"My body, my choice" - consent and inconvenience in Judith Thomson’s justification of abortion

New York's Reproductive Health Act, which passed into law earlier this year, authorises abortions within 24 weeks from the start of pregnancy, or in the absence of fetal viability, "or at any time when necessary to protect a patient's life or health," liberalising the previous law which permitted late term abortions only when needed to protect the mother's life. The act reclassifies abortion as a matter of reproductive health, having formerly been a criminal matter, and so removes it from the state's penal code on homicide. The act also expands the list of professions authorised to carry out abortions to include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and midwives, in addition to medical doctors.

The force of the standard ethical justification of abortion, Judith Thomson's violinist analogy which is outlined in the dialogue below, relies on our identification with the inconvenience that the hostage must feel when she is made to support a stranger's life for up to nine months without having given her consent. But how can this same justification work for late term abortions of viable fetuses to safeguard the health, not the life, of the mother, given that the inconvenience of time is largely removed?

Jack: Abortions are always immoral, except when there is serious medical problem with a pregnancy that put’s the mother’s life in immediate danger.

Jill: What makes abortion justified in that case?

Jack:  In my view the unborn baby is a person who has a right to life, but if a pregnancy endangers the life of a mother then an abortion would be like killing a person in self-defence, which would be justified.

Jill: I’m not sure what you mean by the ‘person’ here, but let’s assume the unborn baby is one at whatever stage of development, it seems that you’re saying that persons have a right to life except in certain special circumstances.

Jack: Yes.

Jill: OK, what about pregnancies that result from rape?

Jack: Rape is unfortunate, but the unborn person isn’t attacking the mother, so the self-defence principle doesn’t apply.

Jill: So there are no other justifications for not respecting a person’s right to life?

Jack: Go on.

Jill: Well, murderers can be executed in countries that practice capital punishment. In warfare innocent civilians don’t have this right, such as those that are the unintended ‘collateral damage’ of targeted airstrikes. Even the intentional killing of civilians during war has been justified on utilitarian grounds, such as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII.

Jack: So the killing of persons is justified in other situations, but an unborn person isn’t committing a crime or participating in a war.

Jill: But in a rape case the unborn person is depending on someone else’s life against that person’s will.

Jack: So? The baby’s right to life outweighs the concern that it is depending on the mother against her will.

Jill: What about this: imagine you are taken hostage, knocked unconscious and when you wake up you find yourself in a bed next to another person, and that your circulatory system is plugged into hers. The other person is unconscious and knows nothing about your predicament. You are told the person is someone special, a world famous violinist, although you personally have never heard of her, and that you have been kidnapped so that your kidneys can be used to filter her blood as well as your own.  If she is unplugged from you now, she will die; but in nine months she will have recovered from her ailment, and can be safely unplugged from you. In that situation, if you were free to do so, wouldn’t you unplug the violinist and walk away?

Jack: OK I’m not sure whether ‘unplugging’ here is exactly like the act of aborting a baby, but assuming that it is, then possibly…..

Jill: Would you not have a sense of responsibility for the violinist’s life, feel some duty of care toward this person?

Jack: I would, but not enough perhaps. So yes, I think I would unplug, although probably with regret that there was no other way to save her.

Jill: So abortions are morally acceptable in rape cases.

Jack. Except there’s something fishy about your analogy.

Jill: What do you mean?

Jack:  The principle at work here, it’s not just applicable to rape cases, is it?

Jill: How so?

Jack: Well if the principle in this case is that the rape victim did not consent to her body being used to keep another person alive for nine months, then that would also permit the abortion of unintended and unwanted pregnancies arising from consensual sex.

Jill: So the argument justifies abortion in general - the mother’s autonomy is what matters. Her body, her choice.

Jack: No, I don't agree. There seems to be a moral difference between abortion in cases of rape and in cases of consensual sex.

Aristotle's analysis of injustice explains Liberalism's obsession with equality

A guiding assumption in Aristotle’s discussion of justice is the formative power of contexts.[1] The root cause of injustice is pleonexia, the over-grasping nature of the vicious person’s devotion to scarce external goods, such as wealth, power and prestige, which leads to competition, conflict and the desire to dominate others.  Human beings become deformed in this way by the mores of unjust political regimes and the households under their influence, which do not give due care to the sort of character formation justice requires. For Aristotle, the cure for injustice requires a personal reorientation toward living life in a way that values the sorts of non-zero sum goods found in friendships and filial relationships.[2] However, Aristotle’s conception of philia distinguishes two types of friendship: those focussed on external goods and those concerned with internal goods. In friendships valued as a means to acquiring scarce external goods such as wealth, prestige and physical pleasures, partners insist on equality as they seek to protect themselves from exploitation.[3] By contrast, the right kind of philia is not concerned with equality of things given or received, since the goods exchanged are incommensurable and do not diminish in the sharing. He has in mind goods such as generosity, fairness, practical wisdom and loyalty, goods that are virtues of character which for Aristotle constitute and enable human flourishing or eudaimonia.

Three main factors contribute to bringing the right philia into being: a mature self-love that values the shareable goods of character rather than the scare external goods sought by immature self-love; the complementarity that is of value when one person can give to another what he or she lacks; and a beloved common good that is mutually shared, such as that created when husband and wife have and raise a child.[4] Aristotle uses both sorts of philia as an analogical concept for thinking about the characteristics of a just community. Philia and justice are for him related ideas since both friendships and just societies are undermined when immature self-love overreaches for external goods, both thrive on and make the best of the complementary qualities of different sorts of people, and both depend on a vision of the good shared with others. Although he is pessimistic about the prospect, Aristotle thinks a just society may be possible if we cultivate the right sort of philia in our relations with others in society at large. This reorientation can only come about if families and political regimes pay due attention to the character formation of human beings, primarily through childhood education. 

Aristotle’s diagnosis of the cause of injustice as excessive devotion to scarce external goods appears no less true today then it presumably was in his day. It is interesting that the theme of equality features so strongly in contemporary conceptions of justice, whether in terms of social goods like dignity, perhaps the modern equivalent of honour, or the material goods that make up or enable our privatised notions of the good life. As such, the failure to be other-regarding and a lack of sensitivity to other people’s notions of the good are taken to be the main source of injustice on the liberal view.[5] However, Aristotle's analysis suggests that liberalism’s focus on equality may be symptomatic of the wrong sort of philia at the heart of a society organised around the desire for external goods and rules to safeguard competitors from exploitation.

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[1] Thomas Smith, ‘Aristotle on the conditions for and limits of the common good’, The American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), pp.626, 631

[2] Thomas Smith, ‘Aristotle on the conditions for and limits of the common good’, p.628

[3] Thomas Smith, ‘Aristotle on the conditions for and limits of the common good’, p.629

[4] Thomas Smith, ‘Aristotle on the conditions for and limits of the common good’, pp.630-633

[5] Thomas Smith, ‘Aristotle on the conditions for and limits of the common good’, p.626

Gods in Cages: Liberalism, Progressivism and Transhumanism

Liberalism is typically praised or dammed for its ethical neutrality toward different notions of the good life, but if, as David Solomon argues, liberals can be convicted of having some view of the human good, it may be possible to convict them for having the wrong view. ^[1] There may be grounds for a verdict if we understand the liberal notion of the good as operating at two levels - the social and philosophical. At the social level liberals should believe that the freedom of individuals to lawfully pursue their private notions of the good is a common good of all members of a liberal society. From this shared good other goods can be derived. For example, prosperity contributes part of the common good of liberal societies, since prosperity provides the most favourable conditions for everyone to pursue their personally chosen way of life.^[2] This in turn justifies the promotion of other goods needed to attain prosperity, such as having a decent work ethic or the courage and creativity needed for entrepreneurial risk-taking. Liberalism then is not neutral to the good, but rather minimally committed to those goods and virtues at the intersection of individuals’ common interests.^[3]  

Critics argue that this liberal good exists in tension with the very conditions needed for its own survival. They point to how liberalism’s emphasis on individualism can undermine family and community life, which nurture the goods of fidelity, self-restraint and co-operation that underpin the personal independence and tolerance needed for a viable liberal order.^[4] Liberals may respond that such morally destructive individualism is not inevitable since we owe duties to other individuals who share the same right to lawfully pursue the good life, but it is doubtful on the liberal view whether such human rights and civic duties have a metaphysical basis outside of the specific historical, cultural and political norms within which they are claimed and upheld.^[5] If rights and their corresponding duties are inherently contingent, then they are likely to be too malleable to guide liberalism out of its internal contradictions. 

However, while at the social level the liberal good might appear self-defeating, the tension outlined above may in fact be necessary for attaining the liberal good at the philosophical level. Patrick Deneen outlines how historically there have been two philosophical conceptions of the liberal good since the Renaissance. ^[6] The first conception, in contrast to the pre-modern view, believed in humanity's essential separateness from the natural world and valued our mastery over it, seeking to channel the self-interested passions of human nature into the building of a rational liberal order using the natural sciences and economics. The second more recent conception rejected the idea of a fixed human nature and instead saw in human plasticity the potential for personal transformation. This envisaged the liberation of the self not from base desires as the pre-moderns had conceived of liberty, but from the limitations of human nature, indeed from the very idea that there is such a thing as a human nature. These two iterations of liberalism demarcate the dividing line in contemporary political philosophy between liberal “conservatives” who value humanity’s power over nature and liberal “progressives” who extend that mastery to human nature itself. What is of note here is that if personal transformation is taken as the ultimate good of liberalism, then promoting the self-defeating tension of liberal order at the social level makes sense, since such transformations can only really take place in conditions of disorder and change. So what appears to be failure at one level is the necessary means to success at another. 

How then are we to answer David Solomon’s challenge and judge the merits of liberalism? One approach is to think about the desirability of a future society that fully manifests the liberal values outlined above. One prospect stands out: the interests of liberal conservatism and liberal progressivism, that of mastery of nature and of personal transformation, merge together in 'transhumanism', the project to use 'enhancement' technologies to evolve humanity beyond its biological limits. Trends in the fourth industrial revolution hint at this as a real possibility. It is not hard to see how secular liberalism might take us there: commercial and national security interests develop enhancement technologies to increase their profits and power; mass media promote ideas that condition people into accepting these technologies; early adopters assert their legal rights to enhance themselves and procreate using genetic technologies; concerns over fairness motivate equality of opportunity legislation that widens access to these technologies; global economic and military competition between states incentivizes their use in societal transformation.

Whatever the likelihood of this scenario, a transhuman future in which human nature is changed beyond recognition is not precluded by liberalism’s philosophical goals, moral principles or patterns of development. But if it were achieved it would be a paradoxical future, since using technology to liberate the self and humanity from the constraints of biology would in effect make us captives to rapid technological change, like passengers on a train the pace and direction of which are beyond our control. There appears, then, to be a choice looming on the horizon between philosophical perspectives which seek to better humanity within the constraints of a given human nature and a liberalism that calls on us to reach for the divine by becoming slaves to technology – like gods in cages. If you have the stomach for the latter path then the liberal good is the one for you.

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[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, Donald P. Kommers,  David Solomon, ‘The Privatization of Good: An Inaugural Lecture’, p.374

[2] Lyle A. Downing and Robert B. Thigpen, ‘Virtue and the Common Good in Liberal Theory’, The Journal of Politics, 55, (1993), 1046-1059, p.1052

[3] Emily R. Gill, ‘MacIntyre, Rationality, & the Liberal Tradition’, Polity, 24 (1992), 433-457, p.435

[4] William A. Galston, ‘Liberal Virtues’, 1277-1290, p.1288

[5] Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue, pp.64-65

[6] Patrick J. Deneen, ‘Unsustainable Liberalism’, First Things, (2012), 25-31, pp.27-28

End of Dollar Era? (July 2011)

With NASA’s domestic manned space programme on the scrap heap and a looming austerity poised to squeeze medicare and social security, Obama could well be the president who closes the book on the legacies of Kennedy, Johnson and Roosevelt. However, is the heritage of another Democratic predecessor also threatened- Truman's 1945 Bretton Woods Act that established the American dollar as the world’s reserve currency? In April, at a George Soros funded conference calling for a "second Bretton Woods", Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, opined about the paradox of a single country owning the world’s reserve currency, which "sooner or later must lose credibility" as the home country runs ever larger deficits to provide the world with enough liquidity (1). At the same conference Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank Vice President Joseph Stilgitz called for a new "global" reserve currency to “take off the burden of any single country” (2). An increasing number of international actors are agreeing.  At the ninth meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in June, Iran's Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi proposed setting up a new regional currency due to the rising volume of trade among member states (3). More significantly at a spring summit meeting, the five BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and new member South Africa –called for “an eventual end to the long reign of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency” and a greater role for Special Drawing Rights in “a broad-based international reserve currency system.” (4) And then there’s gold. As the "barbarous relic" breached £1000 a troy ounce this month central banks appear to have caught the bug. Russia has raised its bullion holding to over 824 tonnes -7.8 percent of total reserves- and plans to continue buying at a rate of a 100 tonnes a year. Banco de Mexico governor Agustin Carstens, who applied to be the next IMF head, increased his country’s holdings by more than 12 times in the first quarter of 2011 (5). In a footnote to NATO’s Libya venture, in the months leading up to intervention Gaddafi is reported to have called on African and Muslim nations to sell oil and other resources only for gold dinars (6). 

Perhaps then it is unsurprising that Obama has been photographed bowing to the leaders of creditor nations, begging the question posed by former director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers: “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?” But given that America’s fiscal and financial challenges would be insurmountable if the dollar were not the world’s reserve currency, the question could easily be “What will America do to defend the reserve status of the dollar?” The move to a new global monetary system may be inevitable, the hope will be for a peaceful transition, but history warns us to prepare for upheaval.

>>>The Recovery- American Ugly

1)http://ineteconomics.org/initiatives/conferences/bretton-woods

2)http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-10/stiglitz-calls-for-new-global-reserve-currency-to-prevent-trade-imbalances.html

3)http://www.presstv.ir/detail/152640.html

4)http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/04/21/soros-bretton-woods-conference-accelerates-push-new-global-economy/

5)http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/central_banks_buying_gold_061320119

6)http://rt.com/news/economy-oil-gol

Giovanni Arrighi: finance capital's 600 year old playbook

In Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, the features that allowed the capitalist state, as pioneered by fifteenth century Venice and Genoa, to grow out of and transform medieval Europe read like the elements of a playbook still in use today:

1) Profits determine all. Apply cost-benefit analysis to all uses of state power, which is deployed to serve the financial interests that control the state.

2) Increase banking profits by delaying the settlement of debts, expanding the amount of credit issued by making deferred repayments overlap one another, a system which collapses if all accounts are cleared simultaneously. When periodic financial crises force counter parties to clear accounts simultaneously, shift the losses onto clients and competitors.

3)  Use sound money as a store of value to reliably measure profits and losses from far flung deals, and profit from the monetary ignorance of trading and financial partners who use less stable currencies that vary in value geographically and over time.

4) Create a central bank for the control of public finances by private creditors. Inflate the pubic debt to strengthen the hand of creditors and progressively empower the central bank to take over the administration of government revenues for the benefit of financial interests.

5) Protect financial interests by limiting the amount the state spends on warfare. Maintain a balance of power among rivals and manipulate it in your favour, for example by having other states fight your wars for you for as little financial cost to yourself.

6)  Run an extensive diplomatic and espionage network to gather intelligence about the ambitions and capabilities of rivals in order to manipulate the balance of power, reduce the amount spent on warfare and increase the military costs borne by others.

7) When conflict is necessary generate revenues from wars to make them pay for themselves. For example, through having military spending boost the incomes of citizens, thereby increasing tax revenues and the capacity of the state to finance more military expenditure.

China, the Global South and Progressive Politics: Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey

Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century) writes from Marxist tradition but takes an empirical approach and talks common sense. In this symposium on Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing, David Harvey by contrast looks to be a Marxist who lauds Mao while demonizing present day China as brutally neoliberal. What the views of Arrighi and Harvey point to is a divide in left politics between those who see the lifting out of poverty of hundred of millions in the 'global south' as a progressive trend for the 21st century and those eager to cast the developing world as the problem - for global security, the environment and human rights - in effect giving left cover to the reactionary project of conserving power in the west. Arrighi provisionally sides with the 'global south', saying it's too early to tell how China will develop, while seeing in her history of mostly peaceful interstate relations a potentially different sort of rise than that of western capitalist states, which was inextricably linked to militarism and territorial expansion (see Capitalism's 600 year old playbook).

Review of deflation risks - Middle East, Eurozone, China, U.S.

In the near to medium term the risk of a deflationary shock to the global economy comes from one or more of the following scenarios:

       Oil price shock –  Alongside ongoing Iran-Israel tensions, the Syrian civil war, a proxy regional conflict between Turkey and the Gulf states on one side and Iran on the other, is spilling over into Lebanon and Iraq. The USA and Russia are backing opposing sides in the region therefore a general middle-east war is possible and may be probable. The resulting oil price shock would have a deflationary impact on the global economy. While higher food and energy prices may increase household inflation expectations, in a depressed economy with considerable slack company profits will fall, depressing wages and consumption. Rising import prices and falling or flat export prices would deteriorate terms of trade globally, further reducing demand for goods and services (Seeking Alpha February 2011).
  
Eurozone crisis – with European banks exposed to stressed eurozone debt markets, a sustained recession increases the risk of a crisis event that destabilises, restructures or ends the euro, contracting global trade in goods and services. In periphery countries the credit contraction looks set to continue as ongoing deleveraging by an over indebted private sector is coupled with fiscal restraint imposed by Maastricht public deficit rules and Germany’s bailout conditions. Fiscal restraint is preventing governments from acting as borrowers of last resort, a necessary role in a liquidity trap if consumer spending is to be stimulated and bank lending revived (INET 2013). For example, Spanish bank lending to the private sector was down 7% year-on-year in May in one of the fastest contractions among advanced economies (Reuters July 15^th). Italy’s economy has contracted for 8 consecutive quarters (Business Insider August 6^th).

Present policy and therefore the potential for crisis is likely to continue over the near to medium term. The German Constitutional court has ruled that further significant EU integration would require a referendum. Given such a poll would likely be based on the adoption of a new EU treaty, and the Lisbon treaty took five years to negotiate, the Eurozone may have to wait until the 2017 German general election for ‘more Europe’ to finally resolve the crisis, meaning a continuation of the present policy of structural adjustment and little prospect of reversing the negative unemployment trend over the next four years (Bond Vigilantes August 2013; Eurostat June 2013).

      China hard landing – an overleveraged financial system, a reliance on exports to depressed western consumer markets and political barriers to reform that rebalances the economy towards domestic consumption are significant structural problems that increase the risk of a deflationary crisis. Indicators such as the level of leverage as measured by the domestic credit-to-GDP ratio, asset price inflation in property and land prices, and factors pointing to a structural slowdown in China’s potential growth rate all suggest a correspondence between the country’s financial-risk profile and those of Thailand, Japan, Spain, and the United States on the eve of their recent financial crises. Further policy easing in these conditions would push the leverage ratio and inflation even higher, risking a disruptive and unpredictable deleveraging process, or‘hard landing’ (Nomura, March 2013).

A persistently weakening Yen (see Threats, Stagflation) could also be a factor in triggering a hard landing and a wider emerging market crisis. A falling yen raises China’s real exchange rate with Japan (7% of exports), and negatively impacts ASEAN’s terms of trade with Japan (ASEAN is 10% of China’s exports). With consumer demand in the EU (16% of China’s exports) already depressed, if the US (17% of exports) also tightens policy, deteriorating balance of payments could trigger a currency crisis in China and across the region. In this scenario the use of large FX reserves to prop up currencies adds to the deflationary monetary squeeze, as domestic currency is taken out of circulation. A weakening yen was a causal factor in the 1998 Asian Crisis (Valuewalk, April 2013, Trading Economics/China).

      U.S. monetary policy – QE Tapering may signal a shift away from easy monetary policy, increasing deflation risks. Money creation through QE has only partially offset the ongoing contraction of bank credit since 2007-8, preventing deflation but delivering subpar levels of growth (Cato Institute, April 2013). Federal Reserve purchases of mortgage backed securities and treasuries have supported demand for those assets, despite negative real interest rates for much of the period, by preventing falling prices/ rising yields from increasing borrowing costs in those markets and causing a deflationary spiral in the wider economy. In May of this year Bernanke’s announcement of a planned ‘tapering’ of QE over the coming quarters was followed by a hundred basis point rise in U.S. treasury yields. This pushed the national average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage up to 4.36% from 3.4% on May 1^st, risking the recovery in the housing market (Bloomberg July 2013).

To taper, the Federal Reserve is looking for the unemployment rate to fall below 7% and inflation to rise towards 2% - they are 7.4% and 1.8% respectively and presently moving toward target (Bloomberg June 2013, Trading Economics, August 2013). The effect of rising bond yields may delay tapering but if introduced any resulting interest rate impact may be eased by the reinvestment of maturing bond holdings into new asset purchases and a lowering of the Government borrowing requirement due to this year’s sequester and payroll tax rises (Aviate Global June 2013, USA Today February 2013, CNN July 2013). However, if having to begun to taper upward pressure on interest rates were to prompt the Federal Reserve to reverse policy, confidence in the central bank’s ability to implement an exit strategy may erode, increasing the risk of a deflationary interest rate shock.