Month: December 2007

Rejecting a collectivist concept of human rights.

Following up on my entry questioning Dr. Richard Shweder’s analysis in defending subjective justifications of male genital cutting by eliminating any consideration for the individual. He responded with more:

In an earlier comment (comment #59) I made brief note of some of the weaknesses in the standard human rights discussions of this topic (both there and here I am recounting published material in the two essays for which links were provided on the November 30 and December 5 Tierneylab). What I did not note in my earlier comment was that one of the more problematic aspects of a human rights argument for those engaged in the global eradication campaign is that the global eradication campaign itself appears to violate several recognizable or conceivable human rights. A short list of such rights includes the right of peoples and nations to autonomy and self-determination, the right of parents to raise their children as they see fit, the right of members of a family to be free of government intrusion into decisions that are private, the right of members of a group to favor their own cultural traditions in the education and socialization of their children, even the right to freedom of religion. …

I can only believe that Dr. Shweder is making this up as he goes along. He has a desired outcome. When no map to his outcome exists, he’ll create one and pretend it represents reality. Note the key foundation he uses, “recognizable or conceivable human rights.” He’s on an island with his conception. The whole notion is absurd.

Conceivably, conceivable could work. Standards of civilization progress, as evidenced by so many changes mankind has brought about demonstrate. Two hundred years ago, slavery fit within the widely accepted notion of a natural order. Today we not only know that to be false, we do not pardon those who believed such blasphemy over what they should’ve known. We understand the context, of course, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental problem.

Dr. Shweder doesn’t seek to progress properly. He ignores the individual’s supreme role in the existence of competing rights. Should the individual’s right face conflict from the group’s alleged claim on his body, Dr. Shweder does not dismiss the latter as subservient. The individual may choose to submit, but choice must exist. Dr. Shweder leaves as reasonable that the group may legitimately override the potentially contrary wishes of the individual. If enough people agree, the majority owns the minority. Unless we’re resurrecting the notion that slavery has a place in mankind, the conflict Dr. Shweder imagines is a mistake. Without medical need, it can never be correct to force bodily modification on another person. The “right of members of a family to be free of government intrusion into decisions that are private” does not grant members of a family to harm other members of the family.

Dr. Shweder writes of the “right of peoples and nations to autonomy and self-determination,” but only the individual has such a right. Collectively groups must reach their own outcomes. Extraneous, subjective input may be provide guidance, but it must never dictate. Still, that outcome must be a never-ending series of individual choices resulting in macro-level reality within society. Dr. Shweder’s suggestion leaves open the question of whether or not it’s legitimate to force downward from within, when that question is a settled “no” beyond the realm of the individual.

The uniquely American love of baseball throughout the 20th century is an example. Citizen or immigrant, rich or poor, white or black, distinction didn’t matter; Americans loved baseball. It inspired heroes and poetry, dreams and faith. The individual who did not embrace baseball may have faced scrutiny, but attempts to force him to love baseball would’ve violated a core more valuable and basic than baseball. No man is less an American if he fails to include baseball in his life.

The same truth exists for the individual who wishes to reject the surgical alteration of his or her genitals. He may not exercise his right to reject it, but he must be given the choice. Any category of supposed rights that excludes this is a fallacy not consisting of actual rights. Such a category must be discarded from the debate.

Use the word “torture” in the headline.

Speaking of “evolving standards of decency”, we’re not always moving in the correct direction:

The House approved legislation yesterday that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, drawing an immediate veto threat from the White House and setting up another political showdown over what constitutes torture.

The measure, approved by a largely party-line vote of 222 to 199, would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding. It also would require interrogators to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The rules, required by Congress for all Defense Department personnel, also ban sexual humiliation, “mock” executions and the use of attack dogs, and prohibit the withholding of food and medical care.
…

The White House vowed to veto the measure. Limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual “would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.

The passage of this bill in the House is correct, although it’s years overdue. The Senate should do the same.

The Bush administration’s immediate rejection of adhering to our existing laws and treaty commitments is shameful. It wants only vague restrictions on itself, with the option to define the interpretation of those vague rules. That is contrary to everything our republic is supposed to represent. Few are still shocked by this, but that does not validate its approach.

Other provisions of the intelligence bill also drew criticism from the White House, including a measure that would require regular reports to Congress on the CIA’s detention and interrogation methods, and on any Justice Department legal justifications for those methods.

This provision, the OMB said, would require from the president “information that may be constitutionally protected from disclosure,” which, if made public, “could impair foreign relations [and] national security.”

If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to be afraid of. Right? Isn’t that what we’re told when the administration wants the option to spy at will? Of course the truth is more complicated, but the Bush administration needs to be accountable to the American people, not the other way around. This is not a dictatorship, despite its apparent aspirations.

John Cole is right when he states:

Bush is a petulant child surrounded by a coterie of scared men who seem to think the world is so dangerous they need not act in accordance to established law, and they really don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. They want all the benefits of pretending to be the world’s moral authority, all the while behaving like despots. January 2009 can not come fast enough.

I’ll echo the last sentence, but only because Congress is guilty of dereliction carrying out its duties. There is no valid reason that President Bush should still be in office.

Good Riddance

I commend this news, even if it doesn’t become a trend:

New Jersey lawmakers on Thursday became the first in the nation to abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court restored it in 1976. Opponents of capital punishment hope the state’s action may prompt a rethinking of the moral and practical implications of the practice in other states.

New Jersey’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly voted 44 to 36 on Thursday to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life in prison without parole. The action followed a similar vote by the state Senate on Monday. Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat and a death penalty opponent, has said he will sign the legislation.

The repeal bill follows the recommendation of a state commission that reported in January that the death penalty “is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency.” …

Indeed. But how this happens is a useful lesson, whatever the topic.

… But equally persuasive to lawmakers was not saving lives but money — it costs more to keep a prisoner indefinitely on death row than incarcerated for life.

There can be a hierarchy of valid reasons to undertake (or prohibit) an action. But what the advocate deems most important is irrelevant in a debate. Convincing others is a better achievement than demonstrating one’s own brilliance.

But mostly, ending the death penalty is great.

Steroids can’t make a pitch curve.

I don’t have much to say about the newly-released Mitchell Report. It’s an illegitimate waste of government time in pursuit of a political quest for ever-expanding power. Not interested. As I wrote when Rep. Tom Davis first brought this nonsense into the federal sphere:

When Rep. Davis called the inquiry into steroids in Major League Baseball, how was that not a conspiracy to seize power? It may have involved one sport industry, but Rep. Davis seemed to enjoy threatening MLB with greater congressional control if it didn’t implement a policy banning a drug that’s already illegal. I don’t think any major sport in America explicitly bans its players from money laundering, drunk driving, murder or income tax evasion, yet we never have hearings about those, even though players have been involved in all of those offenses.

My stance is unchanged. And my basic understanding of liberty requires that steroids be decriminalized.

As for the situation at hand, Major League Baseball would ban steroids in my ideal world. As a group of consenting individuals, it would be free to do so. It would level the playing field to talent alone, which is what I want to see as a fan.

Of course, it would be free to ignore my preference, too, which it clearly did throughout the latter part of the ’90s. John Cole expresses my sentiments on the shock at the report’s finding:

Imagine if, in ten years, the GOP and the media decide to get outraged about intelligence being finessed before the Iraq war, they launch an investigation, and then get shocked when they see what they find. That is the level of stupid this baseball steroid report is right now.

Naturally that doesn’t preclude politicians from going to the for the children defense of our collective outrage:

Recalling that he had raised the steroids issue in a State of the Union speech a couple of years ago, Bush said he did so “because I understand the impact that professional athletes can have on our nation’s youth.” He urged athletes “to understand that when they violate their bodies, they’re sending a terrible signal to America’s young.”

When we force our subjective opinions onto the actions of others, it sends a terrible signal to America’s young that it’s okay to be meddlesome moralists opposed to the liberty of the individual. For the mental development of our youth, I’d say what we’re teaching is far worse than what a handful of athletes are (allegedly) teaching.

Post Script: Russ Roberts sums up the best way to read the names on the list and how detrimental these allegations are (not) to my opinion of the players.

“It’s kind of a random proximity thing.”

I’m not going to claim a large tale of woe. I’m fine, and I expect to stay that way. But having a chunk of my neck excised to remove my first basal cell carcinoma marks today as less than one of the highlights of my life. I say first because, with my fair skin, I don’t expect it to be my last. Joy. Wear sunscreen.

Rather than meditate on life in a way that seems irrationally melodramatic given the circumstances, I’ll take this opportunity to say how grateful I am for American health care. Whatever its faults may be, it worked for me in this instance. I say that even though I’m paying the entire expense out-of-pocket because I have a high-deductible insurance plan. (Sometimes, I actually walk my talk.) We need to be very careful how we encourage politicians to interfere. Turn them lose and they’ll bulldoze our system of care, not the system of political incentives that are the real problem.

With that, my wound is throbbing. I’m going to mindlessly play video games.

P.S. Link title reference here.

Be scared to scar your baby boy.

Bernadine Healy M.D. writes an ethics-free, logic-free essay in the latest U.S. News & World Report on male circumcision. She mostly offers the recycled nonsense promoted by people uninterested in thinking the issue through. However, Dr. Healy searches for a new bottom in the discussion. She comes as close to stating it as anyone I’ve read:

I caution parents, however, against delaying the decision until the child is old enough to decide for himself. Get real. Not many teenage boys would relish the discussion, let alone the act. Nor do I think they would have the perspective to weigh the medical pros and cons.

So, because he would not relish the discussion or the act, it’s better to force it on him as an infant? As if his presumed refusal as a teenager is not a timeless opinion, as true when he’s 13 hours old as it is when he’s 13 years old. And how unfairly low does your opinion of teens have to be to guess that he wouldn’t have the perspective to understand that his foreskin is healthy and doesn’t require surgical removal? How unfairly high is your opinion of parents if you trust that they’re worried more about his (absurdly low) risk of HIV than the risk that daddy junior will freak when he sees that junior daddy looks different?

In a time when it is appropriate to question the use or overuse of certain medical procedures, however minor they might seem, having these discussions in medical journals and in public circles is healthy.

Just don’t have them with your kid when it’s his genitals at stake. He might not understand. He might even say “no”. Otherwise, yeah, let’s discuss this.

What is not healthy in this free flow of ideas is to diminish the real abuse of female genital mutilation with a trumped-up portrayal of the “abuse” that infant circumcision allegedly exacts on our helpless baby boys.

This is the obtuse thinking of a dullard. For (not) the last time, comparing male and female genital cutting does not diminish what is done to girls. That is evil. It is unnecessary. It should not occur. It is a basic violation of the right to remain free from harm.

But the exact same thing is perpetrated upon boys. That is evil. It is unnecessary. It should not occur. It is a basic violation of the right to remain free from harm.

There is nothing complicated about understanding this. The mutilation of boys rises to the level of unacceptability of what is done to girls. No one is saying that the comparison now justifies cutting girls. Stop hearing what you want to hear and listen to what is being said. Medically unnecessary genital cutting on non-consenting individuals is wrong, ethically and morally. Gender is not a factor in the violation.

The individual possesses non-derogable rights.

Carrying his earlier argument to a new realm, one government official understands basic political philosophy.

Tasmania’s Commissioner for Children has again called on the State Government to review laws covering the circumcision of baby boys for cosmetic reasons.
…

“If I have a religious obligation, a religious belief that my child should do X, Y and Z and that conflicts directly with a human right of the child, then the human right of the child will prevail,” Mr [Paul] Mason said.

That’s exactly right. The right to remain free from harm is primary. When an action will cause objective harm to another without his or her consent or need, it is not valid to subjegate that most basic human right to any claim made by another person. Any other right, particularly the alleged right of one person to act on another, is secondary (if it is legitimate).

**********

Compare that to the follow-up to the John Tierney entry on female genital mutilation I discussed last week. Mr. Tierney seeks a clarification from University of Chicago anthropologist Richard Shweder. In his clarification attempting to dispassionately explain the realities of genital cutting for cultural reasons, Dr. Shweder states:

“Female genital mutilation” is an invidious and essentially debate-subverting label. The preemptive use of that expression is just as invidious as starting a conversation about a women’s right to choose by describing abortion as the “murder of innocent life.” Pro-choice advocates rightly object to the presumptive disparagement implied by that label; many African women similarly object to naming a practice which they describe in local terms as “the celebration” or the “purification” or the “cleansing” or the “beautification” as “the mutilation”. Notably in most ethnic groups where female genital surgeries are customary, male genital surgeries are customary as well and are named with the same terms.

Overall I felt Dr. Shweder presented a dispassionate analysis of the objective issues at hand. The point, as I understood it, was to leave out cultural and value judgments on the actions. One can say “this is what it does” without ruling on whether that’s valid. Making that judgment is valid, of course, but we should all start by understanding the facts.

I submitted a comment, which can be read here. I conceded that I’m not dispassionate about this, and stated the basic truth that each individual must be left to decide. However, I also read a subjective acceptance of male genital cutting into Dr. Shweder’s initial comment, which I mistakenly retracted here. I say mistakenly because Dr. Shweder posted a further clarification:

Secondly, some components of the statement of the right (a right to “develop…in conditions of freedom…”) seem to deny the reality of normal and healthy developmental processes and development promoting social relationships, which are often commanding and hierarchical and always constraining and limiting of options, often to a rather high degree. For example, children are not free to decide not to go to school or not to have an inoculation; they are not free to decide to move to some new residence or location, or to select the religion that will be practiced at home, etc. etc. A very particular and culture-specific (and perhaps social class specific) kind of liberationist or radical autonomy perspective (of the kind advocated by one commentator) seems to have been written into this rather ideologically loaded (and hence subjective) formulation of a supposed “natural right.” The moral order consists of many and often conflicting “goods” and values, of which unrestrained freedom of choice for every individual is not necessarily the only good.

Even the idea of a right to bodily integrity seems problematic as a possible foundation for criticizing this particular kind of socially endorsed genital alteration. For one thing, if there is a natural human right to bodily integrity of the type supposed, it would extend to the practice of male genital surgeries as well, and might well run counter to the rights to religious freedom and family privacy of Jews and Muslims around the world. (I am prepared to defend the rights of Jews and Muslims, and others, to circumcise their infant sons and have discussed the issue of gender equity in this regard in the essay for which a link was provided above. One of the many reasons I became interested in this topic was because of my awareness of an association of ugly attitudes toward Jewish minority groups with the ready and rhetorically loaded description of them as barbaric “mutilators” of their children.)

Secondly[sic], it is not at all clear what “the integrity of the human body” actually amounts to, once the overheated and sensationalized morbidity, mortality and sexual dysfunction claims are viewed with a cautious or skeptical eye. As noted above from the cultural perspective of Jews, Muslims and those Africans (Muslim and non-Muslim) who “circumcise” their children (both boys and girls) the human body lacks integrity (contains unbidden, immature, problematic or even ugly and disgusting components) until it is improved, purified and made “normal” by means of cultural intervention and the status conferring procedure of a genital modification.

To be fair, what comes before this is mostly sensible in challenging the notion that all female genital cutting is uniform. I can’t vouch for the validity of his specifics, but the human imagination’s ability to create invasive rituals is not rigid in its degrees of cruelty, nor does it obsess on gender as a dividing criteria. Opponents of forced genital cutting of either sex have a strong enough stance on principle that it would be wise to stop falling into unquestioning assumptions that rely upon female oppression and male benefits as the sole storyline.

Unfortunately the excerpt above is so maddeningly idiotic that it destroys whatever credibility Dr. Shweder built before this mental detour. I could spend all the bandwidth of the Internet rebutting these three paragraphs in sufficient detail. Most of the ridiculousness seems to stem from Dr. Shweder’s refusal to acknowledge the individual’s place within a culture. If enough people value something, the dissenter’s opinion may be ignored. That is simply wrong in the context of rights. Dr. Shweder’s preference does not fit that reality, so he creates his own structure of societal obligations masquerading as rights.

Rereading Commissioner Mason’s statement above clarifies what Dr. Shweder misses. Cultural perspective is not objective. Just because a large number of people believe something does not make it true. Humans are fallible. Ultimately, Dr. Shweder (and all proponents of forced genital cutting
, in general) misses because his foundational assumption is flawed. Whether or not an individual rejects the beliefs of his society is not the issue. Whether or not he has the option to reject them is.

In my view, the culture’s opinion is valid if the individual wishes to submit. In Dr. Shweder’s view, the individual’s opinion is not valid if the group wishes submission.

Oops. Do over?

I like Megan McArdle’s analysis of the sub-prime bailout:

On a moral level, I’m with the latter group: people who qualify for the bailout are mostly people who really should have known better; they will now be bailed out mostly by people who did know better.

On a macroeconomic level, placing blame is somewhat counterproductive. Those who have sensible, fixed mortgages will not really be made happier if the credit crunch turns into a liquidity crisis, the economy plunges into a deep recession, and they lose their jobs, forcing them to default on their sensible, fixed mortgages.

I largely agree with this, and I say that as someone who has a fixed-rate mortgage taken out during the period included in the plan. Unfortunately, too much rests on the if in that last sentence. I don’t think this deal prevents the negatives as much as it delays them. And I worry about how much worse parts of the impending problem will be because we pretended as though we could make them go away by wishing hard enough.

In my opinion, a willingness to tolerate high levels of moral hazard–to give people second, and third, and eighth chances without inquiring too closely about how they got into so much trouble–is one of the great strengths of the American system. It makes us happier as people, and it lets our society make use of human capital that is too often left moldering in (metaphorical) debtor’s prison under the more punitive and moralistic regimes that prevail in the rest of the world.

Again, I agree with the larger view, as it pertains to our wisdom in permitting failure. It creates a dynamic ability to rebound. But rewarding the failed without demanding the necessary consequences of the failure only encourages the first, second, and seventh failures in the next foreseeable disaster.

Their agitation is morally unacceptable.

Religious prudishness is not surprising. It’s nice, though, when it’s advocates do not pretend that they demand laws based on rights. Regarding Alabama’s current ban (and current efforts to repeal the ban) on the sale of sex toys in the state:

Dan Ireland, executive director of the Alabama Citizens’ Action Program, a Baptist group, said it would oppose any effort to overturn the law.

“Laws are made to protect the public,” he said. “Sometimes you have to protect the public against themselves.”
…

“Sexual matters are not to become a nuisance to people and the community,” he said. “We have enough problems with sexual-oriented crimes without enticing or promoting it.”

Sometimes I forget, sex is for procreation only. If it’s engaged in with intention to not procreate – or if it’s enjoyed, even during procreation – we’re just enticing the devil to rape America.

I don’t care how sexually repressed an individual chooses to be. But his personal religious beliefs do not deserve any credible reverence in American government. Any branch of government that respects this perverts liberty in favor of mob rule.

From The Bitch Girls, via Hit & Run.