By Brian D. Earp See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here. See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here. Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. UPDATED as of 27 May, 2013. See the bottom of the post. The AAP report on circumcision: Bad science + bad ethics = bad medicine For… Read More »The AAP report on circumcision: Bad science + bad ethics = bad medicine
See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here.
See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here.
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“Legitimate rape,” moral consistency, and degrees of sexual harm
Should abortions be allowed in the case of rape? Republican Todd Akin—running for the U.S. Senate from the state of Missouri—thinks not. His reasoning is as follows:
From what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy resulting from rape is] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.
There appears to be no scientific basis for the claim that the trauma of forced intercourse can interrupt ovulation or in any other way prevent a pregnancy; indeed pregnancy is just as likely after rape as after consensual sex, according to the evidence I have seen. This news article sums up the relevant data – though please note that one of my readers [see comments] takes issue with the standard interpretation of the most frequently-cited studies.
Let’s start, for now, then, with a bit of data that is not in question: thousands of pregnancies per year, in the U.S. alone, ensue from cases of reported rape or incest–either through the caveat of Akin’s theory that “maybe [the body’s defenses] didn’t work or something” or through the medically orthodox explanation that the body has no such defense. Assuming that falsely reporting rape is relatively rare, as seems to be the case; and acknowledging that many rapes are never reported in the first place, we should be able to agree that pregnancies resulting from rape are a life-changing reality for thousands of women on an annual basis. By “rape” I mean any penetrative act done without clear consent; and here I’m calling attention to the sub-set of such acts that result in conception. I won’t say much about the term “legitimate” — which I find troubling in a hundred ways — simply because other writers have gone to town on it, and I want to say something new.
Now, given everything I’ve just said, what could be going on with Todd Akin’s moral reasoning for him to casually downplay the relevance of rape and incest to the abortion debate while maintaining, as he does, that there should be no exceptions to anti-abortionism even in those cases? Psychologist Brittany Liu uses the notion of “moral coherence” to provide an explanation:
Read More »“Legitimate rape,” moral consistency, and degrees of sexual harm
Tony Nicklinson is 58, and suffers from locked-in syndrome. His mind is as sharp as it ever was, but for the last seven years, as the result of a stroke, he has been entirely physically dependent on others, able to move only his eyes and eyelids. Just recently, his condition has worsened, and he is… Read More »Euthanasia and Human Rights
Another article discusses the morality of different methods of organ transplant. Strangely absent from the discussion, is any indication of the scale of the problem – something that should be front and centre. The numbers are strangely hard to find, but seem to lie between 400 and 1000 deaths per year, with many more suffering from… Read More »Organ donation is not all about the donors
In ethical discussions, we are often quick to lambast advertisements for the way in which they can subvert the consumer’s autonomy. It is certainly true, as other posts on this blog record, that some advertisements aim to intentionally deceive consumers, and to manipulate their preferences in a manner which can serve to undermine their autonomy.Read More »Advertising, Autonomy and Breastfeeding: Some Reflections.
‘I was always the life and soul of the party, flirting with everyone’, wrote Lucille Howe, in ‘Fabulous Magazine’, (22 July 2012), ‘but I wanted John to fall in love with the real, quieter me’. In the same article, Charlotte Ruhle notes how her psychotherapy helped her to recover from a broken relationship. ‘[My] friends started saying I….seemed more like my old self.‘
The media, and indeed our ordinary conversations, are awash with this sort of language. Not only are we conscious – having a sense that there is an ‘I’ that is in some sort of continuity with the ‘I’ that existed yesterday, will hopefully exist tomorrow, and to whom things happen – but we have firm convictions about the nature of the ‘I’. When it is not allowed to express itself – to ‘be itself’, we complain. Depending on our education, we say that we’re ‘out of sorts’, ‘not myself’, or ‘ontologically vertiginous’.Read More »On being yourself
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VIDEO DEBATE LINKED TO BELOW – ARI KOHEN AND I DISCUSS THE ETHICS OF RELIGIOUSLY-MOTIVATED CIRCUMCISION
Ari Kohen doesn’t like my recent post about circumcision—the one in which I argue that it is unethical to remove healthy tissue from another person’s body without first getting his permission. I then go on to say that religious justifications cannot override this basic principle. Here’s that post again.
Ari is a professor of political theory and human rights at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. In this blog post, he takes me to task for failing to take seriously the religious commitments of Jews in framing my arguments. And while he gets some things wrong about, for example, the relevance of “sexually-sensitive tissue” to my overall reasoning; and while he misses the point of my bringing up female genital cutting entirely (I’ve since edited my post to clear up any lingering ambiguity) – he is probably right that my approach to debating this issue is unlikely to win me any converts from within the ranks of the religious.
Read More »Replying to a critic: My last circumcision post (for a while) – with video debate
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See updated material below – reply to a critic.
Of faith and circumcision: Can the religious beliefs of parents justify the nonconsensual cutting of their child’s genitals?
Circumcising minors on religious grounds amounts to grievous bodily harm according to a German court ruling issued on Tuesday. AFP News reports:
The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled that the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents. The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised.”
Some Jewish groups are up in arms. They insist that God has “non-negotiably” required that circumcision take place on precisely the eighth day after birth; hence waiting to perform the operation until the child could consent would amount to breaking this keystone covenant with their deity. Using the force of law to delay circumcision, then, is no different from banning it outright, since a delayed circumcision is religiously meaningless.
I don’t find this argument very compelling.
Love drugs and science reporting in the media: Setting the record straight
By Brian D. Earp, Julian Savulescu, and Anders Sandberg
Love. It makes the world go round. It is the reason we have survived as a species. It is the subject of our art, literature, and music—and it is largely the product of chemical reactions within the brain.
No wonder science is starting to unravel the ways in which we can influence it, and perhaps even control it.
Just as Darwin’s finding that we are descended from apes shocked people in the nineteenth century, so people will be shocked to find that our most lofty social ideal is something we share with our mammalian cousins and which is the subject of scientific scrutiny and even chemistry-book manipulation.
In 2008, two of us (Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg) published an article in the journal Neuroethics on the topic of “love drugs” – a term we use to refer to pharmacological interventions based on existing and future bio-technologies that could work to strengthen the bond between romantic partners. All three of us have an article just published in the journal Philosophy & Technology in which we build upon that earlier work. Interested readers will take the time to study those papers in full, but we have a feeling that much of the population will stop at a handful of media reports that have recently summarized our ideas, including at least one article that we think has the potential to mislead. Let us set the record straight.
Read More »Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …
* Note: this article has been re-posted at various other sites, sometimes with minor edits. This is the original and should be referred to in case of any discrepancies.
A fatal irony: Why the “circumcision solution” to the AIDS epidemic in Africa may increase transmission of HIV
1. Experimental doubts
A handful of circumcision advocates have recently begun haranguing the global health community to adopt widespread foreskin-removal as a way to fight AIDS. Their recommendations follow the publication of three [1] randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in Africa between 2005 and 2007.
These studies have generated a lot of media attention. In part this is because they claim to show that circumcision reduces HIV transmission by about 60%, a figure that (interpreted out of context) is ripe for misunderstanding, as we’ll see. Nevertheless, as one editorial [2] concluded: “The proven efficacy of MC [male circumcision] and its high cost-effectiveness in the face of a persistent heterosexual HIV epidemic argues overwhelmingly for its immediate and rapid adoption.”
Well, hold your horses. The “randomized controlled trials” upon which these recommendations are based are not without their flaws. Their data have been harnessed to support public health recommendations on a massive scale whose implementation, it has been argued, may have the opposite of the claimed effect, with fatal consequences. As Gregory Boyle and George Hill explain in their extensive analysis of the RCTs:
