PEA Soup

Is there a duty to vote?

Rumor has it that there's a presidential election scheduled in the U.S. this fall, which raises the perennial ethical question: Is there a duty to vote?  Harry Brighouse provides some excellent arguments for there not being such a duty, but here I'll lay out a few pros and cons and invite people to weigh in on whether there is such a duty.

Not Such Crooked Timber After All?

When teaching ethics courses, I often spend some time with students going over some of the relevant social psychological literature.  Studies like the Milgram experimients, the Asch conformity experiments, and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment are nice ways to show students, well, just how mean and stupid people can be.  It's a nice way of showing the importance of ethical learning, but also the insufficiency of mere ethical knowledge in producing ethical behavior.

Turns out, however, that one of my favorite examples is a myth.  Kitty Genovese, we all know, was attacked three times over the course of more than a half an hour, all in an alley in the sight of 38 witnesses, none of whom did as much as lift up the phone to call for help.  A powerful indictment of humanity, and strong evidence of what psychologists have called the "bystander effect," right?

Institutions, Systems, Structures

Folks who work on oppression often distinguish oppression attributable to individuals from oppression attributable to institutions.  Thus, there's a lot of discussion about institutional racism or sexism, say, as well as discussion of systematic or structural racism or sexism.  Here's a quick question: anyone have any thoughts on the nature of the relation between the institutional, the systematic, and the structural?  Are these terms just being used as synonyms, at least in the relevant literature?  I have a vague feeling that it is possible to have non-systematic and non-structural institutions, but (since the relevant systems and structures are all social systems and structures, I presume), I'm not sure that there are any non-institutional (social) structures or (social) systems.  Any thoughts?

The duty to die and the right of self-defense

Many philosophers believe that suicide is permissible in at least some circumstances.  Others go further and claim that there are circumstances in which suicide is morally obligatory — that there's sometimes a "duty to die."  While I accept that suicide may be morally permissible in some circumstances, I have reservations that there is a ever a duty to commit suicide. Here I'd like to explore these reservations, framing them in terms of self-defense, and enlist your help in trying to make sense of these matters.

Velleman on pain, persons, and self-killing

Many Kantians have reservations about Kant's rather strident view concerning self-killing. In the Lectures on Ethics in particular, Kant's rhetoric pulls no moral punches.  Kant calls suicide "revolting", an act wherein we reduce ourselves to mere "carrion" with "no intrinsic worth." We ought to "shrink in horror" at the very thought of suicide, for "nothing more terrible can be imagined" than to treat our own value like that of a beast. 

David Velleman provides one of the few sympathetic defenses of a broadly Kantian view of self-killing. Here I hope everyone might help me put his defense in its most plausible light.

The Significance of "Partial Birth"

The recent Supreme Court decision upholding the federal “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act” (Gonzales v. Carhart) attempts to draw a bright line between infanticide and abortion. Supporters of the ban hold that a procedure called “intact dilation and extraction” (intact D&E, or D&X) is a form of infanticide, whereas a procedure called “nonintact dilation and extraction” (D&E, or dilation and evacuation) can, for now, remain on the abortion side of the line.

According to Solicitor General Paul Clement, "The basic point of this statute is to draw a bright line between a procedure that induces fetal demise in utero and one where the lethal act occurs when the child or the fetus, whichever you want to call it, is more than halfway outside of the mother's womb…" (Washington Post, 11/9/06) 

The odd assumption behind “partial birth” abortion bans is that a bright line can be drawn on the basis of where the fetus is in the mother’s body when it is killed, rather than on the basis of the age of the fetus when it is killed (before or after viability), or how gruesome the method of killing is (intact D&E involves collapsing the fetus’s skull, nonintact D&E involves dismembering the fetus). In a recent discussion on a legal blog, one law professor poses the following questions: “What if Congress concludes, based on the Silent Scream videos that we've all seen, that all second-term abortions have a disturbing similarity to infanticide? Or what if Congress decides to ban the D&E procedure entirely, because it involves tearing the fetus apart, limb from limb?” (conlawprof, 4/19/07)

Conferences on Kids (and Parents too)

There are three conferences coming up for those of us with interests in the ethics of children and families. The first is one I organized with some fellow Canadians. "Children, Family, and the State" is the wrap up conference of a three year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant of the same name I've held with Shauna Van Praagh (McGill Law), Daniel Weinstock (Philosophy, Universite de Montreal) and Colin Macleod (Philosophy, University of Victoria). The other two both involve the Society for Applied Philosophy, one to be held in Birmingham this June (that's where I'll be talking about the intrinsic goods of childhood) and the other to be held next year in  Cape Town,  South Africa.   Those feminist ethicists who were concerned that the South Africa conference on bearing and rearing children managed to have not one but two male keynote speakers (and no female keynote speakers) should note that the other two conferences have lots of women on the program.

Thanksgiving

Our US readers are getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving Day.  The inaugurators of this holiday conceived of it as a time for giving thanks to God for the various good things of this life.  In a secular culture—or rather, for secular people—is there anything to be retained of the day’s original purpose?  Many people think there is something to be said for maintaining a general attitude of thankfulness, but towards no one in particular.  Is this conceivable?  And even if it is, is it desirable?

How Useful is Applied Ethics for Moral Theory?

Below Matt Zvolinski argued that in teaching and researching applied ethics systematic moral theory should play only a small role and can even be confusing and harmful. By and large, I agree with him. However, I’m starting to change my mind about the opposite question. That is, we can ask is applied ethics useful for moral theory. I did not think that it would be at all, but slowly I’m starting to change my mind. Here’s one reason why.

How Useful is Moral Theory for Applied Ethics?

The following are some thoughts I've been mulling over in anticipation of a lecture I will be giving at CSU Long Beach's Applied Ethics Center next Thursday.   I've been thinking about these issues with regard to business ethics, but I think the concerns extend to most other areas of applied ethics as well.