Moral Autonomy and the Corporate State

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, and a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute, has written an essay at Truthout.org.

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. [...]

The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy.

Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate. Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." [...]

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. [...]

Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.

Read it and post a comment here.

A Radical Solution to the Gay Marriage Issue: End State Sponsoring of Religious Ceremonies

An article at Time.com discusses an idea put forth in the San Francisco Chronicle by two Pepperdine law professors, who

issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage. The authors ... say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether.

Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license, a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a civil union — anything, really, other than marriage. For people who feel the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they wanted. Religions would lose nothing of their role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that they find in keeping with their tenets. And for nonbelievers and those who find the word marriage less important, the civil-union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states and in federal law for married couples.

The idea does not seem that pragmatically realizable, although the Time magazine writer reports that the authors apparently think it is. Indeed, they hope it will "short-circuit" the need for another referendum.

Their proposal is aimed at helping speed a resolution on the issue in other states — gay marriage is heating up in Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont and elsewhere — and at the federal level.

Even if it's not likely that we establish a separation of church and state in regards to marriage, the idea gets at a central point and effectively gives "equal protection." Any couple could be recognized as a domestic partner by the state and then additionally recognized as married by a religious organization or not. The two would be separate.

But it is not likely to make defenders of Prop. 8 happy.

For ... the folks who feel most strongly about marriage and most passionately supported the expensive campaign to defeat gay marriage — the issue of nomenclature is only the beginning. They are against not just gay marriage but also gay couples — and especially against government sanctioning of those relationships, no matter what they are called.

What do you think?

If Genetic Selection Can Prevent Certain Diseases, Shouldn't it be Mandatory?

Physicians at University College in London announced in February,

the birth of what they described as the world's first "breast-cancer gene-free baby," a designer infant pre-screened for the BRCA1 cancer gene.

A discussion began as to whether screening for preventable diseases ought to be mandatory, at least in the case where the method of in vitro fertilization was being used already.

But mandatory screening is also being discussed as to whether we ought to extend,

the process to all parents-to-be via carrier testing:

All would-be parents should be offered screening to alert them to any genetic disorders they risk passing on to their children. Those at risk should then be offered IVF with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (IVF-PGD) to ensure any children are healthy.

Opponents of mandatory screening, the Opposing View blog says,

will likely point out that such a rule significantly limits the reproductive autonomy of parents. This is certainly true. However, Western societies have long acknowledged that parental authority cannot undermine the medical interests of a child. Jehovah's Witnesses may not deny their children blood transfusions; Christian Scientists cannot substitute prayer for life-saving antibiotics. As United States Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge wrote in the landmark case of Prince v. Massachusetts, "Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves, but it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children."

But let's add another twist to the discussion, which hasn't been mentioned yet on the blogs I've linked to above. So far we are imagining a procedure in which, with existing and in some cases predicted technology, genetic selection is required of parents in order to keep their children from having diseases preventable with this type of intervention. But recently deaf parents have attempted to genetically select for deaf children (read about one case here). Bioethicists may have thought that parents would first select for superficial traits like eye color or height, or maybe they thought that screening would be used to prevent diminishment of 'quality of life' for the would-be parents would-be children. But the deaf case makes us remember that not every one agrees on what counts as good regarding quality of life.

Both cases involve issues about autonomy, but the deaf case adds another dimension which was not at play before.

The Times article mentions a bill which "would make it illegal for parents undergoing embryo screening to choose an embryo with an abnormality if healthy embryos exist."

A coalition of disability organisations will launch a campaign to amend the bill to make it possible for parents to choose the embryos that carry a genetic abnormality.

Francis Murphy, chairman of the British Deaf Association, said: “If choice of embryos for implantation is to be given to citizens in general, and if hearing and other people are allowed to choose embryos that will be ‘like them’, sharing the same characteristics, language and culture, then we believe that deaf people should have the same right.”

What do readers of this blog think? Post a comment.

Morality and AIG's Bonuses

The discussion right now about AIG paying bonuses with bailout money has a moral tone to it, no doubt. People are "outraged." The condemnation of the paying of these bonuses has been intense and widespread.

Additionally, there have been demands that those who received the bonuses must give them back. The sense of the "must" there is the moral sense. Our moral intuitions seem to suggest that it would be right to return the bonus money; that it ought to be returned.

So people's judgment of the behavior falls within the moral domain, the domain of things having to do with morality. It is not just a case of what's legal or what makes good business sense. It's a matter of morality. (Additionally people's suggested course of action, what they think ought to happen has certainly fallen in the moral domain.)

But what can be said about the moral domain itself? Rather than whether the bonuses violate some sense of justice, this post at The Frontal Cortex considers the sense of justice itself.

Jonah Lehrer, author of "Proust was a Neuroscientist," develops an idea relating our sense of justice and fairness to results from psychological experiments surrounding the Ultimatum Game. Read it and please leave a comment here.

Here's a taste:

After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.