Discussion Thread: Does Rampant Individualism Threaten the Institution of Marriage?

At tonight's event one of the panelists said that even if same-sex marriage was not in fact "a threat to marriage," marriage was still in crisis for other reasons. Particularly, it's a rampant individualism that is damaging to marriage. People choose to pursue careers rather than get married. People feel entitled to happiness and so divorce rather than "stick it out;" or, perhaps, rampant individualism also has a component of self-indulgence? In any case, our individualistic society has a social safety net and amounts of prosperity where it's possible to lead a successful life, whatever that might mean, without ever getting married. This is just to put these thoughts out there. Please leave a comment.

Open Thread: Marriage... Who's Allowed? Who Decides?

This is an open thread to continue online the discussion that was begun at the event tonight, Marriage... Who's Allowed? Who Decides? Just click below to comment on the panel or discuss.

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.

More on Empirical Research into Morality

WebMD has an article which leads with "A new study reveals insights into the ancient roots of our modern-day sense of moral disgust."

Morality has been widely considered to be a somewhat recent phenomenon, evolutionarily speaking, that is closely tied to our ability to reason. Disgust, on the other hand, is considered an ancient and primitive emotion, which helped to keep early humans from eating foods that would kill them.

[Adam K] Anderson, lead study author Hanah Chapman, and colleagues conducted a series of experiments designed to determine if morality and disgust are more closely related than experts have thought.

In one experiment conducted to evoke the most basic, primordial form of disgust, participants drank a bad-tasting bitter liquid. In another, they looked at pictures of things generally recognized as disgusting, like dirty toilets.

In the final test, which measured moral disgust, participants were treated unfairly in a classic psychological experiment.

In all three situations, the participants showed activation of the levator labii muscle, indicating that reactions to tasting something bad, looking at something disgusting, and experiencing unfairness all involved similar disgust.

Those are some interesting excerpts. But go read the whole thing.

The Moral Rights of Neanderthals

Many have thought the most exciting ethical dilemma on the horizon would be the problem of moral rights for artificial intelligences. But at Reason Magazine online Ronald Bailey suggests that sooner than that we may have to decide what rights a cloned Neanderthal has.

A team of researchers led by geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany announced last week that they had completed a draft sequence of the genome of Neanderthal humans.

Bailey writes that a scientist who suggests cloning of a Neanderthal is possible...

would modify a modern human genome so that its DNA matches the Neanderthal version. To avoid ethical problems, [...] this Neanderthal genome would not be inserted into a human cell but instead into a chimpanzee cell. This chimp cell would be reprogrammed to an embryonic state, and then introduced into a chimpanzee's womb where it would develop into a Neanderthal infant.

Assuming that cloning is safe, would it be ethical to clone a human being? The short answer is yes. Clones are basically delayed twins—and there is nothing inherently immoral about twins.

Yet, public opinion polling suggests most Americans oppose cloning of humans.

So I suspect [Bailey writes] that the proposal to use chimpanzee cells to clone a Neanderthal is an attempt to do a kind of ethical end-run around this "yuck factor" reaction to human cloning. In this case, researchers could argue that they are cloning a different species, not a human being.

But a problem there is that Neanderthals are human beings!

I fear that using chimpanzee cells to clone Neanderthals would likely be taken as an indication from the outset that they are in some sense subhuman, and thus less worthy of moral respect.

But let's set that worry aside and assume that scientists are able to produce healthy Neanderthal clones. What rights would they have?

Read the article and post a comment regarding what you think.

Morals Surrounding Food and Sex

The New York Times "Ideas" blog links today to a paper authored by someone at the Hoover institution. The paper argues, according to the Times, that we are getting

... a “transvaluation” of values in which food is freighted with taboos, but sex much less so.

I guess the idea is that at one time sex had lots of rules about it and food was a matter of taste (forgive the pun), now sex is a matter of taste (do whatever you want) and food has all sorts of rules about it.

For me, though, an interesting part of the article is the account of how some vegetarians have adopted some of the moralizing language of the past to stigmatize non-vegetarians. In the question of moral progress, it's important to have an account of how conceptual change occurs in moral schemas. It can be a counterexample to a theory of moral judgment, if that theory cannot allow for moral progress, or if it is too conservative, or conserving, of existing morays. In the future, a account of how a conceptual change was achieved in relation to vegetarianism will make an interesting ethnography.

Morality and the Economic Downturn, Part 3

At pbs.org a fellow at the Brookings Institution discussed the moral aspects of the market with a PBS producer. Here is the video.

The World Financial Crisis

In his recent talk, Gary Parr, Deputy Chairman of Lazard and a much sought after financial adviser in the current credit crunch, addressed the world financial crisis. It is a rare but welcome opportunity to meet someone who has first hand experience with multinational corporations and governments and who is involved in high profile decision-making processes that affect so many people worldwide. And it is even rarer to meet such a person and realize that he is not only a calculating businessman, but actually quite human and ethically concerned. Mr. Parr’s talk was stimulating and, apart from facts and numbers, he touched on many complex ethical issues that have no simple answers. I will discuss some of them, in particular corporate social responsibility, government intervention, and institutional design.

How did it happen?
In his talk, Mr. Parr identified human nature as one of the key causes of the current financial crisis. The problem is not, however, egoistic behavior, as one might have thought. Instead, inductive reasoning is the main culprit. Inductive reasoning, based on the assumption that the future will be like the past, is essential for human beings to survive in this world, but it may also drive them into an existential or financial crisis. If everyone believes that prices will go up, as in our case housing prices, because housing prices always went up in the past, and the issued credit volume by lenders is not fully backed by real assets, then we may face a vicious problem of collective action when prices actually fall.

The problem of collective action that arises in this case is, quite refreshingly, not that no action takes place, as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game where everybody defects. Instead, the problem is that too much action takes place because everyone tries to sell, and the run on the banks effectively shuts them down. To illustrate this point, Mr. Parr used the metaphor of a ship in danger to capsize because too many people lean on one side of the boat. Coordinated action, then, if everyone runs from the one side of the boat to the other, will surely do the trick and sink the ship. How can we avoid such unwelcome collective disaster?

Possible solutions
Back to human nature. I think that a good starting point to solve this problem is David Hume’s insight that human beings cannot change their nature, but they can change their environment. Human beings can, by intelligent institutional design, artificially create institutions that guard themselves against collective failure such as we currently experience.

One such institutional coordination device is free markets. If everything goes fine, the invisible hand optimally allocates our scarce resources. That is a start. But markets alone do not always produce socially optimal outcomes. Indeed, as the last couple of months have shown, markets may not even produce stable suboptimal outcomes, but instead falter altogether. But what should we do if the invisible hand gets out of hand? The most obvious answer to this question is government intervention. There are two options. We can either follow a piecemeal strategy or call for systematic government regulations.

The general strategy in the US has been, in particular over the last eight years during which the Bush administration reduced regulations for banks, insurers, lenders, and credit raters, to interfere with the market only in emergency cases and otherwise to let the market work as freely as possible. But this strategy is extremely short-sighted because it does not allow us to prevent unfavorable situations such as that which we currently face. It allows only for rescue plans and ad hoc modifications to the current system, as Mr. Parr discussed.

It seems that in order to prevent collective failure, more systematic institutional design is necessary. The government must tame the market by legislating more rigorous rules for the ‘banking game’ that actually produce socially desirable outcomes, or at least avoid collective disaster. But is this sufficient? Does changing the rules of the game prevent corporations from following extremely risky strategies that, if they should go wrong, must be absorbed by taxpayers because a collapse of these enterprises would be even worse for the public?

It seems that there is still a missing link that forces corporations and their managements to be more responsible for their actions. One possible solution to this problem is partial state ownership. The idea is straightforward. If the government bails out ailing companies, then it should receive a share in the company’s ownership in return, and when stock market prices recover, the government should sell the shares to private investors to the benefit of the taxpayers. This ties private interests to the public interest, at least partially, and thus forces all actors to pull in the same direction. No collective action problem here. Paul Krugman’s recent article on this topic is insightful.

Morality and the Economic Downturn, Part 2

To what extent has the recent failure of our global economic system been a moral failure?

The BBC asks that question in an article here.

It is noted that if you think at first glance that capitalism itself is immoral, you need to remember that the "invisible hand" idea is meant to show that in capitalism there is reward made to those who satisfy the interests of others.

"Wall Street is always motivated by profit, but unfortunately everybody thinks that capitalism is the problem," he says, pointing to how the essential root of capitalism is to reward those who do something that will help others.

But what actually happened in the credit crisis? And was what went wrong a matter of immoral decisions and actions?

Joe Saluzzi says the cause of the current crisis was giving loans to people who didn't qualify, who had no documentation, and no income that could support a mortgage.

"And the reason banks did lend was because they were packing up the risks and selling them off to Wall Street," he says.

"If people become too dependent on loans or are unqualified, the system is wrong and is not going to work," adds Dr Rishi Das.

I'm still not seeing a moral violation. At least not as the BBC reporter is presenting it.

"Everybody is guilty here of trying to make an extra dime and squeeze an extra bit of profit," he says.

Again, that just sounds like the profit motive essential to capitalism. What we are looking for is a moral violation in the pursuit of that profit. Some act of unfairness or harm.

Now, on the other hand, maybe there is more to morality than violations of autonomy (harm) and violations of fairness. The people the BBC interviewed seem to think so. In an earlier post, we discussed the work of Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who has studied the psychology of moral judgment. He finds that a small population of the world thinks that only violations of autonomy and fairness count as moral violations, and the rest of the world agrees with that while also finding violations of Community, Purity, and Authority to be moral violations.

Globalisation has given us insight into the lives of different people, but it has failed to make us appreciate that we are all connected, she believes.

"The culture of greed has created an individualism, selfishness - a society looking for compensation - a society we don't want to live in."

These seem to be violations of Community, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt would categorize them.

Does is make sense that capitalism (and the individualism inherent in the profit motive postulation) would work well for cultures with only the Harm and Fairness moral pillars and work not so well in cultures will all five pillars?

Part of the mission of the Parr Center's Ethics in the News blog is to educate interested members of the Parr & UNC community about ethics and everyday life. There are other ways to do that, to be sure, than merely foregrounding news stories that have an ethical aspect to them. 

So today, I wanted to share some resources for understanding some of the recent empirical moral psychology which is playing such a big part in recent discussions in philosophical ethics.




Above is a video of a lecture by psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the evolutionary origins of morality and on what he calls the five main pillars of morality: Harm, Fairness, In-group, Authority, Purity. He says that Blue State Liberals consider only Harm and Fairness violations to be moral violations. Red State Conservatives (and most of non-Western peoples) consider violations of any of the five to be moral violations.

Additionally, here's a video of Haidt speaking at a New Yorker conference. He claims that diversity and mobility (which is what you encounter when you live on water routes) shrink the moral domain to just Harm and Fairness.

And, here is an important paper by Haidt, for those who are interested and want to dig deeper. 

The idea of the power of moral emotions and the post-hoc rationalizations that people do to defend their emotional judgments is an important Haidt-idea. It is discussed more in the paper than in the video, although he mentions it in the interview portion of the New Yorker video.

He says, and I'm paraphrasing:

"People's reasoning is not the source of their judgments. We make our moral judgments with our gut. It's like aesthetic judgment. You see something and you have an instant reaction. You can't stop yourself. 'That's beautiful' is your judgment. And then you think of reasons why the artwork is beautiful but that reason may not necessarily be the feature of the painting the caused your reaction/judgment. And analogously in morality, we see something and we just have an immediate reaction. Then we are so good at reasoning... but we don't reason in order to find the truth... moral reasoning developed, I believe, in order to help us persuade others to see things our way. Moral reasoning is practiced very strategically in order just to defend what you already believe because of your emotional response."

By the way, I don't know if I necessarily endorse his view, if it's his view that there may be something irrefutably valuable in the other three moral pillars. Perhaps I think it's better to be committed to a society with high mobility, high diversity and lots and lots of tolerance. The reason Authority and In-Group and Purity go away in modern cultures on trading routes is because they tend to favor unfairness to some group that is trying to live with the other groups.

Enjoy the videos!

Morality and the Economic Downturn

Some public comments and certainly personal conversations have couched interpretations of the credit crisis on Wall Street in moral terms. 

But the New York Times reports today that "Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan...the Ivy League professors Simon Schama and Michael Walzer and the Wall Street powerbrokers Mort Zuckerman, Michael Steinhardt and William Ackman gathered to discuss 'Madoff: A Jewish Reckoning.'"

As for moral issues, Mr. Walzer, of Princeton, said, “I’m a moral philosopher, but I don’t think morality is all that important in the way we think about Wall Street and the economy.” The drive to make money is at the root of the business world, he noted: “We have to assume human behavior is what it is, and that’s what you need government for."

Is a moral analysis of the credit crisis appropriate?

Moral Relativism

A columnist at the BBC News Magazine online has addressed moral relativism. Much of the article is filler and anecdotes. The meat, such as it is, is here:

I'd begin with some token reassurance and then go on to discuss some of the parameters of moral relativism, the ways in which such a position derived at least in part from the anthropological insistence upon the uniqueness of separate cultures, from the alleged impossibility of being able to declare one way of living and believing as superior to any other.

I'd also suggest that a thoroughgoing subscription to moral relativism meant that it was no longer valid or appropriate to pass judgement on such practises as wife beating or euthanasia.

But in order not to be too downbeat I'd also point out to my earnest enquirer that there was small consolation to be found in their children's readiness to construct their own ideas of what was right and wrong.

Children who devised their own moral code were far more likely to adhere to it than to one which had been handed down by authoritarian figures such as popes and priests and headmasters and patriarchal fathers. Then I'd say "that'll be ten pounds please", hop back in the van, drive home and count the day's takings.

But then perhaps even more interesting are the comments in which his readers take him to task:

One of my first-day-of-the semester ploys is to have my students say something about themselves by way of introduction. One semester, during this process one boy said, "My name is Aaron and I don't believe in anything."

"Not in ANYTHING?" I asked.

He said, "I don't believe in religion or morality or anything."

I stared for a second and then asked, "'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' I am sure we all would like to know where you stand on that one."

"Oh. I agree with that one."

I waited a heartbeat, then said, "Well, then I can let you stay. If you had expressed ambiguity, I would have felt morally bound to insist you leave."

And this:

Finally the public seem to be catching up with what philosophers have been saying for years; it isn't possible to know anything. Soon we will discount all morality and decide we can no longer pass judgement on anything. Then the law will go. After that we'll decide we aren't sure about science and technology and then we can scrap that. Then we just need to take apart language and we can all be back in caves in no time, getting some damn peace.

What do the readers of the Ethics in the News Blog think? 

Designer Babies: Science and Morality in the Magazine New Scientist

At New Scientist, Dan Jones writes that moral heuristics may be leading us astray in our moral judgments.

Heuristics can be thought of as tools in our mental toolbox that have evolved over millennia to help us make fast decisions in complex situations or where information may be limited, such as when choosing between various options or making everyday predictions. A particularly pervasive example in the moral domain is the injunction "Do not play God" or, in more secular terms, "Do not tamper with nature".

The problem with using moral heuristics to judge science is even starker in some popular perceptions of reproductive technologies. "Designer" babies are a case in point. IVF combined with genetic testing makes it possible to screen the cells of an embryo for specific gene variants before it is implanted into the womb. This pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is primarily used to filter out embryos with genes for heritable diseases, but in future it could be used to choose babies with desired traits, such as tallness or a particular eye colour, and perhaps even physical prowess, intelligence and aspects of personality.

The article then cites Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist:

Wolpert believes that knowledge, not a moral heuristic, is the best guide to thinking about the desirability of scientific or technological progress. So while he doesn't oppose "designer" babies on ethical grounds, he doesn't think there should be a genetic free-for-all either... "You might think you know what you're doing when you put in new genes, but it's very tricky, and you're likely to produce abnormalities," he says. "I think it's a safety issue, not an ethical issue."

Is it just a safety issue? If there is an ethical quandary here what is it? What do you think the right thing to do is?

Making babies 'cancer-free'?

The first baby born in the UK to have been screened as an embryo for a cancer gene is raising again a hornets nest of ethical issues. There is more to discuss with this than can be handled in less than a book, so I won't even attempt it here. It is worth pointing out, though, how even more complicated this issue is than the over-wrought debates about abortion. On top of the question of whether an embryo or fetus has moral status, the issue of designer babies involves serious questions about what duties mothers have to their children, and whether embryonic screening is impermissibly discriminatory or even a form of eugenics. Moreover, there is the considerable cost of genetic screening and in vitro fertilization. As a result, those families who are least able financially to cope with having a child genetically predisposed to disease would be the ones least able to do anything about it. Suffice it to say that bioethicists are going to be busy with this for quite a while. 

Comments welcome.

Preventing, Punishing, and Putting Up With Piracy

An age-old profession is making a comeback off the coast of Somalia. Piracy (of the nautical variety) has flourished in the Gulf of Aden’s major shipping lanes. This resurgence of what many thought to be an long-gone pursuit has been catalyzed by several factors: political instability and violence in Somalia, foreign pillaging of Somalia’s once-rich tuna fishing waters, and a constant stream of international trade vessels heading to or from the vital Suez Canal.

For young men of Somalia, inured to violence and on vulnerable economic footing due to years of intractable political conflict, piracy is an easy way to get rich quick. According to a recent New York Times article, pirate profits in Somalia are “on track to reach a record $50 million” this year. While any sort of economic success in Somalia is a heartening sign, the means to these new riches warrant scrutiny.

Their method is simple: spot a ship, sail next to it in dinghies and skiffs, commandeer the vessel by force and demand a multi-million dollar ransom. There are, of course, complications: both pirates and hostages have been killed, and the UN has given permission for nations to send their warships into Somalia’s territorial waters with the intent of attacking piracy. So far no solution has materialized, and the violence is likely only to increase.

What are the ethical dimensions to this issue? It seems at first to be simply an issue of enforcing universally accepted norms of maritime conduct; that piracy is not to be tolerated is a cornerstone of international law. However, in 2008 the British Foreign Office advised the Royal Navy not to detain pirates from certain nations, as the return of these pirates to their home nations could result in a violation of their human rights, and thus the pirates would be able to claim asylum in Britain under British Human rights law. It is true that many pirates operate out of nations that have particularly violent justice systems, and most often the punishment for piracy in these nations is mutilation or death.

It is unclear, however, that refusing to detain the pirates is the proper course of action. Perhaps it would troublesome to grant pirates asylum, but asylum in Britain does not preclude serving a sentence for piracy there. Failing to detain pirates does nothing to prevent future piracy, and returning the pirates to their countries of origin does constitute a human rights violation if the judicial systems are severely brutal in their punishment of piracy.

Also, a question of whether to return pirates to their nations of origin is only asked when there is a nation to refer to, and it is easy to argue that modern-day Somalia is actually a Somalia-shaped region of perpetual unrest. There are autonomous zones within territorial Somalia, such as Puntland, but the stability and legitimacy of these governments pose open questions.

If nations such as Britain wish to pursue the enforcement of naval law and protection of their shipping, then they are under obligation to pursue these goals in the fashion most just, and that means the fashion that respects all the rights of the accused while subjecting them to the most just legal framework available. If bringing these people to justice involves some inconvenience along the way, so be it.

There is another ethical issue with scope beyond the questions relating to specific acts of piracy. Somali piracy can be seen as a problem in and of itself, but it can also be seen as a symptom of societal malaise. Piracy only became a viable career in Somalia after infrastructure collapsed in the early 1990s. Armed vessels took to the Gulf of Aden to prevent the opportunistic harvest of Somalia’s tuna fishing waters. When foreign ships depleted the tuna, Somali fishermen looking for a living turned to piracy.

Given these circumstances there is a sense in which Somali pirates are not completely responsible for their choice of livelihood. If there has been no stability in one’s country for over fifteen years and nautical violence is seen as just another career, then the role of pirates as fully responsible agents seems diminished against the reality of their situation, a state of effectively coercive hunger and poverty.

Clearly, pursuing Somali piracy from a purely punitive angle misses the real moral issue, much like trying to control smoke, when one’s main concern ought to be the blaze causing it. Piracy will cease when it is no longer profitable, and it will stop being so only when there is a stable Somalia.

-Davis Bennett

Ethics Blog Link

As we continue to work to make the Ethics in the News blog a prolific and popular place to go for analysis of the ethical dimensions at play in our world today, we're happy to share with you another blog by a Parr Center Fellow Stuart Rennie, Research Assistant Professor specializing in Bioethics. Check it out here.

Torture, By Any Other Name ...

Acclaimed author Christopher Hitchens — author of the best-selling God is Not Great, notable supporter of the Iraq war, and one of Rush Limbaugh's favorite writers — decided to see for himself whether waterboarding amounted to torture. See for yourself. In his forthcoming Vanity Fair article, he discusses his experience and how it has affected his views on the technique as used by U.S. personnel.

For Hitchens and others the issue seems to be whether to call waterboarding a form of torture. He writes, "I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

Though settling whether to call it torture may ultimately affect the legality of the practice, from an ethical standpoint it does not matter what to call it. What does matter are the undisputed facts that waterboarding is both physically traumatic (to the point of being life-threatening), and psychologically destructive. On even the most permissive moral theories, waterboarding could be justified in only the most extreme cases where very great losses would be prevented by its application. 

Given the current administration's insistence on secrecy with respect to all things related to the "war on terror," though, we simply have no way of knowing whether such exigent circumstances exist. This alone should be enough reason to oppose the practice, even if one isn't bothered by the question Hitchens raises: "It would be bad enough if you did have something ... but what if you didn't have anything? What if they'd got the wrong guy?"