An update on the issue of late-in-life parents:

·         Pence describes the case of Adriana Iliescu, the Romanian woman who in 2005, gave birth to her first child, conceived through IVF, at age 66. At the time she was the oldest woman to give birth.

·         That record was broken one year later when Carmela Bousada of Spain, at age 66 and 358 days, gave birth to twins conceived through IVF. She later confessed to having lied to her fertility doctors, telling them that she was only 55.

·         But that record was recently broken once again by a woman in India. In November 2008, Rajo Devi, who claims to be 70 years old (she has no birth certificate to prove this), gave birth to a girl conceived through IVF.

 

 

[4.5.] Religious Fatalism.

 

Pence discusses the case of Bobbi and Kenny McCaughey, who in 1997 became parents of septuplets using drugs to stimulate ovulation. The same points that Pence makes about the McCaugheys almost certainly apply to Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets in California on January 26, 2009.

 

An update on the Suleman octuplets:

·         They resulted from embryos created with IVF and then implanted all at one time. If doctors implanted eight IVF embryos, that would have far exceeded the number of embryos that are usually implanted in such cases. It is possible that they implanted fewer than eight and that one or more of them twinned.

·         The embryos were left over from earlier IVF procedures engaged in by Suleman. In fact, all six of the children she already had were created by way of IVF.[1]

 

The McCaugheys asserted that, if any one of their seven children were born with or developed a disability as a result of being gestated at the same time as six others, it would be “God’s will.” Pence calls this position “religious fatalism.”

 

To understand what he means, we need to consider the general meaning of “fatalism”:

 

fatalism (df.): the view that the future is going to be the way it is going to be, no matter what we do or what decisions we make in the present.

·         Someone who believes religious fatalism has adopted fatalism for religious reasons. For example, if you believe that the future is entirely a matter of God’s will and that nothing that we do in the present will affect what he has already ordained regarding one or more issues, then you are a religious fatalist about those issues.

·         This seems to be the attitude taken by the McCaugheys regarding the healthy prospects of their septuplets.

 

Pence considers a number of criticisms of the McCaughey’s religious fatalism (120):

·         They “chose to take drugs to artificially stimulate release of many eggs, something that wouldn’t have happened naturally. It wasn’t God’s will but the choice of the McCaugheys that so many eggs were created, released, and fertilized at the same time in one uterus.”

·         We should not equate God’s will with everything that happens “after certain questionable human decisions have been made.” Why did the McCaugheys not assume that it is “God’s will for couples to think and be compassionate toward their future children?”

·          “[A] couple shouldn’t run the risk of having severely disabled kids and then say that, if disabled kids are born, it’s God’s will.” [To extend the criticism: it is a bit like refusing to make your children wear seatbelts or sit in car-seats, and then saying that if they are injured in an automobile accident, it is God’s will.]

·         A consistent religious fatalist has to say that anything that happens is God’s will, and if this is the case, it is difficult to justify using any medical technology at all (e.g., if you break your leg, then it is God’s will that your leg should be broken, and going to the doctor to fix it thwarts God’s will. “[I]f you’re going to be a religious fatalist, why use modern medicine at all?”

 

 

[4.6.] Emotivism

 

Recall one of the two meta-ethical theories we discussed early in the semester:

 

ethical subjectivism (df.): the meta-ethical theory according to which our moral judgments (judgments like “abortion is immoral,” “charity is obligatory,” etc.) are based only on our feelings and emotions; this implies that there is no such thing as objective morality, and thus no such thing as objective moral truth.

 

Previously we encountered a form of this theory called simple subjectivism, according to which a moral judgment like “cloning is immoral” means “I disapprove of cloning,” while “Cloning is morally acceptable” means “I approve of cloning.”[2] According to this theory, when someone says that cloning is wrong, what she is really saying is that she herself has a negative attitude towards cloning.

 

But as we saw, there is a huge problem with this theory: it implies that there is no such thing as genuine moral disagreement. [see notes 2.4.1, 1/9/2009].

 

In the early 20^th century, some philosophers attempted to improve on subjectivism, to formulate a version of the theory that does not have this problem. One of those philosophers was C. L. Stevenson (1908-1979)

 

According to Stevenson’s emotivism, when I say “X is good” or that “X is bad,” I am doing two things at once:

 

1.      I am trying to affect your attitude toward X.

 

2.      I am expressing my emotions about X; it is as if I were saying, “X... yay!” or “X ... boo!”

 

This analysis applies to “good” and “bad” in the moral senses of those terms, as well as to other moral words.

 

For example, when George W. Bush said “all human cloning is wrong,”[3] he is doing two things:

 

1)      attempting to influence listeners’ opinions about cloning, so that they too will feel negatively towards it; and

 

2)      expressing his own personal feelings about cloning. He says that it is wrong, but he is not stating a fact when he does this. In particular, he is not stating a matter of fact about his own attitudes (as simple subjectivism says he is). Rather, he is expressing the way he feels. [It is this analysis of moral language as expressing emotion rather than as making statements about it that really differentiates emotivism from earlier forms of subjectivism.]

 

These two functions are not independent of each other: in attempting to influence the attitudes of others, it helps to express your own sincere feelings.

 

Although this account holds for the moral senses of “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” and other normative terms, there is a difference in the emotive meanings of the moral and non-moral uses of these words. Non-moral uses tend to express mere liking or disliking. But moral uses express a different, weightier sort of approval…

 

Instead of being about what the hearer and speaker like, [moral language] is about a stronger sort of approval. When a person likes something, he is pleased when it prospers and disappointed when it does not. When a person morally approves of something he experiences a rich feeling of security when it prospers and is indignant or “shocked” when it does not.[4]

 

 

[4.6.1.] Problems with Emotivism and Subjectivism.

 

These problems apply equally to emotivism and other forms of ethical subjectivism.

 

Problem #1

 

Emotivism implies that moral judgments, like “cloning is immoral,” do not attribute a moral property or trait to their subjects.

 

On this view, this statement has no descriptive meaning by which it attributes a property (immorality) to its subject (cloning). So when I say that cloning is immoral, I am not saying anything about cloning itself. In particular, I am not saying that there is a property, namely immorality, that the practice of cloning possesses.

 

So, construed as a statement about cloning itself, the sentence “Cloning is immoral” doesn’t actually say anything, and is therefore neither true nor false.

 

Emotivism seems to imply this same thing about any moral judgment. Can we be satisfied with a moral theory that implies that statements like

·         “Torturing children for fun is immoral.”

·         “Raping political prisoners is not wrong.”

·         “It is good to kill as many innocent people as possible.”

when construed as descriptions of actions rather than as expressions of the speaker’s emotions towards those actions, are neither true nor false?

 

Problem #2

 

“...[S]ome of our feelings are downright shameful and shouldn’t be used to guide morality. … The terrible racial violence in Serbia or the Congo shows what can happen when racist feelings, ordinarily suppressed by morality, surface and go unchecked by moral principles.” (131)

 

 

Problem #3

 

Emotivism has nothing to say about moral problems about which there are no strong feelings or sentiments, e.g., US farm subsidies and their effects on the developing world, or the health insurance crisis:

 

                Understanding and fixing this problem [viz., health care for the working poor] is a complex process. It’s hard to get people excited about the problem or fixing it. But that does not mean it is not an ethical problem or an important ethical issue to understand.

                What is true is that emotivism fails miserably as an ethical theory when it comes to complicated issues like a just national health-care policy. If few emotions attach to a subject, what has emotivism to offer? (135)

 

 

 

Stopping point for Monday February 2. For next time, read Pence pp.137-58. Your first exam is next Wednesday (2/11). The study guide is now on the class website.