Over at UnHerd, philosopher Kathleen Stock, formerly of the University of Sussex, critiques a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that I discussed recently, a paper you can read by clicking below. (You may remember that Stock, an OBE, was forced to resign from Sussex after she was demonized for her views on gender identity. These involved claims that there are but two biological sexes, and her cancellation was largely the result of a campaign by students.)
As I said in my earlier post, this paper seems to whitewash female genital mutilation (FGM), and does so in several ways. The authors think that the term “mutilation” is pejorative, and is more accurate and less inflammatory than saying “female genital modification”, which covers a variety of methods of FGM, some much more dangerous than others, as well as cosmetic genital surgery on biological women or surgery on trans-identifying males to give them a simulacrum of female genitalia. (There is also circumcision, which some lump in with the more dire forms of FGM.)
The Ahmadu et al. paper also notes that anti-FGM campaigns in Africa, where the mutilation is practiced most often, have their own harms. As Stock comments in the article below,
And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.
They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.
And if you don’t believe Stock, here’s a small part of the section of the Ahmadu et al. paper trying to push the word “trauma” out of descriptionos of FGM:
Most affected women themselves rarely use the word ‘trauma’ to describe their experiences of the practices. If they describe the experiences in negative terms, they may use words such as ‘difficult’ or ‘painful’, but some of them may simultaneously describe the experience as celebratory, empowering, important and significant. This may even accompany experiences of pain, but this pain, when made sense of in its cultural context, does not equate to trauma.
Researchers and clinicians often use the mostly biomedically based DSM-5 (the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to assess trauma, with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While narratives of women who have experienced a cultural or religious-based procedure may contain descriptions of symptoms that fall into the PTSD nosological category (such as ‘unwanted upsetting memories’, ‘negative affect’, ‘nightmares’ or heightened sensations, vigilance or sleep disturbance), the cross-cultural validity of PTSD as a construct and its use in migrant populations has been widely contested, because it applies Western cultural understandings to people who do not necessarily equate the experience of pain as directly causing trauma.
That is first-class progressive whitewashing! As Stock describes :
[Anti-FGM campaigns] also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.
Finally, Ahmadu et al. note that anti-FGM campaigns, and the term “mutilation”, have led to unfair stigmatization of some groups in the West that practiced FGM in their ancestral countries (and still practice it in the West, though to a much lesser extent). You could argue, for example, that it leads to bigotry in the West against those of Somalian ancestry, as FGM is rather common there. And I agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize an entire group because some of them practice FGM. Only the perpetrators should be punished and the promoters rebuked. But the practice should be loudly decried, and aimed at communities who employ it.
In her article, Stock rebukes the article as a prime example of “cultural relativism,” the view that while people within a given culture can judge some acts more moral than others, considering different cultures one cannot judge some as having behaviors more moral than do others. One might, if one were stupid, criticize this as forms of ethical appropriation. So, say the relativists, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those in Somalia who practice infibulation of young women.
You can read Stock’s article by clicking below, but if you’re paywalled you can find the article archived here.
Stock is not a moral relativist, at least when it comes to genital “modification,” a term she opposes. I’ll put up a few quotes, but you should read the whole piece, either online or in the archived version:
Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.
That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.
Stock lumps the authors into three groups, which she calls “the Conservatives” (no genital surgeries of any type), the “Centrists” (okay with circumcision for males but no surgery on females), and “Permissives” (people who think that “it is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.” [that quote is from the Ahmadu et al. paper]. These conflicting views lead to the tension that Stock and others can perceive in this paper. What are the sweating authors trying to say?
Cultural relativism, while in style among progressives, is a non-starter. You can see that by simply imagining John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and ask imaginary people who have not been acculturated to look at various cultures from behind that veil and then say which culture they’d rather live in. If you are a young girl, would you rather be in Somalia or Denmark? If you’re gay, would you rather be in Iran or Israel? And so on. Here’s Stock’s ending where she asserts that not all forms of “genital modification” should be lumped together or considered equally bad:
Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.
Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.
But still, there is always a limit on what behaviours might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.
With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.
Here Stock comes close to equating “more moral” with “creating more well being,” a position that Sam Harris takes in The Moral Landscape, and a position I’ve criticized. But here the niceties of ethics are irrelevant. There is simply no way that forcing FGM upon girls can be considered better than banning it.
For some perspective, consider that any functioning adult is free to get these procedures as they choose.
The fact that adult females don’t volunteer to have their clitoris cut off in unhygienic conditions by an amateur and have their labia sewn together is a good indicator that it’s not a good thing to do to girls.
Sometimes there is a medical reason for surgery, cancer, infection, but that is a very different scenario.
Probably not.
In Canada it is a criminal offence to do it on a woman of any age, or to transport a minor out of the country to have it done.
The licensing regulator in Ontario (and surely all provinces given that it’s a federal crime) deems it professional misconduct for a licensed physician to do it, or recommend that it be done, on any woman. Further, doctors are obligated to report any instance of FGM we encounter so that the College can investigate who did it with a view to discipline. (This is one of a long list of circumstances where there is a obligation to report medical information to various authorities as required by law or College policy.)
Does the female clitoral procedure make orgasm impossible? Difficult? Does it make sex painful? Or is it purely to deny women pleasure on some twisted “moral principle?”
I assume it is not to increase pleasure.
What is the goal?
See the earlier post for some of the reasons it’s done.
Yes, the idea behind FGM is that women should not enjoy sex. It should instead be a duty imposed on them by their husband. If they actually enjoyed it, they might seek sex outside marriage.
The idea behind male circumcision is similar, amounting to an abhorrence that teenage boys might wank. The purpose of cutting off penile tissue packed with sensitive nerve endings is to make masturbation harder and less pleasurable, with the hope that teenagers might not do it (of course it flat out and utterly fails in this aim).
For male circumcision, the reasons are many, but it all started with a covenant between Abraham and God in Genesis. I haven’t seen the passage, though.
That story is obviously made up (as all religions are), so the question is how it came to be an identity marker among the Jews such that that story came to be that tribe’s mythology. Maimonides (for example) gave the same explanation that I did,
Also, male circumcision is common in America among non-Jews (unlike in Europe where it is only Jews and Muslims), and if you look into the origins of that (which is amply documented) then it is very clearly what I said — trying to prevent teenage boys wanking. American was, after all, founded by Puritans.
Hi Mark, Studies of the Ancient Egyptians engraving artwork shows they were doing male circumcision long before the Israelite stories were composed. Wikipedia article on circumcision, History: “The history of the migration and evolution of circumcision is known mainly from the cultures of two regions. In the lands south and east of the Mediterranean, starting with Central Sahara, Sudan and Ethiopia, the procedure was practiced by the ancient Egyptians and the Semites, and then by the Jews and Muslims. [Actually that Wikipedia article should be , “by the Jews around 600 BCE and then in 600 CE by the Muslims]
In Oceania, circumcision is practiced by the Australian Aboriginals and Polynesians. There is also evidence that circumcision was practiced among the Aztec and Mayan civilizations in the Americas, but little is known about that history ”
See Wikipedia article on Jews: “The Israelites emerged from the pre-existing Canaanite peoples to establish Israel and Judah in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age (1200 BCE to 550 BCE). By the late 6th century BCE, Judaism had evolved from the Israelite religion, dubbed Yahwism (for Yahweh) by modern scholars”
IIRC, images of the Egyptian fertility god Min, son of Isis, show him circumcised. Rather a shock to first encounter him as a 5m tall line engraving on a wall at Karnak. (No, unlike some Victorians I did not swoon,.)
Errant thought of a 77-year-old: I wonder whether fervent support for terraforming the bodies of gender dysphoric youngsters is leading to tolerance for terraforming the genitals of young women to conform to the values of some cultures. Have these academics, perhaps unconsciously, linked the two ideas and thrown terraforming children’s bodies for these practices into a cultural bucket that puts the practices beyond outsiders’ judgements? Pithy summation of her seven-year-old self: people can be really really stupid.
That has occurred to me too. It would be ironic for a feminist to despise a cultural practice of cliterectomy, but applaud the same procedure when applied to a gender questioning girl.
You have an unusual view of feminists. I don’t know a single feminist who ‘applauds’ mutilation of children who think they have gender dysphoria. Many girls who reject their body are victims of child sexual abuse, they subconsciously blame themselves for a man sexually assaulting them and think that, if they remove the feminine aspects of their body, they will be safe in future. Other girls are autistic and think they will fit in better if they were boys, others suffer from depression, which can be misinterpreted as dysphoria. That is why it’s essential that children have good mental health support and therapy before going down a path of mutilating their bodies.
They need counselling to check for trauma and other mental health issues, not double mastectomies. Many female detransitioners have already pointed this out.
Perhaps I should have used the phrase “so called feminists”. A majority of academic self-describing “feminists” have enthusiastically jumped aboard the trans train. Hence the indifference to women’s concerns about biological men in their locker rooms. And most of them enthusiastically support “trans affirmating care”, including mastectomies, for girls under 18. So far as I know, hardly anyone has advocated genital surgery for kids under 18, but they certainly support it for legal adults.
You can if you wish say “but they are not real feminists”. That rings as hollow as “no true Scotsman”.
I’ve already explained the difference. A Scotsman is not defined by the fact that he wears nothing under his kilt. But the very definition of a feminist is that they fight for women’s rights. One is an anecdote, and one is a fact. They are not the same thing
I oppose all surgery intended to affirm someone’s mental illness, but the difference is that adults can choose for themselves and if a doctor agrees, there’s nothing I can do.
I’m baffled by your assertion “most of them”. Several years ago 80% were against men in women’s spaces. After Wi Spa, Yaniv and Dolotowski I’m positive that number has rocketed. I’m trying to get a friend to redo his survey to prove it. A minority of women want men in their spaces. I suspect most of those who do don’t actually realise that over 85% are fully intact men and many are simply AGPs, not dysphorics.
1st wave: Voting rights for women!
2nd wave: Legal and social rights for women!
3rd wave: What’s a “woman”?
Crazy isn’t it. But they all know exactly which sex they need to find when they want to breed!
What??!!??
The Guardians of Correct-Think stumbling into blind, delusional, lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy?
Surely you are speaking in jest, Madam!
😉
It seems to me that the argument for de-stigmatizing Female Genital Mutilation (“Modification!”) could also be made for de-stigmatizing Wife Beating (“Correction!”) After all, the ancient practice of husbands physically striking and battering errant wives is 1.) on a spectrum 2.) justified by some religions and 3.) openly practiced much more frequently in nonwestern and indigenous cultures.
In addition, women in such cultures often report that they deserved it, it doesn’t matter to them, and/or it helps them better appreciate their place in the family and community. We may even hear some of the same justifications from battered wives in western societies, but sadly the colonialistic laws now tend towards forcing police officers and judges to ignore their personal testimony.
If the oppressed-by-the-West Muslims start emphasizing the importance of wife chastening in their culture, would these academics nod in sympathy and write another paper?
Probably they would. A large fraction of modern so called “feminists”, particularly academic ones, couldn’t care less about women who have a traditional marriage. Cis women, particularly ones who marry, buy into the gender roles of the patriarchy. If a biological woman wants to be counted as a victim and an ally, at least she should call herself “nonbinary” or “genderqueer”, insist on they/them pronouns, and put a stupid purple streak in her hair. Cis women who look and feel traditionally female and marry are no help “queering” the world and hence cannot be real allies or victims. The same applies to conventional gays and lesbians (i.e. “normies” who don’t go out of their way to flaunt their sexual orientation). Conventional women and gays and lesbians are distinctly second class citizens these days in lefty circles.
Most modern ‘feminists’, even lefty academic ones, have a traditional marriage and, while they may be supporting of trans individuals, are not advocating ‘queering the world’.
I said “a large fraction”, not most. It is a fact that a large percentage of academic self-described feminists are very into “queer theory” and general postmodernism. Most enthusiastically advocate “gender affirming care”. The more traditional feminists in academia have been mostly silent about the excesses of the transactivists.
Please don’t insult women by using the ‘cis’ slur. We are not a subset of our sex class. We are women. We do NOT need to be reclassified so that men can be slotted into the female sex class. I expect to see biological reality recognised on this website.
“A large fraction of modern so called “feminists”,”
I don’t think you’ve met many feminists, or maybe it’s just that you don’t read what they say. I move in feminist circles, and what you are saying is totally alien to me.
There are lots of US men on X who have difficulty with feminism and seem to blame ‘feminists’ for everything. We’ve even had the blame for the men who decide they want to imitate women.
I am also a socialist, so I’m left wing, and again you are assuming that people are left wing because they say they are. That’s not true.
One of the key tenets of socialism is equal rights for everyone. ‘Everyone’ includes women. Removing women’s rights to safety and dignity under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is NOT left wing. Perhaps you should be questioning people who claim to be left wing and want to remove women’s rights.
I didn’t think it necessary to put “cis women” in quotes.
There are feminist circles and feminist circles. It is good to hear that you hang out with sensible feminists. But you have to admit that most academics who call themselves feminist have either enthusiastically jumped aboard the trans express to lunacy or been shamefully cowed into silence. Hence their prioritizing the rights of men in dresses to access women’s locker rooms while the women who object are called transphobes.
You seem to consider yourself the arbiter of which people who call themselves feminists really are feminists and which people who call themselves socialist really are socialist and which people who call themselves leftist really are leftist. No true Scotsman anybody? We do, at least, seem to agree that men who call themselves women are not really women.
Since I got taken to task the other day about the “no true Scotsman” fallacy on the mistaken impression that I was talking about what is (not) worn under kilts, I would just take this opportunity to say that the version of the No true Scotsman fallacy I heard expressed long ago was that No true Scotsman puts sugar on his oatmeal. (It’s supposed to be eaten salted, as any true Scotsman knows.)
Michael Cole: You are commenting too often; please read Da Roolz on the left sidebar.
“You seem to consider yourself the arbiter of which people who call themselves feminists really are feminists”
I have never claimed to be the arbiter, that job belongs to the dictionary. I have always used the dictionary definition, which is that a feminist is someone who campaigns for women’s rights. Ergo, someone who campaigns to remove women’s right is not a feminist.
For capitalism to work it requires that people have equal rights before the law (so that private property can be upheld against the desire of the state to divide it according to race etc.) Socialism is hardly unique in professing to believe in equal rights for everyone. Where I think socialism (and the UN) run into trouble is in promoting equal shares for everyone, creating “rights” to as much food, shelter, medical care, and washing machines as one thinks one needs. This, of course, requires treating some people unequally in order to “free” up a pool of resources to be shared equitably. (The weak version of socialism is to demand not fully equal shares but to have some people receive larger shares than they would have obtained by their own productivity.)
Neither feminism nor socialism is coherent when looked at carefully. Which is why both fail and become mere tribal labels.
But no worries. FGM and sex-denying treatment are still bad things, even for right-wing Thatcherites like me. I’d love to see the British socialists get on board with us.
ISTM, “their own productivity” there is carrying a lot of the load. Are a slave’s results their own? Are they the slave’s master’s own? Are an illegally exploited worker’s? The illegally exploiting employer’s? The technically legal exploiting employer’s? A successful rent seeker’s?
Power differences really do affect the equality of many “equal rights”.
I’ve never claimed pure socialism is the answer to anything because it certainly isn’t. But neither is pure capitalism. I’ve said before that a healthy nation needs a mixed economy. Essentials like health, power and basic housing should be coordinated on a non-profit basis because the whole nation benefits if the people are healthy and comfortable and able to work and pay tax. I have no issue if people choose to give money to profit making companies for anything else they want, you should be free to spend your earnings however you like. Having basic housing available for all doesn’t mean that some can’t choose to buy a bigger house.
It’s sad that socialists and capitalists decry each other when they could work together to build a better society.
Despite being both a socialist and a feminist, my aunt was one of the pioneering women who started the UK fight for equal pay for women in the Ford machinists strike in the 60s. Their action brought in the politicians. The capitalists running Ford had refused to pay the women the same pay as men for similar work. Thank goodness feminists stood up.
Capitalism is as incoherent as you claim socialism is. Water is a good example. Down south shareholders in water companies are taking a fortune from the businesses and giving themselves massive bonuses, while increasing prices, pouring sewage into many rivers and not budgeting for future upgrades. In Scotland water is owned by the people, is a third cheaper and invests more per household in infrastructure.
Re another thread – you may have heard multiple alternatives for the ‘no true Scotsman’, but they are still anecdotes, unlike the dictionary definition of feminist.
I think you might be missing the point Michael Cole and I were making about the No True Scotsman thing.
The point isn’t what Scotsmen really do or are imagined to do anecdotally.
It’s just to illustrate a logical fallacy in the same way “No true feminist” is.
Here’s how it works.
Jock claims to be a Scotsman. We observe him at breakfast. Jock puts sugar on his oatmeal. Aha! we say, you aren’t a Scotsman.
Jock objects, “But I was born in Aberdeen of parents who were born there and all their ancestors were as well. I am indubitably and incontestably a Scotsman. I just don’t like salted porridge.”
Well, we say, No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. So there.
Don’t put too much faith in dictionaries. They reflect usage. They don’t prescribe it. There are anti-vaxxers who claim the Covid “science experiment” isn’t really a vaccine at all because (so they say) it doesn’t precisely match the definition in some dictionary they claim to have read as to what a vaccine is. That the dictionary was written before mRNA vaccines were invented doesn’t faze them. “No true vaccine is made from mRNA,” they say. “It says so right here.”
When you say, “No true feminist supports FGM” while many people who profess to be feminists seem unwilling to condemn it you are committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, just as the anti-vaxxers are. You are really just arguing about whether someone can still be a feminist if they don’t condemn FGM, an argument that is of interest only to feminists. The rest of us couldn’t care less.
No, you’re misunderstanding it. We all know what a Scotsman makes, and thus “no true Scotsman!” is an attempt to redefine what it means to be a Scotsman in oder to push some agenda, rejecting generally accepted criteria. But supporting FGM is so anti-woman that it is impossible to be a feminist by any sensible definition of one supports it.
Yes. Yes they would. Although in this case the book chapter and its justifications of wife chastening precede the exegesis on genital mutilation of girls in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Chaudhry, Ayesha. (2013). Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender. Chapter 2. The Ethics of Wife-Beating. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199640164.003.0003
I have to say I have some sympathy for Chaudhry’s argument: it doesn’t make sense to criticize the Qur’an for its promotion of wife-beating (or for its discussions of slavery) because sexism (and slavery) were the norm in 7th-century Arabia. We should avoid presentism.
She writes,
“The Qur’an is replete with commands in the imperative form, yet only some are interpreted to constitute legal rulings, while others are understood to be more akin to moral exhortations. What influenced Muslim legal decision-making to construe some Quranic imperatives as law and others as suggestions?…The ethical discourse on disciplining wives in pre-colonial scholarly discussions is deeply conditioned by the patriarchal idealized cosmology outlined in the previous chapter. Without this cosmology, it is difficult to make sense of the ethical nature of the debate surrounding wife-beating…Many religious studies scholars have argued that it is unfair and unhelpful to be morally outraged at the patriarchal details of a patriarchal discourse. Indeed, in our disapproval of the patriarchal nature of patriarchal societies, we impose a modern, post-colonial, gender-egalitarian hegemony on a system that could not have imagined these norms…For instance, when encountering a treatise about the limits on beating slaves, if we go no further than to feel appalled by the existence of slavery or by the fact that masters were permitted to beat slaves, then we entirely miss the interesting fact that pre-colonial scholars grappled with the question of justice in dealing with slaves at all…In the case of wife-beating, this means that pre-colonial conversations about the procedures for disciplining wives can be read as simultaneously ethical and unethical. Discussions that might be justifiable in the framework of a pre-colonial cosmology can be unjust in a modern, post-colonial, egalitarian idealized cosmology.”
But on all counts (beatings, mutilation, slavery) it seems ok to criticize members or fans of traditional culture who excuse or justify those practices today.
But the Quran, unlike all other books, was both authored and perfectly preserved by an extra-terrestrial super being that created Time and Space, and Right and Wrong. The Quran is both timeless and eternal, therefore not at all subject to the ideas of “presentism.”
Exactly. And in it the war god says that women have nine times the sex drive of men (talk about projection!), therefore it is up to men to suppress female sexuality in whatever ways they can. Hence burkas and clitoridectomies.
I will suggest that the academics who would defend FGM would neither condemn nor defend the practice of wife beating in other cultures. Rather, they would pointedly ignore it. The practice would not be supported because it is obviously abusive. But it can’t be condemned since that goes against lionization of non-Western cultures. There is no virtue signaling to gain either way, so it shall be ignored.
“Obviously abusive” is very much in the cultural eye of the beholder. In my eye, FGM is equally obviously abusive. But what do I know? My perception is doubtlessly limited by my Western Eurocentric colonialist patriarchal and heteronormative blinders.
They would. The logic of their position demands it.
Since when is logic an effective hindrance to motivated reasoning?
Well, OK, if you prefer: their motivation demands it.
If cultural relativism weren’t always an indictment of Western culture and values, I might be more open to examining the relative values of other cultures. It seems like people just use other cultures to indict the West, and don’t actually care about the targets of their arguments. At the same time, like many straw men based on the Noble Savage, it’s not at all clear that other cultures are even properly understood or represented.
I do not think your arguments that Sam Harris is wrong are particularly persuasive. I do not think Sam Harris denies that this is context sensitive. You are correct that there are contexts where there can be no clear winner in contests over which action alternative is better for human well being. There can be ambiguities, uncertainties, trade-offs. Some contexts are less ambiguous, less uncertain, less complicated with tradeoffs and therefore there are logically ethically better and worse actions. You appear to recognize this and yet you still go overboard, throwing out the baby with the bath water, by denying there are any contexts where the ethical judgement has an objective basis rooted within an empirically grounded human well being evaluation.
There are empirical evolutionary / survival bases for some ethical judgements, but IMO beyond that, “objectivity” is not to be found. Particularly when it comes to adjudicating conflicting interests and conflicting ethical systems. Ethical systems, like history, are written by the survivors.
A commitment to being ethical is a choice which is a separate issue from addressing whether or not there is empirically grounded evidence relevant for evaluating if our behaviors are good or bad for human well being. Of course there is such evidence. And if you accept that, and reasonably assign to ethics as a concept the goal of protecting human welfare, given that humans are social animals and how we behave impacts other humans, then what else do we need to have to establish that there are contexts where our behaviors can be objectively evaluated as ethically better or worse?
What else do we need? — more details; more specific proposals; more specific “such evidence”; less “of course there is….”
You have not learned how to criticize someone civilly. And you clearly have not read all my criticisms of Harriss views, nor those of other philosophers.
All ethical judgements are based on preferences, not something objective. And chill out.
(Apologies for jumping into this conversation but I find the topic interesting)
My take on Harris is that the capacity of sentient beings to suffer is an objective fact, that we know from experience that suffering is a bad thing, and therefore minimizing suffering is the goal of an objectively-based ethics. Maybe I’ve got this wrong or am putting it overly simplistically.
The fact that an abnormal minority like to see others suffer – such people are called psychopaths – does not negate the argument, at least as I currently understand it.
I have not yet read Dr. Coyne’s critique though.
Sadists, actually. AIUI, psychopaths/sociopaths don’t react at all to someone else’s emotional state, positive or negative. IMO their neurobiology has a lot to do with it. However, some (the “successful” ones) do manage to pay close attention to someone else’s behavioural correlates, the better to manipulate their prey, appearing to be quite sensitive when it suits them. Like Blade Runner‘s replicants.
IMO, sexual sadists are not so “neurodiverse”, but rather “imprinted” by some early sexual experience(s). This also appears to be the case for other sexual fetishes. I expect that non-sexual sadists have something similar.
Kathleen Stock always writes so clearly.
And a tad to hastily as in the uninformed analogies on terminology where she mocks assisted dying/suicide terminology:
“The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives.”
First, this is bad writing, no matter what she’s about. Hungry homeless depressives in my experience do not execute the necessary documents or have Advance Health Care Directives, and likely don’t have any health care. And if they do happen to be able to take advantage of the extremely carefully safeguarded assisted suicide procedures in state laws, good for them. They can “float off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor” just like the educated middle class folk that apparently annoy her.
If you try to make an argument by analogy, you are usually picking additional fights you don’t need to have, and if you insist on that type of writing, you should know what you are talking about and be able to write sensibly.
FGM needs to be called out for what it is, a barbaric medieval practice. We seem to have progressed to determine which practices, cultural or otherwise, are completely unacceptable as they violate a persons autonomy, dignity and human rights, but are backsliding to privilege cultural practices, even if deemed barbaric, as somehow worth allowing on the grounds of moral relativism.
However, in the light of the research article, maybe I need to reassess my attitude towards my own cultures former practices. The cannibalism, infanticide and constant warfare clearly served a purpose for my Māori ancestors. Perhaps I am judging the effects of these practices too harshly and they actually deserve to be reinstated in a modern world. It’s not too hard to see how the practice of FGM on healthy but troubled trans girls can be skewed to support cultural FGM. What else might be excused in the name of cultural practices?
And one last comment. Using the word cutting increases acceptance of the practice. Here in Australia, we had a problem with young men “king hitting” others, often causing fatalities. Changing the name in the media to a “coward punch” has had a major impact on this practice by reducing its appeal to masculinity.
Wise words when ideologues (left, right, some other social persuasion) try to oversimplify complex issues to suit their purposes. Some actions become asserted as 100% ‘good’, and some become 100% ‘bad’, even though there may be an untidy mix of circumstances and consequences.
I find this entire thread transphobic as transwomen were not mentioned once. Who do I report this hate crime to?
An interesting thing about Genesis chapter 17v10 -14 where God says, “This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised” but there is no definition, description or clarification of what the word circumcised means. Why don’t we read :And Abraham replied, “What are you talking about ? What is this word circumcision ?” And God replied, “Cut the foreskin off your willy like what the Ancient Egyptians have been doing for thousands of years” And Abraham replied, “God you keep telling me that the practices of surrounding tribes are evil and in this case i think that could be true. Why if in the beginning you looked at the man Adam you created and said it was good , would you now say it needed fixed by cutting off the foreskin ?” And God said, “Well after studying Wikipedia i have noted that circumcision could help reduce urinary tract infections in a small percentage of infants but of course there are pros and cons. In any case make sure you sterilize the knife by putting it in boiling water or making it glow red hot in a fire before hand to kill bacteria” And Abraham said, “Oh i see so the original penis wasn’t perfect after all. Well if you are into making updates how about an off switch as male sex drive is sometimes inconvenient. However there are pros and cons to that too.” And God said, “Well i have a theory that circumcision could reduce sex drive but the jury is out on that and i will have to study the results” And Abraham said, “But i thought you wanted me to have very many descendants so isn’t max sex drive a good thing ?”
Traditions such as F/MGM weigh ‘.. like an incubus upon the brain of the living.’ They should, along with prostitution, human trafficking, bride kidnapping, breast ironing, misogyny, virginity tests, being taught that menstruation is unclean, witch-hunting, caste/class, homophobia, marriage to children, as well as blasphemy as a crime, non-evidence based medicine & cock and dog fighting, be thrown in the dustbin of history!
To call the paper ‘odious’ is too kind. It is much worse, than that.