Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world. In order to make the advice practical, it typically takes empirical uncertainty into account. For example, we don’t currently know exactly to what extent the earth’s temperature will rise, if we are to continue to emit CO2 at the rate we have… Read More »Practical Ethics Given Moral Uncertainty
On the ethics of non-therapeutic circumcision of minors, with a pre-script on the law
By Brian D. Earp (Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.)
PRE-SCRIPT AS OF 25 SEPTEMBER 2012: The following blog post includes material from an informal article I wrote many years ago, in high school, in fact, for a college essay competition. I would like to think that my views have gained some nuance since that time, and indeed with increasing speed, as I have researched the topic in more detail over the past several months–specifically during the period of a little over a year since the blog post first appeared online. Since quite a few (truthfully: many thousands of) people have come across my writings in this area, and since I am now being asked to speak about circumcision ethics in more formal academic company, I feel it is necessary to bring up some of the ways in which my thinking has evolved over those many months.
The most significant evolution is away from my original emphasis on banning circumcision. I do maintain that it is morally wrong to remove healthy tissue from another person’s genitals without first asking for, and then actually receiving, that person’s informed permission; but I also recognize that bringing in the heavy hand of the law to stamp out morally problematic practices is not always the best idea. It is a long road indeed from getting one’s ethical principles in order, to determining which social and legal changes might most sensibly and effectively bring about the outcome one hopes for, with minimal collateral damage incurred along the way. Until enough hearts and minds are shifted on this issue, any strong-armed ban would be a mistake.
In the long term, however, I think the goal remains: that each child should have the same moral, legal, and policy protections regardless of sex or gender, designed to preserve their sexual anatomy in their healthy, intact form until such time as they are mentally competent to make a decision about altering them, surgically or otherwise.
The project for the meantime is to work on hearts and minds.
I am grateful to the many hundreds of individuals who have left thoughtful comments on my sequence of posts on the ethics of circumcision, and I look forward to developing my arguments in ever more sophisticated ways in the coming months and years as this important debate continues. I am especially grateful to those of my interlocutors who have disagreed with me on various points, but who have done so in a thoughtful and productive manner. May we all aim at mutual understanding, so that the best arguments may emerge from both sides, and so that the underlying points of genuine disagreement may be most clearly identified. — B.D.E.
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Routine neonatal circumcision in boys is unethical, unnecessary, and should be made illegal in the United States. Or so I argue in this post.
Yet lawmakers in California, it is now being reported, have introduced a bill with the opposite end in mind. They wish to ban legislation that could forbid circumcision-without-consent. What could be going on?
Read More »Is the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys morally permissible?
Coming to a mini-mart near you. The FDA has just approved nine very grisly looking warning labels—to be slapped on cigarette packs throughout the USA. But will they work to cut smoking … or will they backfire?
Here are some of the top reasons why these labels may not only fail to achieve the FDA’s desired outcome, but could actually do the opposite – leading to more smoking, not less.Read More »Shocking behavior: Government scare tactics, smoking, and public health
When I was choosing a topic to write about today, I almost passed over a story on the grounds of it being too boring. It was about a large corporate donation of vaccines for developing countries — much less exciting than some other stories, such as the outbreak of killer bacteria in Germany. But then I realised that as stories go, the vaccine donation was *very* important. It also raised some very interesting questions about ‘important news’ versus ‘exciting news’.Read More »Excitement vs Importance: Do we have any sense of proportion?
Much of the ongoing debate about Libya has rested on what I believe to the mistaken philosophical premise that the United States, or any other potential intervening party, becomes more morally responsible for the fate of Libya if it chooses to intervene than if it doesn’t. Ross Douthat presents the most sophisticated defense in this post. Most relevant line:
But America’s leaders are not directly responsible for governing any country besides their own, which means that almost by definition, they/we bear less responsibility for tragedies that result from our staying out of foreign conflicts than for tragedies that flow from our attempts at intervention.
Douthat here is equivocating two senses of “responsibility;” the first empirical, and the second philosophical. It is true that the United States is only “directly responsible” for governing its own citizens in a contingent sense: the only people subject to U.S. law are, well, Americans. But that brute fact says nothing “by definition” about who to whom the American government is morally responsible. Douthat’s arguments rest on the foundation that empirical responsibility entails moral responsibility: that if we cause something, we are more morally responsible for it than we would have been otherwise. But is this position defensible?
Inflation is swinging upward in the UK and it will surely cause us some irritation soon in the supermarkets. But most of us do not have difficulty putting enough food on the table for our families, and it’s easy for us to forget that things are different elsewhere. During the past few years sharp rises in food prices have contributed to widespread hunger in the third world and to civic unrest, including the recent toppling of the government in Tunisia, and riots in countries including all of these: Algeria, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonsia, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
By Charles Foster
In North Kentucky, forty miles from its Creation Museum (where you can see Eve riding on a triceratops and videos in which weeping girls blame their moral degeneracy on their failure to believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture), ‘Answers in Genesis’ is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s an expensive business. The total bill will be $24.5 million, of which $845,910 has been raised to date. ‘Partner with us in this amazing outreach by sponsoring a peg, plank or beam…’, pleads the website. A peg will cost you $100, a plank $1000, and a beam $5000. But if you buy a beam, you’ll also get a model of the Ark personally signed by Ken Ham, the President of ‘Answers in Genesis’.Read More »On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy
There was a jolly fire in the fireplace. The snow was falling outside the windows, to the delight of children and despair of transport planners. Aristotle sipped on the mulled wine, watching while Kant meticulously wrapped another jar of homemade mustard.
“Dear Immanuel, are you going to give all your friends mustard?”
“Everybody except Georg. He likes to mix it with ketchup; he says it makes a great synthesis. I don’t care much for that idea and I would hate to see it spread. He will get a writing style guide instead.”
“I guess for you it is the thought that counts, when it comes to Christmas presents.”
By Jahel Queralt-Lange
Each year 10.9 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed worldwide, and 6.7 million people die. The good news is that better drugs are developing faster. We all want to hear about “wonder drugs” and the scientific and medical communities feel the urge (and sometimes the pressure) to provide them. However, some ethical problems might appear in our way to this breakthrough. Before being released into the market, any drug has to undergo a trial in which its benefits are tested and weighed up against its adverse effects. Of course, the desirability of increasing our knowledge in order to improve our health is beyond question. What poses problems is that those individuals who participate in the trials are the means by which we achieve that knowledge. Past experiences, like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment that took place in the US showed that it’s morally outrageous to trade the life of some individuals for the sake of benefiting society. Nowadays the issue is regulated but moral dilemmas persist.
Read More »Data or life? Ethical obligations to present and future patients.
A colleague recently emailed me. Her daughter, just turned
12, had come back from school bearing an information leaflet about HPV vaccination
with the Glaxo Cervarix vaccine, and a consent form for the parent to sign.
The consent form nodded inelegantly to Gillick, asserting that ‘[t]he decision to consent or refuse is
legally [the girl’s], as long as she understands the issues in giving consent.’
There was no indication given, in the consent form or the accompanying
literature, as to whether and if so how that understanding would be tested. The
reality is that it won’t be tested at all.
Read More »Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?
