Majikthise

The fertile fringe: Rhythm method criticised as a killer of embryos

This just in from reader John:

Philosopher Luc Bovens argues that the rhythm method is wrong because it increases a couple's chances of creating embryos that don't become pregnancies:

The range of birth control choices may have become narrower for couples that believe the sanctity of life begins when sperm meets egg. The rhythm method, a philosopher claims, may compromise millions of embryos.

“Even a policy of practising condom usage and having an abortion in case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method,” writes Luc Bovens, of the London School of Economics, in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

With other methods of contraception banned by the Catholic church, the rhythm method has been one of the few options available to millions.

In using the rhythm method, couples avoid pregnancy by refraining from sex during a woman’s fertile period. Perfect adherents claim it is over 90% effective – i.e. one couple in 10 will conceive in an average year. But, typically speaking, effectiveness is estimated at closer to 75%.

Now Bovens suggests that for those concerned about embryo loss, the rhythm method may be a bad idea. He argues that, because couples are having sex on the fringes of the fertile period, they are more likely to conceive embryos that are incapable of surviving. [...] [New Scientist]

I think Bovens has produced a near-reductio ad abdurdum for the claim that moral status starts at fertilization. (Update 2, based on the original paper, I suspect that Bovens meant to do exactly that, especially given his wry concluding paragraph: "And finally, one person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens. One could simply conceive of this whole argument as a reductio ad absurdum of the cornerstone of the argument of the pro-life movement, namely that deaths of early embryos are a matter of grave concern.")

Update 1: Commenter Tofumar asked why Bovens' argument is a near reductio of the fertilization=person theory. Here's my argument, formulated on the basis on the New Scientist article, which, having read the paper, I now suspect of being a little off-base.

The so-called rhythm method exploits the fact that women are only capable of conceiving for a few days out of every month. The Catholic Church says it's okay for married couples to try to avoid pregnancy by guessing which days those are and abstaining on those days. Bovens' worry couples who only have sex on presumed non-fertile days may inadvertently end up fertilizing gametes that have been sitting around for way too long. Embryos are conceived on this "fertile fringe" are more likely to be non-viable than those conceived during the monthly sweet spot. So, Bovens suggests, the consistent use of the rhythm method may create far more doomed embryos than necessary. If you believe that a fertilized ovum is a full-fledged person, like your next-door neighbor, you can see how it might be morally problematic to follow a metric that might doom several extra "neighbors" every year, year in and year out, for the next couple decades....

It seems a little odd to classify intrinsically non-viable embryos as a rights-bearing subjects. Ex hypothesi, these embryos aren't even potential fetuses or potential babies because they're too damaged to gestate.

On the other hand, if you assume that embryos are persons, it makes sense to say that you have a responsibility not to kill them. However, Bovens is entertaining a much more radical claim, namely that you have an affirmative duty not to create dead-end embryos in the first place because they are going to die.

Bovens is arguing that the rhythm method is wrong because it's more likely to create doomed embryos. But what's the alternative? Presumably, just to have sex whenever you want. But couples who refuse to plan their reproduction are recklessly risking the production of doomed embryos.

Maybe the answer is not to abandon the rhythm method, as Bovens suggests, but rather to adopt a more conservative rhythm. Classifying more days as "unsafe" reduces the likelihood of doomed embryos. However, the rhythm method probably doesn't work any better for avoiding the edges of fertility than it does for avoiding fertility. A couple who tries to practice a modified rhythm method is still more likely to create doomed embryos than a couple who uses more effective forms of birth control.

If doomed embryos have human rights, it seems unconscionable not to use the most effective methods of artificial contraception during potentially potentially fringe-fertile times. So, Bovens' position seems to imply that couples must use artificial contraception, but only when they think they can't get pregnant.

Of course, stale gametes aren't the only cause of doomed embryos. Many embryos made from perfectly fresh gametes can't gestate because of chromosomal defects or other flaws. I've read that a significant percentage of all fertilized ova die before implantation. So, if you take the fertilization=personhood claim seriously, then trying to conceive is also morally problematic because you risk killing a lot of embryos before you make one that sticks.

Fascism isn't just a buzzword

Steve G argues that "fascism" is just a buzzword that Bush's critics use as a thoughtless insult.

Some people incorrectly use the term "fascist" to criticize any inappropriate exercise of state power. However, there's nothing distinctively fascist about arresting demonstrators, torturing prisoners, fixing elections, domestic spying, or fighting imperialist wars. Communist countries, monarchies,  theocracies, military dictatorships, and other authoritarian regimes commit similar offenses.

Anyone who wants to identify similarities between the current administration and true Fascism will have to specify exactly what's fascist about Bush and the Republicans. This is not a trivial task. However, I believe there's a very strong case to be made.

I'm NOT saying that we have a fascist government in America today. The United States is a democracy, we still have a free press, and the armed forces haven't acquiesced to the one-man rule of George W. Bush. I'm not claiming that it's inevitable, or even especially likely, that America will eventually become a full-blown fascist state. I'm certainly not saying that anyone in power today is consciously striving to create a full-fledged fascist dictatorship on the model of Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain. What I am saying is that the Bush administration has embraced many of the key mutually-reinforcing ideological tenets of Fascism: militarism, imperialism, corporate statism, state-sponsored religion, male dominance, irrationalism, and mass propaganda.

Steve writes:

Fascism arose as a counter-point to Marxism. Marx argued that economics set up a situation where there would be class-driven conflict through a series of prescribed steps which leads, ultimately, to the dissolving of governments and the flourishing of people in a state of complete peace. Fascism denied all of this. In his 1932 piece "What is Fascism," Benito Mussolini, took issue with all of these points. Fascism begins with the axiom that war is the natural state of man.
[...]
This is a crucial point. A state of war is a special thing. When one is in the state of war, the normality of life is suspended. War is a time of crisis and in a state of crisis, what is normally irrational if one wants to create a civil society may become rational. During wartime, a nation is so threatened that all possible projects within the nation depend upon successful prosecution of the war, and as such, all other projects are therefore less important than winning the war. Everything in life is subjugated to the government's efforts. The survival of the country and everyone in it is in question, so your little interests need to be put on hold. A state of martial law allows for complete governmental control because it is needed to protect each and all.

It seems to me that the Bush administration is trying to do something remarkably similar. Here are some non-trivial characteristics that the administration shares with capital F-fascism.

1. Perpetual war. The administration has declared an open-ended "Global War on Terror" (GWOT), aka the "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"(GSAVE), now also known simply as "the long war." Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. The war on terror is unwinnable by design. The so-called war on terror is an endlessly extendable excuse for growing presidential power, foreign military adventures, and increased domestic surveillance. The GWOT has already served as an excuse for the illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, the construction of billions of dollars' worth of permanent military bases abroad, and veiled threats of nuclear attack on Iran.   

The Fascists said that perpetual war was part of the human condition. The Republicans have declared a phony war that can be guaranteed to last as long as they want it to. I don't see a big difference.

2. The Unitary Executive. Fascism is a cult of the leader in which the His supreme authority is required to wage perpetual war. The Republicans have demonstrated fascist tendencies by undercutting the constitutional checks on the power of the Executive Branch and concentrating power in the President himself. Their bogus theory of the Unitary Executive  holds that the POTUS has the authority to override not only the laws enacted by the Legislative Branch, but also the any part of the constitution that might constrain his supposed Article II power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight the so-called war on terror.

Conveniently, you're not supposed to criticize the president during a war. Criticizing the war is also treason . The president says so.

3. The Corporate State. As Steve points out, Fascism arose as one solution to the punishing ups and downs of the free market. Fascism proposed to end the struggle between workers and bosses by uniting the powers of the state and big business to crush labor.

Like the Fascists, the Republicans hate the free market. They don't want competition, they want a handful of big businesses to dominate the economy at the expense of all other interests. They dream of an orderly world of rising profits and increasing shareholder returns, relieved of messy strikes and upstart competitors.

Corporations already shape American policy by subverting democracy and propping up the government's security state. Consider how US policy is influenced by the administration's close ties to companies like Diebold, Haliburton, AT&T, Verizon, and Duke Cunningham's crooked defense contractors. The disastrous Medicare Plan D, the biggest government program US history, is a sop to Big Pharma. Bush's abortive attempt to privatize Social Security was a pure gimme to the Republicans' friends in the financial services sector. The ruinous bankruptcy bill that was practically written by the multi-billion dollar credit card industry.

Also consider the government's intimate relationship with the right wing media machine from FOX News and Regenry books, to far-right talk radio, astroturf conservative websites, and journalistic front groups like Jeff Gannon's unlamented Talon News... For more information on this aspect of the Republican corporate state, see David Brock's exhaustive study, The Republican Noise Machine, and the chapters on the self-declared conservative media in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media.

The Abramoff/Cunningham/Foggo/Scalon lobbying scandals illustrate how corporations have circumvented democracy by simply buying influence. Of course, Duke Cunninham specialized taking bribes from defense contractors while sitting on the House Intelligence Committee. These scandals also reveal how the culture of corruption helps perpetuate America's aggressive militaristic foreign policy.

4. Unification of church and state. The original Fascists wanted to bring the church into the corporate state. Many of today's Republicans seem to have similar ambitions. The influence of the religious right is palpable in many spheres of American policy from the selection of Supreme Court nominees to America's relations with  Israel. The current administration has also slashed secular public assistance and championed faith-based programs to provide social services with tax dollars through religious organizations.

5. The security apparatus. Like Fascist citizens of yore, some Americans are so scared of terrorism that they are prepared to sign away their civil rights in the name of security. Our government is filling that demand by spying on its own citizens, including the press, with the connivance of their corporate allies (e.g., the telcos and ChoicePoint). We also have a global penal archipelago, constructed by private contractors and legitimized by the state's insistence that anything goes in the war on terror, including torture, kidnapping (rendition), and the suspension of habeas corpus.

6. Xenophobia. Fear of outsiders is a cardinal feature of Fascism. Contemporary examples of this ugly trend include anti-immigrant rhetoric, the further militarization our borders, and Bush's proposal to create permanent second-class citizens (guest workers) who will work cheap without voting, organizing, or sharing any part of the American dream.

Our government and its mouthpieces engage in constant fear mongering about outsiders scheming against the American way of life, be they terrorists, Islamists, Old Europeans, the UN, or the Axis of Evil.

7. The cult of anxious masculinity. Like the Fascists of old, Bush and his toadies thoroughly besotted romantic ideas of Decisive Action, Will, and Violent Struggle. They cheer for macho pageantry like Commander Codpiece's "mission accomplished" aircraft carrier stunt.

Like the old Fascists, many contemporary Republicans exhibit an uneasy mix of homophobia an homophilia.

Other areas of overlap between Republicans and Fascists: Contempt for the feminine. Contempt for contemplation and deliberation. Contempt for compassion. Contempt for reason. 

8. Control over women's bodies and the family unit. The Fascists were very concerned with controlling women's bodies. The man's dominance within the traditional family is an integral plank of Fascist ideology. Many Republicans share the same overwhelming preoccupation. Women are, after all, the source of future cannon fodder for perpetual war, the guardians of traditional virtue, and keepers home and hearth.

Check out our government's new Forever Pregnant guidelines, exhorting America's fertile women to live in a perpetual state of "pre-pregnancy." Remember how religious politics trumped science in the Plan B fiasco? 

9. Propaganda. The right wing media contribute to the corporate state by supplying an endless stream of jingoistic imagery, fake news, and political theater (see, Corporate State, above). The state itself gets into the act all too often. Government-produced fake news clips and shills like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher are just two examples of this disturbing trend. I haven't even addressed the administration's attempts censor the news from Iraq, or the disturbing allegations regarding its hostility towards American and non-American journalists in the theater of war.

10. Distrust of science, expertise, and open debate. A few contemporary instances: David Horowitz's academic freedom bills, the subordination of scientific experts to ideologues in government agencies, and the politicization of reproductive health policies at home and abroad. The current administration denied global warming in the face of scientific consensus and intimidated and censored its own scientists to uphold the party line.

Once again, I am not arguing the the US government is fascist, or that it's necessarily going to become fascist, or that anyone in charge is deliberately trying to turn us into fascists. I am arguing that the current regime demonstrates many of the self-reinforcing attitudes, values, and policies that defined Mussolini's ideology of Fascism and that were embodied by Fascist states in the 20th century.

For whatever reason, Fascism and modern Republicanism share a set of ideas that has enduring appeal, especially when combined as an ideological package. I have attempted  to show how these tendencies are mutually reinforcing and self-perpetuating. It is a mistake to ask how far fascism has "crept up" on us. Instead, we should be focusing on how unchecked militarism and corporate statism are already undermining our freedom, regardless of whether these fixtures of American politics are harbingers of an even darker future.

Creeping fascism or fascist creeps?

Two fine philosophical bloggers, two views on the authoritarian threat in the USA:

Steve G of Philosophers' Playground wonders if our fear of creeping fascism is overblown. In Steve's opinion, our government just isn't competent enough to convince people to sign away the last vestiges of their freedom. His argument, as I understand it, is that you need a functioning government in order to run an authoritarian state. The paradox of Republican rule, according to Steve, is that their lust for power is matched by an equally strong (and more efficacious) impulse to break the government. My counter-argument is that even if the current regime merely breaks the government, they're laying the groundwork for a collapse (bird flu, a currency crisis, the next hurricane season...) that will give someone else an opportunity to seize power with promises of dramatic, undemocratic solutions. If the collapse comes, the next generation of demagogue will have a cakewalk becaues the Bush administration is also undermining the Constitution, especially its checks on presidential power.

Helmut also has an interesting post on the implications domestic spying. Maybe it's not strictly fascism that's creeping up on us, but at how far are we willing to warp our own society in the name of fighting terror?

Art and politics: Implicit and explicit political content

This is the second installment of my multi-part series on art and politics. (Introduction, Part I) In my last post, I argued that we should try not to let an artist's biography bias our aesthetic evaluation of his or her work. A lot of great art has been produced by artists whose personal morality leaves a lot to be desired. Pick any genre in any medium, "high art" or pop culture, and I guarantee that a lot of your favorite works were made by people whose ethics ranged from deeply fucked up to murderous: Billie Holiday was an an adulterer and a mob moll, Celine was a Nazi collaborator, Picasso beat women, Neruda was a Stalinist, and so on.

If your artistic tastes range beyond the contemporary, you're virtually guaranteed to admire artists whose social and political beliefs you would find repellent (whether you know the details or not). How many great artists owned slaves, championed colonialism, or subjugated women in their daily lives?

It's probably impossible to maintain any coherent aesthetic value system while restricting your personal canon to artists of moral rectitude. Whatever you can find to admire in the work of upstanding artists, you'll probably be forced to admit that the works by sleazeballs sometimes display the same merits.

As I argued in my last post, biographical details sometimes suggest new critical perspectives--but the fact that a work is open to multiple interpretations is generally considered to be an aesthetic plus in its own right.

Distasteful revelations about an artist's biography may be off-putting and disappointing to individual art lovers. However, their revulsion is not an aesthetic argument, no matter how psychologically understandable it may be.

The more interesting question is whether it's ever fair to take the explicit or implicit political (or moral) content of a work of art into account when judging its aesthetic value.

So, can a glaringly racist, sexist, or authoritarian piece of art still be a great work? I maintain that the answer is yes.   

T.S. Eliot is an interesting case because he wasn't just a great poet who happened to be an antisemite. He was a great poet who wrote some (pretty good) anti-semitic poetry. Here's a excerpt from a remarkable discussion by the Eliot scholar Anthony Julius:

Eliot was not a typical anti-semite. He was instead an extraordinary anti-semite. He did not reflect the anti-semitism of his times, he contributed to it, even enlarged it. And with these poems he exhausted anti-semitism's (very modest) poetry-making reserves. So he did not persist in his anti-semitism as a poet. He did not repeat himself in this way. [Guardian]

Julius repudiates Eliot's antisemitism, but he also admits that some of Eliot's antisemitic poems are good literature.

Anti-semitism is not a discourse rich in literary possibilities. Those who draw on it mostly produce dross. But Eliot's poems are inventive and resourceful and display his mastery over a heterogeneous mass of material. These poems are derived from a cluster of clichés, conventions exhausted by over-exposure. With great virtuosity, Eliot turns this material into art. He compresses anti-semitism into powerfully charged language, and thereby restores something of its menace and resonance.

His poetry is one of anti-semitism's few literary triumphs. [Guardian]

As Julius points out, antisemitism is pretty damned sterile as a starting-point for creative expression. Overt bigotry tends to trade in crude stereotypes that have been circulating for ages. It's hard to make any work seem fresh and insightful if it draws uncritically on cliches.

Moreover, part a bigot's moral failing that he or she is unable to regard certain types of people as fully human. This lack of imagination and/or empathy can be a major handicap for artists who try to draw convincing characters or tell unpredictable stories.

However, not all prejudiced artists end up creating bad art as a result. Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock the Jewish money lender in "The Merchant of Venice" is clearly anti-Semitic in any ordinary sense of the term. Some Shakespeare fans go to great lengths to explain away the play's obvious antisemitism because they want to believe that the great Shakespeare was a thoroughly enlightened humanist by modern standards. This kind of retroactive rehabilitation is dangerous because it legitimizes our tendency to explain away racism in people we admire. In any event, Shakespeare's prejudices don't appear to have prevented him from imagining the world from Shylock's perspective as a full-fledged, if flawed, human being.

Some people go so far as to say that political expression has no place in great art. I disagree. Granted, a lot of political art is bad because it's didactic. Sermons are usually boring. Most lyricists and dramatists are hard pressed to weave a subtle or compelling political argument into their work. Typically, the message gets dumbed down and caricatured in the service of the story, or else the story-telling seems stilted and unnatural.

However, I can think of many notable exceptions to this rule of thumb. A lot of the dialogue in Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" is overtly political. However, Pynchon puts genuinely interesting and insightful arguments in the mouths of Mason, Dixon, and their revolutionary pirate friends. Moreover, the speeches and dialectical exchanges are written in note-perfect dialogue. You never find yourself wondering whether Jeremiah Dixon would really have said what he did about slavery, or the class system in British science, or the right way to brew good coffee.

The short story "Brokeback Mountain" is quite clearly a moral/political statement about how a homophobia destroys innocent people's lives. If you don't finish that story feeling sad and outraged about the human toll of enforcing prejudice, Annie Proulx didn't do her job. (I can't comment on the movie because I haven't seen it yet.)

The other quarrel that I have with the art-for-art's sake crowd is that purist rhetoric often masks double standards about what constitutes a political statement. It's easy to see art as being apolitical simply because it takes the status quo for granted. Purists who admire the Sistine Chapel tend to forget that it's both great art and catchy propaganda. Obviously, you don't have to agree with the message in order to admire the art, but it would be a mistake to pretend it isn't there, or to assume that the message necessarily detracts from the aesthetics.

Scott Lemieux makes a good case for de-emphasizing politics across the board and focusing more on aesthetics. However, I think there's more to it than that. We shouldn't make snap judgments about the merits of a work of art based whether we endorse the implicit or explicit political messages we think we recognize therein.

However, part of our aesthetic judgement rests on whether the various creative choices, including political content, detracts from the overall the aesthetic effect. For example, I have immense respect for Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, but I find the movie nearly unwatchable because Peckinpah does such a masterful job of dramatizing the most offensive stereotypes about race and class imaginable.

The interesting question is whether I can assign any critical blame to Peckinpah, or whether I should chalk my reaction up to the idiosyncrasies of personal taste.

The thing is, when I watch Straw Dogs, I find myself jolted out the the action and wanting to scream "That's so fake! That's such a cheap stereotype, I can't believe that!" Is Peckinpah being didactic about rape and class? Is he a lesser artist for distracting viewers from his brilliantly shot, masterfully edited, well-acted movie to rub their noses in his sexual politics?

Granted, I'm probably much more sensitive to these subtexts than your average male critic in the 1970s might have been. When we make critical judgments, as opposed to simply stating our personal preferences, we do so against background assumptions about what a reasonable, well-informed critic would deem tasteful, plausible, original, etc.   

Peckinpah surely intended to get under the viewers' skin, and to give a certain amount of offense in the process, but I doubt he intended for viewers to be jolted out of the narrative. I'm sure he assumed  that the average critic/viewer would find his characters believable.

The interesting critical question is which background assumptions we should adopt. I'm inclined to take 99% of the "blame" for finding Straw Dogs unwatchable.

However, I also think it's reasonable to point out that certain aesthetic flaws in Straw Dogs that are immediately apparent to a sociologically and politically sophisticated critic might not be so glaring to the average reviewer, especially not in 1971.

It would be a mistake to say that the people intuitively "buy" Peckinpah's characterizations are right (or rightly apolitical) whereas his feminist critics are wrong (or unjustifiably politicized). It's not aesthetic Stalinism to point out that those who argue that Straw Dogs are implicitly claiming that this work meets defensible standards for plausible story-telling without acknowledging that those standards may be influenced by political/cultural norms that deserve to be questioned. Pekinpah's reach may not extend to all aesthetically-receptive people, but rather a somewhat arbitrary subset of the art-consuming public who don't notice or don't mind the rather blatant stereotypes in play.

In the next installment of the Art and Politics series, I'll discuss what, if any moral judgments can be fairly attached to the production and appreciation of art in various contexts. In that post, I'll examine claims that aesthetic goods can sometimes trump important moral principles.

Art and politics: The artist's biography

This is the first in a multi-part series on politics and art.

Many indisputably great works of art have been produced by people whose personal morality leaves a lot to be desired.

It's natural to look for heroes. Many sports fans are disconcerted when their favorite players are accused of serious crimes. Rationally, there's no reason they should care any more the criminal record of their favorite star receiver than about that of any other stranger they'll never meet. Yet, all other things being equal, it's more fun to cheer for someone who's a good guy as well as a good player. Even so, fans usually have no problem accepting that you can be a great player and a terrible person. Even the basketball fans who are deeply suspicious of Kobe Bryant don't argue that  his checkered personal history makes him a worse ball player.

Art lovers aren't always as good at making this distinction. Maybe that's because aesthetic appreciation is a kind of intimacy. Art is consensual manipulation. We put ourselves under the artist's sway in order to feel something or see something from their point of view. For some people, it's extra-disconcerting to realize that the singer of their favorite tender love song is also a rapist.

This is not to say that details of an artist's biography are never relevant to our interpretation of his or her work. Suppose you learn that some tender crooner was also a lifelong abuser who kicked the shit out of his wife after his most famous recording sessions. This information might make us wonder what that guy was really expressing in those songs. Possession? Sentimentality? Real love that he was only able to express on stage?

These the questions that keep the music biopic industry alive. However, in order to answer them, you have to look for aesthetic evidence within the work itself. Does the singer actually sound fake when he's trying to sound tender? Would someone who didn't know his history be able to discern this aesthetic flaw in his delivery? If upon repeated listening the song sounds every bit as heartfelt and note-perfect as you remember, there's no aesthetic reason to discount the work.

As a rule, I'm suspicious of criticism that puts too much weight on the artist's life and times when interpreting their work. Some historical context is important for interpretation. It's a mistake to assume that there's an easily discernable link between experiences and works of the imagination.

It can be upsetting to learn unflattering things about an artist you admire. Some people find that these revelations make it difficult to enjoy the work. That's understandable on an emotional level, but it's not a legitimate aesthetic argument. There's no rule that says that you're obligated to watch or listen to all art that you acknowledge as worthy.

Art and politics: Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts about the intersection of art and politics. This series is inspired by Amanda's Polanski/Kazan post, Scott's denunciation of aesthetic Stalinism, and the spirited response of my commenters on my Polanski thread (94 comments over the weekend in my thread alone, on a thread about an Oscar awarded four years ago!).

Reading through the comments, it seemed as if there were several parallel discussions going on, all of which deserved to be isolated and analyzed more closely.

Some people were talking about what influence our knowledge of an artist's biography should have on our aesthetic evaluation of his work. For example, is Roman Polanski a lesser director because he's a child rapist and a fugitive from American justice?

Others wanted to talk about the relationship between political messages and aesthetic merit.

Yet another issue raised in the Polanski threads was the ethics of consuming great art created under ethically suspect conditions. Assuming that Polanski is a brilliant director and that he's evading a just sentence for a terrible crime, is it right for actors and other talent to travel to Poland and France to work with Polanski? Is it right for viewers who love his art but disapprove of his flight from justice to pay to see his movies? The issue here is competing goods: Is making art more important than serving justice in this case? An implicit premise in many of the comments was that if a work of art is great, then you are morally entitled to consume it, regardless of its dubious provenance. That's a plausible position. However, it's a substantive thesis that has to be argued for. A countervailing view is that the principles of socially responsible consumption apply to cultural products as well as ordinary goods and services.

Obviously, there's a lot to talk about. So, I'm going to break this down into a multi-part series. The first post is about whether an artist's personal life has any bearing on the aesthetic quality of their work. Next up, a post on the relationship between the political content of a work of art and its aesthetic merits. Finally, a post on the ethics of art consumption.

Polanski, the Academy, and rape

Amanda rightly rejects Jennifer Pozner's allegation that Roman Polanski's Oscar was proof of misogyny in the Academy and Hollywood at large.

Polanski won Best Director in 2003 for the The Pianist, the story of a Polish musician who survives the Holocaust after the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Polanski accepted the award in absentia because he is a fugitive from the United States, having skipped bail after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of 13-year-old girl in 1977.

As Scott says:

The fact that a truly great film (about the Holocaust, no less) was made by someone who raped a 13-year old is an interesting puzzle about the human condition, but really nothing more than that; the work, like his grossly immoral act, speaks for itself.

Even if you reject the idea that an artist's personal life is relevant to the aesthetic evaluation of his work, the Polanski case still raises troubling ethical questions. The fact remains that he has been able to live and work as a fugitive from American justice for nearly three decades.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether it's ethical for actors like Adrian Brody to go work with Polanski while he's still refusing to accept his punishment for the rape. The issue is that Polanski hasn't done his time. People who work with him are helping him to evade justice. Arguably, in so doing, they are becoming Polanski's accomplices many years after the fact. If so, viewers like me who paid to see the movie are also complicit to some extent.

Nevertheless, if the Academy Awards are based on merit, then Polanski deserved his Best Director award. According to its own guiding principles, Academy was right to set aside the moral complexities surrounding the making of the film. Polanski's direction was better than that of any of the other directors nominated that year. Therefore, he deserved the award.

You don't have to pretend that foie gras tastes bad in order to condemn the way it's made.

A philosopher debunks the box turtle fallacy

Good for Steve Gimbel clearly and carefully explaining why gay marriage won't lead to human-turtle unions.

Steve emphasizes that the gay marriage debate concerns marriage as a legal construct, not as a social or religious institution. On a legal level, marriage is a recognition that people pair up to form households. Marriage is a legal combination plate that subsumes a whole bunch of rights, privileges, and obligations under a single "I do." Instead of signing a joint property contract, and a durable power of attorney contract, an inheritence without will or probate contract, etc., etc., we have a package deal called "marriage."

Steve elaborates:

Marriage exists to eliminate ambiguities in law that arise from the fact that we do tend to couple up. We arrange our lives in such a fashion that it makes it impossible under the social contract which organizes society to give rights and responsibilities to individuals whose lives are completely intertwined. There is not my money and my wife's money, there are our assets. There is not my house and my wife's house, there is our home. There are not my children and my wife's children, there is our family. When talking about tax liabilities, child welfare decisions, and life choices in general, the responsibilities and benefits are ours together. We are what Thomas Hobbes called an "artificial individual; it makes no sense to think of us as two completely different people in some legal circumstances because we decide and act as a single entity and the law must account for that. If one of us were in an accident that caused that person to be incapacitated, the decision making rights for that person immediately go to the other partner. If one should pass away, all assets and liabilities, all responsibility for the children immediately go to the survivor. Questions about these sorts of thing need to be completely unambiguous to avoid problems like the Terri Schaivo fiasco where different family members were trying to wrest control from each other to further their own agendas. Marriage exists to make perfectly clear who has what rights and responsibilities and who shares what rights and responsibilities.

Anyone who wants to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to enter into this legal agreement is wrongfully discriminating. Religious institutions are private clubs that can have any rules they want. The fact that marriage between two men or two women doesn't feel "real" to some people is beside the point. They're entitled to whatever cockeyed sociocultural construct will pass muster in their group, but their feelings are irrelevant to the legal principle at stake.

The law isn't allowed to engage in sex discrimination when we enter into other kinds of voluntary contracts. We abhor the provisions of Sharia that impose gender tests on other legal proceedings (testifying under oath, inheriting property, criminal justice, etc.). Our prohibition of legal gay marriage is exactly the kind of legal sex discrimination that we object to in conservative interpretations of Islamic law.

There's been a lively debate about whether opposition to gay marriage is homophobic or bigoted in and of itself. I would argue that the answer is yes. There is no legal reason to oppose equal opportunity to enter into a marriage contract. The only reason to oppose legal marriage for gays is if you believe that it is somehow bad, wrong, or destructive for gay couples to entwine their legal and emotional lives in an exclusive pair bond, and that society should be allowed to make their lives more difficult because you disapprove of their choices. That's bigotry.

As Steve points out, there is no reason to think that eliminating sex discrimination for marriage licenses will change the institution in any other way. It will not open the door to unions between children or animals because they lack the legal status of consenting adults. A box turtle can't self-incorporate, serve on a jury or assume any of the other rights and responsibilities of an adult citizen. Unless conservatives have a secret agenda to upgrade the legal status of box turtles to that of humans, gay marriage will not threaten the institution we know and love.

Consensus, identity, and Wikipedia

Robin of 3Quarks has a very interesting essay about the core values of Wikipedia and the effects of these values on the discourse that takes place within the Wiki community.

As you may know, the Wikipedia community strives to achieve consensus and neutrality in main page entries. The discussion pages, however, are free from these constraints. Robin explains:

One interesting consequence has been that the discussion pages, free of the "neutral point of view" and "consensus" requirements, have become sites of contest, often for "cites of contest". Perhaps more interestingly, they unintentionally demonstrate what can emerge in an open discussion without the neutrality and consensus constraints.

Robin goes on to explain how the value of these non-consensus-driven discussion in the Wikipedia backchannels illustrates undermines some of the conventional wisdom about multi-culturalism.

Dawn Eden attempts a thought experiment

Kiss oF a fOOl, originally uploaded by :R.e.a.s.o.n:.

At first I thought Dawn Eden was flirting with Saul Kripke...

. . . suppose you could French kiss your beloved boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse without exchanging spit?

No, seriously. Suppose exchanging spit greatly increased one's fertility at certain times of the month and was hence something to be avoided at all costs by those wishing to be childless.

You could take a pill that would dry up your saliva glands and prevent your own mouth from absorbing your partner's saliva.

To preserve that nice gushy feeling, you could swish some prefabricated spit substitute, just like the real thing, between your teeth before locking lips. But neither you nor your partner would be capable of transmitting any of your own natural wetness to the other.

Physically, it would feel just like a real French kiss. But would it be one?

Is a kiss still a kiss when it's only sensation, with no substance shared? Is it still a soul kiss when you're purposefully withholding part of yourself — something that's always been an essential element of a smooch?

I wonder . . .

Turns out, Dawn's not really not writing essentialist erotica. She's saying that people who use contraception don't really love each other. Or that sex with contraception isn't really sex. Or something...

I'll let Amanda translate:

For the more slow-witted, this is Dawn’s unbelievably clever attempt to trick us into agreeing that your aren’t really having sex unless you get pregnant. I’m actually down with that idea because that means that the Virgin Mary wasn’t a virgin but I am. If you’re not really, truly having sex when you “contracept”, I do believe we’ve stumbled upon a much niftier way for the abstinence-only squad to preserve virginity than through the anal & oral only method that’s currently popular. Just use contraception! You’re not really fucking if you’re on the pill, so who cares?

My promising career as a Dawn Patrol commenter came an abrupt end last night when I attempted to perform the naturalistic fallacy on her comments thread.

"Isn't great," I said, "that we have pills and IUDs that allow us to control fertility without drying up any of those nice seminal, vaginal, or oral juices? Shouldn't we thank science for allowing us to swap these fluids between orifices without worrying about whether we're actually doing what we're doing?"

Apparently, Dawn doesn't want to absorb my memes.