Infant circumcision: a grotesque practice that needs to stop

This is my article that ran in the October 20th issue of The Advocate.

While female circumcision is rightly considered by Americans to be an inhumane practice, male circumcision, a practice performed on more than 1 million American infants each year, is usually shrugged off by the public as benign.

I’d like to suggest that it is actually far from benign, but in fact, is a rather awful thing someone would feel obligated to do to their child.

First, let’s identify what circumcision actually is. Circumcision is the removal, sometimes surgically, sometimes not, of the foreskin of (usually an infant’s) penis.  It’s mutilation. If you were forced to explain this to someone who had never heard of circumcision and revealed that you were part of a society that practiced that, I imagine they would run away from you as fast as possible.

The most common arguments put forward in favor of infant male circumcision include “It looks better that way” (aesthetic), “It’s more hygienic” (hygiene), “It’s better that a boy looks like his father/everyone else” (conformity), “It lowers your risk of STDs” (disease), and “It’s my religious freedom to circumcise my son” (religious).

None of these arguments hold up, and while the default position should be “leave children’s body parts alone unless medically necessary,” it evidently isn’t, so I’m going to hopefully show why these reasons simply aren’t persuasive.

Let’s look at the aesthetic and hygiene arguments. These are two that pretty much all men should find insulting. Think about this: what if you lived in a society that instead of circumcising newborn boys, gave all of the newborn girls breast implants? Most people who are attracted to women would probably find that more aesthetically appealing once the girl becomes mature, so it makes just as much sense, right? Most people should find that disturbing and feel insulted that someone would use that as an excuse to do something like that to an infant.

As far as the hygiene argument is concerned, if there is indeed a reason to think that foreskin makes it less sanitary, then ideally we should be reminding boys to be thorough when washing themselves. It’s offensive to me as a male for people to think that men are somehow incapable of sufficiently washing themselves so much that the proper course of action is to cut off a piece of their body.

If we applied this line of thinking consistently, we would almost certainly feel perfectly okay cutting off the tips of infants’ fingers because sometimes it’s hard to clean under their nails. Clearly, this is not ideal.
Next, there is the conformity argument, which has a component of parental sentimentality to it, which I find understandable, however misplaced it may presently be. Still, there is a much simpler solution to this problem than an uncalled-for surgical procedure.

What parents really should do if the subject comes up is communicate to their children that you cared enough about them to not unnecessarily remove a part of their body; they are fine just the way they are, and that there’s no reason to feel different or ashamed whatsoever. It needn’t be so drastic of a conversation that it needs to be pre-empted by surgery.

The disease argument is slightly more complicated in that there is some evidence that if you’re circumcised you have a reduced risk of contracting HIV. However, this is only true if you live in a country that is extremely high risk for AIDS, and you have no plans on using a condom.

Condoms are significantly more effective at preventing STDs than circumcision, and even if circumcision was better at preventing STDs, that doesn’t mean kids should be circumcised when they are infants and have no possible way of contributing to the decision.

Any potential benefits gained from the operation only mean something once a person is sexually active, which means there is plenty of time to wait so that whoever is potentially having part of their body removed can be asked if they want to do it first.

Even after all of those, the least defensible argument still, is the religious argument. As far as the United States goes, your freedom to practice your religion ends at your causing harm to other individuals.  This should include medically unnecessary (not to mention potentially dangerous) operations to highly sensitive organs, or medically unnecessary operations, period.  We don’t allow people to bring harm to their children due to practicing their religion in any other case, so why does circumcision get a free pass?

It’s 2011. When are we going to realize these kinds of effectively barbaric practices shouldn’t be defended anymore? We stopped letting people sacrifice each other, now it’s time to stop letting them maim each other as well.

Follow me on Twitter here! I tweet frequently.

Refutation of Kant's "On God and Morality"

I wrote this for one of my philosophy classes and thought I would post it on here since I haven't done anything with the blog for a few weeks. Hope you enjoy.

Immanuel Kant, having written a full refutation of the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, thought providing logical proofs for God’s existence were (becoming) an exercise in futility; most arguments can’t prove the existence of any god, and those that at least get you reasonably close, don’t prove the specific god you want. Given that, Kant tried to find an alternative reason for believing in God, while not really demonstrating that the deity exists.

           

His reason is, rather, a pragmatic one. Essentially, what his argument comes down to is this: 1) As rational beings, we have no reason to act morally unless our good deeds get rewarded and evil deeds get punished. 2) Since we don’t see that happening in this life, it is necessary to assume the existence of a god that will make up for the lack of justice we currently face.

The argument is simple enough, but under further analysis, I don’t think it stands up. First of all, excluding the idea that we don’t have a good reason to think a God exists, if injustice is all around us, and God can’t (or won’t) seem to do anything about it while we’re here on Earth, what gives anyone the idea, that he would want to make up for the lack of justice, or even be capable of doing it after we die? So far the evidence seems to be against the concept of a god that has some sort of concern for the state of justice in the world. If I can quote Bertrand Russell, "Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.’ You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’”.

The other objection I will raise is that the argument advanced by Kant precludes the idea that the reasons to act morally could come from within life itself.  It shouldn’t seem unreasonable to anyone (I would think) that purpose for morality can come from the simple fact that there are multiple conscious beings that have to share a living space, at the very least. We can learn to care about each other and desire to get along based on our own shared circumstances, without having to believe something that isn’t supported.

Follow me on Twitter here! I tweet frequently.

Running over "The Chicken Crossing the Road"

Imagine you're driving on your normal route to work and you see a certain chicken crossing the road (why it's crossing I'll leave up to you). It's a one way street with two lanes and you happen to be in the right one, while the chicken is still in the left. It's not in your way, and there's no need to run it over, so you let it cross, letting it go unscathed.

Now again imagine you're driving to work, but this time the chicken is already in the right lane while you're driving in the right lane as well. Any cars that would be behind you are halted at a stoplight, so you are more than free to change lanes and avoid her- but you don't. You decide it would be too inconvenient for you to change lanes, even though it really wouldn't take any effort, even at the expense of the chicken. You get to work safely and don't think about the chicken ever again.

Was it necessary to kill the chicken in the second case?

This is akin to the issue of eating animals for food, because many people cite that it would be too inconvenient to stop eating meat, or simply just don't want to, even though they can meet all of their nutritional requirements with a diet that doesn't require them to kill conscious creatures. I draw the analogy because I think it really illustrates the point that in cases where it is not required to kill an animal but do anyway, it is regarded as cruel, perhaps even monstrous, but for some reason when it comes to food, there is an exemption made. We should all think about what it means to kill another being that is conscious, and whether that is the type of thing we want to continue doing, even when (at least in developed nations) there really isn't any necessity behind it. Essentially what we're doing as a society is putting animals on the road specifically to run over, even though under normal circumstances the route to work doesn't have any animals on it, and we should ask ourselves if we can live with that if we continue to do so.

Follow me on Twitter here! I tweet frequently.

Why Suffering is a Bad Thing

If you know me really well in person you probably know that the suffering of conscious beings is the criterion I take most seriously in determining the moral worth of an action. I am a consequentialist in the way that I think people need to think out the types of consequences that will stem from a particular action before they decide to carry it out. I think it’s probable that a large portion of people would agree with me, at least in a broad sense, that suffering is a bad thing that needs to be avoided. However, what about suffering is it that makes it worthy of being prevented?

This question led me to start thinking about how I would describe suffering to a being that is incapable of feeling emotions or bodily pleasure and pain, and hopefully that would give me some sort of insight in to what exactly is bad about suffering. All I could really think of was try to convey the concepts of good and bad and somehow relay it to sensations, otherwise all I could really think to do is describe analogous feelings: agony, horror, distress, fear, etc. (which I think is a testament to David Hume’s Dependency Thesis), but using feelings to describe feelings wouldn't really do any good to a being that can't feel anything. After this I realized the idea that trying to convey this idea to being like that is ridiculous for a couple of reasons: one, a being like that could never survive natural selection because it wouldn’t have anything driving them to survive (our reasons for not wanting to die are almost entirely, if not entirely, emotional), and for two, they would have nothing to say on the matter of morality, because they probably wouldn’t need it. They may have things that would threaten their existence, but they have no experiences otherwise to attempt to stay away from because there is no reason to.

I’d probably need to think about it more, but given this information, I think it’s quite possible that suffering is a bad thing for merely subjective, self-evident reasons (though suffering to a large degree is a mental cue that something that could end/seriously impair your existence is happening to you, but I think the sensation alone is enough to avoid it). This is not to say that it should have less consideration with respect to morality, and it doesn’t mean that ethics then just becomes a free-for-all and we can do whatever we feel like. What it is though, is a matter of acknowledging that that is indeed the reason, and perhaps the only reason. I think it’s probably “just obvious” to people that they’d rather enjoy themselves than experience pain (though to some people experiencing pain is enjoying themselves, but I won’t get in to that). The types of experiences that are coupled with suffering are inseparable from our concepts of “terrible” and, really “avoid at almost all costs”. We know internally that those experiences are the kind which we wish not to have and thus create dread within us (which is really to say “to think about suffering is to suffer somewhat itself), and since we have this knowledge already in us, at some point, usually early in our lives, we can recognize that it is just as bad to cause that sort of experience within another person.

Note: The suffering I’m talking about in this post is suffering inflicted by one agent to another, intentionally, and without a reason by which it was necessary. Some suffering is necessary to lead to good consequences, or to learn some life lessons, but these are rare instances. What I'm referring to is the malicious, certainly gratuitous type of suffering that can be avoided.

Additionally, there is non-agent-caused suffering (people starving in third world countries), that most people, while not intentionally inflicting it upon other people, passively allow it exist, even in spite of knowledge of its existence. This, I think, can and should be included in the type of suffering that people are in some sense responsible for, because they could certainly help end it, at not much cost to themselves. I have post relevant to this that you can find here.

Follow me on Twitter here! I tweet frequently.

I May Have Found an Argument for Eating Meat

As stated in a previous post, I am a vegetarian, primarily for the purpose of reducing unnecessary suffering in the world. I don't think we can really justify killing a being that has an interest in remaining alive, especially when its existence poses no threat to our own survival (we don't need meat to nourish ourselves). I think at the very least we definitely can't justify the modern way we treat animals harvested for their meat, but that's not really the point I want to bring up today.

As we have learned through evolutionary biology and medical science, the appendix is far-removed from its original function. So far removed it's to the point where its pretty much useless, and a threat to our health. Due to this threat, about 1 in 100,000 people are now being born without appendixes, and we know that all of this change in the form and function of the organ is due to the change in our diet from what it used to be. So as the functionality of the appendix no longer affected our survival rate, it was no longer necessary for people to be born with appendixes that functioned correctly; as long as they didn't kill you, they could sit in your torso and do nothing and it wouldn't matter, though, obviously, some of them do kill people.

Why do I bring all of this up? Let's say we have pretty much a thorough dietary revolution, and nearly everyone on the planet stops eating meat (except in extremely rare circumstances). At this point, we have to ask, do we run the risk of developing more vestigial baggage like what's become of the appendix? I'm not a dietary expert and I don't have an advanced knowledge of how the digestive system works, but I can't help but wonder if this could potentially be the case.

I don't think this could be used to support the amount of meat currently eaten world wide (particularly in America), but I think if it is indeed true that we seriously risk acquiring harmful evolutionary baggage we would then have a reason to permit some amount of meat in the diet of the general population, but still significantly less than what we do now.

I'm interested in any thoughts or information on the issue so any comments are more than encouraged.

Follow me on Twitter here! I tweet frequently.

What is our Obligation?

Imagine one day as you're walking to work, you pass a pond, in which you see a drowning child. You immediately think you should jump in to save her, but then it occurs to you that you're wearing a new pair of shoes that were very expensive. It doesn't take more than a fraction of a second for you to realize that saving the child is unquestionably worth the fact that your shoes will be ruined; not only would it be worth it, but it would be immoral for you not to jump in and save her, since it's a small sacrifice to save the child.

Most people would probably be on board with the statement "If you were in that situation, you would be morally obligated to jump in and save the child." However, if one were to say to them that there is the equivalent of a drowning child whom you could easily help to save, they just happened to be on the other side of the globe, people are much more reluctant to say "of course you would be morally obligated to help". But what is the difference? I think this is something important to consider.

You may correctly guess, that I find this argument compelling, and this has drawn me to donate about 1% of my monthly income to organizations that help try to end absolute poverty. This is money that I certainly will not miss (it's probably the amount I spend on candy or other gratuitous snacks every month, perhaps even less), so I'm not actually sacrificing anything that's even close to a comparable moral significance, to people starving. I urge you to go to www.thelifeyoucansave.com/ to find out more information about what you can do to help

Follow me on Twitter here! I tweet frequently.