|
A
peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 20(2)
– July 2009 |
Mapping a Small Moral
Universe
John Hickman
Journal of Evolution and Technology – Vol. 20 Issue 2 – July 2009 – pgs 9-18
http://jetpress.org/v20/hickman.htm
Abstract
Content
analysis of the texts offered by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity
(CBHD), a think tank affiliated with
Introduction
That bioethics has been politicized in this decade is
patent. Aspects of its politicization in the United States of America include controversy
surrounding appointments to official bioethics advisory committees and panels
(McCarthy 2003), broad policy disputes over national and state funding for stem-cell
research and narrow policy disputes over the approval of medicines and
therapies (The
Globe and Mail 2005). Less
obvious is that marking the boundaries of bioethics is also inescapably
political. Subjects and questions treated as belonging within the domain are more
likely to receive attention by the lay public, journalists, and policy makers, while
those outside it are more likely to be denied attention. That attention may be
translated into individual and collective action about those subjects and
questions.
It is worth recognizing that some bioethical issues
become the subjects of intense public attention while others languish in
obscurity. Much of the responsibility for this is due to the Christian Right,
whose moralizing rhetoric typifies the public exchange about bioethical controversies.
Arguably, much of the explanation for its success lies in how it has drawn the
boundaries of bioethics. This article reports empirical findings from an effort
to map the boundaries of the moral universe – the persons or other entities
deemed to merit moral regard or the recognition of moral duty together with the
questions deemed deserving of public moral judgment – in the numerous texts
distributed by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (CBHD), a Christian
Right think tank.
Background
Bioethics developed as a leading sector for American public
intellectuals during the two terms of the second Bush administration. That happened
less as a response to the ethical questions arising from the introduction of new
medical treatments, as some might suppose, than because it has been promoted by
the leadership of the Christian Right. Medical treatments old and new sometimes
present difficult ethical questions, and moral philosophy as a field of
intellectual inquiry has enjoyed a revitalization during recent decades because
of concern about the introduction of ever more heroic medical treatments that
prolong the end of life (Moreno 2005, 25-26). However, advances in medical
technology and more aggressive end of life medical treatment fail to fully explain
the efflorescence of centers, institutes, conferences and advisory panels devoted
to bioethics in the new millennium. The better explanation is that much of the recent
interest in bioethics is attributable to efforts by the leadership of the Christian
Right, a movement long dependent on abortion and gay marriage as issues to
mobilize the faithful as a voting bloc, to identify and legitimate fresh social
issues (Gilgof 2007, 189-190). The problem for leaders of the
Christian Right was that non-social public policy issues tend to divide rather
than unify their followers as a voting bloc, and thus diminish their relative
political influence.
What the movement’s leaders seek are replacement social
issues that exploit the same psycho-sociological anxieties about patriarchal
authority and human sexuality, reproduction and death. These represent a core
set of related and exploitable anxieties, as indicated by the list of public
policy positions endorsed in “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The
Christian Mission for the Third Millennium,” which was drafted to reflect the
political alliance of conservative Protestants and Catholics (First Things 1994). The document expresses anxiety
about the “crisis of the family” and denounces abortion as, “the leading edge
of an encroaching culture of death,” which it describes as encompassing euthanasia,
eugenics and population control. The phrase “culture of death” appeared again
in John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium
Vitae and became a catchphrase to describe everything about American
society that the Christian Right sought to oppose (Pope John Paul II; Fletcher
2005). That a core set of related anxieties involving patriarchal
authority, sexuality, reproduction and death is readily exploitable is suggested
by the 16 moral issues listed in a
Why seek replacement issues? Social scientists have
long described social movements as having life cycles expressed in cyclical
movements. Individual social movements increase and decline in response to the
population available for recruitment and the intensity with which they perceive
grievances, while drawing on the resources of institutions that may survive
multiple social movements (Piven 1992, 2-9). The Christian Right is
supported by adherents of the same denominations of white Evangelical
Protestants that made the Temperance Movement of the later 19th century and
early 20th century such a powerful force in American politics (Pegram 1998,
114-115). The contemporary movement differs in compassion from its predecessor in
being an alliance between those same white Evangelical Protestants and Roman
Catholic social conservatives.1
Like the Temperance Movement, the Christian Right has
mobilized the faithful to vote for candidates of the Republican Party, and the
fortunes of the movement and party are closely linked (Kerr 1985, 251, 270). Like
the Temperance Movement, the Christian Right is threatened with an erosion of
support due to membership life cycle effects, including the aging of its
membership, competition for the attention of members and potential members, and
failure to recruit a new generation of participants. Based on a 2004 mail
survey of Christian Right activists, Green et. al. conclude that only 3.5% of
its activist corps are under the age of 35, and 71.7% are aged 51 or older (Green et. al. 2006, 31). Political activists are generally older than the general population, but
the Christian Right faces a more difficult challenge because as a social
movement it finds recruitment more difficult than traditional political parties.
Social movements are fueled by popular grievances about social issues. Abortion
and gay marriage, the premier social issues of the Christian Right, may have
reached their full potential for exploitation. Gay marriage helped to
rejuvenate the movement in the 2004 election, but it was not as successful in
mobilizing voters in the 2008 election (Rozell and Gupta 2006, 15). Non-social
issues such as climate change have begun to attract the attention of
Evangelical Protestant voters and their clergy (Kirkpatrick 2007). Replacement
social issues would be valuable for recruiting new members to the movement and
perhaps necessary to sustain existing levels of belief and activism of the existing
members.2
What might make the effort by the Christian Right to
identify and promote replacement social issues unique in American political history
is the use of dedicated organizations affiliated with academic institutions to
establish their legitimacy. Notwithstanding the patent anti-intellectualism
expressed by some Evangelical Protestant clergy in sermons, Christian Right leaders
understand the legitimating power of authoritative statements made by
academics. Jacoby describes efforts by the Christian Right to use Evangelical
Protestant universities and colleges to generate a corps of political elites as
personnel to help institutionalize their moral value positions (Jacoby 2008,
189-190). Academics working in those academic institutions, together with other
professionals associated with the affiliated organizations, serve as sources of
authoritative statements aimed at the same end.
Content Analysis Research
Design and Data
To determine the boundaries of the universe of moral
regard, I have carried out a content analysis of texts written by or for one of
the better established academic entities, the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity
or CBHD. Content analysis is the now familiar method of analyzing the message
characteristics of texts by systematically unpacking their elements to permit
summary and comparison. The CBHD is a non-profit think tank affiliated with the
evangelical protestant
How cosmopolitan or how parochial is the universe of
objects and issues that merit moral regard by the academics and other
professionals who have produced texts for distribution by the CBHD? To answer
that question a systematic content analysis was conducted of the articles,
columns, open letters and transcripts of legislative testimony posted on the
CBHD website as of
The first step in this content analysis was to exclude
repetitive postings of the same text that appeared in different categories on
the CBHD website. That reduced the total number of original texts from 305 to
242. Posted between 1998 and 2008, these texts were written by 99 different
authors. The majority are sole authored works. The second step was to read each
posting to determine its primary thematic topic. Most texts were no longer than
op-ed columns and thus themes were easily identified. The third step was to
create a meta-file of all of the words in the texts for analysis.
Findings
What is bioethics? There can be no authoritative
answer for a field that is still so new, but the bulk of the commentary focuses
on human medical treatments, human health policy and biological research on
human subjects (Andre 2002, 69-70). While the most salient moral
issues in these three areas involve interaction either between physicians and
patients or between researchers and subjects, the effective exclusion of moral
concerns about human nutrition and the physical and mental suffering by other
primates and of non-primate animals is patently arbitrary. Nutrition is at
least as important to human health as medical treatment, and scientific and
technological advances are clearly responsible for changes in the quality of both
nutrition and medical treatment. Similar moral philosophical analyses can be used
in determining whether incompetent humans and non-human primates may be made
involuntary research subjects. Comparable moral questions can be asked about
the humane treatment of non-primate animals as research subjects.
Anyone familiar with social conservatism’s standard issue
set will be unsurprised by the most frequent themes in the CBHD material.
Denunciations of cloning, stem cell research, abortion and euthanasia are
frequent, as are arguments that bioethics must be understood as essentially
theological in nature and advice about medical decision-making at the end of
life. Some of the writers also struggle unsuccessfully with defining the
concept of human dignity, worry about genetic engineering, engage in
hand-wringing about organ transplants, especially xeno-transplants (or
animal-human transplants), or denounce their most feared ideological enemies,
the transhumanists.
In their
Reading the totality of the posted work of the CBHD
website leaves the impression of an aversion to the natural sciences and technology.
Detailed descriptions of existing and hypothetical technologies are infrequent
despite the probable relevance for weighing the associated practical benefits
and risks, and thus the morality of their adoption.
Table
1. Ten Most Frequent Thematic Topics
# Articles Primary Topic
30 Cloning
25 End of Life Decision-Making
23 Stem Cell Research
18 Argument that Bioethics Must
Be Theological
16 Abortion
13 Organ Transplantation
12 Euthanasia
9 Human Genetic Engineering
7 Defining Human Dignity
6 Complaints about Opponents
What the CBHD contributors rarely discuss is especially
telling. Surprisingly few articles challenge the economic inequality that
limits access to medical care for many Americans. Perhaps no other contemporary
bioethical issue involves as many people, and involves them as profoundly, as
the distributive injustice of health care provision. Only a handful of the CBHD
articles take on difficult ethical issues such as substance dependency arising
from pain management, protecting medical confidentiality, or the decision to
separate conjoined twins when one may not survive the procedure.
Conspicuous by their absence are articles dealing primarily
with moral duties to animal test subjects in research, to food, zoo, circus and
companion animals, cloning of extinct species, the maintenance of seed, tissue
and gene banks, biopiracy, farming with genetically engineered organisms, gender
reassignment, medical torture, epidemiological public health surveillance, psychosurgery,
medical supervision of recreational or religious drug use, treatment of
cadavers in popular and professional medical education, and green burials. Each
of these has been considered a bioethical issue by scholars, commentators and journalists
who are not associated with the CBHD (Derbyshire 2008; Fairchild 2008; Garner
2005; Radford 2000; Righini 2007; Rose 2008; Seigle 2007; Wise 2000).
Some topics appear to have been tabooed altogether.
That Great Ape species other than our own might deserve rights is not on the
agenda for discussion. Not only is the focus of moral regard almost exclusively
on bio-medical issues involving human beings, but even within those constraints,
important bioethical issues are ignored. One of the most striking omissions is any
commentary on the ethics of medical personnel participating in the
interrogation of prisoners captured in the War on Terror (Xenakis 2005). This
silence is attributable to the intimate connection between the anti-abortion
movement, with which the CBHD is associated, and the second Bush administration,
whose officials have admitted giving their approval to using torture.
The prominence of primary themes reveals only a
portion of the boundaries of moral regard at the CBHD. More is exposed through analysis of the
frequencies with which individual words appear in the texts. The 242 articles
examined contain a total of 242,422 words for a mean length of slightly more
than 1000 words. Ignoring the most common words such as “the” or “a,” which
appear in all texts, examination of the word frequencies reveals a strikingly
species-centric, fetus-centric, patriarchal and theistic range of objects and
interests. The 20 most frequent subject words indicate interest almost solely
in the human and the bio-medical. “Human(s)” is the most frequent reference,
occurring 2258 times. However, with 192 references “animal(s)” fails to appear among
the top 50 references. There are twice as many references to “God” or “God’s”
as there are to “animal(s).” “Embryo(s)” or “clone(s)” are mentioned more
frequently than either “children” or “patient(s).” “He” or “his,” but not “she”
and “her,” are among the top 20 references. With 195 references, “suffering” fails
to appear even among the top 50 references.
One reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that CBHD’s
bioethicists are generally less interested in the actual experience of suffering
as a morally significant event than in the moral status of the individual who experiences
the suffering. For example, both humans and chimpanzees suffer as subjects in
medical testing, but only the suffering that is experienced by humans is deemed
to merit philosophical/theological attention. To ignore the suffering of entire
classes of beings that are similar to humans is a remarkable elision of moral
regard.
Table
2. Twenty Most Frequent Subject Word References
2258 human(s) (humanity
is mentioned another 68 times)
986 he or his
917 cells
904 clone(s), cloned +
cloning
860 embryo(s)
735 research
675 she or her
642 I
603 stem
560 child or children
524 us
516 people
450 God or God’s
473 medical
463 patient(s)
420 genetic
395 ethical
387 moral
369 you
366 death(s)
Table
3. Ten Most Frequent Religion/Religious Word References
450 God or God’s
238 Christian(s)
55 Jesus
50 Christ
24 Creator(s)
16 Catholic
16 Evangelical
12 Jew(s) or Jewish
6 Raelian(s)
4 Atheist(s) (+ 1
Agnostic)
The word frequencies in the CBHD texts reveal a
religious parochialism. While there are 238 references to Christian(s), the
CBDH bioethicists can hardly bring themselves to mention other religions,
“agnosticism” or “atheism.” Atheism is mentioned 4 times and agnosticism only
once. Neither “Buddha” nor “Buddhism” receives a single mention. The
unavoidable impression is that these writers either avoid discussing or are
unaware of other perspectives on bioethics. When they argue, as several do,
that bioethics must be understood as theological in nature, they mean only one
theology. One problem with religious and philosophical parochialism is that it
may ignore important moral issues apparent to people socialized in other
religious and philosophical traditions. In
The parochialism in this body of texts is geographic
as well as religious. There are 137 references to
What this suggests is insularity, the tendency to look
inward at American society and only intermittently at a small number of other familiar
national societies for ideas or events to discuss. The problem with insularity here
is that it may overlook or delay recognition of important emerging bioethical
issues because they first appear in unfamiliar countries. Moral philosophy
ought to permit recognition in a timely manner of emerging phenomena that might
require moral judgment.
Table
4. Ten Most Frequent Nation/Nationality/Region
Word References
137
36
33
18
13
11
10 France or French
8
7
7 Greek(s)
Mapping the terrain of the collective moral regard at
the CBHD – those objects and issues thought worthy of notice, reflection and
judgment – permits the observer to determine whether or not the center offers a
universal approach to bioethics. Ethical perspective requires breadth as well
as depth, because without sufficient breadth it may fail to offer comprehensive
and consistent ethical guidance.
Conclusion
The results of this content analysis reveal a moral
universe too small to accommodate many of the subjects and questions in
bioethics. The result is an issue focus too narrow to be accepted as a complete
“ethics” for the entire field of questions raised about biotechnology. Moral
philosophers have disputed the degree to which we ought to value and favor
loved ones over strangers (Friedman 1991), and by implication whether we ought
to value and favor fellow citizens over foreigners or members of our
linguistic, religious, or racial group over members of other groups.
Christianity is typically offered as a universal faith, and thus any ethics
that are based on it ought to be similarly universal in scope. However the narrow
range of religious and geographic references in the CBHD texts flags a moral
partiality or parochialism contradicting such universalism. The world
encompassed in the center's corpus of texts is too small to serve as the basis
for a universal ethics.
Another part of the problem is that the partiality
evident in the texts is connected to limited categories derived from religious
belief. To all appearances, religious belief has not equipped most of the
writers to judge the morality of some action or inaction that may have important
consequences, including the suffering of entire classes of beings.
A moral universe too small to contain all of the
persons or other entities deserving moral regard is likely to result in failure
to recognize moral duties and, in turn, failure to answer important questions
deserving moral judgment. That is the basic moral philosophical problem with
the boundaries of the moral universe evident in the CBHD texts. The CBHD texts
fall silent on important moral questions, and that silence directs attention to
the social issues that may be exploited by the Christian Right for political
advantage.
Notes
1. Some scholars interpret the conflict over
Prohibition as a cultural conflict between rural and small town Protestants and
urban Roman Catholics (Sullum 2003, 80-81).
2. Parenthetically, the succession of social issues
was important for the law enforcement career of Harry J. Anslinger, who first
worked to enforce the legal prohibition of alcohol and later worked to enforce
the prohibition of marijuana (Gray 1998, 72-75).
3. In effect, they accuse Transhumanists of the
committing something akin to the Pelagian Heresy (Catholic Encyclopedia).
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