Rachel: A Philosophical Dialogue

In his valiant effort to reassure us that varied perspectives do not obscure the truth, Simon Blackburn (2006) explains that we are not restricted to, for example, viewing the Eiffel Tower from one position only but can walk around it and view it from a number of different perspectives to gain a more complete picture. The following dialogue takes a walk around some of our most sensitive subjects, trying to look at them from various perspectives. The view is less relaxing than ordinary sightseeing, but hopefully even more illuminating.

Scene: Gemma has just returned home from listening to a talk and presentation by her one time friend Rachel at the local Women’s Institute about the latter’s post-adoption counselling and therapy service, and ambitions for the future. Some years previously Rachel was reunited with her daughter Anne, who came along with her to the presentation. Gemma’s husband Brian, a bio-engineer now becoming involved with nanotechnology, is both fascinated and anxious about the arguments around Rachel’s ideas. Now their children have left, they have more time to think about the latest developments.

Brian: I’ve always liked Rachel. She was very nice when Martin was ill in college a few years back. But I do have to confess that what she does unnerves me – I don’t quite know why.

Gemma: Uh, uh. I suppose one way of looking at it is she does the sharp end of what you’re now dealing with at work. She is very single-minded. But Rachel’s a far cry from those American fundamentalists who do similar things in one sense. They’re apt to turn their Crisis Pregnancy Centers into political and anti-abortion campaign centres – at least that’s what the opposition say. Rachel does her own campaigning, of course, and she’s plenty good at it, but I’ve never known her mention God, not to say creationism. I don’t know whether you’ve had time to look at her website recently, but you find nothing about religion on it. Now I think about it, I suppose that’s a hidden effect of her being focused on good alternatives to adoption for childcare purposes, really. Rachel admits her motives are purely personal - about getting people to take the grief seriously instead of assuming adoption’s an easy let off with a difficult pregnancy or whatever. She’s quite sensible - she does accept the point about adoption or fostering in really bad cases, like child abuse, but she’s talking generally when she says adoption lets society or maybe your own family off the hook, but it doesn’t let you or your child off the hook. So far as I know she’s not one of the evangelical atheist company; but I gather faith groups tending to rely heavily on adoption acts as a repellent. There is also the point that she’s got no problem with emergency contraception, which the Vatican as well as the American pro-life people insist is early abortion.

Brian: I get that – and I understand Rachel’s feelings about separation of mother and child being painful no matter what. But the biggest worry I’ve got about getting rid of adoption, which I know Rachel wants us to do, is nothing to do with religion. It’s about money really. They may manage in South Australia almost without adoption as she says, but in practical terms you are then faced with councils or the government spending shed loads of money on support for single parent families. That’s no easy matter when; one, the government’s nearly broke; two, we’re all worried about girls getting themselves pregnant to jump up to the top of the housing list and; three, services for the old and disabled are a mess which is only going to get worse with the aging population. I know Rachel wants deserving cases, like herself when she was young, out of the adoption sausage machine, and I respect that. But, bluntly, adoption’s cheaper even if the government pay people to adopt. Abortion’s cheaper as well, come to that.

Gemma: She got questions about that – we’re all paying enough tax as it is. Basically she wants things run on the same basis as welfare into work. Help the women to help themselves. She said they do it well in Australia but while things are getting a little better she still does some of it herself here.

Brian: Which is doubly hard if there’s no jobs around. But there’s something else - excuse me being a wet fish. We know Rachel’s flat opposed to those pro-life people who talk about adoption being a Christian solution. The Catholic adoption agencies are famous after all. But when Rachel talks about adoption meaning the children get regarded as inferior or a burden she sounds just the way some of the American pro-life campaigners do when they’re talking about abortion. They say an exception even for rape and incest victims means any resulting children get looked on as worthless. But I don’t actually agree, you see. Allowing termination doesn’t mean we treat Downs Syndrome or autistic children with less respect. On the contrary, we allow that to help ensure people who have disabled children can really look after them. Including if adoption isn’t possible anyway.

Gemma: Yes – I think the problem is especially when other people think the child’s a sort of imposition, regardless of what you think. Which is why both Rachel and the pro-lifers spend time telling us women want what they think rather than what the feminists think. But that problem doesn’t seem to arise much with disabled kids.

Brian: Right. Do you think women want what they say?

Gemma: Don’t know. I guess it depends a lot on individual personalities - what they believe about religion, and so forth. I know I’d felt the grief Rachel talks about if I’d ever had to give up Martin or Sam. But in the circumstances where she gave up Anne – I’m not really sure about that. Maybe it would come down to what support was available.

Brian: Yeah – which brings us right back to money again. All too often that settles the moral arguments anyway. Even when Rachel’s touring abroad on human rights issues you find it’s apt to come down to whether the people are too poor to respect human rights even in family matters. Am I right that she thinks getting rid of reparatory marriages in Romania goes along with moving us away from relying on adoption?

Gemma: Definitely. Personal choice and not social constructs. Rachel supports human rights because they’re personal rights, not social standing.

Brian: As ooposed to Marxism and reparatory marriages – I wonder what Engels would have made of that combination.

Gemma: Probably much the same as Rachel. She reckons they stuck to keeping the family identity at all costs because they were so poor and, of course, there isn’t much social welfare.

Brian: Which makes you wonder what happens here if we can’t afford much either.

Gemma: And makes Rachel all the more awkward for liberals as well as the religious when she points out some women are going to hang on to their kids no matter whether the great Care in the Community supports them or not. Even if they’re secularists like her.

Brian: And when it’s no care and not much community, do we just finish with something like Caucescu’s Romania? Or perhaps some nasty version of Social Darwinism? I can’t help feeling that at the end of the day we’ll still need to allow abortion, or morning after pill, or whatever, when all else fails. Maybe to convince the faith groups there ought to be some sort of just war style basis for that.

Gemma: Just war – how do you work that one out? I understood just warfare meant trying to avoid killing innocent people if at all possible.

Brian: Well – that depends a lot on the technicality that combatants are never defined as ‘innocent’ even when they’re just doing what they’re told. Yet you’re always trying to kill enemy soldiers in a war, including when they’re just conscripts who may not even agree with their government’s policy.

Gemma: I see that – but you wouldn’t get even feminists suggesting the unborn child’s like an enemy in a war, for heaven’s sake. That remains like killing civilians, doesn’t it?

Brian: I suppose so – except that these arguments about innocence cut both ways. Someone in the Catholic tradition like Walzer has it that Truman was wrong to use the atom bomb even if he believed – as he did – that more lives would be lost without it, because it outrages our fundamental values to make calculations of crude numbers when deliberately taking innocent lives. The problem is that if you never make calculations like that, you can be sacrificing people’s lives – again quite deliberately – for a cult of innocence that gets quite sinister. The arguments around abortion and innocent life always seem to have just a feel of old Joe de Maistre to me; when the Eucharist and redemption through holy blood are added in it can all sound like a pagan blood purification cult. That’s why I feel Walzer’s on stronger ground against Truman when he points out that the calculations about Hiroshima assumed the Americans would continue incendiary attacks on Japanese cities when they didn’t need to.

Gemma: If I remember rightly, the Catholic arguments around just war included the so-called double effect notion that it might be all right to kill civilians if you didn’t actually intend to, but recognised you wouldn’t be able to avoid it. It‘s all about pursuing peace rather than adding up lives. Which might still justify Truman in a way - civilian politicians are often to blame for wars anyway. But is the idea about protecting noncombatants really about not attacking people who are not involved in anything dangerous?

Brian: Could be. The whole innocence thing might work better with just war being about avoiding attacking people or places which are harmless, rather than trying to sort out who’s to blame for what’s going on and who isn’t – probably impossible in the middle of a war. But there’s another problem these days. The old Thomist idea about noncombatants rested on the notion that soldiers are public servants being authorised by the state to use force, rather than being private individuals. But that distinction comes out artificial in a democracy. Pirates are hardly noncombatants of course, let alone innocents; but when the President authorised the Navy to shoot them to rescue a hostage, we knew the important thing was the public would support him. The state relies on private individuals now anyway. Nowadays we’re starting to get international legal machinery, even with the odd war criminal trial, where what matters is who was in charge rather than whether they were soldiers or not – although the criminals usually seem to know the law better than the prosecution.

Gemma: But what about anyone, including soldiers, having reliable information for deciding whether the government’s order was justified or not? We were told about mass destruction weapons in Iraq, and then ended up with experts spending a year trying to find them!

Brian: Good point. Maybe those will turn up on the black market sometime. But propaganda and wrong information make it even harder to sort out justifiable targets on the basis of innocence, unless we keep it simple and leave it as harmless targets as you suggest. Then I suppose some people wouldn’t like that, because if we switch to thinking about abortion and deciding on whether a pregnancy is harmless, that might finish by endorsing abortion whenever anybody wants one.

Gemma: No, with abortion we can say getting rid of the foetus is definitely intended – it’s not just a matter of ‘collateral damage’ as they like to put it. The pro-lifers can still hold on to that, even if we’re not sure about the innocence, which most women don’t give a monkey about anyway.

Brian: Fair enough. Provided you can sort out a real difference between intending to kill people, and knowing you’re going to kill them. I guess that might be possible in a war with the difference between going to real trouble with precision targeting and the like to minimise casualties rather than the cases where they try to wipe out the other side altogether. Maybe the nearest equivalent to that would be emergency contraception, or just when people try to find alternatives to abortion – another reason why adoption’s a tough nut. At the end of the day I suppose that would mean talking about keeping abortion to the sort of hard cases rather like those cases of war where most people, except real pacifists, think it’s right to fight anyway.

Gemma: Hm – Rachel herself’s a good example that even in a hard case, many women don’t want an abortion. True, she doesn’t want to stop other people having one - in fact she maintains the grief’s more limited then than with adoption when you’ve actually given birth.

Brian: Yes. And Rachel’s a very strong lady. But when some of the American pro-lifers make a big play of what sexual assault victims want, you’re not clear whether they’re trying to treat them as heroines or martyrs.

Gemma: I don’t think so. Many American states cancel the fathers’ parental rights in such cases, but make them pay up anyway. That’s treating them more like indentured servants.

Brian: Which is excellent, provided the police catch them and the prisons aren’t so overcrowded no one knows what anyone’s doing. Here we never do Bentham properly even in terms of making prisons pay, let alone making punishment fit the crime, which is what I gather you’re talking about – amongst other things.

Gemma: Yes – amongst other things. But then Bentham was enough of an eighteenth century intellectual to still have the mentality that turns up in those tribal areas of Pakistan, when he thought sexual assault was a matter of upsetting a woman’s reputation for chastity. I’m not sure they realise it, but this is where Rachel and the American pro-lifers do agree, because they all make a complete contrast to the old honour and shame code. The pro-lifers actually commend girls who choose to keep a rapist’s child, and even try to enlist them for their campaigns.

Brian: Hm – a contrast to sending the girls into a nunnery. But I still doubt whether they’d welcome Dr. Beckford’s take on the Nativity.

Gemma: OK – that might be a bit much for them. But they do agree in principle – with secular Rachel, of course – that all children are equally valuable, regardless of the details of their conception. Which may not always be so inspiring even in marriage.

Brian: I don’t cavil at that, of course. But then it’s adoption, not the value of children where they part company with Rachel. And I notice they keep quiet about rich celebrities adopting poor kids from Africa as a fashion accessory - just what Rachel regards as neo-colonialism; sucking in precious resources from poor countries. Flatly, she doesn’t want children featured in The Economist Commodity Prices Index.

Gemma: Indeed she doesn’t. But don’t forget the pro-life people originally drew their ideas from the anti-Nazi theologians like Barth and Bonhoeffer who were fighting racism in their own country and any suggestion that we’re not ultimately of equal value in the sight of God. I realise that gets forgotten with the crazy politics whereby we assume if you’re against abortion you’ll want to stack up on guns to fight liberals and alien invaders establising public healthcare.That seems to make it saving the unborn children so they grow up ready for Gettysburg. Just thinking back a moment – didn’t the anti-Nazis and the Nuremberg trials establish that you’re responsible for killing people even when acting under orders, I believe?

Brian: Yes, that’s true. But at the same time we never got rid of the traditional principle that you’re not responsible, including criminally responsible, if you’re acting under duress. It’s not very helpful when these ethical principles seem to contradict themselves – that reminds me how Al-Qaida got round the Taliban objecting to training suicide bombers by calling them martyrs, which was OK.

Gemma: Still, there’s no disagreement about us being all basically of equal worth, is there?

Brian: No, provided you leave racists and what have you out of it. And I quite agree with keeping eugenics right out of arguments about pregnancy and termination. I give it that in general nearly everybody does now, although there was a time when someone who made a big thing out of advocating Life with a capital ‘L’, like Nietzsche, was likely to be a eugenics fan.

Gemma: Then your company get blasted for doing backroom eugenics. I know gene manipulation’s different, but that’s what some people say all the same.

Brian: Yees – I get tired of that. I suppose it’s partly our own fault; we don’t say it loud enough and often enough. We tend too much to much to assume that because the experts know that gene engineering and nanotech are not eugenics - as there’s no selective breeding and we’re working on the individual direct - then everyone else does. It makes the political implications different when no one’s being dismissed as unfit to breed. But then a lot of people aren’t aware of all this because of the international ban on germline therapy.

Gemma: And the Vatican count gene manipulation as a sin.

Brian: Huh, huh - I happily return the compliment on that and say it’s a sin for us not to try to do whatever we can to find treatments for diseases like cystic fibrosis and Alzheimers. I hope God finds that enough.

Gemma: I like to think he would for your people who just keep to straight engineering, environment, and medical applications. And eventually your treatments should be available to most people as you keep to using biomolecules like proteins which are cheap because nature’s already made them for us. It’s the transhumanists who talk the sort of stuff about advancing the human race that the eugenics crowd used to in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

Brian: Well, yes and no. I agree there’s still some silly optimists around even in the twenty-first century. When those people talk about going beyond nature they’re not really going beyond it at all; they’re still thinking of trying to make us all more intelligent, healthy, long-lived, stronger, and so on. All the things we’ve being trying to do and praying to the gods for ever since we first left the trees. Nature does all that anyway with natural selection. The transhumanists may be an offshoot of the old secular humanism and Huxley, but when they talk like that they’re making the same mistake as the don’t-play-God crowd and forgetting that we naturally pursue any technology we can come up with. I actually agree with the people who say it would be good if we could pause a while to think again about what we’re doing. But we won’t, of course.

Gemma: The same battle as over contraception and abortion again. And I take it that to pause and think again we’d have to change our behaviour and our nature first so as to go easy on the technology. It’s strange how, with science fiction and environmental doom stuff, nowadays it’s the secular future which sounds the way religion often used to in the old days. Repent ye your sins and ye might still be damned! Now it’s the religious with all those clap-happy services who tell us to cheer up and have a good time. Well, not sure about sex but parties in the community anyway. That’s why I’m not sure about that religious revival we’re supposed to be having. There’s something missing somewhere.

Brian: Yes. Rachel’s the secularist for our times: dour triumph in the vale of tears - and dancing. But in our business we're certainly not dreaming about a higher civilisation. As far as I’m concerned, and most of the guys I work with, so long as we’re helping people to live cleaner and happier lives and getting well paid for doing it we’re quite content. But because of the wider ethics I would be interested if someone were to organise a debate between us and the pro-life set on raising future generations and what reinforcement from technology we’ll all need to cope. And it would be great if WTA Humanity + were to send someone to take part.

Gemma: Huh. Come to think of it, I could ask Rachel about that. She’d certainly be interested, and she’s such a good organiser with plenty of experience at fixing up meetings and what have you that she might actually get them to turn up. Also, being about the new technology, I guess the argument would likely move on to the other end of life as well – whether it’s really credible that our brains could be kept going until we’re 500, along with those voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide battlefields.

Brian: And how we afford luxuries like living to 500 without compulsory euthanasia. I suppose we're bound to have someone suggesting we avoid that outrage by using nanomachines in the bloodstream to keep everyone's brain up to scratch so they can still work at 400. Whether they'd then be the same persons afterward can be yet another debating point.

Gemma: If they were, we'd be on the way to reincarnation on the NHS. The rate this technology keeps throwing out new moral dilemmas keeps it way ahead of our solving the problems in the first place.

Brian: So we just have to be prepared to work things out and make decisions for ourselves. Not just leave them as moral tragedies. I know it sounds clever to say God’s told us we must save life as we can and at the same time we must never meddle with persons, and if we can't fit the moral rules together it’s just tragic. But that just won't deal with technology. We do actually have to make some difficult decisions and then let the moral authority take care of itself.

Gemma: And as we can never get everyone to agree on these matters, I suppose it all comes down to counting heads. Which might at least be better than counting tragedies. I’m not sure, though, what chance even your people or Rachel would have of getting a big audience in.

Brian: We can but try. But would it be difficult for Rachel to fix this because the people being contacted wouldn’t see her as a neutral chair over her anti-adoption stand? My business certainly wouldn’t be neutral territory. Maybe, er, you could try yourself?

Gemma: I suppose I don’t mind, although Rachel’s more likely to get hold of a decent venue. She’s got academic connections in social work and I imagine she’d be smart enough to keep herself in the background if she’s just chairing. But what worries me about that sort of debate is the groups just getting stuck on the creation/evolution battle all over again. I don’t really want to hear any more of that, thank you very much.

Brian: I agree. Sometimes instead of the truth coming out in a clash of opposites the way they say, it’s just blind trench warfare and truth keeps right out of sight. Hopefully the difference in this case from a typical knockabout is our suggested sides can trade warnings. The transhumanists can warn us how unsuited we are – physically as well as mentally – to the way we live now. Some of their ideas are far fetched, but at least they can warn us about things like reconciling our natural instincts with the high-tech toys we now play with, or the length of time between puberty and our being mature in other respects. After all, evolution’s basically about adaptation, and there’s no God-given rules about how adaptation has to come about. On the other hand, the opposition can join the scientists in warning us about rich egomaniacs trying to make themselves into designer Gods.

Gemma: Yes – and if they’re made to remember their own stand that everybody’s still worthwhile even if they don’t fit into somebody else’s picture frame, they might actually help to get nanotech used properly to help people who need it.

Brian: That would be good - if it ever happens. What I’m hoping for is people will realise our business has to draw in the moral dilemmas just because it’s about the technical applications, not just the science. When it comes to it no one wants to be out with what technology does - if only because it pays the bills. The Christian campaigners demonstrate that as well as anybody with their TV and Internet communication. After all, those Crisis Pregnancy Centers need money to fund them, don't they?

Gemma: Nobody’s going to argue with that. Rachel won’t either – she certainly won’t mind the money if this debate comes off, or the publicity either. Talking to a bunch of middle aged women on a Thursday afternoon’s one thing. Hosting a debate between the big money freaks would be something else.

Speaking in Brief

1. Corporations are the capitalist form of collectivism.

2. Modernism is dead. Long live modernity!

3. Montaigne was partly right: I can be educated and a fool, but I can also be ignorant and not wise.

4. When I see, hear, and read modern art I yell 'Just say something; don't worry about how you said it!'

5. Vultures feed on corpses left by tradition and its endless striving for prestige. We call the vultures 'modern' because they need no family pedigree.

6. To pay women for housework would incorporate the Household.

7. Socialists should have declared 'We shall never appeal to envy!'There are more votes in greed and vanity than envy.

8. Was Marxism the first sorcery to enlist our aspirations against ourselves?

9. The Spirit of the Age..... You hypocrite! You self-righteous prig!

10. Genetic engineering is threatening to make us free to be what we choose as well as free to do what we want. Ahead of that we shrank the human genome - almost to a mouse.

11. The best way to get people to take a threat seriously is to be the threat.

12. 'The Space Age is over!' cries the cynic. Of course - it's routine.

13. We don't use the word 'noble' because it was misused. We don't use the words 'progress' or 'civilisation' because they do not describe what we see.

14. 'World' in philosophy has a simple meaning. It refers just to what we experience or imagine outside (not beyond) ourselves.

15. Existentialist characters from Clarissa Harlowe onward are expected to fade out rather than fit to the world. We will have matured when we can treat them as merely wise.

16. What happened to the old German role of doing what others talk about and so making yourselves a tragedy? Americans and Muslims now share it.

17. The horror writer H.P Lovecraft died in 1937. Just a few years later he would have discovered that the Cthulu mythos was unnecessary.

18. A writing career most often depends on making a name for yourself first - once a name you sell. The logic is similar to a military career where you start as a Field Marshal and then work your way steadily down the ranks so as to retire as a private after forty years service.

19. The mystery of consciousness.... Alert! Wake up! They're coming!

20. Doctors often describe people as 'immature.' But societies are founded upon immaturity.

21. Logic and science are our oath of obedience to the Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. (That is also a principle of honour.)

22. Modernists - have no fear of women being sent back home! War and competition are still with you. Technology will do the rest.

23. The art of charity is to make a decision about yourself and then forget about it.

24. Greens talk of the 'balance of Nature.' But don't we want Nature balanced?

25. I do not enjoy being ill but it gives me time to think.

26. How can we trust our languages when we do not trust one another?

27. Best pointed out that the French Revolution took honour into public ownership. Then the modern abominations of fascism and Leninism became possible, because they took the cruelty into public ownership also.

28. Wisdom needs independence. Therefore it must have influence and not power.

29. Why can't some fool explain that the point of ethical foreign policies is to train our children in ethics?

30. I won't give up my hope of a world order just because it's the best way to make money.

31. (a) A progressive is someone who says we can do what we want, and then expects us to cooperate. (b) A conservative is someone who complains we are spoilt, and then promises to give us everything we want.

32. The modern court jesters were the ones who greeted the modern revolution: Marquis de Sade and Rasputin.

33. The best model for computer software is Kafka's bureaucracy.

34. Intelligence services are most successful when it comes to making paranoia rational.

35. What is a miracle? Is it an event like our existence which appears so improbable you have to say it never happened?

36. How could we ever distinguish 'love' from sentiment, lust, passion, infatuation, or images? Why not forget it and just have the Golden Rule of ethics?

37. Positive and negative freedom are different perspectives: If I run a bar the end of licensing restrictions sets me free from controls. If I am a customer it sets me free to stay drinking through the night.

38. Must a universal morality be our last refuge?

39. What is the difference between suicide and martyrdom? Who decides which is which; the audience or the critics?

40. I suggest that science fiction should be not limit itself by attempting to be mere literature.

41. Can Americans switch around to honest and blinkered liberals or wise and corrupt conservatives?

42. Even ordinary folks are talking a lot about trust now. Naturally - because we don't anyone or anything past the end of our noses.

43. Existentialism has dropped out of fashion. To be expected when it tells us the truth about our society.

44. Religion is about personal faith, authority, ritual, losing my ego, salvation, tradition, obedience to God, the moral point of view,... No wonder we all get confused.

45. A secularist holds that death is simply eternal.

46. Caring for others is hard, gritty business.

47. Authority will be restored when we find fresh ways to teach rather than merely campaign.

48. (a) Growing up means moving on from learning to listening to advice. (b) Growing up means moving on from caring for the world to coining in the dough.

49. Age now means relying on people who cannot be relied upon.

50. Modernity shifts women from images of grace (if you're lucky) to just the latest images (you're a joke).

51. In the 1900s modern art told us what was coming. The 2000s won't say.

52. We're still looking for alien civilisations. But what could we ever say to them?

53. Khaled Hosseini reminds us of what we should have remembered from our own literature.

54. The point about 'saving the planet' is the planet will go on but we may not.

55. C. J. Friedrich misunderstood experts if he thought they understood the contingent.

56. Family honour was the first experiment in anarchism.

57. Modernity shifts honour killings from epic tragedy to social problem in rundown communities.

58. A liberal is someone who represents whatever we don't like.

59. How else can we assess machine intelligence than by finding whether the machine disobeys us?

60. Logically, if the future is warm and wet, we should get back into the sea.

62. We are told Abraham offered his son's neck to prove his faith. Now each group has its own test of faith.

63. In a global economy the one way to stop migrants coming for jobs is to see there are no jobs.