CHAOS AND CONFUSION IN LIFE&DEATH ETHICS

Life and death are major areas within moral philosophy. The ethics of assisted reproductive technologies such as IVF, donors and surrogacy, and at the opposite end of the spectrum abortion, euthanasia (active and passive) and assisted suicide, amongst others evoke strong reaction. These issues are not abstract philosophical problems existing in academic journals; these are issues which apply to the everyday world and have direct consequences for human beings.

In order to further my understanding of this veritable minefield,  I am reading- 'Rethinking Life and Death' by Peter Singer and 'Causing Death and Saving Lives' by Jonathan Glover. In a future blog post I will give a more detailed review of these books, as I am yet to finish. However, I will share some of what they have to say about our approach to these issues. For anyone interested in bioethics and applied ethics, I would highly recommend these books.

Emotion clouds judgement

Glover argues that emotion often clouds our judgement. Whilst we accept the statement 'killing is wrong', he points out that we find it hard to hold onto this principle when confronted with killing in specific contexts: "Very few people are committed to absolute pacifism. Some support capital punishment. There are several different views about abortion." Another issues he raises is the drawing of boundaries when we talk about killing. When, for example is a war justified? When talking about abortion, it could be argued that it is justified if the baby born will be severely handicapped, but these same people will be "appalled at the suggestion that we should kill grossly abnormal children or babies who have already been born".

Glover attempts to answer the question whether we can formulate general principles to tell us which acts of killing can be classed as right or wrong. He divides the book into two sections: The first part deals with method of argument, the second with moral theories such as the sanctity of life.

Singer too raises the point that such issues cause chaos and confusion. His hypothesis however, is that our long held beliefs, mainly the ethic of the sanctity of life, are under attack, and that we must rethink our traditional ethic in light of the advances in modern technology, where people who are considered brain dead have their bodily functions continuously running by life support machines, for instance. He wishes to introduce a new way of looking at life and death (as yet I cannot say what it is!) 

The Sanctity of life under attack

The doctrine of the sanctity of life states that life should always be upheld as it has particular sacredness. Even those who are not religious will argue that there is something special about life and should hence always be preserved. The doctrine is attacked by both authors. Let us first deal with Glover's critique.

Glover: Killing as a direct wrong and the importance of consciousness

If we accept the sanctity of life, we are saying that killing is an intrinsic wrong, that killing is wrong in itself. Glover rejects this, but wishes to say that life is important. How does he reconcile this? 

When we talk about killing being wrong, we often talk about direct and side effects. By side effects we can say for instance the grieving of family. Glover is not concerned with that.  When we speak of a direct wrong, we talk about the negative effect, i.e. consequence on the person killed. It is this view which Glover wishes to retain. He also tries to set a boundary between life and death. 

Moral Philosopher Jonathan Glover 

An instance where this issue becomes important is how we treat a person in an irreversible coma. Is he/she alive? Still a human being? In investigating such an issue, Glover comes to the conclusion that essentially we are dealing with the importance of consciousness. He asks "Do we value life if unconscious, or do we value life only as a vehicle of consciousness?" He answers that life is a vehicle of consciousness. "Those of us who think that the direct objections to killing have to do with death considered from the standpoint of the person killed will find it natural to regard life as being of value only as a necessary condition of consciousness."

He introduces the concept of a 'Life Worth Living'.  Glover doesn't deny that what makes such a life isn't easy to decide. He does however say this "A life worth living has more to it than mere consciousness," which is described as simply consisting of awareness or the having of experiences. When humans have something more than just being aware, then to end such a life is directly wrong. 

Such a view can have dangerous consequences, but Glover is not advocating that we exclude certain people, he is saying that we are only trying to judge whether someone's life is so empty and unhappy as to not be worth living. The attempt  ("obviously an extremely fallible one") is to see the person's life from there point of view and to see what they get out of it. There is no suggestion that we have the right to start killing people if they don't have a 'life worth living'. The point being made is that if this person has such a life, "this is one reason why it is directly wrong to kill him". 

Singer's Critique. 

In Peter Singer's view,  the traditional ethic "has collapsed". He cites the case of Anthony Bland*, a young man who after the infamous Hillsborough disaster** was left in a persistent vegetative state. On the 4th of February 1993 Britain's highest court allowed doctors to lawfully end his life. According to Singer "we are going through a period of transition in our attitude to the sanctity of human life". Such a problem he says, is bound to cause 'confusion and division'. (In the case of abortion, many who do not agree with abortion may well go the paradoxical extreme of murdering doctors who carry out the procedure!)

Bioethicist Peter Singer 

The confusion is further caused by the advances of medical technology. We are now able to keep people who are brain-stem dead for decades. The question is, should we always uphold the Sanctity of life, regardless of the quality and nature of that life? Singer answers "that ethic (the Sanctity of Life) is now being brought undone by changes in medical technology with which its inflexible structures simply cannot cope."

The need for a new outlook is cited by certain examples. For instance the "American Medical Association has a policy that says a doctor can ethically withdraw all means of life prolonging medical treatment, including food and water, from a patient in an irreversible coma. Yet the same policy insists that the 'physician should not intentionally cause death'." 

In summary, if we hold onto an ethic whose views are inconsistent with the medical advances of today, it is bound to create problems. For this reason we must rethink our views on life and death which can cope with these new issues.

Further information

*Anthony Bland- http://www.spuc.org.uk/about/no-less-human/Bland.pdf

**The Hillsborough disaster- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

More on the authors: Peter Singer- http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/

                                  Jonathan Glover- http://jonathanglover.co.uk/

LOOKING BEYOND THE CAVE PART 2

Plato's God

Plato's God is formless and timeless.

According to Plato, there is the world of perfect Forms, which exist beyond time and space and were not created; they're eternal. There is also raw, chaotic matter. It is unordered and constantly changing obeying no set of rules. Plato's God was called the 'Demiurge', literally meaning public worker but also the word used to describe a craftsmen. 

The role of the Demiurge is to bring order out of such chaos. He uses the pre-existing matter to do so, using the Forms as the model. The creator faces the problem of matter resisting its will. The universe can never be perfect due to the matter it is created from and can never be a perfect universe, and is also always changing because it is in space and time. 

An important point need to be made here. The God of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is said to create the universe 'ex nihilo' i.e. creating something out of nothing. He is all loving, all powerful and a personal God. The Demiurge is not all powerful, and does not create something from nothing. He is morally good as judged against the Form of good. 

Influence

Although I will discuss this in later posts, I need to raise the point that such ideas influenced thought on how God was defined by early Christians and western Philosophers. The idea of something having 'perfection' was defined as something that was beyond space and time, and something which was not contingent on anything but is seen as necessary and eternal. 

The idea that God brought the universe into existence and is spaceless and timeless, and is a necessary being, not a contingent one, was most certainly influenced by such thought. In particular, the Christian Theologian St Thomas Aquinas was to offer such an argument to prove God's existence in his famous 'Five Ways' (But that is another post for another day!)

PLATO: LOOKING BEYOND THE CAVE PART 1

The great philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.E) has undoubtedly been extremely influential to western philosophy. In this post I will discuss two ideas, in this post we look at The Theory of Forms, Part 2 will discuss the 'Demiurge', Plato's God.

Plato, holding the dialouge 'Timaeus'. This particular
picture is representative of his views. For example, his
hand points up, showing the
Forms as the true reality.

The Theory of Forms

Plato considered the world a dance of shadows, that true reality belonged to perfect ideas such as good, love, justice, beauty and so on. All these realities existed above the material world. Taking the example of beauty, we may all find different things beautiful: a young girl, a work of art, or even the birth of a child. All of this beauty we see is merely a reflection of the perfect Form of beauty. The same applies to the other Forms, such as those aforementioned. For Plato, true reality lies beyond the world of experience and our purpose in life is to see through the illusions of this world and to arrive, through philosophy, to a knowledge of the Forms.

The Story of the Cave  

In 'Republic', Plato explains how humans ought to use Philosophy. In the cave analogy, we are asked to imagine that all human beings are in a cave, tied to chairs and facing the wall at the back of the cave. They have never changed from this position and had never left the cave. Behind them is a fire and between the fire and the backs of the people are figures moving backwards and forwards. The people on the seats would see the flickering shadows on the wall of the cave cast by the light of the fire and the movement of the figures between the fire and the wall. They would assume the shadows are real.  

For Plato, the objective of Philosophy is to try and see the world as it really is and not as a dance of the shadows. Through reason, he believed we could be released from the limits imposed by our senses. This is done by a questioning everything. Once we were able to do so, we could turn around, walk past the fire and out of the cave into the light of the sun, which for him, represents the Form of Good.

 Criticism of the Forms

Some of the weaknesses in the theory are present in Plato's dialogue 'Parmenides'. One problem raised is the exact relationship between the form and the particular. How exactly is a particular cat, for example, a resemblance of the Form of cats? How does the perfect ideal intermingle with its imperfect copy is essentially the question.

Furthermore, we have a problem of limits. How many things can we say actually have a Form? It may be that, as Socrates says in the dialogue, there are Forms for beauty, or truth, or virtue, but Parmenides does ask whether characteristics like hair and mud too have Forms? Do all things have a Form, or do only some specific things have a Form? Is it possible to make a distinction?

One problem is that if Forms do exist, they are beyond what we can experience, so how can we be sure that they really are there? The great Philosopher Aristotle, as I will show in a later post, argued that we must examine the world and draw conclusions based on evidence and sensory experience. If we want to know what makes a good tree, we must study trees, if we want to know what makes a human beautiful, we should study humans. Thus, an empiricist would argue with Plato's approach.

Aristotle in his 'Metaphysics' raised two objections to Forms. Firstly, he argues that we must accept that ultimate Forms exist even of things which are negative, for instance evil and suffering. The second problem he reveals is that if something has 'perished', for example a particular animal, since we still have an image of it, accepting the idea of Forms will mean we still perceive a form for it.

Sources: The Thinkers Guide to God by Peter Vardy and Julie Arliss

               http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/thforms.htm

               http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/archives/Theory%20of%20Forms%20Criticism.htm#III. A Critique In Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon Schuster, 1972), pp.126-130.

               

Hedonism: Should we seek pleasure alone?

What is Hedonism? 

Funny as it is, Epicurus was not an 'epicurean' He actually lived what we may call an ascetic life. 

Hedonism is the doctrine that pleasure is an intrinsic good. In other words, in all our actions, we ought

Epicurus, the man himself

to seek pleasure, which can be defined as happiness in the absence of pain, which is similar to the definition of happiness provided by Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century.

The philosopher most associated with Hedonism is Epicurus (341-270 BC). He felt that people should live moderately but pleasurably. With certain pleasures however, come pain. For example, although a person may enjoy the effects of excessive drinking, he/she may feel ill as a consequence. The proper way to lead life, according to Epicurus was to seek pleasure but avoid the pain that came with certain pleasures. He thus divided pleasures into two types. Those that were 'dynamic' pleasures were accompanied by pain, such as drinking as it can lead to disease, and those which were not accompanied by pain were termed 'passive' pleasures, such as friendship. It is the latter which we ought to seek according to his ethical system.

Hedonism as a philosophical doctrine is subdivided into two forms: 'Psychological Hedonism' which states that all activities are directed toward the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and 'Ethical Hedonism' goes further, suggesting that not only should people seek pleasure but that they ought to do so since pleasure alone is good.

Strengths of the theory

If we examine psychological hedonism, we see that it is a theory that attempts to provide a single explanation for every possible type of conscious or voluntary actions we engage in, and it also provides a simple explanation. Consider the question 'why do people behave in a certain ways?', to which the answer is 'they are seeking pleasure'. All actions are thus seen to have instrumental value; they are being used as a means to an end: pleasure. 

Ethical hedonism essentially examines two questions: 'What is the good life for people?' and 'How ought one to behave?' An ethical hedonist would answer that the good life consists of pleasure, and how one ought to act is the gaining of pleasure. It too provides an answer for questions that are more general and apply to a larger group of people, as if almost providing a guide on how to behave, which is convincing in the eyes of the followers of such a system.

Weaknesses of the theory 

Psychological Hedonism has been scrutinised scientifically. Psychologists agree that sometimes we are motivated by the search for pleasure, but not always. Take for example, the pleasure which some people may try to seek when acquiring great wealth. As time passes, they may see the acquisition of wealth as an end, rather than the pleasure it may come with. In psychological language, they become 'fixated' on collecting riches rather than the pleasure it may come with. This criticism, may however have a response. It could be argued the the actual collection of wealth brings pleasure, even if the pleasure is limited. At this point science alone cannot be used to evaluate the problem, as it is now a philosophical problem. Even so, it can be be criticised. When any theory cannot be refuted by facts, it loses its explanatory force. It becomes true 'by definition', but it no longer refers to the world in the way in which scientific theories do, as it cannot be verified or falsified by facts. 'Pleasure' is defined as what people 'desire', but to claim that all people are motivated by a desire of pleasure is no more than saying that all people are motivated by a desire for what they desire. It thus becomes trivial. 

Ethical Hedonism can be attacked on the grounds that some pleasures will always come with pain. To thus assert that the good life is a life of pleasure alone is incorrect. Epicurus attempted to find pleasures which did not have painful consequences and argued that it is these pleasures which lead to a good life. Even this approach is not without its problems, as friendship, which he defined as a 'passive' pleasure has pain, say for example if the friend died, the person would feel intense sadness. Even if it were argued that pleasure itself is never bad, but the painful consequences are in themselves bad, this does not hold because we cannot always separate the painful consequences of a course of action from the pleasurable ones, as taking a drug like cocaine, while it may be have effects on the body that one may seek pleasure from, it does have painful consequences.

Sources: Philosophy by Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll.
               http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07187a.htm

  

WHY PHILOSOPHY?

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Far from being irrelevant or dead, Philosophy and philosophical concepts underlie some of the most fiercely debated social issues in our world today*. So it should come as no surprise that I believe Philosophy must be studied.

Initially, I was interested in the issues discussed which included those within ethics (moral philosophy), morality and philosophy, and with the perspective of religion. What should we use a source of morality? Scripture, Conscience, or the word of religious authorities? Should we depend on deontological commands or approach questions situationally and assess actions by their consequences, giving good moral actions instrumental value, not intrinsic value? How moral is euthanasia? Is abortion murder? How do we evaluate the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies such as IVF? Are they always a good idea? 

On the philosophical side, the question of 'Does God exist?' and to what extent disciplines such as science challenge religion and religious beliefs; Can the two ever work together, or do they oppose one another? Can arguments be used to prove God's existence, such as Aquinas's five ways, Anselm's Ontological argument or through religious experience? To what extent is evil 'the rock of atheism' (David Hume) a problem for the theist? Can we ever logically verify a statement? How does the use of language affect our views on philosophical and moral issues? How do other disciplines such as logic, metaphysics and mathematics affect our views on philosophy? 

Such questions can never definitely be answered. The arguments and the reasoning used to reach certain important conclusions by examining such issues is something that attracts me to the subject. It really is a discipline that challenges your own beliefs and your ideas of how the world works. It is also a discipline that gives you new perspectives, examining ideas you may never have come across, or new issues that you may not given much thought to. It helps you structure an argument, and makes you read and write critically, skills that are useful not just useful in philosophy! 

The idea for a blog where I could discuss the problems of philosophy came to me a few months ago. However, at this time I was taking important AS examinations which forced me to wait until June to create the blog. Even so, I wish that this blog is helpful and that you gain new ideas and new insights into some very demanding questions.

Please leave any appropriate feedback and ask any questions you may have. Happy reading!

*Evolution vs Creationism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial

*Surrogacy (famous case of Baby M) http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/09/6211/
*Relationship between Morality and Religion http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?id=11127

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