HOW WE ARE IMMORAL: RIGHT AND WRONG AND HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks.
—Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
In the 1991 comedy film City Slickers, the story of three men turning forty (played by Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby) who go on a New Mexico cattle drive, there is much discussion about the purpose of life, the meaning of death, and especially sex. Crystal’s character Mitch, for example, explains to Phil and Ed (Stern and Kirby, respectively) that “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.” Despite this comedic observation, Mitch has been happily (and faithfully) married to his wife, Barbara, for many years; by contrast, Phil has been in a miserable marriage to his boss’s daughter and just got busted by his wife for having an affair with a young checkout clerk; Ed is the consummate playboy bachelor who recently—although somewhat reluctantly—tied the knot with his latest flame. As is often the case among men, the talk turns to sex and infidelity. Ed wants to know if Mitch would cheat on Barbara if he wouldn’t get caught. Mitch reminds him of what just happened to Phil. So Ed offers this scenario:
ED: A spaceship lands and the most beautiful woman you ever saw gets out. And all she wants is to have the best sex in the universe with you. And the second it’s over she flies away for eternity. No one would ever know. You’re telling me you wouldn’t do it?MITCH: No. Because what you’re describing actually happened to my cousin Ronald, and his wife did find out about it at the beauty parlor. They know everything there! Look, what I’m saying is it wouldn’t make it all right if Barbara didn’t know. I’d know. And I wouldn’t like myself. That’s all.
Ed persists in pushing Mitch with a cereal analogy, explaining that he has been selecting from a Kellogg’s variety pack all his life but now he has to eat the same cereal every day. “And then you wake up one morning, and you’re just not hungry anymore.” The problem, Ed confesses, is that his wife, Kim, wants to start a family, which means to Ed that he will never have sex with another woman. Poor Phil, whose life appears rather dismal at the moment, can’t understand why being married “to this gorgeous twenty-four-year-old underwear model who thinks the sun rises and sets in your pants” is not enough for Ed. Ed retorts: “You don’t understand. I don’t want to screw around on Kim.” Phil admonishes him: “So don’t.”
Can Ed “just say no” to the temptation of an extramarital affair? Was Phil justified in having an affair since his wife was a ball-busting banshee who regularly refused him sex? Are Mitch’s high moral standards the norm or the exception, and is his reason for not accepting the ultimate offer of safe sex—that even if his wife never found out he would know and that is reason enough—a higher moral reason than fear of retribution? In this chapter we shall consider how we are immoral by examining a number of principles that help us tell the difference between right and wrong. We will also apply these principles to a number of ethical issues (truth telling and lying, adultery, pornography, abortion, cloning and genetic engineering, and animal rights) to examine where science, fuzzy logic, and provisional ethics can help us resolve them, or at least inform our moral decisions.
At the underpinning of all theistic ethical systems is the belief that without God there is no ultimate basis for determining right and wrong. We have already seen the limitations of theistic ethics, but there are two additional questions to consider here: (1) what if the moral issue is not discussed in the sacred writings of the individual’s religion? Cloning, stem cell research, and genetic engineering are not discussed in the Bible, of course, so what are Jews and Christians to think about these very real moral issues? They either have to attempt to infer from ancient biblical writings something that is loosely related to the modern moral issue, or they have to think it through for themselves; (2) what if the moral issue is discussed but is clearly inappropriate or outright wrong in its moral command? With both of these limitations the believer is often forced to selectively read the sacred text, picking and choosing passages without consistency.
Consider, for example, the many Old Testament moral rules that make one blanch with embarrassment for believers. (All biblical passages cited below are from the Revised Standard Version.) For emancipated modern women thinking of adorning themselves in business attire that may resemble men’s business wear (or for guys who dig cross dressing), Deut. 22:5 does not look kindly on such behaviors: “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” An even worse abomination is a rebellious child. Deut. 21:18—21 offers this parental moral guideline: “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”
If that isn’t ridiculous enough, here is the Bible’s recommendation on how to deal with women who may or may not have had sex before marriage. According to Deut. 22:13—21: “If any man takes a wife, and goes in to her, and then spurns her, and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings an evil name upon her, saying, ‘I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her the tokens of virginity,’ then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the tokens of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate.” (For those not accustomed to reading between the biblical lines, the phrase “goes in to her” should be taken literally, and “the tokens of virginity” means the hymen and the blood on the sheet from a virgin’s first sexual experience.) If the father of the bride can produce the tokens of virginity, then he “shall spread the garment before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man [the husband] and whip him; and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver, and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought an evil name upon a virgin of Israel; and she shall be his wife.” However, lo to the woman who has dared to have sex before marriage. “But if the thing is true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you.”
Finally, for those of you who have succumbed to the temptations of the flesh at some time in your married life, Deut. 22:22 does not bode well: “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel.” Do Jews and Christians really want to legislate biblical morality, especially in light of the revelations of the past couple of decades of the rather low moral character of some of our more prominent religious leaders? And on the legislation question, those on the religious right who are lobbying for the Ten Commandments to be posted in public schools and courthouses should note that the very first one prohibits anyone from believing in any other gods besides Yahweh. (The first commandment is “Thou shall have no other gods before me,” a passage indicating that polytheism was commonplace at the time and that Yahweh was, among other things, a jealous god.) That is to say, by posting the Ten Commandments, we are sending the message that any nonbelievers, or believers in any other god, are not welcome in our public schools and courtrooms. Fortunately, the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights prohibits such religious exclusionary practices.
To be fair, not all biblical ethics are this antiquated and extreme. There is much to pick and choose from that is useful for our thinking about moral issues. The problem here is consistency, and selecting ethical guidelines that support our particular personal or social prejudices and preferences. When slavery was the social norm, it was simple for proslavery defenders to point to passages such as those in Exod. 21, which outlines the rules for the proper handling of slaves, for example: “when you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing,” and “when a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do,” and, finally, slave families should be kept together, unless the master gave the slave a wife, who then bore him children, in which case the master gets to keep the woman and children when the slave is sold. If you are going to claim the Bible as your primary (or only) code of ethics and proclaim (say) that homosexuality is sinful and wrong because the Bible says so, then to be consistent you should kill rebellious youth, nonvirginal premarried women, and adulterous men and women. Since most today would not endorse that level of consistency, why pick on gays and lesbians but cut some slack for disobedient children, promiscuous women, and adulterous men and women? And why aren’t promiscuous men subject to the same punishment as women? The answer is that in that culture, at that time, men legislated and women obeyed. Thankfully, we have moved beyond that culture. But what this means is that we need a new set of morals and an ethical system designed for our time and place, not one scripted for a pastoral/agricultural people who lived 4,000 years ago. The Bible and other sacred texts have wonderfully edifying and sometimes transcendent passages, but we can do better.
If we cannot reliably turn to the Bible and other sacred texts to determine moral right and wrong, to whom shall we turn? If we cannot ask God, whom shall we ask? One answer can be found in the first moral principle, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The Golden Rule is a derivative of the basic principle of exchange reciprocity and reciprocal altruism, and thus evolved in our Paleolithic ancestors as one of the primary moral sentiments. (If I’m right about this, then it means that religion did not invent the Golden Rule and other moral principles; it co-opted them, then codified them.) In this principle there are two moral agents: the moral doer and the moral receiver. A moral question arises when the moral doer is uncertain how the moral receiver will accept and respond to the action under question. In its essence this is what the Golden Rule is telling us to do. By asking yourself, How would I feel if this were done unto me? you are asking, How would others feel if I did it unto them? But the Golden Rule has a severe limitation to it: what if the moral recipient thinks differently from the moral doer? What if you would not mind having action X done unto you, but someone else would mind it? Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women. Most men, then, in considering whether to approach a woman with an offer of unsolicited sex, should not ask themselves how they would feel if the roles were reversed. We need to take the Golden Rule one step further, through what I call the ask first principle.
There is one surefire test to find out whether an action is right or wrong: ask first. The moral agent should ask the moral recipient whether the behavior in question is moral or immoral. If you aren’t sure that the potential recipient of your action will react in the same manner you would react to the moral behavior in question, then ask. Consider an easy test of the ask first principle—adultery. If you want to know if having an extramarital affair is moral or immoral, ask first the potentially affected moral recipient—your spouse: “Honey, is it okay if I sleep with someone else?” You will receive your moral answer swiftly and without equivocation. In this example, as with so many others, you do not actually have to ask the question to know the answer. The thought experiment alone should give you a strong sense of what is right and wrong.
Such moral thought experiments are at the heart of moral reasoning. For this process you can monitor your own sense of guilt and other emotions as a guideline. Imagine, in the above example, how you would feel if your partner had sex with someone else. I mean, literally imagine it. For a few people, perhaps, their marriages and relationships are so dead that such fantasies have no effect—truly a sign that the emotional attachment has been severed. For most people, however, imagining their partners having sexual relations with others is extremely emotionally disruptive. There is, in fact, solid scientific research on this subject. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss wired up subjects to monitor their pulse, blood pressure, breathing rate, and perspiration (the basic measurements used by the polygraph, or lie detector). He then asked them to imagine their significant other having sex with someone else. For most of Buss’s subjects, their heart rate and blood pressure went through the roof, their breathing became rapid and forced, and their bodies perspired profusely.1 It is not a big leap of the imagination for the moral doer to project that response onto the moral receiver to get an answer to the moral question.
In addition to asking the moral receiver, what other criteria might we use to judge the rightness or wrongness of an action? For millennia, philosophers and observers of human behavior have noted that we have a tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure and pain encompass many things, from pure physical to pure ethereal states. We may find pleasure in a kiss or an idea. We may experience pain in a slap or an insult. Happiness is a good synonym for pleasure, and unhappiness is a good synonym for pain, and thus we may state that one of the fundamental drives of human nature is that we all strive for greater levels of happiness and avoid greater levels of unhappiness, however these may be personally defined. Happiness and unhappiness, then, are emotions that evolved as part of the suite of emotions that make up the human psyche.
As we have seen, humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, nasty and nice. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty. Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, so that we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. The happiness principle states that it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness. My colleague, social scientist and moral philosopher Jay Stuart Snelson, expressed this sentiment well in his “win-win principle”: “Always seek gain through the gain of others, and never seek gain through the forced or fraudulent loss of others.”2
This is not always easy to do. There is a tension in the human condition between these competing motives, and as often as not the darker side of our humanity emerges. The moral animal struggles with the immoral animal within. Whether the moral or immoral animal wins in any given situation depends on a host of circumstances and conditions. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle.
So, for any given moral question, one may begin by asking the moral receiver how he or she would respond, then ask yourself if the action in question will likely lead to greater or lesser levels of happiness for yourself and the moral receiver. These two moral principles dovetail, because the moral receiver is, presumably, seeking greater levels of happiness; thus, by asking first what you should do, you will also receive feedback on how the moral receiver’s happiness will be affected by your actions.
In addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive: the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty. Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness. The liberty principle states that it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty. The liberty principle is grounded in history and anchored in modern enlightenment values.
In prehistoric bands and tribes, liberty was limited to the actions and interactions of individuals within their families, extended families, and tiny communities. Liberty as a political concept was nonexistent, because there was no politics. Society was mostly a loose confederation of individuals—families and extended families—within a slightly larger community. The primary purpose of these communities was to resolve conflicts within the band or tribe, to secure food and natural resources, and to protect against other bands and tribes. As bands and tribes coalesced into chiefdoms and states, and populations grew from hundreds to thousands and tens of thousands, political organizations were needed because the informal methods of conflict resolution that worked so well in smaller populations broke down among the much larger populations, and the small skirmishes between bands and tribes grew into much larger and costlier wars between chiefdoms and states.
Because chiefdoms and states require revenue to support a bureaucratic infrastructure and bureaucracies are not designed to be revenue-generating organizations, the individual members of the chiefdom or state must relinquish some percentage of their productive labor. Today this is done through taxes, duties, levies, tolls, excises, and various other financial assessments. Where there is no money, or a limited supply of cash flow, the barter system may be employed, such as in feudalism, where peasants gave over a portion of their agricultural products to the land-owning lord, and/or a fraction of their time to military service in defense of the castle, manor, or realm. Here, and elsewhere, some freedom and autonomy is exchanged for security and resources, and this may lead to an increase in overall liberty and the general good of the chiefdom or state. It is at this point—roughly 3,000 to 5,000 years ago when bands and tribes evolved into chiefdoms and states—that the concept of civil and political liberty was born. Here we can turn to the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid, figure 6, to see where and how that transition was made. It is at the bio-cultural transitional boundary between the community and the society, where social status and recognition lead to social justice and security, and where the drive of reciprocal altruism gives rise to indirect and blind altruism, that liberty emerges. This is the birth of liberty, the principle that when individual members of the community exchange freedom and autonomy for resources and security, in the long run their overall liberty increases. For example, exchanging a portion of my earnings for food that someone else produces allows me the freedom to pursue nonfood-producing activities. Ideally, the exchange of some freedom and autonomy for resources and security leads to other forms of freedom and autonomy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
For many millennia the concept of liberty for all members of the state lay dormant, suppressed by the selfish and competitive drives of the political and religious leaders who held the reins of power. Even the occasional enlightened societies that set up quasi-representative bodies to protect the interests of the citizens at large restricted liberty to a narrow class of land-owning or power-wielding males. Only in the last couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their rank or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies that encourage intolerance and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the early modern period has been to grant greater liberty for more people. Although there are still setbacks, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all humans continues.
On July 16, 1964, in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater gave voice to one of the most memorable one-liners in the history of politicking: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” For most human endeavors, however, Goldwater is wrong. Extremism is almost always a vice that generates countless unintended consequences. Extremism too often leads to violence, terrorism, and even war. From 9/11 to the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, and from the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City to the blowing up of abortion clinics, the principles of happiness and liberty are violated in the most ultimate fashion.
The opposite of extremism is moderation. The moderation principle states that when innocent people die, extremism in the defense of anything is no virtue, and moderation in the protection of everything is no vice. The moral principles behind the moderation principle are happiness and liberty. If you are killing people in the name of anything, you are seeking happiness and liberty at the ultimate expense of someone else’s happiness and liberty.
Real-world problems are the true test of any theory of morality. Other than for intellectual recreation, what good is an ethical theory without moral application? In the remainder of this chapter we shall examine how provisional ethics and a science of morality—particularly the ask first principle, the happiness principle, and the liberty principle—might be applied to a number of such ethical issues, including truth telling and lying, adultery, pornography, abortion, cloning and genetic engineering, and animal rights.
We begin with a relatively easy moral issue: truth telling and lying. We all agree that truth telling is vital for trust in human relations, so in a binary system of morality, truth telling is right and lying is wrong. Life, however, like nature, is never this simple. It turns out that all of us lie every day, but most of the lies are so-called little white lies, where we might exaggerate our accomplishments, or they might be lies of omission, where information is omitted to spare someone’s feelings. Such lies are usually amoral. Fuzzy logic better represents life—and lies—than does binary logic. In the case of truth telling and lying, fuzzy provisional ethics allows us to nuance our thinking on such moral issues.
Little white lies, for example, since they are commonplace and mostly harmless, might be ranked a .1 or a .2 lie. Lies of omission might perhaps be catalogued as .3 or .4 lies. Lies of commission—intentionally providing false information—might be classified as .5 or .6 lies. Big lies—lies in the range from .7 to .9—are getting much more serious, and thus can be seen as more immoral than little white lies.
When in doubt as to whether a lie is moral, immoral, or amoral, you can ask yourself how the moral receiver might feel if he or she found out you lied, and whether the moral receiver’s happiness and liberty increased or decreased as a result of the lie you told. When telling a lie, most of us, most of the time, do so to increase our own happiness or liberty, or to avoid anticipated unhappiness or loss of liberty if someone else knows the truth. Thus, the moral thing to do is to never tell a lie if it leads to someone else’s unhappiness or loss of liberty. Of course, there are circumstances when telling the truth might lead to someone else’s unhappiness or loss of liberty. For example, if an abusive husband inquires whether you are harboring his fearful wife, it would be immoral for you to answer in the affirmative if you are, because the truth might lead to the abuse or death of the wife. Here we must be cautious since it would be easy to rationalize a lie when, in fact, telling the truth is usually the right thing to do.
There is a lighthearted biblical story told by ministers and rabbis about Moses and the Ten Commandments. In this revisionist spin, the great prophet descends from the mountaintop with the divinely chiseled tablets, announcing to his people, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that God kept the number of commandments down to a manageable ten. The bad news is that God left in the one about adultery.”
Well, what if He had not left that commandment in? Would that remove adultery from the list of immoral acts? Would it make it amoral, or even moral? Divine Command Theory, a narrower version of theistic ethics, implies that it would. For Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, if the monotheistic God of Abraham does not decree an act immoral, the implication is that it is not, at least as far as the Bible goes (all three religions have a long and honorable tradition of biblical commentary and moral discourse in which the sages of each generation have produced extrabiblical works on all matters moral). As to whether there is a God or not, however, we need to go beyond divine command as our guide. Eighteenth-century theistic German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz explained it this way: “In saying, therefore, that things are not good according to any standard of goodness, but simply by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory; for why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing the contrary?”3
Religions and societies have long struggled to regulate human sexual behavior, one of the strongest of all the passions. In some cases, it has been outlawed, even in modern America. In Rolling Hills, California, for example, Section 9 of the municipal code, on “immoral conduct,” specifically states that “any person occupying, using or being present in any bed, room, automobile, structure or public place with a person of the opposite sex, to whom he or she is not married, for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with such person” is guilty of a crime punishable by up to three months in jail.4 Such laws sound arcane to us today, but many states once had them on the books because marriage is considered a contract, the violation of which leads to third-party damages. But since most states have moved to no-fault divorce laws, adultery as a cause of divorce fell into disuse, along with the antiadultery laws. (In April 2003, for example, the city council of Rolling Hills voted to repeal the antiadultery statute.) Although adultery may retain its status as a sin, its designation as a crime has proved ineffective as a behavioral curb. If two consenting adults wish to engage in unsanctioned sexual behavior, there is little church or state can do to stop them. Behavioral restraint needs to come from within.
Here, again, we can look to evolutionary theory for a deeper understanding of why we do what we do unto others. In provisional ethics, adultery is provisionally immoral because of the disruption it causes to the natural mating condition of our species. We evolved as pair-bonded primates for whom monogamy, or at least serial monogamy (a sequence of monogamous marriages), is the norm. Adultery is a violation of a monogamous relationship and, as we shall see, there is copious scientific data (and loads of anecdotal examples) showing how destructive adulterous behavior is to a monogamous relationship. In fact, one of the reasons that serial monogamy (and not just monogamy) best describes the mating behavior of our species is that adultery typically destroys a relationship, forcing couples to split up and start over with someone new. Thus, in contrasting provisional ethics with theistic ethics, adultery is immoral because of its destructive consequences no matter what God or the patriarchs said about it. And evolutionary theory provides a deeper reason for adultery’s immoral nature that is transcendent because it belongs to the species. If there is a God, and if He does condemn adultery as an immoral act, it is because evolution made it immoral.
According to evolutionary psychologist David Buss, sexual betrayals are primarily a biologically driven phenomenon (although they may be accentuated or attenuated by culture), encoded over eons of Paleolithic cuckolding. Buss argues that there are differences between men and women in this tendency and that these differences cut across cultures, and thus are primarily driven by our genes. He cites a study by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield in which college students were approached by an attractive member of the opposite sex who asked one of three questions:
1. “Would you go out on a date with me tonight?”2. “Would you go back to my apartment with me tonight?”3. “Would you sleep with me tonight?
The results were revealing, to say the least. For women, 50 percent agreed to the date, 6 percent agreed to return to the apartment, and none agreed to have sex. By contrast, for men, 50 percent agreed to the date, 69 percent agreed to the apartment, and 75 percent agreed to the sex. Yet, even with such a basic and simple drive as sex, Buss admits that genes are only part of the story: “Desires represent only one set of causes of actual mating behavior. Individuals cannot always make decisions that correspond precisely to their desires—people can’t always get what they want. Mates possessing all of the desired qualities are scarce and often unavailable. Competition is keen for the limited supply of desirable mates; members of the same sex constrain access. Parents can wield influence. And members of the opposite sex exert preferences that further restrict access.”5
As for the act of adultery itself, its evolutionary benefits are obvious. For the male, depositing one’s genes in more places increases the probability of this form of genetic immortality. For the female, it is a chance to trade up for better genes and higher social status. Its evolutionary hazards, however, are equally obvious. For the male, revenge by the adulterous woman’s husband can be extremely dangerous—a significant percentage of homicides involve love triangles. And while getting caught by one’s own wife is not likely to result in death, it can result in loss of contact with children, loss of family and security, and risk of sexual retaliation, thus decreasing the odds of one’s mate bearing one’s own offspring. For the female, being discovered by the adulterous man’s wife involves little physical risk, but getting caught by one’s own husband can and often does lead to extreme physical abuse and occasionally even death.
Beyond the evolutionary implications, there are the sociocultural problems, such as the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, family and extended-family rejection, social ostracization from one’s community, and the like. It would be difficult to justify adultery as a moral act from either an evolutionary perspective or a cultural one, for either the individual or society. Extreme exceptions come to mind, of course, such as a woman whose husband is in a long-term coma and she finds solace through intimacy with another man. But such “lifeboat” cases are so rare as to fall outside the purview of provisional ethics. And one occasionally hears about “open marriages” in which both partners allegedly agree to tolerate extramarital affairs, but such arrangements appear to be desired more by one partner than the other and typically end in divorce when one partner becomes attached to and falls in love with the paramour.
In provisional ethics, then, most moral actors, especially those who are directly or indirectly involved in or affected by the affair—one’s mate, the mate of the adulterous partner, the families of both adulterous parties, the community, and the society—would likely offer their provisional assent that adultery is an immoral act for most people, in most circumstances, most of the time, because it causes considerably more harm than good. Thus, overall and in the long run, the adulterous act leads to disastrous consequences and a decrease in liberty and happiness for most parties involved, and thus cannot in most circumstances be justified. If there is any doubt about this, before you set out on an adulterous adventure, ask first your partner.
On July 26, 1991, Paul Reubens, better known as the affably paedomorphic Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for indecency in the South Trail Cinema, an X-rated theater in Sarasota, Florida. It seems that the actor, then star of his own syndicated children’s television series, which followed his wildly popular film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, was enjoying Nancy Nurse a bit too carnally for a public venue.
The event quickly turned into a media feeding frenzy and exploitative fodder for stand-up comics, including Reubens himself who, as host of a subsequent television awards show, quipped, “Anyone heard any good jokes lately?” The Pee-wee porn affair was much ado about nothing. Most wondered why he did not simply indulge his passions in the privacy of a hotel room or his own home, where such materials are readily available and confidentially enjoyed. Unfortunately, the image of some guy masturbating to an erotic film in a public theater is what far too many people conjure up in their imagination when they hear the word pornography.
Simply defined, pornography constitutes images in the form of films, videos, photographs, literature, and other materials that enhance sexual arousal. Determining which images specifically constitute pornography is so fraught with moral and legal complications that it led D. H. Lawrence to comment, “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another,” and Supreme Court Justice Stewart to famously pronounce that although he could not define pornography, “I know it when I see it.”6 Unlike all the other primates (with the exception of bonobo chimpanzees), whose sex lives are largely governed by seasonal periods of receptivity (primarily when the female is “in heat”), humans evolved with the desire to engage in sexual behavior at any time of the year. So who would object to enhancing the arousal of a perfectly natural and exceptionally pleasurable activity designed to propagate the species and bring new life into the world?
Plenty of people, as a matter of fact, do object to such supplemental activities, and they have been largely successful in transmogrifying the meaning of the word pornography into a lewd and smutty activity conducted by sandal-wearing, tree-hugging, left-leaning, liberal, pinko, godless communists, homosexuals, and perverts of all stripes for the purpose of preventing this great nation from returning to its roots as a Christian country and to subvert its foundation in the puritanical ethic whose greatest fear is that somewhere, someone out there is enjoying carnal pleasure. Pornography, we are told, is immoral—a sin of the mind only slightly less violative than such sins of the body as adultery, masturbation, homosexuality, and premarital sex. Even President Jimmy Carter famously (and shamefully) confessed that he “lusted in his heart.”
Let’s see how provisional ethics applies to pornography, examining three types: mental pornography, positive pornography, and negative pornography. In essence, I shall argue that mental pornography and positive pornography are not immoral because most people in most circumstances most of the time are not harmed by them and, in fact, may find much pleasure in them, both individually and in their relationships. There is, however, some evidence that negative pornography (pornography that depicts harm or violence against women, such as pleasure in being raped) is harmful to at least some people in some circumstances some of the time and may therefore be considered provisionally immoral. Let’s examine what science can tell us about the effects of pornography of these three types.
Mental pornography. Stripped of its pejorative connotations and seen for what it really is—images that enhance sexual arousal—the simplest form of pornography is the sexual images in our imaginations. Mental pornography, or what Havelock Ellis called “autoeroticism,” is one of the most ubiquitous of all sexual activities. I do not know if sexual fantasy itself evolved, providing some selective advantage to individuals who had them versus those who did not, or if autoeroticism is just a spandrel—a by-product of some other evolutionary adaptation. But certainly the ability to fantasize in general did evolve as a useful by-product of a large cerebral cortex, and no doubt this ability did provide a selective advantage (imagining the positive outcome of a hunt or the negative consequences of a fight). Sexual fantasies are probably a contingent free ride that comes with having a large brain capable of fantasizing about other scenarios in life. Since social relations between humans are so important, and because sex is so intimately intertwined with how we feel about and interact with other members of our group, then it would not surprise me if it turned out that fantasizing about sexual relations with others did ultimately serve some functional purpose in our evolutionary history.
Western religion has typically prohibited sexual fantasies. Consider this medieval church punishment in the form of penances for erotic fantasies among church leaders of ascending stripes: twenty-five days for a deacon, thirty days for a monk, forty days for a priest, and fifty days for a bishop. (I guess the pope is not only infallible, but also unimaginative.) How can something so harmless to others (this assumes negative sexual fantasies are not expressed behaviorally—more on this below in the discussion of negative pornography) and yet so fun and fulfilling to the individual be immoral? Science sees it rather differently. Erotic fantasies may serve a variety of personal functions, including the fact that sometimes it is a lot easier to just fantasize about a sexual encounter than it is to actually invest the time, energy, and money, and to risk rejection, failure, disease, social ostracism, or the possibility of an unsatisfactory experience in an actual sexual encounter. Some of the best sex any of us have ever experienced is the sex in our minds. That mental sex may be informed by actual sexual experiences—usually the most enjoyable ones we have had with a partner who is especially important to us—but it remains safely ensconced in the private domain within our skulls.
Therefore, from a provisional ethics perspective, it would be reasonable for us to offer our provisional assent that mental pornography in the form of positive sexual fantasies is not immoral because the evidence confirms that almost everyone has them, they provide numerous benefits, they harm no one else, and thus they are justified if so desired by the individual or couple (sharing your sexual fantasies with your partner, particularly if they are positive and about that partner, can be very stimulating and provocative).
Positive Pornography. I define positive pornography as images that enhance sexual arousal by depicting individuals or couples in non-harmful and nonexploitative sexual situations. (I do not consider sadomasochism [S&M] harmful as long as the partners involved in an S&M encounter are willing participants.) Films, videos, photographs, and literature that depict individuals masturbating or couples engaging in consensual sex and that are viewed by either individuals alone or couples together for personal enjoyment represent pornography in a positive mode. So-called soft-porn films that leave something to the imagination and depict sex as a romantic and loving expression of affection between two people are fine examples of positive pornography. So too is the body of erotica literature in its higher form by authors such as the French diarist and novelist Anais Nin. In fact, erotica is a synonym for positive pornography and is a term already in the lexicon that carries positive connotations. Let pornography describe negative pornography. Let erotica describe mental and positive pornography. Erotica is literary, highbrow, graceful, elegant, and, most of all, sensual—the very essence of a positive sexual experience.
Pulp fiction romance novels that portray lovemaking in crass terms, such as describing a man’s “throbbing pole of love,” and so-called hard-core porn films that leave nothing to the imagination in graphically revealing cunnilingus and fellatio, vaginal and anal penetration, ejaculation, multiple partners, and spontaneous sex with strangers in unlikely venues tend to be preferred much more by men than by women. Contrast these images with the following passage from Anaïs Nin’s book of erotica Little Birds, in a short story about a young woman married to an older man who delays ultimate intimacy several nights to “woo her slowly and lingeringly, until she was prepared and in the mood.” After several nights of teasing kisses and caresses,
he discovered the trembling sensibility under the arm, at the nascence of the breasts, the vibrations that ran between the nipples and the sex, and between the sex mouth and the lips, all the mysterious links that roused and stirred places other than the one being kissed, currents running from the roots of the hair to the roots of the spine. Each place he kissed he worshiped with adoring words, observing the dimples at the end of her back, the firmness of her buttocks, the extreme arch of her back, which threw her buttocks outwards … . He encircled her ankles with his fingers, lingered over her feet, which were perfect like her hands, stroked over and over again the smooth statuesque lines of her neck, lost himself in her long heavy hair.7
Pages later, the lovers finally embrace in full intimacy. This is positive pornography at its finest, and research shows that it is very effective in sexually arousing both men and women. Physiological research, for example, shows that penile erection, vaginal vasocongestion, blood pressure, and genital temperature all increase in response to exposure to positive pornographic material (such arousal effects can be also be generated through the imagination alone).8
There are cases, of course, when positive pornography can become negative (in a manner different from negative pornography to be discussed below), and that is when pornography becomes an alternative, rather than a supplement, to a satisfying sexual relationship with your partner. Here we are well advised to follow Aristotle’s golden mean: all things in moderation. If the viewing of pornography becomes so addictive and compelling that it replaces sex with your partner, and your partner then becomes dissatisfied with this arrangement, then such pornography is no longer positive. We should always remember that, by definition, pornography is supposed to enhance sexual arousal, not replace it. When in doubt, ask your partner.
On the flip side, positive pornography may be a useful substitute for sex when you are between relationships or, for whatever reason, you do not desire a sexual relationship with your partner (and your partner is not frustrated by this substitution). Sex with yourself is safe, and pornography can be a positive enhancement of the self-sexual experience.
Negative Pornography. I define negative pornography as images that enhance sexual arousal by depicting sex as violent, abusive, or exploitative, and especially those that imply or show women being seduced and raped against their will and then enjoying the experience as it unfolds. Here we enter the darker realm of rape and the relationship of pornography to this especially malevolent act.
One argument made against pornography is that it leads men to rape women. Indeed, attacks on pornography often begin here and come not just from the conservative right but from the liberal left as well (mainly from extreme feminists). Catharine MacKinnon, for example, describes all pornography as “the celebration, the promotion, the authorization and the legitimization of rape, sexual harassment, battery and the abuse of children.” Andrea Dworkin defines pornography as “the material means of sexualizing inequality.”9 As a blanket causal variable in the study of why men rape, however, there is no evidence to support this claim. Indeed, if only it were as simple as eliminating pornography in order to eliminate rape; but it is not so, as evidenced by the fact that rape has been a tragic part of human history millennia before pornography of any sort made its appearance on the cultural landscape.
With pornography and rape we need to make an important causal distinction: although some rapists have watched and enjoyed pornography (as noted by critics in citing serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy’s remark just before his execution, “You are going to kill me … but out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that”), by far the vast majority of men who have watched and enjoyed pornography have never raped. In a review of seven studies on the relationship of pornography to sex offenders of all types, Berl Kutchinsky concluded: “Sex offenders are, as a rule, not more acquainted with pornography or more sexually aroused by such material than are other males—in fact, such differences tend to be in the opposite direction.”10 Indeed, an extensive study of rapists and their backgrounds revealed that instead of being driven to rape by the hypersexuality allegedly produced by pornography, rapists tend to come from sexually repressed environments in which sex was rarely or never discussed, nudity was forbidden, and sexuality was portrayed as sinful. By contrast, nonrapists were more likely than rapists to have experienced pornography while growing up and to have been raised in a family environment in which sex was openly discussed and not shamed into quiescence.11
Several correlational studies were equivocal on the relationship between pornography and rape. A 1986 study investigated the relationship between exposure to sexually explicit material and attitudes toward rape in 115 men, finding that only exposure to coercive or violent sexual themes was related to more traditional attitudes about women as submissive and inferior; but contrary to predictions, subjects with greater exposure to general and nonviolent sexual materials held more liberal and egalitarian attitudes toward women. A 199 study based on data from the Uniform Crime Reports, circulation data from three sexually oriented magazines, and the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas found no relationship between pornography and rape. This same study did find, however, that population size, proportion of young adults, percentage divorced, and population change were all significant predictors of rape. Finally, in an extensive cross-cultural study of rape in four countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the United States), there was no correlation between the availability of pornography (type not specified) and increased sexual violence.12
Interestingly, a number of studies point to a possible catharsis effect for pornography, with most citing Denmark and Japan as examples. In the 1960s Denmark experienced a surge in pornography. Instead of taking draconian measures to stop it, the government lifted all bans on pornography. Subsequently, there was a dramatic drop in sex crimes. In Japan, levels of pornography are as high or higher than in America, while rates of sex crimes are fourteen times lower than in the United States (34.5 rapes per 100,000 in the United States versus 2.4 per 100,000 in Japan). “Japanese view the availability of such stimuli as a cathartic valve,” wrote the researchers who conducted the study. “It is presumed to provide vicarious satisfaction of a socially unacceptable behavior. In a culture that endorses strict codes of behavior and highly defined roles, the depiction of rape also provides a context in which Japanese men can vicariously abandon all of the explicit signposts of good behavior.”13 Of course, this is not a recipe for subjecting potential rapists to pornography, but at the very least this evidence shows that whatever the cause of rape, it is clearly not pornography by itself.
On the other hand, negative pornography as I have defined it, particularly pornography that depicts a reluctant women who subsequently succumbs to the pressures of her would-be lover and in the end enjoys the experience, may elicit in male viewers inappropriate sexual behavior toward unwilling females. A number of studies show a strong positive correlation between such pornographic scenarios and subjects’ self-reported probability of raping a woman.14 A corroborative study on nonpornographic but aggressive material found an equally positive correlation between portrayed aggression toward women and actual aggression toward women.15 According to Indiana University psychologist Dolf Zillmann, what generates or increases aggression toward women are not specific sexual or aggressive acts toward women per se, but the overall degree of excitation within the film itself. But this varies considerably among individuals; pornographic and aggressive films appear to have the greatest effect on individuals with limited social and sexual experience. “Persons with limited sexual socialization experience in particular have been found to respond negatively to erotica. Such persons … appear to be especially vulnerable to behaving aggressively after exposure to erotica, even to comparatively mild erotica—innocuous as their stimuli may seem to others.” Similarly, W. A. Fisher and D. Byrne found that pornography had a greater effect on people whose attitudes toward sex were negative.16
A particularly important finding made by Neil Malamuth and James Check was that rapists who report that they are more likely to rape if they think they would not get caught show greater excitatory response to pornography than do nonrapists and men who report that they would not rape even if they would not get caught.17 Here again we see the reverse causal relationship between pornography and rape. Rapists may be stimulated by pornography, but people who are stimulated by pornography do not become rapists. Interestingly, pornography that shows a woman being sexually seduced against her will, and showing disgust in response, decreased the arousal rating among rapists and potential rapists, in contrast to pornography that supports the myth that women like to be raped.18
As with most ethical issues and moral dilemmas, rarely are matters black and white in the world of pornography and erotica. Instead, there are shades of erotic gray. As with other forms of fuzzy morality, assigning fuzzy fractions to shade the world into erotic degrees is much more useful. Watching a stimulating erotica video once in a while is surely no sin, especially if it is not meant as a replacement for intimacy with one’s partner, so we might assign it a .1. When the experience of pornography gets to the point of being a daily ritual, is done for masturbation purposes only, and replaces intimacy with one’s partner who finds this substitution violative of the relationship, then it might be appropriate to rank that form of pornography as a .9 act of immorality. One can assign fractions in between these extremes according to preference and consequence.
All the scientific studies and reasoned arguments about positive pornography’s harmlessness (or even benefits), however, do not amount to a hill of Viagra beans if your partner finds it offensive, or feels repulsed or replaced instead of aroused. Here is another place to apply the ask first principle. Because sex is such a personal matter, and because there is so much variation in what individuals find sexually stimulating, asking your partner first is the simplest and surest way to find out what constitutes acceptable pornography.
There has been, arguably, no more contentious moral issue of the past half century than abortion, where morality, politics, and science are confoundedly conflated. Moral issues are personal. Political issues are social. Scientific issues are factual. Herein lies confusion. Pro-choicers believe that whether a woman decides to abort a fetus or not is a personal moral issue in which the rights of the mother take precedence over the rights of the fetus.19 Pro-lifers want to make it a political moral issue in which the rights of the fetus take precedence over the rights of the mother so that society determines what a woman can or cannot do with her body and her fetus.20 Can science help settle this dispute?
When pro-lifers and pro-choicers square off to debate, they are oftentimes talking at cross-purposes. Pro-lifers speak of the “murder” of innocent fetuses and attack their debate opponents on the grounds that murder is wrong, as if pro-choicers accept murder as moral. In fact, pro-lifers and pro-choicers all agree that murder is immoral. What they disagree about is whether aborting a fetus constitutes murder. This apparent moral question is actually a factual question, because abortion can only be considered murder if it means taking the life of a human being, and when a fetus becomes a human is a question that is difficult to resolve, as Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun noted in his decision in the 7—2 majority ruling in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case: “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”21
The problem is more one of logic than of knowledge. Moral and political decisions are grounded in binary logic in which unambiguous yeses and noes determine Truth. Science is grounded in fuzzy logic in which ambiguous probabilities determine provisional truths. In provisional ethics, moral choices correspond to scientific facts in being provisionally right or wrong, where moral or immoral means confirmed to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer provisional assent. It remains provisional because, as in science, the evidence might change. Here is how provisional ethics may inform a decision in the abortion debate: most pro-lifers believe that human life begins at conception—before conception not-life, after conception, life. Binary logic. Binary life. With fuzzy logic we can assign a probability to human life—before conception o, the moment of conception .1, multicellular blastocyst .2, one-month-old embryo .3, two-month-old fetus .4, and so on until birth, when the fetus becomes a 1.0 human life-form. Fuzzy logic. Fuzzy life.
The process does not sound very romantic, but from a scientific perspective, life is a continuum from sperm and egg, to zygote, to blastocyst, to embryo, to fetus, to newborn infant.22 Neither egg nor sperm is a human individual, nor is the zygote or blastocyst because they might split to become twins or develop into less than one individual and naturally abort.23 The eight-week-old fetus has recognizable human features such as face, hands, and feet, but neuronal synaptic connections are still being made, so thinking is not possible. Only after eight weeks do embryos begin to show primitive response movements, but between eight and twenty-four weeks (six months) the fetus could not exist on its own because such critical organs as the lungs and kidneys do not mature before that time. For example, air sac development sufficient for gas exchange does not occur until at least twenty-three weeks after gestation, and often later.24
Not until twenty-eight weeks, at 77 percent of full-term development, does the fetus acquire sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities typically found in newborns. Fetus EEG recordings with the characteristics of an adult EEG appear at approximately thirty weeks, or 83 percent of full-term development.25 In other words, the capacity for human thought does not exist until just weeks before birth. Of all the characteristics used to define what it means to be human, the capacity to think is provisionally agreed upon by most scientists to be the most important.26 By this criterion, since virtually no abortions are performed after the second trimester, and before then there is no scientific evidence that the fetus is a thinking human individual, it is reasonable for us to provisionally agree that abortion is not murder and to offer our provisional assent that abortions within the first two trimesters are not immoral because the evidence confirms that during this time the fetus is not a fully functioning human being. Therefore, although one may oppose abortion on a personal level, there is no scientific justification to shift the abortion issue from a personal and moral one to a social and political one.
One objection to this line of reasoning is that science and technology have so fuzzified the boundaries between what were once reasonably discrete categories (even in my fuzzy analysis) that it becomes difficult to justify precisely where to draw the line. Unborn babies are now being treated as patients, with complex surgeries being performed in the womb for such maladies as spina bifida (an opening in the spine through which the spinal cord dangerously emerges), congenital diaphragmatic hernia (the fetus’s abdominal organs merge into the chest), and congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation (cysts in the fetus’s lungs). Fetuses that would have been aborted before are now being saved, and they are treated medically as little people.27 On the other end of the spectrum, there are adults whose cognitive capacities are so severely retarded through brain damage that they cannot think at all. They may even lie comatose, completely brain-dead, and yet still retain rights as humans.
The response to this argument is that most fetal surgery is done well into the third trimester, when abortions are rarely performed anyway. And brain-damaged adults already retain rights as humans, so their rights cannot be taken away. We retain hope that they may come out of the coma and regain their thinking ability, so we might think of them as potential humans, in the same sense as it is sometimes argued that a fetus is a potential human. Is a potential human, however, a full rights-bearing person? That depends on how we define personhood. Pro-lifers argue that the genome is entirely in place shortly after conception when the two half-genomes from both parents combine. From that moment on the little clump of cells is a prospective human, a pending member of our species. That is true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Human eggs and sperm are potential humans, but no one would consider monthly menstruation or male masturbation to be murder. The counter to this is that the uniting of egg and sperm is a dramatically significant step. Agreed, but a lot of things have to happen during the nine-month gestation period for the potential human to become an actual human and, unfortunately, there are a lot of things that go wrong that lead to natural abortions, another normal process that no one moralizes about. Potentiality does not equal actuality, and moral rules and principles must be applied first and foremost to actual persons, not potential persons. Given the choice between granting rights to an actual person or a potential person, it is more tenable to choose the former. Herein we find another important distinction to make in the abortion debate, and that is the difference between a human and a person.
Figure 23. Drawing the Line
The law requires distinct categories—black or white, life or death, right or wrong—whereas science traffics in shades of gray and fuzzy fractions. When does life begin? The law demands that we pick an arbitrary point. Science assigns a fuzzy probability to life—before conception o, the moment of conception .1, multicellular blastocyst .2, one-month-old embryo .3, two-month-old fetus .4, and so on until birth. Not until twenty-eight weeks—between these two images of a fetus at twenty-three weeks (left) and thirty-two weeks (right)—does the fetus acquire sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities found in newborns. (Courtesy of GE Medical Systems)
A human is a member of the species Homo sapiens. A person is a member of a social group or society with legal rights and responsibilities and with moral value. Even if one could justify a fetus as being a human (even if only a potential human), that still does not make it a person. What makes it a person is the granting of legal rights and responsibilities and moral value by the rules governing that society. Pro-lifers are encouraged by changes in the law in many states that grant personhood rights to the unborn, in cases where a pregnant woman has been murdered and the fetus dies as well. No less than twenty-eight states now criminalize harm to a fetus, and many more are moving to pass the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which in 2003 was renamed Laci and Connor’s Law after victims of a notorious murder allegedly committed by Scott Peterson, who was charged with double homicide in the killing of both his wife and unborn child.28 Legally, if killing a mother and her fetus is double murder, then killing a fetus by itself is single murder. This would make abortion a crime of murder.
Here again, we face moral inconsistencies of deep significance. Where do we draw the line? If our society were to grant personhood rights to the unborn, then it would be logical to do so for nonhuman persons as well, such as our closely related primate cousins, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Since, as I shall argue at the end of this chapter, this is a scientifically justifiable thing to do, then why not grant them to the unborn? After all, we grant rights to adult humans who are so low functioning as to be less “human” than both an eight-month-old fetus and a chimpanzee.
This is a very knotty problem to unravel. We cannot first ask a fetus if it would like to be aborted or not; we can, however, run that thought experiment by imagining ourselves in the position of an unborn potential human who would be granted personhood rights and dignity value upon birth. Presumably, most of us would choose life. By the ask first principle, we would have to conclude that abortion is immoral. However, although asking the unborn can never be more than a thought experiment, there is someone we can ask first, and that is the pregnant woman, who is both a human and a person who already has all the rights, privileges, and moral dignity values bestowed upon her by society. Given the choice between asking the fetus in a thought experiment and actually asking the woman what she thinks should be done, it is logical to give the moral nod to the woman. Given the choice between the potential rights of the fetus and the actual rights of the woman, it makes more sense to go with what already exists in fact over what might exist in potential.
Finally, we can turn to the liberty principle and consider the historical treatment of women. The trend over the past several centuries has been to grant greater freedom, autonomy, and self-determination to minorities, children, and women. Modern civilizations have systematically outlawed slavery, freed children from the burden of excessive labor, and granted women the same rights and privileges as those given to men. We have done so under the principle of liberty: expanding freedom and autonomy to as many members of our species as possible. One of the most important sources of freedom and autonomy for women has been control over their bodies, especially in relation to reproduction. Social and political advances, coupled with scientific and technological discoveries and inventions, have increasingly provided women with greater amounts of reproductive autonomy and control, which, in turn, leads to the overall increase of liberty for women in general. To take away an important source of reproductive control from women by outlawing abortion would be a significant step backward in the historical trajectory of liberty. Thus, given the choice between increasing the liberty of an adult person and the liberty of an unborn fetus, it makes more sense—historically, legally, logically, and morally—to grant that liberty to the adult person, the woman.
This is not to claim that abortion is moral, only that it is not immoral. This brings us back to where we began in making a distinction between individual morality and political morality. If abortion is not murder, then it is not immoral, from a social/political point of view. Or, if a woman decides that even though having a child may burden her physically and financially it is still more important to her to grant life and liberty to her unborn child, that is her choice to make, not the state’s. In the end, abortion remains a personal moral choice.
On December 27, 2002, Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, the scientific director of Clonaid—an organization associated with the Raelians, who believe that life was seeded on Earth by aliens and that cloning is the next step toward immortality—announced at a press conference that a thirty-one-year-old American woman had given birth to the world’s first clone, whom they nicknamed, appropriately, “Eve.”29 The story was a bust, although the media feeding frenzy over it generated millions of dollars worth of free publicity for a hitherto obscure fringe cult.
My skepticism is not directed toward the Raelians, however, because whether they succeed or not is superfluous since it will soon become apparent whether cloning is possible or if medical complications will make it impractical as another form of fertility enhancement. That is, the current moral dilemma may be displaced by a scientific factual matter of whether cloning works or does not work. If cloning works as a viable reproductive technology and generator of usable stem cells, then it will be used somewhere by someone regardless of legislative restrictions. If cloning does not work—that is, if it generates genetic monstrosities and nonviable stem cells—it will most likely fall into disuse from lack of interest. Reproductive physicians and their patients will choose other, more viable, technologies, stem-cell researchers and genetic engineers will apply more reliable means to achieve their scientific goals, and madmen will not want to reproduce themselves if they think that their genetic doppelgänger will join Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrosity in the Arctic hinterlands.
Given the current scientific limitations on cloning, how can science inform this moral debate? By debunking three fundamental myths about cloning: the Identical Personhood Myth, the Playing God Myth, and the Human Rights and Dignity Myth.
The Identical Personhood Myth is well represented by Jeremy Rifkin, the king of genetic Luddites: “It’s a horrendous crime to make a Xerox of someone. You’re putting a human into a genetic straitjacket. For the first time, we’ve taken the principles of industrial design—quality control, predictability—and applied them to a human being.”30 The argument is heard in religious circles as well. The Catholic theologian Albert Moraczewski (echoing the pope’s 1987 Donum Vitae) proclaimed that cloning would “jeopardize the personal and unique identity of the clone (or clones) as well as the person whose genome was thus duplicated.” What about twins? Don’t they jeopardize each other’s unique identity? No, Moraczewski explained, since they are not the “source or maker of the other,” meaning only God can do that.31
Baloney. These cloning critics have the argument bass ackwards. Because they tend to be environmental determinists, they should be arguing: “Clone all you like, you’ll never produce another you because environment matters as much as heredity.” Even proponents of the position that behavior has a significant genetic component to it argue not for genetic determinism, but for gene-environment interactionism. This interactionism starts when genes code for proteins, which generate biochemical reactions, which regulate physiological changes, which govern biological systems, which impact neurological actions, which induce psychological states, which cause behaviors; these behaviors, in turn, interact with the environment, which changes the behaviors, which influence psychological states, which alter neurological actions, which transform biological systems, which modify physiological changes, which transfigure biochemical reactions. This all happens in a complex interactive feedback loop between genes and environment throughout development and into adulthood. The best scientific evidence to date indicates that roughly half the variance between us is accounted for by genetics, the rest by environment. Because it is impossible to duplicate the near-infinite number of environmental permutations that go into producing an individual human being, cloning is no threat to unique personhood. Psychologist and twins expert Nancy Segal cautions that “Genetic influence does not mean that behaviors are fixed, but the ease, immediacy and magnitude of behavioral change vary from trait to trait, and from person to person.” It is from that variance that unique personhood, even between identical twins, emerges.32
The Playing God Myth has numerous promoters, the latest being Stanley M. Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University, who responded to the news that the Raelians had achieved human cloning with this unequivocal denouncement: “The very attempt to clone a human being is evil. The assumption that we must do what we can do is fueled by the Promethean desire to be our own creators.”33 In support of this myth he is not alone. A 1997 Time/CNN poll, conducted after Dolly the cloned sheep was revealed to the world, found that 74 percent of Americans answered yes to the question, “Is it against God’s will to clone human beings?”34 President Clinton, not the most religious president we have ever had, nevertheless threw his spiritual hat into the fear-of-cloning ring with this statement: “Any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry, it is a matter of morality and spirituality as well.” Even before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission—established by Clinton to present to him all the ethical considerations surrounding cloning—submitted its report to the White House, Clinton instituted a ban on federal funding related to research on the cloning of humans and asked that the private sector do the same. Shortly thereafter, Clinton held another press conference urging Congress to ban human cloning altogether (not just research funds): “Personally, I believe that human cloning raises deep concerns, given our cherished concepts of faith and humanity.”35 Most religions are against cloning on similar argumentative grounds. The Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, on March 6, 1997, passed a resolution that called on Congress to “make human cloning unlawful” and for “all nations of the world to make efforts to prevent the cloning of any human being.” Similarly, Fred Rosner, a Jewish bioethicist, wrote that cloning can be considered as “encroaching on the Creator’s domain.”36
Balderdash. Cloning scientists don’t want to play God any more than fertility doctors do. What’s godly about in-vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and other fully sanctioned birth enhancement technologies? Absolutely nothing. Yet we cheerfully accept these advances because we are accustomed to them. In fact, most of us are alive because of medical technologies and social hygiene practices that have doubled the average life span in this century. What’s godly or natural about heart-lung transplants, triple bypass surgeries, vaccinations, or radiation treatment? Nothing. The mass hysteria and moral panic surrounding cloning is nothing more than the historically common rejection of new technologies, coupled with the additional angst produced when the sphere of science expands too quickly into the space of religion. The editorial cartoon in figure 25 captures this fear well, in which the cloning of God Himself spells the end of monotheism.
The Human Rights and Dignity Myth is embodied in the Roman Catholic Church’s official statement against cloning, based on the belief that it denies “the dignity of human procreation and of the conjugal union,”37 as well as in a Sunni Muslim cleric’s demand that “science must be regulated by firm laws to preserve humanity and its dignity.”38 Members of Congress, assigned to deal more with legalities than moralities, have decreed that cloning violates the rights of the unborn. Bunkum. Clones will be no more alike than twins raised in separate environments, and no one is suggesting that twins do not have rights or dignity or that twinning should be banned.
In his 1950 science fiction novel I, Robot, Isaac Asimov presented the “Three Laws of Robotics”: “1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”39 Given the irrational fears people express today about cloning that parallel those surrounding robotics half a century ago, I would like to propose the “Three Laws of Cloning” that address these misunderstandings:
1. A human clone is a human being no less unique in its personhood than an identical twin.2. A human clone is a human being with all the rights and privileges that accompany this legal and moral status.3. A human clone is a human being to be accorded the dignity and respect due any member of our species.
Instead of restricting or banning cloning, I propose that we adopt the Three Laws of Cloning, the principles of which are already incorporated in the laws and language of the U.S. Constitution. Most of the horror-laden scenarios proposed by moralists are already addressed by law—a clone, like a twin, is a human being, and you cannot harvest the tissues or organs of a twin. A clone, like a twin, is a person no less than any other human.
Cloning is going to happen whether it is banned or not, so why not err on the side of liberty and allow scientists to freely explore the possibilities—not to play God, but to do science. The soul of science is found in courageous thought and creative experiment, not in restrictive fear and prohibitions. For science to progress, it must be given the opportunity to succeed or fail. Let’s run the cloning experiment and see what happens.
At the top of the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid (figure 6) is the biosphere, which includes all life on earth, a love of which Ed Wilson calls “biophilia.” The sentiment behind biophilia, if there is one, I call bioaltruism. Bioaltruism appears to be almost entirely the product of culture, not evolution, and as such it must be learned. In the long run, bioaltruism may be the most important moral sentiment that will save our species, along with other species upon which we depend, from extinction.
Moving up the BCE pyramid from the family to the extended family to the community to the society, the liberty principle has been expanded to encompass more members of our species. Eventually we will achieve complete species altruism and belongingness, in which all members of our species are considered equal in terms of liberty rights. Achieving liberty for all human animals has been a difficult struggle against tyrannies of many types. It has been only a century and a half since slavery was outlawed. Only over the past century have women begun to approach anything like the liberty rights enjoyed by men. And it has been less than half a century since minorities began to see some progress in gaining civil liberties (gays, for example, have the legal right to marry in only three countries and are still fighting to gain rights for such matters as adoption, inheritance, and insurance benefits). What hope, then, can there be for nonhuman animals? Animal rights activists must often feel like King Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to roll the boulder of freedom up the hill of oppression, only to have it roll down again just before cresting the top. If far too many people still think that women and minorities do not deserve full liberty rights, what hope can there be for chimps and dolphins?
At the heart of the animal rights debate is how we should treat nonhuman animals. Clearly, when we are talking about “animal rights,” no one is proposing that animals have the right to vote or the right to a public education. Animal rights are much more basic. Some, in fact, are already in place. In many Western countries, for example, it is a crime to treat animals inhumanely. Humans can be tried and convicted for the crime of cruelty to animals, although this is usually restricted to horrific abuses of our favorite pets, such as dogs, cats, and horses (the Animal Planet television network even has a series on animal-abuse busters who drive around, camera crews in tow, looking for abusers). Modifying the legal system to include some animals under its protective umbrella is going to require breaking through a number of substantial barriers, including economic, religious, legal, and psychological .40 On a positive note, these are the same obstacles faced by women and minorities who, in time, managed to leap the hurdles.
Economically, the trade in animals, as it was in slavery in nineteenth-century America, is so extensive that if animal rights were suddenly instituted just for all mammals, the economy would suddenly grind to a disastrous halt. The blood and fat from cows, to pick just one example, goes toward the production of adhesives, contraceptive jellies, cosmetics, cough syrup, crayons, detergents, dyes, fabric softeners, fertilizer, fire extinguisher foam, ink, jet engine lubricants, lubricants, plastics, shaving cream, soaps, textiles, and countless medical products.41 And this does not even include the food industry. How many of us are willing to give up eating juicy tenderloin steaks? We are the dominant carnivore species on the planet. We cannot simply grant all nonhuman mammals the same rights as human mammals without considerable economic consequences. Religiously, the Bible says that God bestowed upon one species (us) dominion over all other species. Of course, for centuries God and the Bible were invoked by slave owners and oppressors of women. Christians enslaved Africans, Muslims enslaved Africans, and Jews enslaved gentiles, Africans, and other Jews. One justification for the enslavement of black Africans was that they were subhuman and thus not full rights-bearing members of the human species.42 Similarly, for centuries religion laid the foundation for the control of women, by fathers, husbands, and patriarchal society at large.43 If religion can justify the treatment of blacks and women as subhuman, we should not be surprised about the religious attitudes toward non-humans. Legally, animals are, in essence, things—products and property for humans to buy and sell. The legal treatment of nonhuman animals as things means that we think of them in substantially different ways than we think about human animals. Psychologically, it is the same attitude found in the proslavery movement of centuries past, as the slave historian David Brion Davis explains: “Today it is difficult to understand why slavery was accepted from pre-biblical times in virtually every culture and not seriously challenged until the late 1700S. But the institution was so basic that genuine anti-slavery attitudes required a profound shift in moral perception.”44 That shift could not come about until there was a psychological shift toward including all people as members of the species. For the animal rights movement to succeed, there must be a psychological shift from speciesism toward bioism.
Fuzzy Animal Rights
Arguably, one of the most extreme religions in the world is Jainism, a form of Hinduism whose members hold such a deep reverence for life that it drives them to sweep the ground before them to avoid squashing insects. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the animal rights movement—since there is no good place to draw the line, then we should grant all animals all rights, including the mosquitoes buzzing about our heads. This position is so ridiculous that, thankfully, almost no one embraces it. However, this is the logical opposite of the system of binary rights that we presently hold—all rights for us, no rights for them. But what constitutes “us” and “them”? There is a logic, however binary and restrictive, to speciesism. Although species are nonstatic and malleable over evolutionary time scales, they are static and fixed entities on historical time scales. I shall never forget memorizing Ernst Mayr’s definition of a species in my first course in evolutionary theory: “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”45 Since humans are reproductively isolated from all other species (that is, we cannot interbreed with them and produce viable offspring), the species level is a clear and distinctive place to “draw the line.”
In 1955, the French novelist Vercors penned a science fiction story entitled You Shall Know Them, in which a scientist impregnates a female chimpanzee, kills the offspring, then turns himself in for murder. During his trial the fuzzy boundaries between human and nonhuman primates are explored, demonstrating how difficult it is to justify any particular line between us and them.46 Something like this scenario almost played itself out in our own evolutionary history. Considerable fossil evidence now reveals that not long ago—within the past 100,000 years—there were several species of hominids living simultaneously and reproductively isolated in the same geographic regions of the globe, most notably Homo erectus in Asia, Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, and Cro-Magnons, or anatomically modern humans.47 If the Neanderthals had not gone extinct about 35,000 years ago, and instead were living among us in Europe (where they flourished for 200,000 years before our arrival), would they be granted rights? Their brains were as large as if not larger than ours, but they showed little cultural progress and they may or may not have had language. If we were able to control them, imagine the justifications for Neanderthal slavery and slave labor: “Neanderthals to the mines!”
Still, that is not what happened, and here we are, the dominant primate species, the last one left standing at the end of the Pleistocene. So, yes, we are the only hominids around and we are reproductively isolated from all other species. But once we expand our thinking to include, well, thinking, the lines blur with a handful of other species. This is fuzzy logic applied to animal rights. Fuzzy logic allows us to expand beyond our fuzzy species boundary to include in our circle of liberty rights a tiny cadre of other big-brained, intelligent, emotional mammals, including the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) and what we might correspondingly call the great marine mammals (dolphins and whales). Fuzzy logic is a very effective way of thinking about animal rights, so I was not surprised to encounter it in Steven M. Wise’s brilliant analysis of the animal rights debate, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights.48 My fuzzy scale is not as inclusive as Wise’s (see figure 26), which includes African elephants and African grey parrots. I will admit to considerable sympathy, even empathy for elephants, especially when seeing them grieve over the murder of one of their brethren by poachers. 49 But I sense that I am over-anthropomorphizing; I also retain some skepticism about some of the language and cognitive studies conducted with chimps, gorillas, and parrots, particularly because of the tendency for their scientist handlers to exaggerate and anthropomorphize their abilities. Nevertheless, there is now a sizable body of evidence that makes a potent case that in terms of evolutionary closeness, cognitive abilities, and emotional capacities, the great apes are too near to us to withhold from them certain basic liberty rights; and although dolphins and whales are genetically more distant from us than the great apes, their large brains, convoluted cortexes, socially complex groups, and apparent symbolic languages put them in the same fuzzy set to receive basic liberty rights.50
Figure 25. Equal Rights for All Hominids?
What if Australopithecus afarensis and other hominids had not gone extinct? Would we grant them equal rights, or would we enslave them? (Illustration by Michael Rothman. Reproduced by permission)
Figure 26. The Fuzzy Logic of Animal Rights
In Drawing the Line, attorney and animal rights activist Steven M. Wise applies fuzzy logic to arrive at a scientific basis for the granting of basic liberty rights to some species. In Category 1 he includes species “who clearly possess sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights,” including the great apes (although not on the chart, he includes chimpanzees). In Category 2 he includes species who might qualify for basic legal rights, depending on what other criteria we might consider. In Category 3 he includes species for which we do not have enough knowledge to determine what rights they should have, and Category 4 includes those species who lack sufficient autonomy for basic liberty rights. (From Steven Wise’s Science and the Case for Animal Rights, 2002. Courtesy of Steven M. Wise)
As Wise notes, for example, the mind of Koko the gorilla is on par with the mind of a six-year-old human. Koko has a sense of self, in that she can pass the mirror self-recognition test in which a red dot is clandestinely placed on her forehead and she notices that something is different. Koko can pass an “object permanence” test in which she can remember the shape and location of objects, as well as the conservation of liquid, in which she realizes that the quantity does not change when it is poured into a different-sized container. Koko imitates the actions of humans and other gorillas, has learned hundreds of symbolic language signs with which she can answer questions and attempt to deceive her handlers, and has even attempted to teach language signs to other gorillas. This implies that Koko has a “theory of mind”; that is, she not only has a sense of self, she realizes that other gorillas and humans have the same sense of self. Most tellingly (in terms of how many people judge an animal’s moral worth), Koko has scored between seventy and ninety-five on a standard human child intelligence test.51 And there is evidence that the minds of a chimpanzee named Washoe, a bonobo named Kanzi, and an orangutan named Chantek are functionally equivalent to that of Koko, bringing all of the great apes into the same cognitive set.52
The case for dolphins is also compelling. Two extensively studied bottle-nosed dolphins, named Phoenix and Ake, exhibit evidence of symbolic communication, and other dolphins studied in marine laboratories have passed the mirror self-recognition test, which means they too have a sense of self.53 Dolphin brains make for an interesting comparison. Although the brains of gorillas (average 500 cubic centimeters, or cc), chimpanzees (400 cc), bonobos (340 cc), and orangutans (335 cc) are considerably smaller than ours (1440 cc), dolphins’ brains (1700 cc) are slightly larger than ours, even when adjusted for body size and weight (figure 29). More importantly, the surface area of a dolphin’s cortex—where the higher centers of learning, memory, and cognition are located—is enormous, averaging 3 700 cc squared compared to 2.300 cc squared for humans. Although this is a little misleading—the thickness of the dolphin’s cortex is roughly half that of humans—when absolute cortical material is compared, dolphins still average an impressive 560 cc compared to our 660 cc. Dolphin brains are also asymmetrical, which some neuroscientists believe is related to intelligence and language ability.54
Provisional Animal Rights : The Moderation Principle
For the animal rights movement to succeed, the moderation principle must be applied. Torching scientific laboratories that use white rats for subjects is no virtue; in fact, it is immoral, illegal, and idiotic. Human property rights, liberties, and freedoms are destroyed in the extremist name of animal liberation. The end result is that the hearts of people are hardened against granting any animals any rights, and the animals are not liberated. Here, extremism is a vice. Why worry about lower mammals when higher mammals can’t get a fair hearing in the court of public opinion? Let’s take this movement one step at a time, justifying each claim with a mountain of scientific evidence and legal precedence. We have that for apes and dolphins. Based on their evolutionary closeness, cognitive abilities, and emotional capacities, it is reasonable to offer our provisional assent to extend basic liberty rights to them. If we can win for them basic liberty rights, then we can worry about monkeys, elephants, dogs, and parrots. What rights? We can begin with the most basic rights granted by the U.S. Constitution: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Figure 27. Comparative Brain Size
Comparing the brain sizes of humans, primates, dolphins and porpoises, and other mammals reveals that there is a direct relationship between brain weight and body weight—in general, bigger bodies take bigger brains to operate. However, when controlling for body size, there is still a powerful trend showing that humans, primates, dolphins, and porpoises have larger brains for their body weight than all other mammals. In addition to their capacity for symbolic language and their ability to pass the mirror self-recognition test for self-awareness, this is powerful data in support of granting these species basic liberty rights. (From John M. Allman’s Evolving Brains, 1999. Courtesy of John Allman)
Applying the ask first principle is difficult with nonhuman animals, of course, but as a thought experiment, it is a reasonable means of approximating what an animal might think about what you are contemplating doing to it. (Although I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if you taught Washoe, Kanzi, Koko, and Chantek the sign for electric shock, and then asked them with sign language if they would like to receive one as part of an experiment, you would very quickly receive an answer.) We cannot ask a chimpanzee how she might feel if we lock her up in a small, cold stainless steel cage for the rest of her life in order to inject her with various human diseases, but we can observe her nonverbal communication, and, for most chimps, it is abundantly clear that they are none too pleased about such arrangements (as in the title of Wise’s first book, Rattling the Cage). In regard to the happiness principle and the liberty principle, as a first step toward a higher moral principle, we should never seek happiness and liberty when it leads to a great ape’s or a great marine mammal’s unhappiness and loss of liberty. For chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas, this may mean nothing more than the freedom to go hunting and foraging for food in an open natural environment and to be protected from poachers who kill them for the “bush meat” market. For dolphins, this may just mean the liberty to swim in social bands throughout the planet’s oceans, free from tuna fishermen who drown them in their extensive fishing nets. It’s that simple. Don’t kill ‘em. Don’t eat ’em. Don’t wear ’em. Don’t cage ’em. Just let ’em be.
To many animal rights activists, this proposal will seem cowardly in its timidity. To many anti-animal rights activists, this proposal will seem ridiculous in its grandiosity. It is, I think, the moderation principle in practice. If we adopt the historian’s stock in trade, deep time, I think it is a provisionally moderate moral step up the Bio-Cultural Evolutionary Pyramid, expanding our sentiments to include, first, more people and then more species into our circle of sympathies that will ultimately lead us toward the bioaltruism that will one day save our biosphere and, as a consequence, our species.
For all of humanity it has been a long journey on the evolutionary and historical pathway to where we stand today, on the brink of triumph or disaster, survival or extinction. Which road we take depends on which moral choices we make. Since we have the capacity for both moral and immoral actions, and the freedom to choose, our destiny lies within.
In the first century B.C., the Roman statesman Cicero remarked, “Although physicians frequently know their patients will die of a given disease, they never tell them so. To warn of an evil is justified only if, along with the warning, there is a way of escape.” As we shall see in the last chapter, there is an escape from our immoral disease.