we're confronted with a choice: option A (withholding the vaccine) results in an irregular, pseudo-randomly-enforced death penalty for premarital success. Option B (administering it) results in there being no such death penalty.
Put in these terms, the deplorability of option A is clear. This is so primarily because the death penalty is shockingly disproportionate to the offense, even if premarital sex is very bad. The pseudo-randomness issue is a problem, too, for fairness reasons. Withholding the vaccine is the moral equivalent of instituting the following policy: if a young woman has sex, then we roll some dice. If the losing combination comes up, then we kill her. (After all, she shouldn't be having sex!) This is a deplorable policy (and it makes no difference whether it's instituted at a government level or at a family level.)
People may fuss about a morally relevant distinction between doing and allowing, but that's hopeless in this case. (I mean, really, it's hopeless in general, but it's best to rely on the weakest sufficient principles.) Do it in terms of causation: we're choosing between policy A and policy B, and our choosing of policy A would cause these deaths.
Oops, I overgeneralized a bit. I said:
ReplyDeletethe following is in general not valid:
A or B.
If A, then p is best.
If B, then p is best.
Therefore, p is best.
This is clear when A is vastly preferable to B, and P(B|p) is much higher than P(A|p)
I should have said:
This is clear when A is vastly preferable to B, P(B|p) is much higher than P(B), and P(A|p) is much lower than P(A). Intuitively: when p will come along with a greater likelihood of the less desirable outcome.
Well, I'm glad to see that the chest-thumping has turned into some argument, though I'm still not entirely persuaded.
ReplyDeleteClayton: I think you want 'manner' rather than 'manor'; if you're going to resort to describing your opponents' positions by amusing adjectives ('Victorian') rather than providing strong arguments against them, at least use the right words. I think you'll find, too, if you take off your cultural blinders, that the vast majority of the cultural traditions with which people in our world identify themselves take sex to be most or only appropriate for marriage or some similarly intimate and committed relationships. Such views didn't die out with your own cultural tradition's abandonment of them. Anyway, "it could go badly!" doesn't strike me as a very good principled response to anything. You pass over the most important part of the argument that you need to make by labelling your opponents rather than giving the reasons that you desperately need to make your account sensible.
Now, Jonathan's response is a different story. I think I personally agree with it, though I find its strength where he may not. The problem that persists is that he hasn't adequately addressed (or even acknowledged) that his own judgments about the moral propriety of sexual activity are what make the argument work. That is, the argument purports to provide reasons why failing to provide a child with a vaccination for a sexually-transmitted disease is necessarily 'deplorable' without tackling the problem that creates the disagreement, the moral propriety of certain kinds of sexual activity.
The argument works perfectly well if we have a fairly open attitude to sex, but not otherwise. An (admittedly imperfect) analogy might show what I mean.
Assume that we are opposed to the use of heroin (I make no assumptions about your own sympathies to heroin use, but I trust that you are aware of at least a few lives that have been wrecked because of it) on the grounds that its use aims at no end beyond the bare sensate pleasure (reportedly some of the greatest imaginable) which tends to incapacitate people. That is, using heroin produces extraordinarily pleasurable sensations, so extraordinary, in fact, that the drug easily comes to dominate people even as its intensity makes them not only unable, but often unwilling, to pursue any of life's genuine goods. Heroin ruins peoples lives because it leads them to organize their lives around the pleasure that they get from shooting up and makes them incapable of pursuing any other complex goals. The fact that heroin is also incredibly addictive, so that an addict never really ceases to be an addict even after he stops using the drug, just makes using heroin seem like a worse idea; it is not the fundamental reason why we (on this account) consider heroin use to be an inappropriate end. Certainly it produces additional reasons not to use the drug, but the fundamental reason why using heroin is 'a a bad idea' are that it serves no end other than the enjoyment of a sensate pleasure which tends to dominate and incapacitate people even before they become physically addicted.
Now, suppose that some technology were to become available by which we could render people immune to the addictive properties of heroin. By analogy with Jonathan's arguments about sex, we should consider anyone who fails to administer this 'anti-addiction' technology 'deplorable,' because failing to do so amounts to instituting a 'pseudo-randomly-enforced death penalty.' Heroin use, after all, is about as likely to lead to death as pre-marital sex is once we consider overdose, diseases contracted through needles, and other causes of death which are consequences of, though perhaps not immediate effects of, heroin use (and when we keep in mind precisely how much sex unmarried kids have; the vast majority of them don't end up with HPV). People who are addicted to heroin are the ones who are most likely to engage in the kinds of high-risk activity that leads to death, and so failing to free people from the possibility that they will become addicted to heroin if they choose to use it regularly would be like condemning them to 'pseudo-randomly-enforced' death.
Yet this doesn't seem like a good reason to consider anyone who fails to immunize their child from heroin addiction 'deplorable.' Certainly heroin would cease to be quite so ruinous to people if it were not addictive. There are a great number of people who eventually decide to quit using it, but find that they can't. If that risk were to vanish, it would be much easier to repair the lives that have been damaged by heroin use. Yet that doesn't seem to give us any good reason to apply such technology when using heroin is such an inappropriate goal in the first place. Giving kids the 'vaccination' might not cause them to go out and try heroin, but some apprehension about the understood message would be understandable. I would be fairly uneasy about the effects that such an immunization would have on people; rendering them immune to the physically addictive properties of heroin would be no guarantee that they would not wreck their own and other peoples' lives by choosing to structure their lives around the satisfactions of heroin use. Marijuana is proof enough that a drug need not have any physically addictive properties to maintain a powerful psychological control over a person, and the domineering and incapacitating effects of heroin would not be diminished if it were not addictive. If anything, immunity from its addictive properties would likely lead people to treat it as less dangerous and therefore safe for experimentation.
In short, it would be better if people who decide to stop using heroin were not forced to struggle with addiction, but it does not seem sensible to conclude that therefore we would be 'deplorable' or otherwise blameworthy if we fail to immunize our children from heroin addiction. It may be sensible to say to our children, "There are such immunizations available for people who believe that using heroin is really a worthwhile thing to do; if you think long and hard about it and decide that it's really a worthwhile thing to do, then you'll probably just go ahead and do it anyway. But we don't think that it is a worthwhile thing to do, and here's why..."
You will no doubt have begun to protest at the analogy a while ago, and I'm not sure that anyone would seriously maintain that there aren't important differences between using heroin and having sex. But there are plenty of similarities, and at any rate the analogy is good enough to demonstrate that Jonathan's argument can't stand alone without some assertion, explicit or not, that sex of the relevant kind does not merit the same kind of moral consideration as I have given to heroin use above. And that means two things: first, that Jonathan's huffing and puffing about how 'deplorable' those damn right-wingers are is every bit as morally self-righteous as the typical fare of his opponents; second, that any government program which would make such immunizations mandatory would be committed to the assertion of some range of moral claims about the proper place of sex in a good life, and thus the justification of such programs would need to appeal to something beyond the standard considerations of liberalism. For people with thicker theories of politics, that may not be a problem; otherwise, it is.
My own opinion on the issue is that there are good reasons why even people who oppose sex in anything but its conjugal, procreative form (which I do not) should have their children vaccinated for HPV. Most of those reasons hinge on the differences between using heroin and having sex. In fact, I don't think my ideas are really much different than Clayton and Jonathan's, except that I don't find resistance to the idea so 'deplorable' or out-moded as they do, and think that we're all better off when we reason through ethical questions rather than thumping our chests and curling our brows about them, providing reasons only when antagonized.
There will, of course, be some people who oppose having their children immunized for truly ridiculous reasons, and they won't listen to anything we have to say to them. Maybe I'm being unrealistic about the number of those sorts of people that exist, but my sense is that they are a distinct minority and that, for the most part, we could get most people to have their daughters vaccinated by insisting on the dissemination of accurate information (including about sociological generalizations like, "Doing this will make people have more sex!") and honest, open dialogue about the moral issues involved. If people resist these immunizations, most of them do so for reasons which are both understandable and amenable to discussion. If you don't believe that ethics is non-cognitive, then your response to ethical disagreement ought to be thoughtful discussion about the issues with the people who disagree rather than congratulating yourself and the people who already agree with you for having the right opinion while damning those buffons who are so stupid as to fail to see things your way. I'm glad that at least one of you took the reasonable route; I hope I've been able to convince you that you'll need a more substantive argument in response to people whose objections to immunizations are based on ethical qualms about their actual aims and effects.
Am I the only one troubled by Jonathan's conflation of failing to take some action which might prevent death and actually killing someone? On that account, every time our legal system releases a criminal on parole and that criminal then commits another crime, our legal system is responsible for that crime. After all, repeat offenses might happen, and do in some measurable percentage of cases, so the legal system's failure to keep those criminals off the street or somehow from commiting the crimes at all makes them responsible for those crimes. They had available to them a virtually guaranteed method: denying parole. And yet they didn't take it. So we should blame them?
ReplyDeleteThe claim just seems to rest on a completely implausible understanding of action and responsibility. It isn't clear that I can be said to have killed someone even when that person is almost entirely passive in the death. Suppose, say, that I see a small woman walking alone at night in a sparsely populated part of the city; suppose I know that some percentage of women in similar situations are raped or killed; I consider, but abandon, the idea of offering to accompany her to her destination, since she has no idea who I am and has every reason in the world to reject my offer. I go about my business and a few blocks later the woman is raped, killed, or both; on Jonathan's account, I not only incur some responsibility for that woman's violation and death; I actually violated and killed her.
Sounds a bit ridiculous to me.
Wow, lots of action in this thread! Apparently, I have some defending to do. So here goes.
ReplyDelete(I'm not sure if the two recent anonymous posts are by the same person or not. I'll call the author of the first and second anonymous posts 'A1' and the author of the most recent anonymous post 'A2', leaving open the possibility that A1 and A2 are identical.)
A1 -- I don't usually criticize people for tone in blog comments, but you've apparently decided it's fair game, in your response to Clayton. Take a close look at his post again, then yours. You accuse him of ignoring arguments and merely labelling opposing viewpoints with nasty names like 'Victorian'. Yet you do not address his argument, and instead content yourself with describing him as having 'cultural blinders'. You also seem to attribute very bad argument to him; I cannot find it in his text. (I said in my last post why I don't think he's decent-sounding argument, which you ignore, is actually a good argument.)
You also accuse me of 'chest-thumping', of 'huffing and puffing', and of being 'every bit as morally self-righteous as the typical fare of his opponents'. But you cannot point to an example of me criticizing a right-wing opponent for self-righteousness, for there are none. I criticize them for being wrong, and for having reprehensible views. You are the only one who is arguing with people by insulting them. To this end, you say that I 'present reasons [for my views] only when antagonized'. This is at best highly uncharitable: my post wasn't about the deplorability of withholding cancer vaccines from children; it was about Tony Perkin's being hyper-sensitive and defending himself from attacks that were never made on him. I mentioned the former in passing, you asked me to follow up, and I did. Nevertheless, you persist in a combative, accusatory tone, and fill your substantive points with ad hominems. Stop it.
Ok, on to substantive points. A1, you say:
The problem that persists is that he hasn't adequately addressed (or even acknowledged) that his own judgments about the moral propriety of sexual activity are what make the argument work.
This is not true. I granted the 'unmarried sex is wrong' view for the purpose of argument; I was very clear about that. Here is my quotation:
But actually, let's see what happens if we're really, really charitable. Suppose, with the groups in question, that the vaccine would increase premarital sex and that premarital sex is pretty bad -- that there's substantial value in preventing premarital sex. Now we're confronted with a choice: option A (withholding the vaccine) results in an irregular, pseudo-randomly-enforced death penalty for premarital success. Option B (administering it) results in there being no such death penalty.
Put in these terms, the deplorability of option A is clear. This is so primarily because the death penalty is shockingly disproportionate to the offense, even if premarital sex is very bad.
So, A1, you are right when you say that I avoid "tackling the problem that creates the disagreement", but you are wrong when you say that this is an oversight or that it impugns my argument. The conclusion of my argument is: (even) if premarital sex is very bad and the vaccine would increase premarital sex, withholding the vaccine is deplorable. The truth of the disputed antecedent is irrelevant to this claim. You say, but do not argue, that my argument doesn't go through if we don't have an open attitude about sex. Then it is your onus to identify a bad step in the argument, which at least has the appearance being compatible with the impropriety of premarital sex.
An analogy is not helpful to this end. At best, an analogy might convince us that there must be something wrong with the argument, even though we are at a toal loss to identify it. This is not a very satisfying position, especially since there are many opportunities to deny that the analogy is apt. So, point 1: The only direct challenge to my argument (it relies crucially on my own sexual morality) is false. There is only a very indirect argument, through a questionable analogy.
Now about that analogy. As I said, there are numerous ways to deny that the analogy is apt. A very important one that you don't mention is that while most people don't use heroin, most people do have sex. So the costs of administering the heroin-addiction-vaccine might not outweigh the number of saved lives, even if the costs of the cancer vaccine do. It also might be relevant that heroin use is a crime in this country.
That said, I'd be 100% behind the administration of that heroin vaccine, provided that the costs are not too high. You yourself cite the debilitating damage done to lives by heroin use; would you really pass up the chance to prevent almost all of it, just because you are "apprehensive about the perceived message." Your apprehension, A1, is trivial compared to the harm of the lives that are destroyed by heroin use.
A2, I am out of time just now. I will reply to your comment when I get a chance. The short version: I don't hold any of the ridiculous views you attribute to me. I'll clarify later.
A2, you are presumably reacting to this passage from my comment:
ReplyDeletePeople may fuss about a morally relevant distinction between doing and allowing, but that's hopeless in this case. (I mean, really, it's hopeless in general, but it's best to rely on the weakest sufficient principles.) Do it in terms of causation: we're choosing between policy A and policy B, and our choosing of policy A would cause these deaths.
You are "troubled" by my "conflation of failing to take some action which might prevent death and actually killing someone." But I am not conflating the two; I'm not talking about those two things, and I'm also not conflating. I say there's no morally relevant difference between doing and allowing. The implicit content of each should, of course, be the same. Obviously, for some X and some Y, doing X is worse than allowing Y. So the comparison between killing someone and allowing someone to walk down the street where she might be killed is irrelevant. The apt comparison is between (knowingly) killing someone and (knowingly) refraining from preventing her death.
(There are plausibly relevant complications: it would be difficult to interfere, actually killing someone is done out of malice, etc. But if these are relevant, they don't point to an essential difference between doing and allowing; they point to common features of doing that make many doings more morally charged than allowings. It may also be difficult to avoid killing (as when I'm under durress), or I may refrain from helping out of malice.)
So that's the first problem with the charge. Maybe we recast the charge, thus:
Maybe I am guilty of a "conflation of failing to take some action which might prevent death and performing an action which might cause death."
This has less intuitive appeal, I think, but maybe you still think this is a good objection, A2. But even if such a conflation is an important mistake, I am not guilty of it, for I am not conflating the two. I am claiming that (at least) in this case, they are morally equivalent. Compare: it's morally wrong to stab someone to death, whether you do it with the right hand or the left hand (it doesn't matter which). I am not conflating left-stabbing with right-stabbing; I'm claiming they're relevantly similar.
In the case under consideration, we're deciding between two policies; on one policy, lots of people will die of cervical cancer, and on the other policy, very few will do so. To choose the first policy is to cause those people to die. That's not to say anything about responsibility -- there may be good reasons to cause people to die. But they'd better be damn good reasons. I'm waiting to hear them articulated.
So the view A2 attributes to me is rightly considered ridiculous, but wrongly considered mine. A2, do you have any reason to think I hold (or am committed to) views like this?
Since I'm really interested in political liberalism, I've got something to say about the heroine argument. I think it fails on its own merits because a truly liberal government ought not make the distinction between valuing the use of heroin and valuing the having of sex that is necessary for the example to have the impact it is intended to.
ReplyDeleteCouple of assumptions: A1, in the first post, refers to the U.S. as an "ostensibly democratic, liberalist government". I assume liberalist in this quote is meant to refer not to the belief system generally referred to by the term liberal in American politics, but instead to the term 'liberal' as it is generally used in political philosophy. Liberal in this sense is generally meant as having the attitude that people ought to generally be able to decide for themselves how to live their lives, or to put it another way, people ought to be able to decide for themselves what to value.
I assume that A1 believes the U.S. government ought to be liberal in this sense; A1 doesn't actually say this, but it is implicit in the above quote and throughout both posts. Incidentally, I think Jonathan does not believe so.
The heroin analogy hinges on the fact that we (probably instantiated as the government) ought to discourage the structuring of lives around the use of heroin, that it is an 'inappropriate goal.' A liberal government /cannot/ do this. A liberal government can make no claims about the value of a particular life-path. If it does so, it ceases to be liberal.
This does not mean that people can't have opinions about what a good life is, obviously, nor does it mean that people can't attempt to influence other people to change their minds about what a good life is. All it means is that the government cannot have, as a reason for some policy, the fact that it values some life-path above others.
Obviously, A1 might want to say that liberalism is concerned with religion and political views, not with something like heroin. However, that claim itself is illiberal. Such a view has already decided that politics and religion are more important to life-paths than the use of ecstatic drugs. A liberal government can't say that. A liberal government can make no claim about the inherent value of /any/ action.
This might be taken to be an ad absurdum against liberalism; if liberalism fails to decry heroin use, so much the worse for liberalism. That's a concern liberals have to deal with, but it seems like A1 has this view.
Not to get sidetracked or anything (as if this entire thread weren't a sidetrack!), Nathan, why do you think that I deny political liberalism? It's true that I'm (sort of) an absolutist about value, and further that I believe that the government ought to, when it can, take steps to improve people's lives. So there's a sense in which I'm at odds with political liberalism. But as a policy matter, I'm 100% behind the claim that Nathan uses to gloss liberalism, which he thinks I deny: people ought to generally be able to decide for themselves how to live their lives, or to put it another way, people ought to be able to decide for themselves what to value.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree with this principle (because I think, as a matter of policy, that government in accordance with this principle will best promote the good).
Hmm...Yeah, I think I was a bit loose with terminology there, which is unfortunate.
ReplyDeleteI think you deny the claim that the government ought never use a valuation of a life-path as a reason for passing a policy. Actually, I think your consequentialism commits you to this view, because I think in all likelihood your conception of the good is best served by an illiberal government.
It's an empirical matter what kind of government best promotes the good (as I think it is). I don't know enough civics to argue the matter. So my views may or may not commit me to the preferability of an illiberal government. (There are also difference between a particular illiberal government and an governmental institution governed by illiberal principles.)
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to claim the term 'political liberal'. I don't much care whether I count as one or not. I'm just observing that I do support the claim you used to characterize liberalism.
"So the comparison between killing someone and allowing someone to walk down the street where she might be killed is irrelevant. The apt comparison is between (knowingly) killing someone and (knowingly) refraining from preventing her death."
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm confused. You appealed to the alleged lack of a relevant distinction between doing and allowing in support of the claim that the people who fail to administer vaccinations for HPV cause the deaths of the people who die from HPV. If that's your claim, then you need to accept that a person who allows a vulnerable person to walk alone at night in a dangerous part of city causes that person's death if he or she does in fact die. Yet you don't.
Your reason for rejecting this, I take it, has something to do with what we can 'know.' But what we can know about a person who is unvaccinated against HPV is about the same as what we can know about, say, scantily clad young women walking alone at night in dangerous parts of a city -- or isn't it? What is the difference between these two scenarios that makes us 'know' something about people without vaccinations for HPV that we don't 'know' about highly vulnerable people putting themselves in high-risk situations?
So, it seems clear to me that you've got to conclude that I cause the death of a vulnerable person if I don't accompany him through a high-risk situation. To me, that conclusion is a reductio, and accordingly a reductio of your claim that failing to administer a vaccination causes the deaths of the people who die from the disease. Rejecting that conflation (pick whatever word you like for it, you're taking two different things and considering them equivalent) does not commit me to the position that failing to take some action is never morally blameworthy; it simply means that failing to take action is not properly considered a cause, at least not in the sense of directly and actively contributing to an event. There are still plenty of situations in which failing to take action will be morally blameworthy without being a cause -- indeed, could be morally blameworthy even if the actual outcome of events doesn't turn out badly.
Your 'charitable' objections to withholding the vaccination, however, plainly rely on the rejection of those distinctions, so that it can seem plausible that failing to prevent the possibility of death amounts to instituting a death penalty. Of course, once we restore the distinction between doing something and allowing it to happen, that idea looks absurd. My failing to protect you against some potential danger is just not the same thing as subjecting you to the actual harm. So, while it certainly may be 'disproportionate' and 'unfair' that some people 'suffer the consequences' while others don't, it isn't actually a penalty, and isn't subject to that sort of evaluation.
Finally, I do think there's something to the charge that you haven't taken the alleged impermissibility of (certain kinds of) sex very seriously. Even apart from the problems with your 'death penalty' argument, your 'charity' seems more like assigning an imaginary fuzzy numeric value to the 'badness' of sex and concluding that the costs are outweighed by the benefits. Taking the issue seriously, though, would involve considering certain sorts of sex under descriptions that make clear why they are to be avoided. I'll leave it to your imagination to do that, but I doubt that it will matter much. After all, you've indicated that you're perfectly happy to bite the bullet of the heroin analogy, indeed, you don't even think of it as a bullet to bite.
Thus, I suspect that the difference between you and your dissenters is a very different picture of the relationship between goods worth pursuing, right action, and our relationship to both of these as agents. From my perspective, none of your arguments hold water, but they're directed at a very reasonable point: parents should protect their children against harm, even where that harm can only come about as the result of moral error and even where providing protection might make a child more willing to take risks. This point makes sense when we're talking about sex, but not when we're talking about using heroin, because of important differences between the two. The people who actually intend to withhold these vaccinations from their children -- rather than quarreling with you about philosophical reasons for accepting or rejecting that decision -- are deplorable only insofar as they are mistaken, either about the effects that the vaccination will have on their children's actions or about the real value of the goods and the harms that motivate their decisions. After all, the people we're talking about (some? most of them?) are motivated primarily by the desire to guide their children towards what they conceive as the right orientation towards the proper goals in life. If they're just wrong about what the proper goals are, or about what the effects of a vaccination on their children's behavior will be, then it will be best if they can be corrected. But it's hard to take seriously the claim that they're deplorable.
A quick note on Nathan's response to the heroin analogy and liberalism: the heroin analogy was intended to show that it would be reasonable for individuals to decide not to protect others against a harm that could only be inflicted as the result of moral error. It was not an argument about what a government should do at all; the argument was, all along, that the governments shouldn't compel anybody to take vaccinations which aren't demonstrably a matter of public health (as HPV might conceivably be, but I don't know). Even if a truly liberalist government shouldn't stake any claim about the value of heroin use (which may not be the case), the analogy had nothing to do with that at all. What the argument was supposed to show was that we, as moral agents rather than as political policy makers, can have good reasons to refrain from protecting someone from a harm that is only possible as the result of a moral error.
ReplyDeleteI agree with just about everything else you say about liberalism, and take the qualities of liberalism that you describe as flaws. But that wasn't the point of the heroin argument, which apparently didn't do the work it was intended to do anyway.
Sorry if I was unclear.
Maybe I'm confused. You appealed to the alleged lack of a relevant distinction between doing and allowing in support of the claim that the people who fail to administer vaccinations for HPV cause the deaths of the people who die from HPV.
ReplyDeleteNo, that wasn't my point. We're mixing up several issues here. People who merely refrain from vaccinating children who go on to develop cervical cancer are not the people I'm considering. One might argue (1) that they are morally responsible for the cancer, or (2) that they caused the cancer, but I'm not arguing for either of those things.
The subjects of the above paragraphs merely "refrain from vaccinating". So who are they? Maybe parents... maybe bystanders who happen to have vaccines on their persons. If I happen to have a needle of vaccine in my hand, and I see a mother and her infant girl passing me on the street, I will refrain from vaccinating her. But, even if she goes on to develop cervical cancer as a result of HPV, I don't think that I'm morally responsible for this, or that I caused her cancer. (I may, however, wish, in retrospect, that I had vaccinated her. Her mother would have been incensed, and I might've gone to jail, but it would have saved her life!)
The people I'm talking about are the people who are at (causal) play in determining which policy will be enacted: one (B) requiring vaccinations, or one (A) not doing so. These are people like legislators, and the people, like the groups I am responding to, who attempt to (causally!) influence legislators. Here is a fact that is not in dispute: if policy A is chosen, more people will die of cervical cancer than would die of cervical cancer if policy B were chosen. This is common knowledge to all parties in the debate. Choosing policy A causes the consequences of policy A to come about -- including those deaths. So choosing policy A causes those extra deaths.
I'm not really interested in getting into a discussion of the metaphysics of causation. I take it to be obvious that choosing policy A causes the deaths, but if you think that causation has to involve energy transfer or something like that, then this is not a case of causation. That's fine. I'll rest my case on "knowingly choosing a policy that will result in many deaths". I don't care whether this counts as causing the deaths or not. The relevant consideration is about moral responsibility.
The upshot on the analogy with the woman alone at night should be obvious. There may be good reasons not to go walk with the woman that I see over there: she may feel threatened by my presense, or I may have somewhere important to be, or she may prefer to be alone. These considerations are all relevant. (This is like the fact that there may be good reasons to withhold the vaccine, as in the case where a stranger walks by me.) If I don't help her and she gets mugged, I'm not necessarily responsible, and it's not very plausible that I caused the mugging.
On the other hand, if the local police department was considering putting up more street lights in the neighborhood and increasing patrols, and I convince them not to do so, it is more plausible that I am responsible for the mugging.
We may tighten the analogy. Suppose that crime is high in the neighborhood in question, and that most of the time, the victim is a prostitute. The police are considering installing security phones and more street lights, in order to make it more safe. But James argues: prostitution is immoral. Why should we take steps to make prostitutes safer? He convinces the city not to make that neighborhood safer.
Later, Susan, a prostitute, is raped in that neighborhood, and so is Jenny, a non-prostitute. Neither rape would have occurred if the safety measures had been put in place.
It seems obvious that James incurs some responsibility for at both rapes. Even if you think he's only responsible for Jenny's rape (Susan brought things on herself), that's enough -- for just as there are good, morally unobjectionable reasons for women to walk through that neighborhood (even though lots of women there are prostitutes), so are there good, morally unobjectionable reasons for women to have sex (even though, on the assumption I'm granting, premarital sex is morally wrong, and lots of women are having premarital sex).