A quick report on the Mardi Gras ethics conference.

The pranks paper went well, I thought. There really was a food fight, of sorts, in the session. And every one of the questions touched on one of the areas of ethics that either Andy or I knew something in particular about. So I think we came across as fairly knowledgable, which was a nice touch.

Sarah McGrath did a paper arguing that existing arguments in favour of the ban on the sale of non-vital organs are, to put it bluntly, awful. The audience didn’t do a much better job of convincing one that there is a decent argument here. The overall impression I had was that the only way one could find something interesting to discuss in pro-ban arguments was by spotting one or two premises that were clearly false, and arguing about the premises that were only probably false. This is fun and all, but it hardly encourages the thought that there might be a cogent argument behind the ban. I’m probably just mean, but I don’t think Some things shouldn’t be for sale is really an argument. And it certainly isn’t an argument that grounds an infringement on personal liberty.

Just in case anyone reading this wants to argue for a ban on organ sales, here’s a quick hint, one that if followed will improve your argument immensely. (From hearing Sarah’s paper, I’d imagine that any argument that merely acknowledged the following distinction would be the best available argument for a ban.) There are two kinds of arguments for banning a course of action that people might have wanted to take. First, there is the flatly paternalistic argument that the ban prevents individuals doing things that they want to do, but which are really not in their interests. This is the Government as the ropes around Ulysses model, and it only works if you assume you know more about what is in individual’s interest than they do. Secondly, there is the game-theoretic argument that taking some options out of play will mean that the decisions made by all players lead to an outcome that is preferable for all. Here the role of government is to rule out, by fiat, defections in Prisoners Dilemmas.

Now it is possible that one or other kind of argument could work here. But it is hardly plausible that both could work at once. For the first kind of argument rests crucially on the irrationality of the citizenry, and the second kind on their rationality. So when someone tries to make an argument for the ban by sliding back and forth between the first kind of argument and the second, it is a strong sign that they are looking for any argument they can find for the ban. And that in turn is a sign that they don’t really take the argument seriously – they have already decided on the conclusion and are now looking to justify it.

Patrick Hopkins argued that technology could help solve the abortion controversies. The idea, which didn’t seem particularly novel, was that if we could move the time at which foetuses were viable back earlier and earlier, then we could just remove the foetus from any woman who didn’t want to be pregnant and grow it artificially up to a time it could be adopted out. This apparently will make all sides happy, because no foetuses get destroyed (making the pro-lifers happy) and no woman is forced by law to remain pregnant (making, allegedly, the pro-choicers happy). As became clear in the discussion period, this only works if one assumes that the only motivation for pro-choicers is that women should be able to determine whether they remain pregnant or not. If the idea is that women should be able to determine whether they become parents or not without interference by the state, then this will look like a complete capitulation to the pro-life side. And, as Leslie Cannold has suggested in her research on women’s attitudes towards abortion, that idea is what motivates many, perhaps most, pro-choice women.

Patrick’s argument also rested an unfortunate amount of weight on the actions of pro-life terrorists. He seemed to argue, and I could be unfairly paraphrasing here, that one reason we should look for a ‘compromise’ solution to the abortion controversies was the damage the very existence of the controversy was doing to the polity. But this damage seemed to consist largely in the existence of pro-lifers who are prepared to bomb clinics and murder doctors in support of their moral views. Whatever the merits of the moral case, I’m certainly not inclined to give more weight to a side because some of its adherents are prepared to murder in support of it. In this debate, like many others, count me in as preferring the option of treating criminals as criminals before we get to addressing ‘root causes’.

The most philosophically interesting (to me at least!) paper was Liz Harman’s paper on the potentiality problem. Liz wanted to reconcile the following two intuitions:

• How harmful a certain action is might depend, in part, on the potential for flourishing of the thing that is harmed.
• Killing an embryo is not a morally significant harm.

(I don’t have my notes for the talk – so I’m paraphrasing a bit here. These summaries feel a little sloppy, but I hope you get the idea.) The worry is that since embryos have quite a bit of potential, destroying them counts as a very significant harm, if potential matters to harm. But then it seems like the question of whether embryos may be destroyed becomes very morally significant.

(Note that the discussion here is, for now, all about early embryos. We’ll see in a bit how this carried across to foetuses.)

One frequent concern with using potential as a measure of harm is that it seems to lead to some odd conclusions. It suggests that whether or not someone else is primed to kill you affects how much I might harm you by killing you. This I think is true on Liz’s theory, but not so counterintuitive. What would be bad is if the harm becomes vanishingly small the more likely, and the more quickly, the other guy is to kill you if I do not. If lost potential is the only measure of harm, then that would follow. But I think on the view where lost potential is only one factor that goes into judging harm, it need not be. And I don’t think Liz is committed to anything like that – it is consistent with the first intuition that other factors determine how harmful a harm is.

The solution is to agree that destroying an embryo harms it, and in fact harms it quite severely, but this does not matter, because only harms to creatures that have moral status are morally significant. And the only creatures that have moral status are those that (a) are ever conscious, and (b) are now alive. This means many foetuses have moral status, but embryos that are destroyed do not, since they never become conscious. This is a very clever solution, and I think that at least in broad outlines it is probably right. If so the details matter, so I want to look at one of the details.

One alternative that came up in discussion is that we add to the conditions on moral status a condition that the thing in question ever have an independent existence, which means, in practice, that it is ever born. (The commentator suggested that Liz’s arguments suggested this move, and this was a reductio of Liz’s position. I certainly disagree with the second part.) Liz said she didn’t like that move because whether or not someone is born is an extrinsic property of them, and moral status should rest as much as possible on intrinsic properties.

So I, naturally, turned this into a debate about intrinsic properties. (You knew this would all come back to me, didn’t you.) I said that we had to focus on extrinsic properties some of the time because we didn’t want to say that proper parts of a person, like their torso, or their brain, have moral status. If you punch me in the head you harm my brain, and my upper body, and me, but only the third of those harms counts morally. Counting the others would be double, or triple, counting. Moreover, if I had my legs amputated, my upper body would have moral status, because it would be me, so whether or not it has moral status is very much dependent on whether it has the extrinsic property being attached to two legs.

The interest here isn’t really in what we say about the moral status of the upper body. It could be that some special extrinsic properties matter for moral status, but not many do. I think it will be hard work to delineate those ones that do matter, but if smart people work on it I trust it can be solved. The real interest is in whether we can use this case directly to tell us something about the moral status of foetuses. If (a) undetached proper parts of a thing with moral status do not have moral status, which is what the above cases suggest, and (b) a foetus is an undetached proper part of a thing with moral status, then a foetus does not have moral status. Both (a) and (b) here are questionable, but neither is obviously wrong, and there might be a quite strong pro-choice argument to be made by pushing along these lines. At this stage, however, I’m prepared to turn it over to the experts. (If you do write up a paper using that argument, please send me a copy – preferably with a credit to this blog!)

Overall, I thought the conference was a great success. The organisers, especially James Stacey Taylor, did a fantastic job. Now all I need is another ethical thought to turn into a paper for next year’s conference…

One last nugget from actually reading the print version of the Times last week. I meant to write this earlier, but I forgot. This is from an article about gay adoption.

Gay people are the only group categorically restricted from adopting children in Florida. Even people who have abused drugs and alcohol or people who have a history of domestic violence may adopt under some circumstances.

State courts have upheld the law, with a state appeals court ruling in 1993 that the ban could be justified because homosexual parents are unlikely to be able to give heterosexual children sound dating advice.

I’m almost speechless. What about the dating advice that gay children might want? And what about the fact that a rather substantial number of people in the world have absolutely no ‘sound dating advice’ to offer anyone? Well, at least no positive advice. Advice like When I did this it was a complete disaster doesn’t really count. Anecdotal evidence, or perhaps just induction on a small sample size, suggests this group is well represented in the blogoworld. Should they be barred from adoption too? And does this mean heterosexual no-longer-children should never turn to gays for dating advice?

One of the surprising things about the conference was how the non-philosophers would use Courts have ruled that p as a reason to believe p. This is never a step philosophers would take, and you know I think we’re right about this one.