Moral Deliberation, Religious Freedom & Church-State Separation

I’m glad we live in a society where we have the freedom to believe whatever we want to believe.  No matter how crazy or dangerous some of these beliefs are, no matter how unreasonable and irrational some of them may be, and no matter whether some of these beliefs may hurt others and detract from their happiness and life fulfillment, we have the freedom to believe them nevertheless.  We also live in a representative democracy (for now at least), thereby granting us the freedom to vote for political representatives and the policies they stand for and in some cases granting us the freedom to vote for some of the particular laws themselves.  Combining these two freedoms, freedom of belief and freedom to vote, we have the freedom to vote for a particular candidate or law based on whatever reason or belief we wish.  It is this latter freedom that I believe is being grossly abused by so many in this country.

I’ve written previously about the imperative of democracy for any just society, but within that post I also mentioned the (perhaps) equal importance of moral deliberation within any just democratic framework.  People should be justifying their votes and their positions on particular issues through a moral deliberative process.  We do this to some degree already but not nearly enough and not in any useful public format.

We can’t simply leave it up to a room full of politicians to decide for us (as we primarily do now) as then all the individual perspectives that constitute and drive the public’s understanding of some issue become truncated, distorted, or superseded by some kind of misleading rhetorical caricature that can take on a life of its own.

Our society needs a political system which stresses the need to justify the laws enacted through moral deliberation not only to create more transparency in the political process but also to help resolve moral disagreements (to the best of our ability) through a process of open and inclusive critical discourse, helping to encourage citizens to form a more well-rounded perspective on public policy.  The increase in transparency is not only to help us distinguish between political aims that are self-interested from those that are actually in the public’s best interests, but also to point out the different fundamental reasons driving people’s voting preferences.  In order to point out errors in one another’s reasoning (if there are any errors), we have to talk with each other about our reasons and the thought processes that have led us to some particular point of view.  It may be that the disagreement is about a difference in what we value but often times its due to a rational argument opposing an irrational argument.

Moral deliberation would help us to illustrate when political or legislative points of view are grounded on beliefs in the supernatural or other beliefs that are not based on evidence that the opposing side can examine and consider.  We may find points of view that are dependent on someone’s religious beliefs, which if voted to become the law of the land, could actually exclude the religious freedom of others (simply by majority rule).

Let’s consider abortion and embryonic stem cell research as examples.  If through a moral deliberative process we come to find that people are voting to ban the right to an abortion or to ban the use of life-saving medical technologies that require embryonic stem cells, because they believe that human embryos have souls or some other magical property, then we need to point out that creating a law grounded on non-demonstrable religious beliefs (such as the belief in souls) is not something that can reasonably be implemented without violating the religious rights of everyone in that society that do not share their unfalsifiable belief in souls.  Those people should consider what they would feel like if a religion other than their own became endorsed by the majority and tried to push for legislation based on some other unfalsifiable religious dogma.

Ultimately, a majority rule that enacts legislation based on religious belief is analogous to eradicating the separation of church and state, but rather than having the church or churches with direct political power over our laws, instead they indirectly obtain their political power by influencing their congregations to vote for some law that is deemed acceptable by the church’s own dogma.  It’s one thing for a religious institution to point out what evidence or secular arguments exist to support their position or that of their opponents, whereby the arguments can at least move forward by examining said evidence and seeing where it leads us.  But when an argument is based on beliefs that have no evidence to support them, then it lacks the objective character needed to justifiably ground a new law of the land — a law that will come to exist and apply to all in a secularized society (as opposed to a theocracy).

If we are to avoid slipping further into a theocracy, then we need to better utilize moral deliberation to tease out the legislative justifications that are based on unfalsifiable beliefs such as beliefs in disembodied minds and magic and so forth, so we can shift the argument to exclude any unfalsifiable beliefs and reasoning.  Disagreeing on the facts themselves is a different matter that we’ll always have to deal with, but disagreeing on whether or not to use facts and evidence in our legislative decision-making process is beyond ridiculous and is an awful and disrespectful abuse of the freedoms that so many of our ancestors have fought and died to protect.

The arguments surrounding abortion rights and stem cell research, for example, once the conversation shifts from the personal to the political sphere, should likewise shift from those that can include unfalsifiable supernatural beliefs to those that eventually exclude them entirely.  By relying on falsifiable secular claims and arguments, one can better approximate a line of argumentation that is more likely to transcend any particular religious or philosophical system.  By doing so we can also better discover what it is that we actually value in our everyday lives.  Do we value an undetectable, invisible, disembodied mind that begins to inhabit fertilized eggs at some arbitrary point in time?  A magical substance that, if it exists, is inadvertently flushed out of many women’s uteri countless times (by failing to implant an egg after conception) without their giving it a second thought?  Or rather do we value persons, human persons in particular, with consciousness, the ability to think and feel, and that have a personality (a minimum attribute of any person)?

I think it’s the latter that we actually value (on both sides of the aisle, despite the apparent contradiction in their convictions), so even if we ignore compelling arguments for bodily autonomy and only focus on arguments from person-hood as they relate to abortion and embryonic stem cell research, we should see that what we actually value isn’t under threat when people have an abortion (at least, not before consciousness and a personality develops in the fetus around the 25th-30th week of gestation) nor is what we value with persons under threat when we carry out embryonic stem cell research, since once again there is no person under threat but only a potential future person (just as blueprints are a potential future building, or an acorn is a potential future oak tree).  If I choose to destroy the blueprints or the acorn to achieve some other end I desire, nobody should falsely equivocate that with destroying a building or an oak tree. Unfortunately, that is what many people do when they consider abortion or embryonic stem cell research, where even if they limit their arguments to falsifiable claims and make no mention of souls — they falsely equivocate the potential future person with an actual realized person.  In doing so, they falsely attribute an intrinsic value to something that is only extrinsically valuable.  It should be said though that the latter argument to ban abortion or embryonic stem cell research, while still logically fallacious, is at least based on falsifiable claims that can be discussed and considered, without any mention of souls or other non-demonstrables.

It should be pointed out here that I’m not saying that people can’t decide how they ought to act based on religious beliefs or other beliefs regarding magic or the supernatural.  What I am saying is that one should be able to use those non-secular reasons to guide their own behavior with respect to whether or not they will have an abortion or have their embryo used for stem cell research.  That’s fine and dandy even though I strongly discourage anybody and everybody from making decisions that aren’t based on reason and evidence.  Nevertheless I think it’s one’s right to do so, but what they most definitely shouldn’t do is use such reasons to justify what other people can or can’t do.

If I have a religious belief that leads me to believe that it is immoral to feed my children broccoli (for some unfalsifiable reason), should I try to make it a law of the land that no other parents are allowed to feed their children broccoli?  Or should I use my religious belief to simply inform my own actions and not try to force others to comply with my religious belief?  Which seems like a more American ideal?  Which seems more fair to every independent citizen, each with their own individual liberties?  Now what if I find out that there’s a substance in the broccoli that leads to brain damage if fed to children of a certain age?  Well then we would now have a secular reason, more specifically a falsifiable reason, to ban broccoli (where we didn’t before) and so it would no longer need to remain isolated from the law of the land, but can (and should) be instantiated in a law that would protect children from harmful brain damage.  This legislation would make sense because we value conscious persons, and because reasons that appeal to evidence can and should be examined by everyone living in a society to inform them of what laws of the land should and shouldn’t be put into place.

In summary, I think it is clear that our freedom of belief and freedom to vote are being abused by those that want to use their non-demonstrable, religiously grounded moral claims to change the law of the land rather than to simply use those non-demonstrable moral claims to guide their own actions.  What we should be doing instead is limiting our freedom to vote such that the justifications we impose on our decisions are necessarily based on demonstrable moral claims and beliefs (even if our values differ person to person).  And this still allows us the freedom to continue using any number of demonstrable and non-demonstrable moral claims to guide our own behavior as we see fit.  This is the only way to maintain true religious freedom in any democratic society, and we need to push for the kind of moral deliberation that will get us there.

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Why I Became a Pro-Choice Advocate

There have been a number of arguments raised over the years concerning whether or not a woman should have the right to choose to have an abortion or not.  I’d like to briefly discuss the primary arguments that I’ve personally found to be the most compelling.  Personally, I hold the view that a woman should indeed have the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, and thus I am a pro-choice advocate, though this wasn’t always the case (as a former pro-life/anti-choice atheist, and before that a pro-life/anti-choice Christian).  The primary arguments I’m going to discuss will hopefully illustrate why in fact I hold the pro-choice view that I do, and why I believe it is both rational and reasonable for others to share this view as well.

First, when it comes to determining what individual rights we should or shouldn’t have, we must ask if we want to live in a world where we theoretically begin with no rights at all and then add any desirable rights as needed over time, or where we theoretically begin with every possible right and then remove/restrict rights as desired over time.  It seems obvious to me that the first scenario would be simply absurd and wholly impractical to implement.  Among many other reasons to reject this first scenario, we need only realize that if we began with no rights at all, we wouldn’t even have the right to determine or vote on what rights we should be given at some future point in time.  Furthermore, nobody would have the right to enforce any kind of “no-rights” system put into place.  At the very least, to avoid these absurdities and impracticalities, it is easy to see that the second scenario best describes what any rational person would want.  That is, people want to have as many personal liberties and freedoms as possible with the intention of only excluding certain liberties when they contradict other liberties that are more fundamental.  When it comes to determining which rights should be restricted or excluded in a society (and/or which are most fundamental), people also tend to want to accomplish that decision-making through well-informed democratic processes rather than some particular individual or group making the decision and forcing everyone else to abide by such laws.

Why Have Individual Rights in the First Place?

So what exactly is the primary goal of having and protecting any rights for an individual?  I believe the primary goal that most people (if not all) would agree with is the ultimate intention of creating, maintaining, and living in a society that is conducive to the greatest levels of overall satisfaction and well-being of the lives of every member of that society.  From a libertarian perspective, we could also say that this amounts to a goal of minimizing the magnitude and number of situations in which people are forced into doing something that they don’t want to do.  When we consider the topic of abortion, the primary arguments on either side of the issue tend to pertain to determining and defining which specific individual rights exist (or that arguably should exist) and then we apply these definitions and determinations to the scenario of abortion to see if any rights have in fact been violated.  With regard to this topic, we must also examine the consistency and efficacy of a person’s position on the issue in terms of how well it achieves the aforementioned goal or purpose of having and protecting rights and freedoms in the first place.  It goes without saying that if a person’s position on the issue is such that it’s implementation through any proposed legislation would effectively increase suffering in the world and/or increase the magnitude of people being forced to do things that they don’t want to do, then that person’s position is self-refuting in that it directly contradicts their ultimate reason for wanting to protect individual rights – unless their goal for protecting individual rights substantially differs from the one I’ve stated above, in which case, we would have to evaluate how rational any other stated goal would be in comparison. 

We must also examine the consequences of taking someone’s position on the matter to its logical conclusion, seeing how it would be applied in definitively similar situations, whether or not there would be special exceptions to the rules proposed, and once again whether all of those conceptual elements are consistent with one another.  Ultimately, how we choose to define terms (and their specificity) within this topic of discussion is important for determining the tenability of anybody’s position on the matter.  Let’s take a look at some of the primary arguments that have developed over time while trying to clarify some terminology and definitions along the way.

The Argument for Bodily Autonomy

Perhaps the most primary and fundamental argument in favor of protecting a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy is the argument for bodily autonomy.  In it’s basic form, it simply asserts that an individual has the right to choose who or what uses their body, for what purpose, and for how long.  The most common (and uncontroversial) examples of applying this very basic principle would be preventing a person from being forced to donate blood, tissue, or organs to another person, even if in doing so, it would potentially save that other person’s life.  If anyone abides by this principle and doesn’t believe that a person should be forced to donate blood, tissue, or organs to another person (to use these common examples) then the same principle would also forbid forcing a woman to donate blood, tissue, or organs to an embryo or fetus, even if in doing so, it would potentially save that embryo or fetus’ life.  During pregnancy, starting from conception, the embryo and later fetus indeed use the woman’s uterus, her blood, her tissue (including for the placenta that eventually forms) and even the woman’s food and oxygen resources. This is arguably the most extreme example of one person using another person’s body. If in fact the embryo or fetus’ use of the woman’s body is against the woman’s consent, then a right to bodily autonomy protects that woman’s right to abort that pregnancy, regardless of whether or not that fetus has no chance of surviving as a result.

Some might object and say, what about the embryo or fetus’ rights? Shouldn’t they have the same rights as every other human being? Well, if we treat all human beings equally and give them all the same rights (which is hardly controversial), then this amounts to giving the embryo or fetus the same rights to bodily autonomy as is afforded to the woman. However, the embryo or fetus doesn’t have any other person who is trying to use their body against the consent of that fetus (nor does that fetus have any consent on the matter one way or the other, although this is irrelevant in any case). Thus, one would have to afford the fetus special rights (a right to use another person’s body against their will), and this is a right that isn’t even granted to children that are already born, since a child’s mother isn’t forced to donate an organ, blood, or tissue to that child, even if it can potentially save that child’s life. Thus, arguments against a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy are only tenable if one also denies the right of bodily autonomy. Furthermore, if this right was only denied to a woman with respect to a fetus inside her (and not denied to anyone else), and thus is not consistently applied in all other cases, then we have a special right for fetuses that is being argued for, thus arguing against equal rights for all human beings. The only way to reconcile this and make the individual rights equal for all human beings (while attempting to preserve the life of the fetus) would be to completely abandon the right to bodily autonomy which seems like a position that almost nobody would choose to adopt.

On top of this, if one were to grant these same special rights to a less developed human being residing in a pregnant woman, such as a fertilized egg (the first stage of pregnancy), then women would also lose the right to take certain birth control medications. For example, while common birth control medications such as “the pill”, Norplant, or any other chemical birth control medications primarily function by preventing ovulation and impeding sperm, this isn’t 100% effective and so if the chemicals fail to prevent ovulation or fertilization, then they end up preventing implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterine wall, thus aborting the pregnancy. So it must also be kept in mind that if these special rights were granted to any developing human life residing in a woman’s body (whether a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus), in order to remain consistent with this reasoning, one would also be taking away a woman’s right to use the most common forms of birth control in existence (i.e. chemical/hormonal and IUD methods) since it is well known that they often lead to abortions when they are used.

Defining “Personhood”

Another prominent argument in favor of a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, involves the definition of personhood. In the case of the aforementioned argument for bodily autonomy, it was mentioned that the fetus could indeed be granted the same rights as the woman carrying that fetus, and it still wouldn’t deny the woman the right to abort that pregnancy since it is the woman’s right to bodily autonomy that is being violated in that case. However, it is also worth asking on exactly what grounds are people arguing that the fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus should in fact be granted the same rights as the woman carrying it, or any rights at all for that matter? This comes down to defining what exactly we are granting individual rights to. For example, are we granting rights to a fetus because it is human or has human DNA? A skin cell is also human and has human DNA, but we don’t grant rights to skin cells or the like so there is something else more specific under consideration here. It seems that the primary factor here pertains to defining personhood, for it seems undeniable that it is people that should have these shared individual rights. So what exactly is a person or individual and how do we define that concept?

One might argue that a person is simply a human body, but this can’t be correct, because we don’t grant rights to deceased human bodies. We could further clarify the definition of a person to be a human body that isn’t dead, but what about a brain-dead human body? If my mother became brain-dead but remained on life support (with a beating heart and functional organs), and I was given the option to “pull the plug”, if I chose to do so, would I be killing my mother? One way to determine the answer to this question would be to ask another, namely, who or what is my mother exactly? Would my mother be the brain-dead (though otherwise living) human body that lies before me? It may look like my mother, but I would argue that this body isn’t my mother at all, for my mother is a personality, an identity, a collection of memories, or at the very least a conscious and self-aware being that experiences perceptions and emotions.

Who my mother is exactly is ultimately contingent on the configuration and state of her brain, for it is our brain that manifests our personal identities and any particular self. To prove this, one need only consider the fact that if your brain were swapped with that of another person, you would cease to be you even if the rest of your body was kept original and intact. “You” would now have the personality, memories, thoughts, values, interests, likes and dislikes of that other person. On the other hand, you could swap your arms or legs or various other body parts with another person (or simply get them amputated), and you would still be you (so long as your brain was kept intact).

So to return to my hypothetical scenario involving pulling the plug on a brain-dead mother, because my mother is no longer alive in that case, but rather it is only her body that is alive, my pulling the plug would not in fact be an act of killing my mother. In fact, it wouldn’t even be an act of killing “a person”, because as was just illustrated, a person is contingent on a living brain, and more specifically a living brain with a particular configuration and minimal set of features (such that it has conscious experiences at least some of the time). This just goes to show what we value in a person and why we want people to have protected individual rights in the first place. It isn’t because they are living human bodies, but because we know that “people” are conscious, thinking beings and we value this fact and empathize with them and their experiences. We don’t want people to suffer because we know what it feels like to suffer (to varying degrees), and to consider the contra-positive, we also want to maximize the satisfaction and well being of people. So if a particular human being is not able to experience anything at all (that is, there are no perceptions, and thus no consciousness), then what we value in how we define a person is missing in this case, and thus the ultimate purpose for giving that human being rights is no longer applicable, for that human being is unable to suffer, let alone experience anything at all.

Now if we return to the concept of a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus, we can apply the same reasoning and ask the same questions. When exactly does the fetus have the requisite brain structures developed such that it can be conscious and experience anything at all (much like my hypothetical mother was before she was brain-dead)? Well, a fetus doesn’t actually become neurologically active until approximately the fifth month of gestation (an event that the medical community refers to as “quickening”). It is at this point that some of the physical hardware (a complex form of the cerebral cortex) is in place for some future capability of consciousness, however the thalamo-cortical complex is integral for consciousness as well and doesn’t begin to materialize until sometime between the 24^th and 28^th week of gestation. It isn’t until about two months after that (32^nd to 36^th week), when a synchronous electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm starts to signal that there is in fact a global neuronal integration taking place – a process that is a fundamental element of consciousness, working memory, etc.

Thus, before the fifth month of pregnancy (the 20^th week), the fetus’ brain hasn’t nearly developed enough of the requisite hardware to be conscious (let alone to be self-aware), and thus it is unable to form an individualized personality, and therefore it is not yet a person based on the definition and reasoning given earlier. It doesn’t yet have this personhood status, the very status that we value and thus the very fundamental status that motivates us to ascribe individual rights to a person in the first place. It should also be noted at this time that the majority of elective abortions on record occur before the fourth month of pregnancy, which is several weeks before the fetus is even capable of being conscious, let alone well before it is even capable of beginning to develop any kind of personality or identity, which are necessary attributes in order to be considered a person as defined above.

Are Pro-Life/Anti-Choice Arguments Tenable?

So there are indeed very strong arguments for protecting a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy including the argument for bodily autonomy and the argument for defining personhood, using reasonable metrics that are based on what we fundamentally value in “people”, and thus why we want people to have protected individual rights in the first place. Arguments against a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy are likely to be ideologically untenable in that they deny a right to bodily autonomy that I think most people aren’t willing to universally (and thus consistently) argue against. These arguments also tend to rely on defining personhood using criteria or attributes that are either arbitrary, not universally applicable or that are unreasonable because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what we actually value in a person. Furthermore, these arguments are also pragmatically untenable since they also deny women the right to use the most common forms of birth control in order to remain consistent with the basic principles that constitute a pro-life/anti-choice position. For these reasons and more, my position on the issue has changed markedly over time, and after careful consideration of the arguments both for and against a woman’s right to choose, I am happy to say that I finally adopted what I found to be the most reasonable, rational, consistent, and ultimately tenable position on the issue.  Indeed, I support a woman’s right to choose, and I believe that the facts demonstrate this to be the most moral position to have on the matter.