If embryos are babies, then in-vitro fertilization is immoral

Alabama and the GOP are discovering what this blog pointed out 15 years ago--if you're going to adopt a policy that embryos are full bearers of moral personhood, then you can't allow in-vitro fertilization (IVF). From my five-part debate with Vocab Malone about abortion in 2009:

Once the zygote becomes a blastocyst, it forms into an outer layer of cells, which later becomes the placenta, and an inner cell mass of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, each of which is capable of differentiating into any kind of human cell. Only after this stage does the blastocyst implant in the wall of the uterus, about a week after fertilization, and begin taking nutrients directly from the blood of the mother--a dependency that can itself be of moral significance, as Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist argument shows. As already mentioned above, a great many fertilized ova do not reach this stage. Further, the percentages of implant failure are higher for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure which Vocab's criteria would have to declare unethical, even though it is the only way that many couples can have their own biological offspring.

I made the same point earlier in a comment on a podcast interview with atheist anti-abortion advocate Jen Roth (comments are no longer present but I reiterated it in response to Malone):

Was Jen Roth ultimately arguing that personhood is something that a human organism has for its entire lifecycle? At what starting point? Conception, implantation, or something else?

I find it completely implausible that an organism at a life stage with no capacity for perception, let alone reason, counts as a person. Nor that a particular genetic code is either necessary or sufficient for personhood.

I think every point that she made was brought up in a debate I had with a Christian blogger on the topic of abortion, who similarly argued for an equation between personhood and human organism. I wonder if she has any better rejoinders. Does she think that IVF and therapeutic cloning are immoral? IUDs?

The naive anti-abortion position is philosophically and scientifically unsupportable and leads to bad public policy, and today's GOP consists of a majority struggling to avoid it and a minority that is full-steam ahead and prepared to ban IVF and contraception.

The full debate between Vocab Malone and myself was spread across our respective blogs.  My contributions were:

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 1 (December 11, 2009)

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 2 (December 13, 2009)

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 3 (December 16, 2009)

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 4 (December 18, 2009)

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 5 (December 19, 2009)

And, finally, perhaps most apt to the current situation, was this exchange from the following year:

Does Vocab Malone understand the implications of his own position? (November 15, 2010)

Vocab's response is that he does think IVF is immoral, except perhaps for some hypothetical version he doesn't describe, that perhaps involves adopting all the "snowflake babies" and removing and reimplanting excessive multiple births into surrogates. (But that still doesn't address the implantation failure rate!)

Does Vocab Malone understand the implications of his own position?

Vocab Malone, with whom I had a blog debate about abortion and personhood last year, recently came across this comment of mine on the Point of Inquiry podcast with Jen Roth, an atheist who argues for the immorality of abortion:

Was Jen Roth ultimately arguing that personhood is something that a human organism has for its entire lifecycle? At what starting point? Conception, implantation, or something else?

I find it completely implausible that an organism at a life stage with no capacity for perception, let alone reason, counts as a person. Nor that a particular genetic code is either necessary or sufficient for personhood.

I think every point that she made was brought up in a debate I had with a Christian blogger on the topic of abortion, who similarly argued for an equation between personhood and human organism. I wonder if she has any better rejoinders. Does she think that IVF and therapeutic cloning are immoral? IUDs?

Vocab claimed that my argument was a "Chewbacca argument," a smoke screen, or a slippery slope argument, but in fact it is none of these.  I posted the following comment in response to him:

Vocab:

The argument I made is not a slippery slope argument, it's a reductio ad absurdum.  Your position is that the human organism is a person and has a right to life from fertilization to death (and presumably beyond), so you've already gone down the "slippery slope" and must of necessity say that IVF, therapeutic cloning, and IUDs are immoral because they result in the destruction and death of fertilized ova.  My position is that it is absurd to think that these things are immoral, and if you were to avoid the slippery slope by agreeing with me, you would have contradicted a logical consequence of your own position--thus, a reductio ad absurdum by being committed to a proposition and its negation.

A slippery slope argument is an argument that says your position is committed to some consequence because there is no criterion that you can use to draw a line to avoid.  For example, if I argued that your position committed you to giving a right to life to all animals, and required you to be a vegetarian, or that it required you to give a right to life to every organism with DNA, and required you to hold a position like the Jain religion that all killing is wrong.

As it happens, you never did supply an account of just what it is about the human organism that gives it a right to life or personhood--you offered no constitutive account of what properties entail a right to life or personhood, other than a genetic one.  I made the case near the end of our debate that you are probably implicitly assuming that personhood comes from a soul, and that souls are connected to human organisms at the point of fertilization, but there's clearly no evidence for that position, scientific, philosophical, or theological.

BTW, my argument is also clearly not a Chewbacca argument or smoke screen, which is a simple non sequitur.  To think that, you would have to fail to understand that the items I identified all result in the destruction of fertilized human ova.

It's important to note that not all slippery slope arguments are fallacious--if there really is no criterion to stop the fall down the slope, the argument is valid.  As Vocab never did explain what it is about human organisms that make them rights-bearers, I think he does face the slippery slope argument I presented unless he can offer some criterion for distinguishing human organisms from other organisms with respect to having a right to life.

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 5

Vocab has put up the fifth and final part of his essay on abortion and personhood up at his blog, devoted to Thomson's violinist argument. I don't really have much to say about it--we didn't coordinate our posts in advance, and I've already discussed Thomson's argument myself in my response to part 4. I disagree with Vocab's claim that Thomson's argument proves too much and would allow infanticide--her argument only addresses a physically dependent fetus. And, as I already pointed out in my prior response, the argument doesn't prove as much as it purports to. The violinist case isn't exactly analogous to pregnancy and abortion in a number of ways, and Vocab is right to point out the differences. I agree that if a pregnancy is allowed to go to term (as well as to some earlier point at which there is plausible evidence for personhood on my standard), then that entails at least tacit consent and a moral duty of care. I would still argue, however, that abortion would be legitimate beyond that point for medically justifiable reasons (e.g., endangered health and life of the mother). This position--like the current position of the courts, which I think is approximately correct despite being based on viability--points out that there are more than two polar opposite positions in this debate.

In Vocab's final part, he talks a bit about the work that he and his wife do in caring for foster children. I commend him for that work, which is all-too-rare among opponents of abortion.

Thanks, Vocab, for the debate--and I still would like to hear a response from you in the comments on some of the issues that have been left hanging (e.g., in the comments on part 3).

UPDATE: It would probably be better to end this discussion with a summary that I already made in the comments on part 3:

We don't disagree that there is continuity of organism (just as there is continuity of a population of organisms over time)--all life on this planet is connected in that way. But just as we don't count every species as human, even in our own genetic lineage, we don't count every life stage of individual human organisms as persons. There's a sense in which "I" was once a zygote that had my same DNA, but at that stage there was no "me" there yet--there was nothing that it was like to be a zygote, to use Thomas Nagel's expression. In that same sense that "I" was a zygote, "I" will be a dead body in the future, even though there will at that point be nothing that it is like to be me, and the person that I am will be gone from the world though my body will briefly remain.

I think we understand each other's positions. You think that being a human organism is the same thing as to be a person, while I think personhood is a feature that comes into existence and persists for a subset of the life of an organism, that requires capacities of sentience or self-awareness.

But I think I can give reasons to support why my view makes moral, legal, and practical sense, and why human cultures and practices are more consistent with my view than yours. I don't think you can give such reasons, other than the brute assertion that human organisms are persons from start to finish. Your view has no need of the notion of person, yet it seems to me that there are all sorts of practical, moral, and legal reasons why we do need and use such a notion.

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 4

Vocab Malone has posted the fourth part of his essay on abortion and personhood, addressing the arguments from viability and wantedness. These are two more arguments that I don't place a whole lot of stock in, though perhaps some commenters will want to say more about.

The viability criterion is significant in that it's the basis of current federal case law on abortion since Roe v. Wade, but Vocab correctly notes that viability changes with the availability of technology, and that doesn't seem like a feature that should be relevant to whether one is a person. On the other hand, it is relevant to the notion of dependence--pre-viability is a time where, if you do grant that a fetus is a person, it's a person that is dependent for its existence upon another person. This raises questions of when it is morally permissible for a person upon whom another is dependent for their life to sever that dependence. Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument on abortion, which I referred to earlier in my response to part 1 of Vocab's essay, presents the following scenario:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, "Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you." Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. "Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him."

My intuition is that in this scenario, it is morally supererogatory to remain connected to the violinist--it is not a moral requirement. The problem with this scenario is that it isn't quite analogous to pregnancy except in case of rape. If one gave voluntary consent to be connected to the violinist to save his life, it seems that one would have a moral duty to see it through. That raises the question of what constitutes "voluntary consent" with respect to pregnancy, which may occur accidentally or unintentionally despite use of contraception, for example. And note again that this scenario only applies in the case where personhood is taken as given, which I've been arguing is definitely not the case in early stages of a pregnancy.

The argument from wantedness, like the argument from viability, doesn't appear to be offer a criterion of personhood, but it is of course relevant to the overall abortion debate. Bringing into being persons who are not wanted and aren't going to be cared for is something that should be avoided, since the odds are not good for children in such circumstances. A controversial argument in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book Freakonomics is that there's a correlation between abortion rates and declining crime rates--i.e., the authors argued that a consequence of the unavailability of abortion is more unwanted children who become criminals. If that argument is correct (and I personally wouldn't bet on it), that's a form of evidence in favor of the availability of legal abortion, though I don't think it trumps a personhood argument. [NOTE (added Nov. 24, 2012): Levitt and Dubner's argument is thoroughly debunked in chapter 3 of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (pp. 119-121).  Freakonomics in general is found to be filled with errors in a review in the American Scientist by Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung.]

Vocab quotes from a book by abortion doctor Suzanne Poppema about her own abortion, in which she says to her embryo, "I’m very sorry that this is happening to you but there’s just no way that you can come into existence right now." He identifies this as "confused logic," since clearly the embryo already exists. I agree with Vocab that she has written this statement in an apparently confused way, but it could be made coherent if she had written of the embryo developing into a person or of a person coming into existence, which is probably what she meant to imply.

Continue to part five.

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 3

Vocab Malone has posted the third part of his argument against abortion at his blog, focusing on what he calls "the argument from size." As I don't think there's any plausibility to this argument, I won't spend any time with it, but there are still a few things in his post that I think demand response. The first is the assertion Vocab quotes from "prolific pro-life trainer and speaker Scott Klusendorf" that he always encounters this argument when he speaks at Christian schools. I find this assertion very difficult to believe--I don't think I've ever encountered this argument anywhere, and I suspect that Klusendorf is either intentionally or unintentionally misconstruing some other argument as this argument. (Would he consider Randy Newman's song, "Short People," to be an instance of the argument, given its lyric, "short people got no reason to live"?)

The instance of the argument Vocab suggests is nothing of the sort, though at least he admits that it is an argument about another subject. Here's the quote as Vocab presents it:

From the other end of things, a recent New York Times article featured a similar argument (although his piece was on a broader topic than abortion):

Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else? … We do not see cells, simple or complex – we see people, human life. That thing in a petri dish is something else. [2]

The quote is from a New York Times editorial by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga about the difference between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Here's the quotation in context; it's the ending of the piece:

In his State of the Union speech, President Bush went on to observe that "human life is a gift from our creator — and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale." Putting aside the belief in a "creator," the vast majority of the world's population takes a similar stance on valuing human life. What is at issue, rather, is how we are to define "human life." Look around you. Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else?

Most humans practice a kind of dualism, seeing a distinction between mind and body. We all automatically confer a higher order to a developed biological entity like a human brain. We do not see cells, simple or complex — we see people, human life. That thing in a petri dish is something else. It doesn't yet have the memories and loves and hopes that accumulate over the years. Until this is understood by our politicians, the gallant efforts of so many biomedical scientists, as good as they are, will remain only stopgap measures.

Vocab has removed a critical piece of what Gazzaniga wrote--he's not making anything like an argument from size, but rather an argument much more like my position, as seen in what Vocab omitted with his ellipsis and immediately following what he quoted. The piece as a whole is taking issue with the conflation of reproductive and therapeutic cloning, with the idea that the latter involves creating cloned people, and Gazzaniga's position seems to be that this confusion occurs because people are thinking of and talking about undifferentiated cells as though they are people--the same thing that is occuring in this very debate. (BTW, the president's Council on Bioethics, of which Gazzaniga was a member, argued that therapeutic, but not reproductive cloning should be permissible. My view is that while there are currently issues of knowledge and technology that could result in harm to cloned people, in the long run I don't see any ethical difference between reproductive cloning and natural reproduction, so long as the products of each get equal treatment on the same standard of personhood.)

Vocab suggests it would have been better to call this the "just a bunch of cells" argument, but that's really not an argument based on size, but rather an argument based on structure, function, and capacity--which is a good argument! I suspect that this is, in fact, the sort of argument that Klusendorf is misconstruing.

Next Vocab gives an argument from essences:

can any living being become anything else besides what it already is? How can something become a person unless its essence is already personhood? If the color blue is only blue and not the color red in the same way at the same time, its very essence – its fundamental property – must be blue and not red. Another example is that of the tadpole and frog. The tadpole is simply a name for a specific stage during a frog’s development. If one were to terminate a certain tadpole, then a certain frog would be terminated and no longer exist. This means you did not come from a fetus you once were a fetus.

The answer to the first question is clearly yes--there are all kinds of metamorphoses that occur in living things while they are alive, including changes of shape, color, size, and sex. And when they die, they can become parts of other things--just as other things become part of them when they come into existence, develop, and change. The second question is, I think, flawed. First, I don't think it's correct to regard personhood as a fixed, unchanging property. Douglas Hofstadter's book, I Am A Strange Loop, argues that self concepts not only develop over time, but can be shared across persons. Second, the question implies that anything that is a person is always and eternally a person and cannot be constructed out of something else. But on everybody's views, human beings are biological organisms, which come into and go out of existence in virtue of the states of their underlying components. Both the view Vocab has been defending and mine say that there are biological components which are not persons, which through some change of state subsequently become persons. If Vocab wants to hold a view by which personhood is an essential property of a simple substance, then he can do that by holding a dualistic view of an eternal soul which is a person that attaches at some point to a human as a biological animal. But if that's his view, then that's the argument we should be having, rather than one in which Vocab is defending a view like animalism.

Vocab makes a subsequent statement that I think vividly illustrates the error in his view:

One way to think about the idea of probability (or potentiality) is that every adult was once an unborn person, just as every oak tree was once an acorn. An acorn is simply a mini-oak tree, just as a microscopic person is a mini-human.

But that last sentence is just false. Acorns are not miniature oak trees and zygotes are not miniature people. That's precisely the error that Gazzaniga is warning against in his article.

Vocab subsequently makes a point about skulls being crushed in an abortion procedure, and on that point he's correct--embryos do develop into fetuses, they do develop identifiable distinct parts and functions, and at some point they do become miniature people, but they don't pop into existence as such.

Continue to part four.

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 2

Vocab Malone has posted a second set of arguments, addressing more directly the argument that some sort of capacity for sentience is a proper criterion for personhood.

He begins with a few quotations, none of which address the question of personhood. The first, from Millard Erickson, says that abortion involves "the taking of a human life." That's correct. The second, from Jerome Lejeune, says that abortion "kills a member of our species." That's also correct. The third, from R.C. Sproul, says, "abortion-on-demand is evil, no one has the moral right to choose it. If it is an offense against life, the government must not permit it." This doesn't actually follow, if one thinks that it is possible to morally use lethal force in self-defense, in war time, and as a form of legal punishment. As it happens, Sproul does think that it is legitimate for governments to engage in just war and capital punishment. I'm not certain how he reconciles his views on those topics with the quoted statement, but I suspect he says that these forms of taking human life do not constitute "an offense against life" and are not evil.

Vocab gives four arguments that he says he's seen used to argue for the moral legitimacy of abortion:

1. Sentience makes a person and the unborn are not sentient
2. Size makes a person and the unborn are too small
3. Viability makes a person and the unborn are not viable on their own
4. Wantedness makes a person and the unborn are not wanted

#1 is essentially my position. #3 is close to the U.S. Supreme Court's position, but I don't think it's quite accurate. #2 and #4 strike me as completely implausible.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states may not prohibit abortion for any reason prior to viability, the time at which a fetus can survive on its own independently of the mother (including with artificial assistance), or after viability when abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother. The point of viability is something that has shifted as technology has improved, and could potentially become completely meaningless, so I don't see it as a plausible ethical criterion.

So what does Vocab think is wrong with #1? He writes: "A component of this argument is it implies the pro-life position is weak because abortion is not cruel because the fetus cannot feel pain. Does this mean if I am unconscious or sleeping, I have lost my personhood?"

This response misconstrues my position. Sentience is significant not just because it involves the possibility of actual perceptions at a given time, but because it allows for the sort of being that can have beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests. The absence of such a capacity entails that a being cannot have beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests. This doesn't mean we cease to have those things when we are temporarily unconscious. When I sleep, I may not be conscious of the external world (though I sometimes do perceive external stimuli in lucid dreams), but I still have the capacity for such conscious awareness, and continue to maintain beliefs, desires, intentions and have interests. A better objection to my position would be a case where I sustain some kind of brain damage which puts me into a persistent vegetative state, yet there is still some possibility of recovery. In my opinion, the only way I would have some possibility of recovery and be the same person would be if I continued to have beliefs, desires, and intentions represented in my brain even in the persistent vegetative state. If those were all lost, and biological recovery were still possible--say, through some therapy made possibly by embryonic stem cells transplanted into my brain, which ironically, Vocab's view would likely make unethical--the person who would then come into being would be starting over afresh as a new person.

Vocab quotes Scott Rae observing that a person who has their legs cut off is harmed even if they feel no pain in the process, and even if their legs are not useful for locomotion. That is no objection to my position--I agree that there is harm there, because it is done to a person in conflict with their beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests, without their consent.

Next, Vocab says that a fetus is "sensitive to touch at ten weeks and eleven weeks" and "most certainly does feel pain" by the third month. I believe it is a mistake to conflate "sensitive to touch" with "experiences sensations." Reflexive actions don't identify experiences. Further, I haven't identified the ability to experience sensations with personhood, since I've already observed that animals can experience pain, but don't think that necessarily entails the immorality of killing animals for food or other reasons (though I do think it probably entails a moral requirement for humane treatment).

Vocab goes on to complain that a "developmental view, in which the basic thesis is humans become persons by some ability they acquire and not by the kind of entity they already are" is rarely "defend[ed] ... with any rigor" and asks "Who says they get to lay out the qualification for personhood?" Regarding the first point, Vocab's view is also one which attributes a right to life at a particular point, when two living haploid cells, a sperm and an egg, meet. He's defended this by reference to two features, (1) that at this point there is a complete set of DNA and (2) left to itself, it will (if all goes well) develop into what we all would agree is a human being. (1) is clearly insufficient, since any somatic cell sloughed off a person's skin has that property as well, and (2) only carries any persuasive weight from its appeal to future status rather than present. His subsequent question seems to assume that arguments for a view of personhood are dependent upon a claim to authority or power, rather than for their own intuitive force--and I think that's just mistaken.

He then asks, "Shouldn't a civilized and ethical society desire to err on the side of life?" In the way this is written, I can't agree--for the cycle of life requires death. I do agree that we should err on the side of protecting persons and treating humanely creatures that can experience pain, but that gives no reason to think the boundary line is where Vocab draws it.

He writes that "It is an artificial and arbitrary distinction with no scientific grounding. One more reason the human/person distinction is artificial is because I have never met a person who is not a human, nor have I ever met a human who is not a person. Is this even possible?" I disagree completely with this description. The question of sentient capacities is one with very strong scientific grounding, though we are uncertain of exactly where the boundary is. The fact that Vocab only recognizes humans as a clear-cut case of persons on earth today just shows that he isn't taking seriously the ideas that some other contemporary species (such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and whales) might meet reasonable criteria of personhood, some past species (Neandertal) probably did meet reasonable criteria of personhood, and extraterrestrial intelligent life might meet reasonable criteria of personhood. Suppose for a moment that we found out that a subset of human beings turned out to be a different species, incapable of interbreeding with the rest of us. It's a consequence of Vocab's view that this subset would not be persons. My intuition is completely to the contrary--creatures that are like us to the extent that they have beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests are persons, regardless of their biological makeup.

Vocab's final argument is his strongest, which is that my view has the potential consequence that some forms of infanticide and euthanasia--namely, those in cases where the conditions for personhood are not met--may be ethical. This is correct, presuming that personhood is the only justification for not permitting killing. I suggest that there are at least two other possibilities. One is just a recognition of the epistemic limits of determining personhood--that is, I believe, a reason for erring on the side of caution, and setting legal limits outside the boundaries of personhood. Another is a consequentialist argument about public policy considerations, which also argues for erring on the side of caution. While policies of permissible infanticide have been not been uncommon in history, they raise possibilities for brutalization or desensitization of the killer, among other negative consequences that go beyond the immediate act. This is itself a possible argument against abortions of fetuses that have recognizable human form.

Early on in this post, Vocab wrote "It's not as if there is a strong consensus, anyway." On the contrary, I think there is virtually no support for Vocab's view in history, from religion, from philosophy, or from science. In the United States, complete bans on abortion only became common after the Civil War, with the first post-quickening abortion prohibitions starting earlier, in the 1820s.

I don't think Vocab has come anywhere near making his case. He's not addressed many of the points I brought up in my prior post, and though he cited Judith Jarvis Thomson, he hasn't addressed the case of a conflict between two rights-holders, where one is dependent upon the other, which her violinist example brings up in an argument for the moral permissibility of abortion even if the fetus is counted as a person. Nor has he addressed the harm to non-actualized twins, or the case of cloned human beings who might develop without the process of fertilization (though I suspect he would identify them as persons at either the point of nuclear transfer or electric shock, and would probably have some reason for calling the process itself unethical). His view entails that IUDs, morning-after pills, in vitro fertilization, and embryonic stem cell research are immoral. His view suggests that if a building containing frozen embryos and small children were on fire, one should not give any preference to rescuing the children over the embryos. His view entails that a particular genetic makeup, rather than features like having beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests, is what's relevant to personhood. His view doesn't make sense of the idea of non-human persons.

I see no plausibility to the idea that fertilization is a morally relevant event or that having a particular genetic makeup is the morally important part of being a person.

UPDATE (December 14, 2009): Corrected sentence about U.S. abortion laws and added reference link to Wikipedia.

UPDATE: It should be noted that Vocab misconstrues Peter Singer's position on the relative worth of humans and animals; Singer speaks for himself on the subject on an episode of the Ethics Bites podcast:

Nigel: And it’s interesting that many of your critics focus on descriptions of a situation where you’re playing off a human being who’s less than a person, against an animal which is a person.

Peter: I think that’s a tactic. Maybe it’s quite an effective tactic with some audiences. They try and say that animals in some circumstances deserve more consideration than humans do. It’s accurate that there are some situations, though I think they are quite rare ones, where that would be true, where the human was so intellectually disabled or incapable of understanding things where you would want to give preference to the non-human animal; it would have greater interest in going on living or not suffering in a certain way. But it’s really completely irrelevant to the vast majority of cases in which we are interfering with animals, that is where we’re producing them for food where obviously they’re suffering, and it’s not at all necessary for me to say that somehow they have the same let alone a superior status to humans to point to the fact that we’re inflicting unnecessary suffering on them, and that should be enough to make it wrong given that we’re not doing this in order to save human lives but just because we like to eat a certain kind of food.

I also think Vocab errs in claiming that PETA is being more consistent in holding animals above humans--that is not a consequence of my or their position, and I believe they are more concerned with publicity than consistency, as they euthanize adoptable animals by the thousands.

UPDATE (January 3, 2010): A story from the Sunday Times today argues that "dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'":

Dolphins have long been recognised as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioural studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

Continue to part three.

Vocab Malone on abortion and personhood, part 1

Vocab Malone has put up his first post arguing for the position that "the unborn human embryo is a full person at the moment of conception and should be afforded the full rights due human beings by their very essence."

Criteria of Personhood or Humanity
He starts by looking at the question of what it is to be human or to be a person, citing a few historical references of individual characteristics--being rational, being "in relationship," and "the capacity for self-objectification." He expresses doubt that any single characteristic is appropriate, on the grounds that human beings undergo changes of state such as being asleep or being drugged, or not thinking. I agree with him that the characteristics he has listed won't do the trick, and I also agree with him that features that go away when we sleep are inadequate. But it doesn't follow that there is no single feature that can do the trick--if the feature is a capacity that we have, for example, that capacity doesn't cease to exist when it's not being used.

He goes on to note that lack of personhood doesn't entail that any treatment is morally permissible, pointing out animals as examples of nonpersons that deserve humane treatment. Again, I agree with him--and observe the converse, that possession of personhood doesn't mean that there are no cases where it can be moral to kill a person--cases of self-defense, euthanasia, capital punishment, or war come to mind as possibilities. But what makes animals deserve humane treatment is that they have certain capacities and interests, such as an inner mental life that includes at the very least the ability to feel sensations--and note that humane treatment doesn't necessarily entail a right to life on the part of an animal, or a duty on our part not to kill them.

Vocab appears to want to lay the groundwork for rejecting the use of a criterion of personhood in favor of a criterion of humanity as his standard for arguing against abortion, but here he only offers a promissory note and doesn't provide an argument to that effect. I think this is a mistake, however, because ethical distinctions should be based on morally relevant features, and I don't believe species membership is any more relevant in and of itself to being the holder of rights or of being the object of duties than is race or gender. If a member of an intelligent alien species capable of language were to make contact with us, my intuition is that we would attribute personhood to that entity and give it the same consideration as a human being. Likewise if we manage to build artificially intelligent, self-directed machines with beliefs, desires, and intentions, though the intuition is not as strong there unless I imagine them to have mental lives similar to our own.

Conception: Fertilization
Even though Vocab hasn't yet given a reason to reject a personhood criterion in favor of a human being criterion, the rest of his case is solely about human life rather than personhood, which I think is the wrong issue for the reasons I just gave. He argues that human life begins at conception, and clarifies that he means fertilization rather than implantation. This choice means that 30-50% of human lives are spontaneously aborted due to the failure of the fertilized ova to implant in the uterine wall. If Vocab thinks that this loss of human life is the loss of beings with rights and interests to whom we owe a duty to enable them to live out normal lives, then he has some explaining to do. First of all, why would a loving God create a human reproductive system that resulted in such a Holocaust of lives lost before they get a chance to start? Second, why has no one considered this to be a serious ethical problem that we need to urgently devote medical resources to address? We can call this the problem of natural abortion, which has both a natural evil and human evil component that requires justification.

Complete at Fertilization?
Vocab says that at conception (by which he means fertilization), "every human is complete and alive." I agree that a fertilized human ovum is alive--as life is a continuous process, arising from living components, at least until synthetic biology gets to the point of creating life from entirely nonliving components. Sperm and ova are also alive. But it is certainly not complete--zygotes have no brains, no central nervous systems, no organs, no body parts other than undifferentiated, identical cells.

An Individual at Fertilization?
Vocab also says that at fertilization and pre-implantation, "it is not merely a collection of cells lumped together but an actual individual." This also need not be the case. At fertilization, a zygote is an undifferentiated cell that undergoes a process of division without changing size for several days, to become a blastocyst by about the fifth day. During this period each of its cells is totipotent, meaning that each individual cell has the potential to become a full human being. Sometimes more than one of the cells does become a separate human being, as in the case of identical twins. In the case of identical twins, if they don't split completely, they may become conjoined twins or parasitic twins, or one twin may be completely absorbed into the other or otherwise fail to develop and become a vanishing twin. Where a vanishing twin occurs with fraternal twins, the resulting individual can be a chimera, with two sets of DNA. Should we also grieve for those twins who fail to develop, either due to failure to split off or failure to develop?

The science fiction scenarios of teleportation that create interesting philosophical puzzles for the notion of personal identity are real puzzles for a view that attributes personhood to zygotes, though without the additional problem of memories and experiences, since zygotes are undifferentiated cells.

Blastocysts
Once the zygote becomes a blastocyst, it forms into an outer layer of cells, which later becomes the placenta, and an inner cell mass of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, each of which is capable of differentiating into any kind of human cell. Only after this stage does the blastocyst implant in the wall of the uterus, about a week after fertilization, and begin taking nutrients directly from the blood of the mother--a dependency that can itself be of moral significance, as Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist argument shows. As already mentioned above, a great many fertilized ova do not reach this stage. Further, the percentages of implant failure are higher for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure which Vocab's criteria would have to declare unethical, even though it is the only way that many couples can have their own biological offspring.

It should also be noted that the process of therapeutic cloning involves taking a female ovum (which Vocab doesn't seem to indicate he considers to be a bearer of rights on its own), removing its haploid DNA, inserting the nucleus from a (diploid) human somatic cell (this is called somatic cell nuclear transfer), and giving it a shock to cause it to start dividing just like a fertilized egg. This occurs without fertilization by a human sperm. Once it reaches the blastocyst stage, its inner cell mass is harvested for embryonic stem cells, which destroys the blastocyst in the process. The natural process of fertilization never takes place, but there's little doubt that reproductive human cloning is possible via this process. Vocab's choice of fertilization as key suggests that there is no moral issue with this process, even though it also has some potential to become a human being. Further, if fertilization is a necessary, not just a sufficient, condition for rights, Vocab's view suggests that human clones would have no rights.

Fully Programmed?
Vocab goes on to say that "the embryo is already 'fully programmed' (to use computer language). This means the pre-implanted embryo needs no more information input at any further point in its development." While this was formerly believed to be the case about the individual embryo's biology, we now know that the environment of development can play a role in the characteristics that will come to be exhibited, such as from mRNA supplied from the mother to a developing embryo after fertilization and prior to zygote formation. But in any case, I would maintain that it's not our cellular biology that gives us moral value, as opposed to our capacities to have interests, desires, intentions, plans, sensations, and so forth--all capacities that zygotes lack.

Vocab ends this piece with some anthropomorphizing of zygotes, which appears to me to be a highly misleading form of argument--his analogies cannot be taken literally, since zygotes have no mental processes.

Human and Living = Human Being?
I agree with Vocab that a fertilized human ovum is living, that it's human, and that, if all goes well, it will become one (or more) individual human beings. I don't agree that it's yet a person or a "human being," since it lacks the requisite parts and capacities.

To sum up:

1. Vocab hasn't given a reason to favor a criterion of "being human" over personhood for determining when it's legitimate to attribute rights or incur duties on our part.
2. His choice of fertilization as the point at which rights begin is not when life begins (as it is continuous) and implies that a large percentage of rights-bearing entities die without any apparent concern from God or those who share Vocab's views, an inconsistency requiring justification and explanation.
3. A zygote has the potential to be not just one person, but multiple. The same lack of concern over non-actualized multiples that could have been born requires explanation.
4. Vocab's view suggests that IVF, which similarly loses even more zygotes or blastocysts (not even counting the embryos that are left frozen or discarded), is unethical.
5. Vocab's view so far gives no reason to classify human therapeutic or reproductive cloning as unethical--but might even entail that human clones have no rights, since there's no fertilization by a human sperm, if he thinks that fertilization is both a necessary and sufficient condition for rights.
6. In the stages of life described so far, we've gone from completely undifferentiated totipotent cells to a differentiation between two types of cell, the outer wall of the blastocyst (which we both agree is neither a person nor a human being, but what becomes a placenta) and an inner cell mass of embryonic stem cells. Vocab hasn't given a reason why we should give that rights or moral value.
7. At this state, the embryo is dependent upon the mother for its existence; Vocab will need to give an account of how the mother's rights are weighed against the embryo's in light of arguments like Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist example.
8. Vocab calls a fertilized zygote a "complete" human being and implies that it has everything it needs to determine its future state, but this is neither the case biologically (given maternal effects on development, for example) nor regarding features that we consider quite important for human value, such as those that develop as a result of acquisition of language, ideas, experiences, and so forth.
9. Vocab has used some anthropomorphic language in describing the implantation process which is misleading since zygotes have no mental processes.

Continue to part two.

UPDATE (December 12, 2009): Added the sentence on chimeras.

UPDATE (December 13, 2009): Vocab has posted a brief rebuttal to this post.

Discussion on abortion and personhood w/Vocab Malone

Local Christian hip-hop artist and slam poet Vocab Malone, who I've interacted with online and met when Daniel Dennett spoke at ASU early this year, asked me in January for my thoughts on abortion and personhood. He's now written a paper on the subject which he's asked me to critique, and we thought it would be interesting to see how it would work out to do it in a public manner via our respective blogs. The plan is that he will post successive sections of his paper on his blog, and I'll respond here, with cross-links to share some traffic and discussion. Both of us allow blog comments; it probably makes the most sense to post your comments at the blog for the person you'd like to see a response from.

Vocab has posted an introduction and the comments that I originally sent to him on the subject at his blog, Backpack Apologetics. He's taking a position that I think is very difficult to justify, that full personhood and human rights are acquired at the moment of conception--we'll have to see which definition of conception he chooses, fertilization or implantation.

Just to throw out a little issue I raised this semester in one of my classes--some have argued that climate change raises the ethical issue of a duty to future generations. If we can have moral duties now to people who don't exist at all yet, what does that imply about duties to embryos?

Richard Carrier on the ancient creation/evolution debate

Richard Carrier, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia University, gave a talk this morning to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix titled "Christianity and Science (Ancient and Modern)." He argued that there was a creation/evolution debate in ancient Rome that had interesting similarities and differences to the current creation/evolution debate.

He began with Michael Behe and a short description of his irreducibly complexity argument regarding the bacterial flagellum--that since it fails to function if any piece is removed, and it's too complex to have originated by evolution in a single step, it must have been intelligently designed and created. He observed that 2,000 years ago, Galen made the same argument about the human hand and other aspects of human and animal anatomy. Galen wrote that "the mark of intelligent design is clear in those works in which the removal of any small component brings about the ruin of the whole."

Behe, Carrier said, hasn't done what you'd expect a scientist to do with respect to his theory. He hasn't looked at the genes that code the flagellum and tried to identify correlate genes in other microbes, for example.

In the ancient context, the debate was between those who argued for natural selection on random arrangements of features that were spontaneously generated, such as Anaxagoras and atomists like Democritus and Epicurus, vs. those who argued for some kind of intelligent design, like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Galen. Carrier set the stage by describing a particular debate about the function of the kidneys between Asclepiades and Galen. Asclepiades thought that the kidneys were either superfluous, with urine forming directly in the bladder, or was an accidental sieve. Galen set out to test this with a public experiment on an anesthetized pig, which had been given water prior to the operation. He opened up the pig, ligated (tied knots in) its ureters, and they started to balloon and the bladder stayed empty. Squeezing the ureter failed to reverse the flow back into the kidney. When one ureter was cut, urine came out. Thus, Galen demonstrated that the kidneys extract urine from the blood and it is transported to the bladder by the ureters. The failure of the flow to operate in reverse showed that the kidneys were not simple sieves, but operated by some power that only allowed it to function in one direction. This, argued Galen, was demonstration of something too complex to have arisen by chance, and refuted the specific claims of Asclepiades.

Galen's 14-volume De Usu Portium (On the Usefulness of Parts) made similar arguments for intelligent design about all aspects of human anatomy--the nerve transport system, biomechanics of arm, hand, and leg movement, the precision of the vocal system, etc. He also asked questions like "How does a fetus know how to build itself?" He allowed for the possibility of some kind of tiny instructions present in the "seed," on analogy with a mechanical puppet theater, programmed with an arrangement of cogs, wheels, and ropes.

Galen also investigated the question of why eyebrows and eyelashes grow to a fixed length and no longer, and found that they grow from a piece of cartilage, the tarsal plate. He concluded that while his evidence required an intelligent designer, they entailed that God is limited and uses only available materials. Galen, a pagan, contrasted his view with that of Christians. For Christians, a pile of ashes could become a horse, because God could will anything to be the case. But for Galen, the evidence supported a God subject to the laws of physics, who was invisibly present but physically interacting to make things happen, and that God realizes the best possible world within constraints.

Which intelligent design theory better explains facts like the growth of horses from fetuses, the fact that fetuses sometimes come out wrong, and why we have complex bodies at all, rather than just willing things into existence via magic? If God can do anything, why wouldn't he just make us as "simple homogenous soul bodies that realize functions by direct will" (or "expedient polymorphism," to use Carrier's term)?

The difference between Galen's views and those of the Christians was that Galen thought of theology as a scientific theory that had to be adjusted according to facts, that facts about God are inferred from observations, and those facts entail either divine malice or a limited divinity. What we know about evolution today places even more limits on viable theories of divinity than in Galen's time. (Carrier gave a brief overview of evolution and in particular a very brief account of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum.)

Galen's views allowed him to investigate, conduct experiments to test the theories of his opponents as well as his own, and make contributions to human knowledge. He supported the scientific values of curiosity as a moral good, empiricism as the primary mode of discovery, and progress as both possible and valuable, while Christianity denigrated or opposes these. The views of early church fathers were such that once Christianity gained power, it not only put a halt to scientific progress, it caused significant losses of knowledge that had already been accumulated. (Carrier later gave many examples.)

Tertullian, a contemporary of Galen, asked, "What concern have I with the conceits of natural science?" and "Better not to know what God has not revealed than to know it from man."

Thales, from the 6th century B.C., was revered by pagans as the first natural scientist--he discovered the natural causes of eclipses, explained the universe as a system of natural causes, performed observations and developed geometry, made inquiries into useful methods, and subordinated theology to science. There was a story that he was so focused on studying the stars that he fell into a well. Tertullian wrote of this event that Thales had a "vain purpose" and that his fall into the well prefigured his fall into hell.

Lactantius, an early Christian writer and tutor of Constantine the Great, denied that the earth was round (as part of a minority faction of Christians at the time), said that only knowledge of good and evil is worthwhile, and argued that "natural science is superfluous, useless, and inane." This despite overwhelming evidence already accumulated of a round earth (lighthouses sinking below the horizon as seen from ships sailing away, astronomical observations of lunar eclipses starting at different times in different locations, the fact that different stars are visible at different latitudes, and the shadow of the earth on the moon), which Lactantius simply was uninterested in.

Eusebius, the first historian of the Christian church, said that all are agreed that only scriptural knowledge is worthwhile, anything contrary to scripture is false, and pursuing scientific explanations is to risk damnation. Armchair speculation in support of scripture, however, is good.

Amid factors such as the failure of the pagan system, civil wars in the Roman empire, and a great economic depression, Christianity came to a position of dominance and scientific research came to a halt from about the 4th century to the 12th-14th centuries.

Carrier compared these Christian views to specific displays at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky, which compared "human reason" to "God's word." One contrasted Rene Descartes saying "I think therefore I am" to God saying "I am that I am." Galen wouldn't have put those into opposition with each other.

Another display labeled "The First Attack--Question God's Word" told the story of Satan tempting Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which highlights the "questioning" of Satan for criticism, and argues that putting reason first is Satanic.

Another diagram comparing "human reason" to "God's Word" showed evolution as a 14-billion-year winding snake-like shape, compared to the short and straight arrow of a 6,000-year creation.

Carrier noted, "It doesn't have to be that way. Galen's faith didn't condemn fundamental scientific values; Galen's creationism was science-based."

He then gave numerous examples of knowledge lost or ignored by Christianity--that Eratosthenes had calculated the size of the earth (a case described in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series), Ptolemy's projection cartography and system of latitude and longitude, developments in optics, hydrostatics, medicine, harmonics and acoustics, pneumatics, tidal theory, cometary theory, the precession of the stars, mathematics, robotics (cuckoo clocks, coin-operated vending machines for holy water and soap dispensing), machinery (water mills, water-powered saws and hammers, a bread-kneading machine), and so on. He described the Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer similar to WWI artillery computers, which was referred to in various ancient texts but had been dismissed by historians as impossible until this instance was actually found in 1900.

Another example was the Archimedes Codex, where Christians scraped the ink from the text and wrote hymns on it, and threw the rest away. The underlying writing has now been partially recovered thanks to modern technology, revealing that Archimedes performed remarkably advanced calculations about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity.

Carrier has a forthcoming book on the subject of this ancient science, called The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

A few interesting questions came up in the Q&A. The first question was about why early Christians didn't say anything about abortion. Carrier said it probably just wasn't on the radar, though abortion technology already existed in the form of mechanical devices for performing abortions and abortifacients. He also observed that the ancients knew the importance of cleanliness and antiseptics in medicine, while Jesus said that washing before you eat is a pointless ritual (Mark 7:1-20). Carrier asked, if Jesus was God, shouldn't he have known about the germ theory of disease?

Another question was whether Christianity was really solely responsible for 1,000 years of stangnation. Carrier pointed out that there was a difference between Byzantine and Western Christianity, with the former preserving works like those of Ptolemy without condemning them, but without building upon them. He said there are unerlying cultural, social, and historical factors that explain the differences, so it's not just the religion. He also pointed out that there was a lost sect of Christianity that was pro-science, but we have nothing of what they wrote, only references to them by Tertullian, criticizing them for supporting Thales, Galen, and so forth.

Another questioner asked how he accounts for cases of Christians who have contributed to science, such as Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Bacon. Carrier said "Not all Christians have to be that way--there's no intrinsic reason Christianity has to be that way." But, he said, if you put fact before authority, scripture will likely end up not impressing you, being contradicted by evidence you find, and unless you completely retool Christianity, you'll likely abandon it. Opposition to scientific values is necessary to preserve Christianity as it is; putting weight on authority and scripture leads to the anti-science position as a method of preservation of the dogma.

It was a wonderfully interesting and wide-ranging talk. He covered a lot more specifics than I've described here. If you find that Carrier is giving a talk in your area, I highly recommend that you go hear him speak.

You can find more information about Richard Carrier at his web site.

ACLU plan for restoring U.S. civil rights

Day one steps are closing Guantanamo Bay, ceasing and prohibiting torture, ceasing and prohibiting extraordinary rendition; steps for the first 100 days include ending warrantless spying, watch lists, the Ashcroft doctrine on FOIA requests, monitoring of activists, the Real ID Act, the abortion gag rule, the death penalty, and faith-based initiatives.

At least one of Obama's transition teams is, at the very least, reviewing Bush's executive orders for constitutionality, which covers some elements of the above. Most, however, have been implemented by act of Congress, which will require Congressional action to repeal.

Good and bad news on propositions

Good: Washington joins Oregon in allowing doctor-assisted suicide, South Dakota rejects further abortion limits, Michigan allows medical marijuana and stem cell research, California rejects further abortion limits, Colorado rejects the definition of person as beginning at conception.

Bad: California, Arizona, and Florida ban gay marriage with constitutional amendments, Arkansas bans gay couples from adopting children.

(Results at CNN.)

UPDATE: Ed Brayton notes at Dispatches from the Culture Wars that the California result on gay marriage was evidently due to religious bigotry:

In California, exit polls showed that those who attended church regularly voted against marriage equality 83-17%. Those who attended church only occasionally voted for marriage equality 60-40%. Those who do not attend church at all voted for marriage equality 86-14%.

The same was true in Arizona, where exit polling found that:

Protestants generally supported the measure but that Catholics were fairly evenly divided. Nonreligious voters were solidly against it. ... Proposition 102 had slight leads among Whites and among Hispanics.
...
The youngest voters were split for and against, with support for Proposition 102 increasing among voters in older age groups. Voters age 65 or over were solidly for the amendment.

Prop. 102 will ultimately be overturned as the older generation dies off.

Palin declines to call abortion clinic bombers terrorists

Sarah Palin says that Bill Ayers counts as a domestic terrorist for setting off bombs, but declines to apply the term to those who set off bombs to blow up abortion clinics:

WILLIAMS: Are we changing -- it's been said that to give it a vaguely post-9/11 hint, using that word that we don't normally associate with domestic crimes. Are we changing the definition? Are the people who set fire to American cities during the '60s terrorists in -- under this definition? Is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist under this definition, Governor?

PALIN: There's no question that Bill Ayers, via his own admittance, was one who sought to destroy our U.S. Capitol and our Pentagon. That is a domestic terrorist. There's no question there. Now, others who would want to engage in harming innocent Americans or facilities that it would be unacceptable to -- I don't know if you're going to use the word terrorist there, but it's unacceptable, and it would not be condoned, of course, on our watch. But I don't know -- if what you're asking is if I regret referring to Bill Ayers as an unrepentant domestic terrorist, I don't regret characterizing him as that.

WILLIAMS: No, I'm just asking what other categories you would put in there, abortion clinic bombers, protesters in cities where fires were started, Molotov cocktails were thrown, people died?

PALIN: I would put in that category of Bill Ayers anyone else who would seek to campaign, to destroy our United States Capitol and our Pentagon and would seek to destroy innocent Americans.

I agree with her that Bill Ayers' actions constituted domestic terrorism. But so do those of abortion clinic bombers, which is why they are considered an appropriate target for the FBI's counterterrorism efforts. The RAND Corporation's terrorism incident database is no longer available via the web, but when I last looked at it, bombing incidents by abortion opponents was one of the largest categories of U.S. domestic terrorism, along with actions by animal rights activists and environmental activists.

Video:

Hell House

The Door Christian Fellowship, a creepily cultish Pentecostal Christian sect that's an offshoot of Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Gospel Church, is putting on a "hell house" in Chandler. They're calling it "Hell 101," and, as usual, they are advertising it in a deceptive manner that attempts to hide the fact that it's religious propaganda. I say "as usual" because not only have they put on such "hell houses" for years around Halloween, they're also known for advertising events such as Christian rock concerts while conveniently forgetting to mention the "Christian" part.

Such deception has long been associated with Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944), who was a fraudulent faith healer, alcohol Prohibitionist, and anti-evolutionist who later in life faked her own abduction in order to run off with her lover, Kenneth G. Ormiston, who had been an engineer for her radio station KFSG in Los Angeles. After disappearing for 35 days, she stumbled out of the desert in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, just south of the border from Douglas, Arizona, and told a phony story of kidnapping which quickly fell apart when witnesses came forth who had seen her at a resort in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She ended up dying of an accidental drug overdose from taking too many Seconol sleeping pills, but her Foursquare Gospel Church still exists today with over two million members, mostly outside of the U.S. (Interestingly, as a teenager McPherson was an agnostic who defended evolution in letters to the newspaper.)

The Potter's House, The Door, Victory Chapel, and other Foursquare Gospel spinoff churches are Pentecostal churches that engage in faith healing, speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, and other activities of anthropological interest. They can be very hardcore in the pushiness of their evangelism, and engage in cult-like conversion techniques such as separating people from groups they come with, pairing them off with someone of the same approximate age and sex, and bombarding them with rehearsed questions designed to push someone to a conclusion that they need to accept Jesus and join their group. (The Wikipedia page on The Potter's House describes this particular sect's origins in Prescott, Arizona in 1970, originally officially affiliated with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. The Wikipedia biography of its founder, Wayman O. Mitchell, is also of interest. The sect's origins trace back to Los Angeles, as does the Pentecostal movement in general.)

"Hell 101"'s website calls it "Final Destination III," and describes the hell house as "a twist on a haunted house style attraction that was described by Phoenix Arizona NBC News Affiliate Channel 12 as 'scary, horrifying, suspenseful, sick....' NBC 12 News had a live video feed from our annual event where hundreds waited up to two hours in line to have the hell-scared out of them." Their FAQ has the question "If I quit because I was scared or anything else can I get a refund?" The "anything else" would include feeling defrauded by having paid money for a haunted house, but getting instead Christian propaganda. The answer: "There are no refunds if you get scared, cry, feel angry, get sick, hate it, love it or just want to run!!! Our job is to confront your senses and that we do!"

A Christian hell house can be quite entertaining, so long as you know what to expect and are prepared to exercise your right to walk away at the end when the attempts at conversion go into overdrive (they may suggest that the doors are locked and that you may not leave). George Ratliff's documentary film "Hell House" is a great way to get a preview, and shows some of the unintentional comedy that can be produced when a bunch of ignorant people try to put together a scary haunted house designed to persuade you that you're going to hell unless you believe the way they do. That documentary also shows how ineffectual some atheists can be in their confrontation of Christians, and I highly recommend that anyone planning to visit one of these hell houses for any reason give it a watch before going.

A "hell house" usually follows a common script template which the churches purchase and customize. They go through a writing, casting, and production process similar to a high school stage production. The "hell house" script typically guides a group of visitors through a series of rooms, each of which contains a brief performance by actors portraying some scene that argues for certain practices, beliefs, or actions as likely to terminate with eternity in hell, though that latter point may initially be somewhat subtle. (By the end, it is anything but.)

I attended a hell house at a Potter's House church in Tucson in 1990, from which the flyer image was obtained. (Also see this PDF of an Arizona Daily Star newspaper story about that particular hell house, which got in trouble with the local fire department for fire code violations.) That hell house followed a female character from scene to scene which included a car crash caused by teenage drinking (featuring an actual wrecked car and empty beer cans), a band of demons playing AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" (suggesting that at least some rock music is demonic in origin and consequences), and the ever-popular hanging nun in hell (Catholicism is regarded by this sect as ruled by Satan) and young woman on a stretcher with a pool of blood between her legs shrieking that she's killed her own baby (the anti-abortion segment). At the end, there's a high-pressure call to Jesus which provides an opportunity to argue with someone who may be something like a street preacher in their skill of providing pre-programmed responses to common objections they've heard many times but is unlikely to have actually thought deeply about. If you do choose to visit one of these, I advise not getting involved in such a discussion if you're somebody who is likely to blow up, call people stupid, or otherwise lose your cool--that's just going to be seen as confirming evidence that you're under the control of the devil and anything you say can be dismissed without consideration.

UPDATE (October 31, 2008): New Times has a review of The Door's "Final Destination III" hell house.

Sex education reduces abortion rates

This doesn't seem terribly surprising, but Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out a New York Times op-ed piece that observes that the U.S. ties with Hungary for most abortions among OECD nations, even though Denmark has the most sexually active teenage girls. Denmark's teenage birthrate is 1/6 of the U.S.'s, and its abortion rate is 1/2 of the U.S.'s. The Netherlands has a teenage birthrate 1/7 of the U.S.'s, and an abortion rate 1/7 of the U.S.'s, and its teenagers start having sex on average two years after U.S. teens. The difference is that Denmark and the Netherlands have comprehensive sex education, while the U.S. has been pushing abstinence-only education that doesn't work, and about half of U.S. states now reject federal funding for abstinence-only sex education for that reason.

ApostAZ podcast #5

The fifth ApostAZ podcast (MP3) is out:

Episode 005 Atheism and Freethought in Phoenix- "Every Sperm is Sacred" from Monty Python's 'The Meaning of Life'. Group Events. Phoenix, Billboards! Suckics hone in on Autism. Astromnology. Us vs Them? Phelps Hallucinations. Gay marriage, still an issue, still a tax money black-hole! Greydon Square, "Dream" from 'The Compton Effect' album.

I didn't get my contribution in on time, but I'll have a science and skepticism segment in episode 006.

My comments on this episode:

While McCain opposes gay marriage and pays lip service to the idea of same-sex civil unions, Obama also opposes gay marriage (though says he'd like to repeal DOMA and institute a federal law supporting same-sex civil unions, even in front of audiences that oppose gay rights, so he is somewhat better than McCain on that issue). They also both support faith-based government programs--neither is a strict separationist on church and state. (But again, I think Obama is slightly better than McCain on that subject in terms of what he says--at least he opposes giving federal funding to groups that discriminate or proselytize, though it's unclear he'll take action to stop it.)

On abortion, there can certainly be secular moral arguments for restrictions on late-term abortion, just as there can be secular moral arguments against infanticide. Arguments that abortion involves killing a person, a being with a right to life, need to come to terms with Judith Jarvis-Thomson's violinist argument, which argues that even if a fetus has a right to life, it doesn't have the right to be supported by its mother's body if the mother did not consent. This has further implication that if the fetus could be transplanted or removed and survive on its own (e.g., it's already reached the point of viability, which is the standard applied by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade), then that's immoral and criminalizable. But it also implies, it seems to me, that there is a reasonable range of actions which could constitute consent to supporting a fetus--such as voluntarily engaging in sex without contraception, which any reasonable person should know has a reasonably high probability of producing a child.

My own view is that abortion is immoral to the point of justifying legal prohibition in any case where (a) there's such at least tacit consent to carry a child and (b) the fetus has reached a point of brain development where there's a reasonable case to be made for personhood. I'm not convinced that (b) ever happens in reality, since I think there's a strong argument that personhood requires a capacity for self-awareness, which doesn't seem to occur until about six months after birth, but I can certainly conceive of empirical evidence that would change my mind about when that point is reached. There may be other cases where abortion is immoral, e.g., intentionally waiting until late in the pregnancy, and then terminating for a trivial reason of convenience.

On the Biblical justification for opposition to medical treatment: Jehovah's Witnesses oppose blood transfusions on the grounds of Old Testament prohibitions on consuming blood (Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:11-14, and Acts 15:20, 29), even though those all refer to consuming animal blood and have nothing to do with transfusions of human blood. Christian Scientists oppose medical treatment not on the basis of anything in the Bible, but based on the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. Their view is that everything good and holy is spiritual, while everything physical or material is evil, yet is also illusory or at least a distortion of the spiritual world. This has some resemblance to Buddhist views of "maya," and also to the early Christian heresy known as Docetism, which was the view that Jesus' humanity was an illusion, because the physical cannot be holy. Thus, under this view, engaging in physical repair (medicine) of what is an illusory distortion of the underlying spiritual reality is not only a waste of time, but sinful--the only real repair possible is spiritual, through prayer. (And further, illness itself is of the physical, and thus illusory.)

The ApostAZ website is here.

Jeffrey Dahmer and Answers in Genesis

(I've had this in draft since June 21, but forgot about it--I was making an effort to verify that Dahmer was actually raised as a creationist or Christian, but didn't find anything to indicate when Lionel Dahmer became either one. I raised the question in comments at Ed Brayton's blog, and one commenter, Kristine, replied that Lionel Dahmer says he only became a creationist after his son was arrested. That undermines the specifics of the case below. There have certainly been serial killers raised as Christians (such as Ted Bundy), but I've not heard of any that have been specifically raised as creationists. I don't think police departments look at Christianity or creationism as a relevant factor in a serial killer profile, the way they look at, say, possession of a copy of the Satanic Bible, except in extreme cases, which is probably as it should be.)

Ken Ham likes to argue that evolution is the cause of a variety of social ills--teen pregnancy, pornography, drugs, abortion, racism, the Holocaust, etc. His book The Lie: Evolution argues that evolution is responsible for all of these things.

I just learned (thanks to Ed Brayton's blog) that Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer, was raised as a creationist, and his father, Dr. Lionel Dahmer, is listed on the Answers in Genesis website as an analytical chemist who accepts the biblical account of creation.

If evolutionists used Ken Ham's technique, they would argue that being raised as a creationist causes cannibalism. Answers in Genesis specifically suggests that it was belief in evolution, rather than issues from his upbringing, that caused Jeffrey Dahmer to kill, quoting a 1994 statement from him that "If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…"

The Wikipedia entry on Dahmer observes that he "dissected already dead animals as a child" (he collected and sexually interacted with roadkill), began abusing alcohol at 14, had extremely low self-esteem, and his parents divorced after "constant fighting" when he was 18. His father "forced him to enlist" in the Army for six years, but he was discharged after two due to excessive drinking. He built an altar of candles and human skulls in the closet of his apartment that was found when he was arrested. In prison, he declared himself a born-again Christian (which he was when he made the above statement), and was beaten to death in prison in 1994.

Psychiatrist George Palermo testified at Dahmer's trial that he killed his victims because he hated his own homosexuality.

UPDATE (September 6, 2013): It has been pointed out to me that if Lionel Dahmer claimed to have become a creationist after his son's arrest, this is false--Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, but Lionel Dahmer co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, a conference which was held in 1990.

UPDATE (December 15, 2023): Glenn Branch brought to my attention that Lionel Dahmer died on December 5, 2023, and received an obituary in the New York Times (December 12th) that is as much about his son as him, but makes no mention of the creationism. He also noted that Lionel Dahmer's memoir says that he was inspired to return to Christianity in 1989 via the influence of young-earth creationist Bert Thompson of Apologetics Press.  Bert Thompson was subsequently fired from Apologetics Press after allegations of grooming and sexual abuse of teen boys.

UPDATE (December 27, 2023): Glenn Branch has published an article: "Like father, like son: Jeffrey Dahmer's claims about evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer's creationism"

Mr. Conservative

Tonight I attended the Goldwater Institute's screening of the HBO documentary "Mr. Conservative," a biography of Barry Goldwater produced by his granddaughter, CC Goldwater, who was in attendance along with Barry Goldwater Jr. The audience was a mix of people who still call themselves conservative, libertarians, and even a few liberals. (Gary Peter Klahr sat directly behind me, and his question in the Q&A session was what Goldwater would have thought of the Bush administration's power grab and war in Iraq. Barry Goldwater Jr.'s answer was that his father disliked foreign entanglements and supported the Constitution.)

The film features footage and photographs taken by Barry Goldwater himself--the film notes that he always had a camera in his hand, and at least three books of his photographs have been published. He was born in Arizona prior to its statehood, to a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother--which led to one quip from Goldwater reported by Robert MacNeil in the movie: "He would say things like, 'I went to a golf club where they wouldn't let Jews play, and I said, "I'm only half Jewish. Can I play nine holes?'"

The movie features interviews with people ranging from George Will, Barry Goldwater, Jr., and Sandra Day O'Connor to Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Al Franken, Julian Bond, and Hillary Clinton. Also featured is the exceedingly evil Jack Valenti.

The film covers Goldwater's life in Arizona, including his mother teaching him to shoot guns, his coming home from the University of Arizona to run the family store in Phoenix so his smarter older brother could stay at Stanford, his love of ham radio and flying airplanes (he would hear on the radio of medical emergencies among the Hopi Indians and personally deliver medicine from Phoenix--and this during his political career). He was a very early runner of the Colorado River (in 1940 using wooden dories--when fewer than 100 people had run the river; Goldwater was #73). He ran the river with camera equipment, making a film which he traveled about Arizona to show, which made him well-known before running for office. He won his first election to the Phoenix City Council, and went straight from the City Council to the U.S. Senate.

In his later life, he was outspoken in his support for a woman's right to abortion, for gays to serve in the military, and for the religious right to stop pushing their religious views into politics. The film reveals that he supported his daughter obtaining an abortion before Roe v. Wade, and that he has a gay grandson. Several of the more liberal interviewees say that they thought Goldwater became liberal later in life (and some in the audience seemed to have a similar view), but Goldwater himself is shown making a statement that preempts this claim, back in 1963--that he is a conservative, but that at some time in the future people will call his views liberal.

He was a supporter of individual liberty who wanted the government's role in private life minimized across the board, on both economic and social issues--it wasn't he who changed, but the political environment that changed.

I recommend the movie--it is well done, it fairly points out his foibles and flaws as well as his strengths. It is sad that there are virtually no politicians today who are as forthright, honest, and outspoken about their views--who are as genuine as he was. We need more people in the public sphere who speak out with integrity and honesty, rather than with dissembling and spin.

UPDATE (August 17, 2007): I glossed over Goldwater's negatives in my last paragraph, but the film doesn't. It reports on how he lost the 1964 election in the biggest landslide in history, and why--including his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (though he supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, supported the Arizona NAACP, and helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard), his remarks about the use of atomic weapons for defoliation in Vietnam, and his remark about sawing off the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and letting it float away. LBJ's political ad graphically depicting the latter remark and his famous "Daisy" mushroom cloud ad are shown in the film. Goldwater's reaction to the latter is reported as saying that if he thought that accurately depicted what he would do, "I wouldn't vote for me either."

A few other points of interest in the film: Goldwater was a friend of John F. Kennedy, and they were looking forward to running against each other in the 1964 election, flying from city to city on the same plane together to campaign against each other face to face. That would have been an interesting match up. (I should note that my opinion of JFK is not as positive as the general public's view, after having read how he made use of the CIA. He was one of the worst abusers of the CIA for interventions in attempt to overthrow the governments of other countries who ever sat in the White House.)

Barry Goldwater Jr. was a long-time friend of Nixon White House counsel John Dean, and Dean consulted with Goldwater Sr. before testifying in front of the Senate about Watergate. Goldwater told him to go ahead and nail Nixon, because Nixon was a liar.

During Watergate, Goldwater, whose wife had decided to remain in Arizona, spent much of his time in D.C. at the home of Lt. Gen. William W. Quinn and his wife Bette. The Quinn's daughter Sally was a journalist engaged to Ben Bradlee, publisher of the Washington Post. Bradlee reports that Goldwater told him that he thought Nixon was going to resign, but not to publish a story about it because if he did, Nixon was so stubborn that he'd then refuse to do it.

The Wikipedia page on Goldwater is quite comprehensive.

UPDATE (August 18, 2007): Apparently the golf story is apocryphal. The discussion page on Goldwater's Wikipedia entry says "In his autobiography, 'Goldwater,' BG attributes this joke to his brother Bob, speaking about HIS brother Barry at 'a golf pro tournament near Los Angeles.' B. Goldwater adds, 'The story got a big laugh, but the incident never occurred.'"

Maintaining beliefs in complete contradiction to fact

One of the subjects which I had intended to make part of my Ph.D. dissertation on social epistemology (pertaining to how most of what we know is known on the basis of testimony) was an examination of how some social groups manage to maintain beliefs that are completely at odds with the facts. This would allow me to incorporate data accumulated from some of my hobbies, like criticizing creationism and Scientology. Unfortunately, I never got past the first chapter of my dissertation, but I still think about such topics, especially as I encounter new examples.

I recently encountered another example of the strategy of finding an excuse for dismissing claims without examining them, on the blog of a woman who homeschools her children and teaches them young-earth creationism. I posted a comment on her blog contradicting some of her specific claims, and pointing to Christian sources (both old-earth creationist and theistic evolutionist sources) contradicting them. Here's her dismissive response:

Shortly after you initially posted, I formed a point-by-point rxesponse. I posted it, and it got lost in the internet ether. I wrote it out again, this time meaning to copy it onto a document in case it got lost again, but clicked on “Submit Comment” out of habit before I did so, and whaddya know? It disappeared again. Wireless connection problems, or something. I wasn’t really up for writing it a third time, so I backed off, which gave me time to better-consider my answer.

I’m ready now to respond, but it’ll be in a way in which you’re probably not going to be satisfied.

Reading your post here, and following up a bit by looking into your blog and the site you moderate (www.talkorigins.org), and reading the e-mail you sent to me offline, I was struck with this parallel: You remind me of a pro-choice activist. I have this theory — I’ve had it for so long, I don’t remember if it’s an original thought, or if I gleaned it from someone else — that one of the reasons that many women pro-choice activists are so vehement in their stance is that they have actually had an abortion, and are desperate for someone to not be able to tell them, legally, that it was wrong. They’re desperate to avoid that judgement; they don’t want anyone to tell them that they were wrong in aborting their baby. SO, they take up activism to ensure, to the best of their abilities, that no one will be able to do just that.

Similarly, I had a good friend in college who was gay. He startled me by stating that it was well-understood in the gay community that the men who most assertively proclaim their hetero manhood are the ones most likely to be harboring some homosexual tendencies, and by their “super-hetero-manly” actions and/or words, are overcompensating to hide/stuff/avoid such tendencies. Oddly, sadly, ironically, the men who actively are hateful towards the gay are very often “closeted” themselves.

Not that you are either an abortion activist or gay. My point is that your time spent proliferating the anti-creationism message is EXTREME. You have admittedly “spent over a decade researching the creation/evolution controversy”. You have just about every book on the topic, and have written much on it yourself. You (co-) moderate probably one of the largest anti-creationism websites out there. [This is an error on her part--I'm a listed moderator of the talk.origins Usenet newsgroup, not the website, and the newsgroup's actual moderation is completely automated. -jjl] You obviously have such topics on an RSS feed, or are trolling in some other manner for articles/blog posts/etc. on the topic; you found my lowly blog post a little more than 7 hours after I posted it. It appears to me that you are *highly* preoccupied with what, truly, should be a fairly peripheral topic.

Your tone in this post (and in your e-mail) is very friendly. However, my suspicion meter is blipping.

I think it would be unwise for me to embroil myself in a debate with you. Not because I’m wrong, necessarily, but because you’re better armed.

I don’t think you’re really interested in what I think, other than to shoot me down. On the surface, anyways, that’s how I think you’d react. However, I think there’s something deep inside you that really longs for creationism to be right & true, and you’re waiting for it to be “proven” to you. While I think God honors a truly searching heart, I think it’s unlikely that you’ll find what you’re looking for. Not here, anyways. What I believe you truly want, you going to have to ask God to speak to your heart, in a way — language — that you understand; in a way that’s meaningful to you.

Thanks for stopping by, and thank you for compelling me to pray for both yourself and others who may read our posts.

~Karen

She made the issue not about YEC claims, but about me--an ad hominem argument. She says I "seem" friendly, but suggests, via remote psychoanalysis, that I'm not. Rather, I'm an angry atheist who wants to wipe her out in debate, and I'm angry because I'm searching for God. Therefore, there's no need to consider anything I've said, and she can continue teaching her children falsehoods from Answers in Genesis.

I fully understand her desire not to get involved in a debate. While I used to actively debate a variety of subjects online, I don't have time for it anymore. When people try to engage me in an email exchange on subjects like creationism, I'm glad to help out those who are inquiring for information, and occasionally will engage in discussion if the other party seems rational and not just a parrot of ridiculous views who's not willing to think. But the parrots are only worth my time to respond to publicly, where somebody else can potentially get some value from it--the parrot isn't going to get any.

The reason I posted on her blog was that in her initial post, which I found while looking for blogs commenting on the Answers in Genesis/Creation Ministries International dispute--she was raising potential doubts about YEC and the idea of OEC. This led me to believe that she is not just a parrot, and is someone willing to consider other ideas. So I shared my experience with young-earth creationism and pointed to sources I thought she and her readers would find valuable.

Perhaps if I had not been an atheist, but a Christian advocate of old-earth creationism, she would not have felt the need to be so dismissive. This is why I support non-atheist responses to creationism--I think that in many cases, OECs have the best chance of communicating with YECs, theistic evolutionists with OECs, and so forth. There are exceptions, however--sometimes it's the opposite extremes that communicate best with each other, like fundamentalists and activist atheists who see the world in black and white. It's common for new converts/deconverts to swing from one extreme to the other, from evangelizing fundamentalist to evangelizing atheist, with both criticizing the liberal believer who's willing to accept ambiguity and thereby exhibit "wishy-washiness."