The great British natural-law philosopher John Haldane made a good case earlier this week on the BBC’s world service broadcast that to make public policy regarding controversial issues like assisted suicide, genetic engineering, and embryo manipulation, lawmakers need a common ethical framework and understanding of the value of human life. Without this framework, decisions about life and death become purely pragmatic, a matter of pleasing the most—or at least the most powerful—people, or are based entirely on intuition.
Haldane’s interlocutors—Lord Falconer, former Lord Chancellor, and Lisa Jardine, chair of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, the government agency—provided perfect fodder to prove his point as they argued that a common ethical framework is impossible to achieve, and unnecessary. “Spiritual objections,” Falconer argued, cannot be considered by organizations like the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. If they were considered, “then [the HFEA] couldn’t agree to half the things that they agree to.” Basic ethical principles, are unnecessary anyway, since “decent people”— as Falconer put it—and especially women, Jardine added, can rely on their their gut feeling to determine the morality and possible moral consequences of procedures like pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.
You can listen to the BBC segment here.
February 3rd, 2010 | 3:30 am
Haldane is engaging in what in the blogosphere we would call “concern trolling”.
He is oh so terribly concerned that there is no common basis on which people ground their moral judgements, which leads to them disagreeing about important moral issues which leads us to the EXTREMELY trivial fact that people disagree about stuff. Wonderful.
So what if nowadays the conflicts exist between the various moral spheres of a pluralistic society, be they Christian, Islamic, Hindu or various shades of Secular (Pragmatism, Utilitarianism etc…)?
200 years ago these sorts of debates took place among competing Christians sects or denominations: while they might have claimed the Bible as their common moral framework it didn’t preclude them from often violently disagreeing about the “correct” interpretion of scripture regarding a specific topic.
Frankly, I am MUCH more comfortable with today’s way of deciding these issues in the usually peaceful court of public opinion. I know that makes some “natural law”-types quiver in fear of the imminent moral breakdown they believe to be the inevitable result when morality is allowed to be nothing but a child of its time.
But that’s how it has always been. Just because one ethical framework has enjoyed a long hegemony doesn’t mean there is anything remotely “natural” about it. This too shall pass.
February 4th, 2010 | 6:56 am
Wow, Marc. Stunning. So there is absolutely no basis whatsoever, in reason, to adjudicate between a moral position that thinks we should cannibalize our unborn children for spare parts, and one that says we should protect them; between a utilitarian one that says we should force seniors to shuffle off their mortal coil when they are no longer productively contributing to the GNP and and one that says we should love them; one like Peter Singer’s that says that the disabled should never have been born (and their parents should be able to kill them with impunity) and those of us who see our disabled friends and loved ones as amazing gifts of love. I could give ten thousand examples.
Moral CODES may differ over time and place (thrift was an important value to colonial Americans, hospitality was important in the ancient world where there were no hotel chains etc), but moral PRINCIPLES are real and necessary. There is a world – a universe, a cosmos – of difference between those who see human life as an expendable, patentable product and those who see each and every human being as having intrinsic worth, dignity, and value to be cared for in charity (caritas) and truth). There is a world of difference between utilitarian calculation about the value of things and people, and natural law principles.
I suggest you start doing some reading. You have ZERO clue what the word “natural” in “natural law” refers to – it refers to HUMAN REASON – and perhaps you should start with the Nichomachean Ethics and move on up to Evangelium Vitae.
February 4th, 2010 | 1:21 pm
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