What are ethical and unethical intentions to conceive a child?
In today’s blog, I want to ask you for your opinions on a question that has been bothering me for some days now. The question relates to the potential motivations of couples who try to have a baby. My question is: What are ethical – and what are unethical – intentions to conceive a child, and how do we asses whether these intentions are ethical or not? The reason why this question came to my mind is that I read reports on a legal case in German media that gave rise to very strong emotional reactions both in the court and in the media – and in me, to be honest. So, I want to warn everybody who is about to read on, because the case I am about to depict is truly shocking.
Last Monday, the District Court in Essen (Germany) convicted a couple for sexual abuse of their own baby (case number: AZ.: 23 KLs 148/11). What makes this case so particular is that they conceived their child out of the clear intention to sexually abuse it later.
The couple first got to know each other on a web forum, on which both were looking for casual sex. They acted out their mutual sexual fantasies over web chat and later met for sexual encounters. At some point, the man told the woman to be sexually interested in children. They agreed on the plan to have a mutual child on the purpose to involve it in their sexual encounters. To put their plan into action, they systematically met for sexual intercourse whenever the woman had her most fertile days; she got pregnant and carried out a boy. When he was five weeks old, the women took the boy to introduce him to the man. Then, as the woman’s lawyer describes it, when she changed the child’s diapers, the man held his erect penis besides the naked baby and took a picture. Later, the man sent this picture to one of his other sexual partners, via which it was passed on to the police, and the couple was arrested before any more harm could be done to the child. Both parents confessed. Also, their fantasies on what to do with the child once it was born were well documented in web chat histories. Hence, the court convicted the couple to 5 years (the woman) and 8 years (the man) in prison. Fortunately, the actual sexual abuse that took place was – as the court stated – comparably harmless, and the baby was neither physically nor mentally harmed.
When I read about this case, it deeply horrified me. It still does. Of course, the actual sexual abuse that took place is not to be played down. However, what makes this case so extremely disturbing is less the actual abuse but rather the intention out of which the couple wanted to have a child. However, from a legal point of view, the motivation out of which somebody conceives a child is not accusable. “Everybody can have a child for whatever reason they want” was explicitly stated by the court. Hence, the parents were convicted for the actual abuse (and related crimes). This huge discrepancy between our psychological reactions on the intention to conceive a child to abuse it (deepest disgust) and the juridical implications of this intention (none) made me wonder about the ethical implications of this case. I want to ask the question: It is unethical to conceive a child with the intention to abuse it? Or, on a more general and less provocative level, what are ethical and what are unethical motivations to have a baby and how do we distinguish them?
As a psychologist, so I am not familiar with the philosophical “toolkit” of how to approach such a case from an ethical perspective. My gut feeling is conceiving a child with the intention to abuse it is morally wrong – even if this intention is never put into practice later and no actual harm is done. However, I am not able to clearly pinpoint why this mere intention is unethical. Hence, I wonder about how we should ethically assess people’s intentions to give birth to children.
One idea that comes to my mind is that it might be the incredible degree of selfishness that makes the doing of the convicted couple’s morally wrong. Having a child to abuse it for one’s own sexual desires is one of the most selfish reasons thinkable So is it selfishness we should argue about to asses whether intentions to conceive a child are morally right or wrong? However, I think that the minority of children are conceived for entirely unselfish reasons. Some people might have children to serve their religion or their community, but having a child often is motivated by wishes related to self-fulfilment. So, is it unethical to have a baby to simply fulfil your personal dream of life? Or to conform to your society’s role expectations? Or in the hope that the child will feel morally obligated to support you financially when you are old? Although these motives do not reach the massive degree of selfishness described in the case above, would this mean that selfish reasons for conceiving a child are unethical (to a degree)?
Or, related to selfishness, is the attribute critical for ethical assessment that the intention was to do something harmful to the child? Does this make this intention particularly unethical? However, again, I think that also other intentions out of which babies are conceived in everyday life might be potentially harmful for the child – of course in far more subtle (and often unconscious) ways. For example, from my psychologist’s point of view it may well be (mental) harm doing if you use the child as a lever to keep your partner from leaving your violent relationship.
What are your suggestions on this issue? Are there any clear criteria of what makes motives to conceive a child unethical?
The will is caused, not free
By Brian Earp
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The will is caused, not free
Everyone is talking about free will these days. Sam Harris has a new book out. Eric MacDonald has weighed in on that. Jerry Coyne, Paul Bloom, and some philosopher-types have a debate going on in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And way back in 2009 the Society for Personality and Social Psychology hosted a “showdown” between psychologists Roy Baumeister and John Bargh on the topic: What does the ‘free’ in ‘free will’ really mean? [A video of Bargh's half can be seen here. Baumeister is here.]
The SPSP conference led to a fiery exchange of blog posts between the two principles, and then to a more sedated pair of papers in the society’s newsletter, Dialogue. Baumeister enlisted Kathleen Vohs to co-author his piece, and Bargh (for some reason) enlisted me. Here is what Professor Bargh and I had to say – after this delightful FoxTrot comic by Bill Amend.
Kony 2012, Malaria and Pizza
Last week this blog mentioned the Kony 2012 video, and suggested that many of the criticisms of it were ‘dishonest’ in a particular sense, and biased. Criticisms of such a worthy cause, and other charities seeming to piggy-back on Kony 2012’s success, often meet with great anger. But such piggy-backing is entirely justifiable. Continue reading
Kony 2012 and Saying What You Mean
Kony 2012 has become the highest profile issue of international justice on social media by far. For those without a Facebook account, Kony 2012 is a slick 30-minute YouTube film about Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. The video explicitly seeks to mobilise support for efforts to arrest Kony, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, particularly against children. As I type, the video, released Monday, is approaching 70 million views. The video has also attracted a fair share of criticism, much of which I’m not sure is honest.
Arbitrary Execution: Why the Law Needs Help from Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy
On February 29th, 2012, Robert Henry Moormann was executed in Arizona for murder. Back in 1984, he was in prison for kidnapping and molesting an eight year old girl, when the state gave him three days of compassionate leave. His elderly adoptive mother took a long bus trip to go and meet him. After an argument in a motel room where she was staying, he beat, stabbed and suffocated her, then dismembered her body. He asked a number of local businesses if he could dispose of “spoiled meat and animal guts” in their refuse containers, before disposing of most of her remains in bins and sewers around town. He also asked a prisoner officer to dispose of a box of what he described as “dog bones”. This behaviour raised suspicion. Moormann claimed not to remember the details of the crime, and at the original trial, Moormann’s lawyers mounted a defence of insanity. The jury rejected it. Since 1985, he had been living on death row while his appeals process was gradually exhausted.
In light of the gruesomeness of his crime, it is easy to think that if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, Moormann did. But the contention of Moormann’s defence lawyers that he was intellectually disabled casts a new light on the case.
ASSASSINATING CITIZENS: How not to fight terror
By Brian Earp
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In this ‘hour’ of danger: Civil liberties and the eternal threat of terror
The U.S. government is legally justified in killing its own citizens overseas if they are involved in plotting terror attacks against America, Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday.
“In this hour of danger, we simply cannot afford to wait until deadly plans are carried out, and we will not,” he said in remarks prepared for a speech at Northwestern University’s law school in Chicago.
Pay attention to Mr. Holder’s choice of words here. This hour of danger? Excuse me: an “hour” is a bounded stretch of time – and not very long. But terrorism is a threat with no border – it has existed always, and will continue indefinitely. The “war on terror” cannot be won: you can kill a terrorist, sure, but you cannot eliminate a tactic. So let us not talk about an “hour.” This sort of speech is insidious. We all know that an hour takes sixty minutes and then it’s finished. But terrorism will present a “danger” forever.
The censor and the eavesdropper: the link between censorship and surveillance
Cory Doctorow makes a simple but important point in the Guardian: censorship today is inseparable from surveillance. In modern media preventing people from seeing proscribed information requires systems that monitor their activity. To implement copyright-protecting censorship in the UK systems must be in place to track where people seek to access and compare it to a denial list, in whatever medium is used.
Rick Santorum, birth control, and “playing God”
By Brian Earp
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Rick Santorum, birth control, and “playing God”
Rick Santorum thinks that birth control is immoral. Santorum, a former Senator from Pennsylvania, is one of two human beings – if the polls have it right – likeliest to become the Republication nominee for President of the United States this election cycle.
“Liberals Are Disgusting”: In Defence of the Publication of “After-Birth Abortion”
Editorial note: John Harris has responded to this post to clarify his position on infanticide. You can find the relevant post here.
The Journal of Medical Ethics prepublished electronically an article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”
This article has elicited personally abusive correspondence to the authors, threatening their lives and personal safety. The Journal has received a string abusive emails for its decision to publish this article. This abuse is typically anonymous.
I am not sure about the legality of publishing abusive threatening anonymous correspondence, so I won’t repeat it here. But fortunately there is plenty on the web to choose from. Here are some responses:
“These people are evil. Pure evil. That they feel safe in putting their twisted thoughts into words reveals how far we have fallen as a society.”
“Right now I think these two devils in human skin need to be delivered for immediate execution under their code of ‘after birth abortions’ they want to commit murder – that is all it is! MURDER!!!”
“I don‘t believe I’ve ever heard anything as vile as what these “people” are advocating. Truly, truly scary.”
“The fact that the Journal of Medical Ethics published this outrageous and immoral piece of work is even scarier”
(Comments selected from The Blaze, which features the article as a news item )
As Editor of the Journal, I would like to defend its publication. The arguments presented, in fact, are largely not new and have been presented repeatedly in the academic literature and public fora by the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris in defence of infanticide, which the authors call after-birth abortion.
The P-Factor
Electoral reform is an often-discussed topic. But the issues often concern minor modifications to the status quo. Here I suggest an entirely new approach to electing leaders of a country. It would have numerous benefits over the current system, including:
- Better voter turnout
- Better representation of the working classes among those who vote
- Better fulfillment of democratic values
- Producing a better informed electorate
- The election of more competent leaders
- The election of less deceitful leaders
- Greater social mobility from the working classes to the ruling class
The electoral system is principally modeled on three popular television shows: the X-Factor, Big Brother, and, to a lesser extent, Strictly Come Dancing. I call it ‘The P-Factor’.
In the first round, we would have open auditions from all around the country. This is modeled closely on the X-Factor. Candidates would have to audition in front of a studio audience and a panel of judges. They would have five or ten minutes or so to give the top few reasons why they would be excellent as a ruler of the country. (At this stage, we would use a regimented interview structure, which avoids many of the biases associated with unregimented interviews). Rather than a decision by judges, which would be undemocratic, the decision would be made by a studio audience of 100 people or so, randomly selected from the UK population.
This stage has the benefit that the opportunity to rule the country would be genuinely available to everyone in the country, rather than the tiny proportion of people who have had a sufficiently good education and the right contacts to enable them to run for parliament. It could thus be a powerful driver of social mobility: even someone with no home and little education could do extremely well. Moreover, insofar as the pool of potential candidates in this system would be vastly greater than the current pool of potential candidates, this system would be much better at filtering the population to discover undiscovered latent political talent, in much the same way as the X-Factor succeeds at discovering phenomenal vocal talent that would not otherwise be found.
Those that are particularly promising, at this stage, would make it through to the televised auditions round. The auditions would be similar to those at the first round. However, in order to make sure that the process was sufficiently entertaining so that the ratings stayed high – so that we would have a sufficiently informed and engaged electorate – we would require every candidate to also demonstrate their crowd-pleasing ‘special talent’, which would be akin to the skills displayed on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.
One might object that those candidates who would get voted through at this stage are those who would have the best ‘special talent’, like whoever could swallow the weirdest object. But it’s difficult to see how this objection can be made given the presupposition that the government should be elected in accordance with democratic values. If the current demos wishes to elect a leader based on their ability to make a dog dance, then that is what should happen. (Though I doubt that this is what would happen).
At this stage, there would be judges. Two independent political and economic experts, in order to point out aspects of the candidate’s performance that are particularly auspicious, qua political leader. But also Amanda Holden, as the voice of the people, and Simon Cowell, again to keep the ratings up. However, the judges would not be allowed to vote, as this would be undemocratic. The voting at this stage would be open to the public, with the judges only there to offer expert opinion.
The voting system would be modeled on Strictly Come Dancing, which uses range voting (ranking each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10). As even a cursory glance at the literature on voting theory will show, this is a far better voting system than the current first-past-the-post system, or the Alternative Vote system (which, incidentally, are among the worst voting systems ever seriously proposed: the former limits itself to the smallest possible amount of information from the voter; the latter violates conditions like monotonicity). Though the Strictly voting system is vulnerable to tactical voting, in the presence of tactical voting it collapses into Approval voting, which is another excellent voting system. (For those who are worried by this, we could alternatively use a sophisticated Condorcet method like the Schulze method.)
At this point, the 50 or so candidates with the greatest number of votes would enter a 2 month-long ‘boot camp’ phase, where the candidates undergo extensive training in how to lead a country – including personal presentation, debating skills, and education in economics and politics. This would give those from the working classes a better chance against those who have had a long and expensive education.
Each week, during the boot camp’phase, there would be a different test that the candidates would have to perform, such as debating, oration, political knowledge (perhaps in the style of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’), IQ tests, heuristics and biases in decision-making, and economic forecasting. Again, in order to keep the ratings up, and to make the conditions more realistic, these tests would have to be done in a variety of stressful conditions – such as while sleep deprived, or while being insulted in every possible way by journalists. Again, every week the voting would be open to the public, so they could use the additional information that came through the testing as they saw fit. Insofar as this system would employ assessment of the skills required for good political leadership, whereas the current system has almost no such assessment, we should expect the leaders produced by this method to be more competent.
Once the candidates were down to a small number – let’s say the final ten – then we enter the final, ‘Big Brother’ round, where all ten candidates have to live in a house together, under constant surveillance. A recurring complaint among the electorate is that politicians cannot be trusted: insofar as it would be almost impossible to dissimulate one’s personality for 24 hours a day, for ten weeks, using the Big Brother systems enables us to get a sense of the true character of all the potential candidates, and to develop something like a feeling of friendship and understanding towards the better candidates. Again, we would subject the candidates to a variety of tests. (I personally would favour Takeshi’s Castle-style challenges. But perhaps that’s just getting silly).
This would answer the problem that voter turnout is often disappointingly low: though the claim that Big Bother has a better voter turnout than general elections is unfounded, I would guess that this competition would be far more popular (and more entertaining) than the previous Big Brother shows, and would get overall a much larger vote. It would also ensure that turnout is better distributed in proportion with the range of the social spectrum, rather than being biased in favour of the middle and upper classes.
One final benefit of this approach is the cost. One might worry that this system would require a substantially larger infrastructure than the current voting system. However, it seems pretty plausible that the money could be made back and more through advertising during breaks.
So this electoral system seems to have an awful lot going for it. However, the point of this blog post is not to seriously suggest the above as a new way of electing the leaders of a country (though, I confess, in writing it, I find it remarkably convincing). The likelihood of my coming up with the optimal system of electing the leaders of a country over an hour-long coffee with my fiancé is vanishingly small. But I do want to suggest that, aside from the fact that people wouldn’t take it seriously, the system described above is far better than the current system of electing leaders, in the UK or the US. And I designed it as a joke.
Political debate can often take too much for granted; in its attempt to be ‘practical’, it can unthinkingly put great weight on the status quo. Philosophy allows us to take a step back and realise that, sometimes, what is needed is not a minor repair here and there, but rather to tear down an institution, completely redesign it, and start over.
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