Why Giles Fraser is wrong about assisted dying

Giles Fraser’s recent argument on Comment is Free against euthanasia and assisted dying was both mistaken and objectionable in its conclusions. In it, Fraser tells us that his problem with euthanasia is not so much that ending life in order to alleviate suffering is wrong, but that it springs from an undesirable political ideology.

The value that Fraser particularly objects to is that of self-determination or autonomy, and he connects this with liberalism. Liberalism, he suggests, places too much value on personal autonomy, and he trots out the tired old idea that the liberal view of the individual is atomistic and selfish:

‘No, we are not brains in vats. We are not solitary self-defining intellectual identities who form temporary alliances with each other for short-term mutual advantage.’

The problem with Fraser’s communitarian-flavoured argument is that it fails on two fronts: it fails because he is wrong in his characterisation of liberalism, and it fails again because the alternative he offers is morally repugnant.

At the core of liberalism is an attempt to reconcile the freedom of individuals with the need to live a communal and cooperative existence. The social nature of human existence is a necessary feature of liberal ideology and the idea of reciprocity is built into it. The liberal does not deny that, as Fraser puts it ‘My existence is fundamentally bound up with yours,’ at all. How could they? However, the liberal believes that the individual should be able to choose who the objects of her affection are and what she wishes to pursue in life. We may be bound together, but not in ways that are fixed and insensitive to the choices we make and the character of our desires.

Fraser writes:

‘Having someone wipe our bums, clean up our mess, put up with our incoherent ramblings and mood swings is a threat to our cherished sense of personal autonomy.

But this is where the liberal model of individual self-determination breaks down. For it is when we are this vulnerable that we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be loved and looked after. Lying in a bed full of our own faeces, unable to do anything about it, is when we break with the idea of René Descartes’ pernicious “I think therefore I am”.

Putting aside his obvious misunderstanding of Descartes, Fraser reveals an ugly paternalism here. To be autonomous is to be a free-willed moral agent capable of reflecting and acting according to reason, to be capable of forming, revising, and pursuing rationally chosen goals. Fraser tells us that when we refuse to allow someone the option to end their life, when we tell then: ‘Shut up about being a burden. I love you,’ that this is what it means to love someone.

To override free choice in order to impose one’s own conception of the good is not an expression of the kind of love that exists between two adults at all. Rather, it is precisely how we treat children when we believe them to be incapable of making fully rational choices. Fraser’s argument boils down to abandoning the principle of equal moral respect between moral agents and replacing it with theologically-inspired paternalism, and that certainly is not how adults should demonstrate their love for one another.

Beneath Fraser’s argument for paternalism there also lies an unpleasant suggestion that suffering, and indignity are things to be cherished. Suffering, according to Fraser, is what allows us to properly appreciate ‘that which is valuable.’ Presumably, the good things we’ve experienced in life will seem even better to us when we’re ‘lying in a bed full of our own faeces, unable to do anything about it.’ Perhaps it’s just me, but I suspect that comparing a miserable pain-filled present existence to the joys that have gone before is cold-comfort to the terminally suffering. A present existence of misery and indignity, coupled with the certainty that the future holds only more of the same, is simply bad. And whilst I can understand Fraser’s perfectly natural desire to make it seem less so, the paternalism he responds with is nothing less than an assault on the dignity and equal moral worth of other persons.

If there are arguments to be made against allowing the suffering to end their own lives, then they will need to be made much better than Fraser has made them.

Should we obey God? What political theory tells us about faith.

Doing some tutoring in theories of political obligation has, to my surprise, prompted me to think about  God  over the last couple of days. Specifically, I’ve been asking myself what the existence of a creator being might mean and whether it might generate any obligations in us.

Assuming there is a creator being (a pretty big assumption, and one that simply moves the creation problem one step away and generates an infinite regress the moment we ask how the creator being came into existence). But, assuming there is a creator being (or beings), how should we act towards that being? What is the correct response to the creation of the universe and the conditions within which we came into being?

My first thought is that the fitting response cannot be reciprocation. It cannot be reciprocation because there’s simply nothing we can do to reciprocate for the creation of everything. Perhaps one might argue that the correct form of reciprocation is not to give something of similar value in return, but to obediently. Leaving aside the problem that there’s no evidence of any commands ever having been issued; should we obey if a command were to be issued?

If someone gives something to us does that give us a duty to obey them? Of course it does not. None of us has ever been in a position to ask for creation and nor have we been able to refuse it. Nozick, arguing about fair play as source of political obligation, famously described a scenario where a group of book-tossers lob books into people’s property and then demand obedience in return for the benefits of having free books. Even if I really like the book thrown at me, and I benefit from having read from it, the book-tosser has no right to demand anything from me. Perhaps I should thank her, but she certainly cannot demand that I pay her or obey her commands. Furthermore, it’s very hard to see what benefit a being powerful enough to create the universe might gain from having its commands followed. Fair play theories begin with the intuition that it’s wrong to share the benefits of cooperative endeavours, but not to share in the burdens generated by them. But, the creator isn’t bearing any burdens from our non-compliance with its wishes. Thus, since the ignoring of any commands costs the creator nothing, it does not seem unfair to disobey its commands.

Perhaps we should at least feel gratitude for creation. Falling back on political theory once more, this time in the form of A. D. M. Walker’s work on political obligation and gratitude: gratitude involves a sense of goodwill and respect for our benefactor. It requires both the communication of our appreciation of the benefit we receive and that we not act in ways incompatible with our attitudes of goodwill and respect.  Once again, it’s hard to see how that translates into a duty to obey. As above, it’s difficult to argue that disobedience harms the interests of a creator being, and nor is it clear how goodwill and respect translate into a right held by the creator to have its commands obeyed. I’m grateful to my parents for many things, but they have no right to command my obedience as a result.

If fairness and gratitude do not provide duties of obedience to a creator, then that leaves just three other possibilities that I can think of.

The first possibility is that we should obey commands because those commands are what it’s morally right to do. However, this just leads us to the edge of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma: if we should do what the creator tells us because we judge its commands to be morally right then we’re simply doing what we judge to be right and our obligation comes not from the creator but from the rightness of the act. As an example of this principle: the reason we shouldn’t murder people is not because the law says murder is wrong, but because murder is wrong irrespective of what the law says.

That point leads to the second reason: we should obey the commands of the creator because it will punish us if we do not. This sense of ‘should’ provides us with a pragmatic rather a moral reason to obey the creator being. Whilst we might have a reason to obey such commands, they would not generate any duties: there is no duty to obey commands issued with threats.

The third possibility is also connected with the first: perhaps we should obey if we agree to do so. Initially, it seems pretty clear cut that if I consent to the authority of the creator being, then I should obey its commands. This means that only those who willingly consent take on duties (something only autonomous adults can really do). But (and here’s the link with the firs point), we cannot be bound by agreements to do things which are morally wrong. For example, if I agree to assist you in torturing your enemy and then have qualms and back out, you do not have a right to my assistance in your act of torture based on the earlier promise I made. Promises and contracts are constrained by other demands of morality – a promise is important, but not strong enough to overcome all other considerations. This means that the creator is limited in what it can demand of its followers (burning witches and persecuting homosexuals is right out).

The only real way to escape the first and second problems is to claim that the commands of the creator are synonymous with morality. Not only is it really odd to draw a logical connection between creating something and being morally right, but the Euthyphro Dilemma shows why this approach is problematic.

So, to conclude, only those adults who consent to the authority of a creator have duties to obey its commands and then only if those commands are to do what it morally permissible to do.  Hopefully, if the infinite creator regress is solved, and a creator being ever does start issuing commands, we now have an idea about how we should respond to it.

Why should we conserve rhinos?

The question of why we should conserve rhinos popped up on Twitter earlier today. We tend to assume that it’s bad when a species is under threat of extinction, but it’s rare to see any defence of such claims. So what reasons might we have for thinking that poaching rhinos to extinction is bad? Below are five potential reasons why we should preserve a species, using rhinos as an example:

1. Because then there would be no more rhinos for us to enjoy

This reason sees rhinos as instrumentally valuable – they are the means by which we gain enjoyment, much as we would from viewing an aesthetically pleasing artwork or a beautiful sunset. If the loss of rhinos were a bad thing on this ground then we would have to show that there is a particular type of enjoyment that we can only gain from rhinos and which cannot be compensated for from other sources. Maybe there’s a special quality to the enjoyment of watching rhinos that we cannot gain from watching elephants or hippos, but it seems unlikely to me. Not a very strong reason then.

2. Because rhinos fulfil an important role in the ecosystem

Again, this reason views rhinos as instrumentally valuable insofar as they help preserve an ecosystem. Why we might want to preserve an ecosystem may be because we see ecosystems as valuable for their own sake (although I’m not sure what features of an ecosystem we could pick out to that would make it so), or because we judge ecosystems to be important in meeting human (or potentially other animal) needs. If we think the preservation of rhinos is important for ecological reasons, then that importance is contingent on no other animal being able to fulfil the same role in the ecosystem and the ecosystem being unable to adapt to the loss of rhinos. In other words the rhino must be a necessary component of the ecosystem for it’s extinction to be a matter of concern under this reason. Ecosystems are often quite resilient and adaptable, so whether rhinos are necessary in this way is something I’m sceptical of.

Edit: thanks to @AGBear for pointing out that the precautionary principle might apply here. Perhaps we cannot know what the negative consequences of the loss of a species on an ecosystem will be. Because those potential negative consequences might be very high – ecosystems are very complex beasts – we should do our best to preserve endangered species such as the rhino. This argument still doesn’t value rhinos for their own sakes though. Furthermore, the value of the species is also (as above) derived from the role played by individual non-human animals in the ecosystem. I’m also inclined to think that whilst we might not know the precise risks to an ecosystem that the loss of a species carries, we can know with greater or lesser degrees of certainty, and the accuracy of our predictions is likely to increase as numbers of a species decrease and we can see the effects of this decrease. In other words, our lack of perfect knowledge doesn’t provide a knock-down reason for saving a species.

3. Because rhinos fulfil an important economic role in a community

It’s not uncommon to see reference made to the valuable contribution certain wild animals make to poor communities through the attraction of tourists. Here again the reason to preserve a species is instrumental and contingent, this time upon the species being an irreplaceable source of income. That rhinos are the only way a poor community can gain wealth is a pretty strong claim – not one that I’m sure can succeed, so I think that this reason ultimately fails too.

4. Because the destruction of the species involves the destruction of individual members rhinos

Here we come to what I think is a much more plausible claim: the reason to save rhinos from extinction is that extinction involves the death and probable suffering of individual rhinos who are worthy of moral concern for their own sakes. This, of course, is where the argument for animal rights comes in – I’m not going to defend it here, but I think it offers the only truly convincing reason for saving a species, a reason that is derived from the moral status of the individual non-human animals making up that species. Thus, we care about saving rhinos not because we care about whether there are rhinos in the world or not, but because we care about the individual rhinos that do presently exist.

5. Because the species is valuable to individual rhinos

This fifth reason hangs of the fourth: the thought is that if an individual being is worthy of moral consideration for its own sake, and it values its own species, then that species might form part of the individual being’s good. Although I can see how we might see the preservation of a community or a family as important for the reason it plays in a creature’s life, I don’t see how the species can be analogous to the family in a way that is makes sense in this kind of argument. Furthermore, I suspect it will only be a subset of non-human animals that it can be convincingly claimed of that they value their communities. Perhaps the higher apes, dolphins, perhaps elephants etc. So, this reason also looks like it too fails.

The weird thing about the reasons I’ve given above is that the claim about the badness of a loss of a species usually appears to rest not on them, but on an implication that species are intrinsically valuable. That is to say that species are valuable for their own sake and not because of the individual members of the species that make them up. But that claim is very different from the potential arguments I’ve listed above. It seems like we have an intuition that species are intrinsically valuable, but I can’t think of how you might defend this claim convincingly.

Ultimately then, I’m not sure why the destruction of a species counts as a bad thing separate from the loss of the individual members of that species, so I’m minded to conclude that we should focus instead on the plight of individual non-human animals and on their communities.

Anyone got a good argument for the intrinsic value of species?

Is the UK’s Work Programme a form of forced Labour?

In the news today is the story that the government acted unlawfully in requiring a woman to work for Poundland for two weeks in order to receive her unemployment benefits.

The judge ruled that the government acted unlawfully for the following reasons: ‘not giving the unemployed enough information about the penalties they faced and their rights to appeal against being made to work unpaid for.’

However, the government minister concerned, Mark Hoban, is quoted responding the claim that her treatment amounted to forced labour. This in itself is interesting, because the Guardian and other campaigners against the Work Programme appear to be treating the judgement as affirmation of this claim. The quotes in the Guardian article clearly show that the judgement does no such thing, but given that this is the issue that everyone’s most interested in, I thought I’d reflect upon it myself (and then inflict my musings on the rest of you).

Under the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (which the UK is signed-up to), forced labour counts as:

all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily’ but excludes ‘ any work or service which forms part of the normal civic obligations of the citizens of a fully self-governing country
http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C029

I suspect that Hoban might claim a) that signing up for the Job Seekers Agreement (JSA) counts as offering oneself voluntarily, and b) that is might also count as part of the normal civic obligations. I think the latter sounds ropey, but the former less so. The sanction for not working is up to 26 weeks of loss of benefits. However, if I go to the Job Centre and tell them I’ve not been looking for work, and I don’t intend to look for work, and they can go screw themselves, then they will remove my benefit. That sounds like it has some similarities with the Work Programme case. To claim JSA I must first sign the Jobseekers Agreement, in other words I make a promise to do certain things, I sign a contract. What the judge has said in the case above is that the terms of the agreement were not sufficiently spelled out and so the contract is not binding. What that doesn’t mean is that the Work Programme is necessarily a form of forced labour. If the benefits provided by the JSA are given on the understanding that I must be seeking work, that I will work if I can, and that I must do what I can to improve the chances of my getting work, then it seems to me that calling the Work Programme ‘Forced Labour’ might be going to far.

One reply to that might be to say that signing up to JSA isn’t really voluntary since the alternative is pretty terrible, but then that could result in an argument that no claimant would have duties to comply with any of the rules of JSA because their acceptance of them was not voluntary. I think this probably stretches the concept of voluntariness though since there’s no coercion or duress involved in signing on, and the unpleasant alternative (lack of money) is not a threat imposed by the government.

One might also reply that if the terms were not clear, i.e. that the job seeker was unaware when signing on that they would be required to enter the Work Programme, then their labour cannot be considered voluntary. This seems like a valid argument, but I’m not convinced, given the widespread coverage of the scheme, that is a strong one. A job-seeker might not have been aware of all of the details of the Work Programme, but it’s questionable that that amounts to not knowing about the obligation at all.

All this is not to say that the Work Programme is right, or that the way that this lady was treated does not deserve criticism. But, I’m not at all sure right to claim that it’s forced labour.

Not only that, but I’m more than a bit worried that the comparison of 2 weeks work in Poundland as a requirement to receive JSA with slavery is actually rather offensive to all of those who really have been enslaved. I worry that the debate surrounding this case may diminish the moral horror of real slavery, and that a misunderstanding about the nature of benefits plays into co-opting the outrage felt at slavery for an attack on something else.

So, this post is a call for clarity about what the wrongs are in a particular case.  In order to form the correct response to a situation, and one that coheres with our other moral judgements, it’s important to seek that clarity. If we’re going to focus on what’s wrong in this case then perhaps good starting points would be:

• It’s wrong not to be fully clear about all of the details of a contract.
• It seems wrong (and stupidly inflexible) to require someone to stop voluntary work in a post relevant to their qualifications in order to spend two weeks unpaid working in somewhere that isn’t (unless the extent of that voluntary work prevented active job-seeking).

Those things are bad, but they’re nowhere near as bad as slavery.

Boycotting quinoa: duties of consumers & producers

I’m tentatively working on a paper on ethical consumerism and duties to fellow citizens. One question that’s particularly exercising me right now is whether, if individuals have duties not to buy certain things, might that entail a duty in the seller not to offer to sell those things to me and visa versa?

I’m writing the paper in the context of several newspaper articles complaining that the rising popularity of quinoa in the West has made it less available to Bolivian citizens, who have eaten the seed since the time of the Incas.

Currently I’m unconvinced it’s unambiguously bad that Bolivians can’t afford or source their grain. So far, this is something the some journalists telling the tale have assumed. Why might it not be bad? Well, for one thing, the increased price of quinoa means more profit for the Bolivian farmers that grow it, and more spending by them in their local communities. There are also plentiful and cheap high-protein alternative staples grown locally (such as soya) that can be bought instead.

Nevertheless, if we assume that Bolivians not being able to buy quinoa is an overall bad state of affairs – perhaps they gain more utility from eating it than those who it’s exported to, or perhaps their conceptions of the good are bound up in eating their traditional foods. If this is so, then maybe Western consumers should not be buying quinoa as part of a duty to maximise the good or to avoid harming distant strangers. Given that Bolivian farmers have, I assume, freely sold their products for export, I’m not sure it’s straightforwardly right to boycott quinoa, but let’s put that objection aside and assume that it is for now.

If it is wrong for me to buy quinoa from Bolivia, then presumably it’s also wrong for Bolivian farmers to sell their quinoa to me. However, there are a great many problems with this position, and that’s what’s really troubling me. For one thing, this position may mean that producers of goods are required only to sell where doing so might produce the overall best state of affairs. I can see that this could be the case if the producer is selling goods he or she knows will be used to do some terrible wrong (such as guns to a murderous regime), but is an apple producer only to sell apples to people he or she knows to enjoy apples the most or are most in need of the nutrients the apple contains? There’s a lot of freedom sacrificed in that position. A further problem I see is that it means the producer must avoid selling to anyone he or she thinks may sell or give the product to anyone else. Again, it would seem strange for the apple seller to be required to refuse to sell his or her apples to someone who might give those apples to a third party who might like the apples less than some other person, particularly when none of the intervening transfers are likely to be unjust. What’s more, it seems rather strange to think that private producers have duties to their fellow citizens to give them first right of refusal on any product they want to sell, and that the duty requires offering the product at a price their fellows can afford even if they can sell it for much more elsewhere. If there are such duties then those the product was sold to would also acquire a duty not to transfer their purchases out of the community. All of that looks to be an unacceptable set of constraints on freedom and rife with epistemic problems for the duty-bearers.

Let’s remember, Bolivian farmers aren’t forced to sell their quinoa to people who will export it, and they benefit substantially from doing so. Nor does it seem plausible to me (I’d love some input on this) to suggest that they have a duty not to sell to anyone but their fellow citizens. If it’s not wrong for Bolivians to sell their quinoa, then just what makes it wrong for me to buy it? I’m quite puzzled by the idea that it might be permissible for Bolivian farmers to sell their quinoa to me, but impermissible for me to buy it from them. Anyone care to help me out on this one?

If quinoa is so important to Bolivians, might I even be required, if I am able, to purchase their exported quinoa and then give it back to them (or sell it at an affordable price)? That might be a position utilitarianism requires, but it looks highly implausible to me.

Trust and the Holy Spirit

This morning, I watched a debate on the BBC’s The Big Questions programme. During a debate about faith, one panellist claimed that he had remained faithful to his wife for 15 years, not through his own agency but because the Holy Spirit had ‘moved in him.’ Later, he claimed that he’d been moved, again by the Holy Spirit’ to give to a homeless charity. I found these claims deeply troubling for several reasons.

First, the claim that he only acted morally because the Holy Spirit compelled him is troubling because it amounts to a denial of free will and agent-responsibility. If the reason we do good is because a spirit moves us to do good, then we don’t do good because it is right, but because we are compelled to do so. It’s possible that the gentleman intended making a weaker claim than he did – perhaps that he is commanded rather than compelled by the Holy Spirit. Which brings me onto my second concern.

If someone says that they did good because they were instructed to by a spiritual being, then there’s that worry there’s no moral judgement being made by the individual.  It’s very hard to call obedience to command a moral theory. Indeed, if we only do right because we are commanded, then we’re not really moral beings at all. The concern is that they’ve subscribed to Divine Command Theory – that what is good is what God says is good. This means that the person receiving commands would obey whatever they believe comes from the Holy Spirit without assessing rightness (because rightness is assured by the fact that it’s a command). And, if someone does whatever they believe to be a command from the Holy Spirit moving within them, then they would be as willing to torture children as they would to remain faithful to their wives or give money to homeless charities. That’s pretty alarming.

I suppose that the gentleman on the panel might reply that he doesn’t always act on command of the Holy Spirit, and that he usually acts on an assessment of the moral worth of an action. But then I would question whether he would be prepared to refuse the command of God – if not, then he doesn’t really act morally when he is ‘moved by the Holy Spirit’, he merely acts obediently. If this is true, then others around him will never be quite sure whether he’s currently acting morally or on what he believes to be the will of God. All this means that he could act on a perceived command to do something terrible in the sincere belief that he acts rightly, or he might act in the belief that his will is not his own.

All in all, this makes it pretty hard to trust someone who claims they act on command of a spiritual presence that makes itself known to them. Would you trust someone who claims to be receiving spiritual instruction or control, and would not question the morality of acting according to whatever the voice in their head commanded? I don’t think I could.