Category Archives: ideas

Philosophers in all fields often resort to thought experiments in order to highlight paradoxes and throw light on particularly knotty questions. Well-known examples in the field of ethics include the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Trolley Problem. Less often, a real-life example throws up issues which run even deeper than a made-up thought experiment.

A recent example is the case of Barbara Harris and Project Prevention, reported in-depth in The Guardian earlier this week. Apparently, Project Prevention offers drug addicts £200 or so if they agree to undergo sterilisation. Harris adopted a number of children born to addicts, and took on the mission of preventing such ‘crack babies’ by any means possible.

And it seems that Project Prevention will adopt any tactic, including doling out flyers with the slogan distributing flyers with slogans such as “DON’T Let a Pregnancy get in the way of your crack habit”. It’s hard to believe Harris and her organisation really do take the stance attributed to them. But let’s assume they do.

Their ‘offer’ is very controversial – almost everyone who reads about it intuitively thinks it is wrong. But what ethical issues does it throw up?

Even if we allow Project Prevention’s major premise, that addicts must, at all costs, be prevented from falling pregnant, Harris’ solution is replete with ethical problems.

Firstly, Project Prevention, in offering addicts a sum which might fund a week or two of drug addiction, is stretching the notion of ‘consent’ impossibly far. Indeed, those who take up Project Prevention’s offer tend not to tell their doctor that they have been offered cash to undergo the procedure (if they did, doctors would be bound to refuse the procedure, as they would see the patient’s consent as prejudiced).

Another ethical problem with Project Prevention is that the inducement they offer (a few hundred pounds) is short-term, but encourages people to undergo a medical procedure with long-term consequences – in essence selling off part of their personal autonomy.

A further alarm bell (should one be needed!) is sounded by the fact that Harris seems to despise addicts – she has said: “we have campaigns to spay cats to prevent them from having unwanted kittens, yet we allow these women to have litters of 14 children”. It seems obvious that, if we hold people in contempt, our ethical motives for intervening in their lives are doubtful at best. In this case, Project Prevention seems to be using the bodily autonomy of crack addicts as low value means in a mission to prevent harm to hypothetical babies.

This leads on to another point. Project Prevention effects an irreversible change in an actual human being, in order to prevent harm to a possible human being. This is a controversial area (see Risking Wretched Lives, a recent paper by Michael Gibb). In any case, in the Harris case there is a massive assumption that the to-be-sterilised addict , if not sterilised, would go on to become pregnant (or make another person pregnant).

Finally, many who have written about Project Prevention have raised the spectre of Eugenics. The Nazis were one famous group who wanted to select an ‘ideal’ society. Sterilising addicts could be the thin end of a wedge, where we ended up sterilising one group after another in an attempt to select out undesirable character traits. My view is that the Eugenics objection, though emotionally compelling, is less important than the points above about autonomy and consent.

Can anyone think of any ethical arguments in favour of Project Prevention?

Most people accept that there are right and wrong actions- immoral and moral behaviours, if you will. This feeling presupposes some kind of framework or system for judging whether actions are immoral or moral.

What is this system? Natural or supernatural? Human-limited or utterly objective? Learned or innate?

My own instincts push me in the direction of a minimal, open-ended system, something like ‘what if everyone did what you did/you were the object of the action you’re contemplating’?

I also feel that respect and empathy (some of the key drivers for moral behaviour) are learned, so in a way, morality is learned.

I’ll need to write more on this in my final year philosophy dissertation. Watch this space for developing thinking!

Heard a very interesting story at dinner the other night, about a High Court judge from Pakistan, who came to the UK to observe UK judges at work. It turned out that as the Pakistani judge observed two of his UK counterparts spending a day deliberating over one case, he creased up with laughter, explaining that in a typical day, he would hear around 50 cases, giving judgements in about 25 of them!

The story gets better- apparently an example of this judge’s brisk modus operandi involved him summoning government officials to court (some in handcuffs, threatened with contempt) in order to expedite the repayment of a widow’s missing pension. If true, I was quite impressed by the example of the widow, who’d struggled for nine years to receive her due, suddenly given justice literally overnight. It seemed a good example of justice standing up for the rights of the individual, against the slow-turning wheels of bureaucracy.

But as I thought about it more, I wondered at the summary powers of this judge. There was something almost regal about his ability to demand instant compliance from sheepish officials.

Is there a danger in dispensing justice too quickly? I suppose that one might argue that showing justice to be swift and effective has the benefit of discouraging people from vigilanteism. But in cases where a resolution can’t be found in a single day, does ‘swift justice’ risk stoking frustration by creating unrealistic expectations?

From my own experience of jury service, I saw the wheels of justice turn very slowly (albeit thoroughly). Perhaps the bottom line is that a plaintiff wants swift redress, but a defendant prefers an adequate chance to put their side of the story.

What do you think? Swift or slow?

Quakers, especially unprogrammed meetings, like to talk about how we strive to keep things simple, so we can get on with building a spiritual community and listening to what God has to say to us.

But we’re also very good at creating structure, process, and things to do.

It’s right and valuable that Quaker processes are built around wide participation. But I can’t help feeling that sometimes we have so much process going on that we end up reducing the space from which inspiration can grow.

So where does all the process come from?

I think the ‘DIY’ nature of our faith leads us to want to foster involvement and participation- we want people to find roles for themselves.

We also want to take great care to ensure ideas are tested thoroughly, so tend to appoint committees here, send minutes there, etc etc.

Unprogrammed and liberal Friends can end up using process as a kind of community ‘glue’- they replace orthodoxy with orthopraxis (an idea suggested by Ben Pink Dandelion)

Do we need all the process all the time?

Quaker worship (especially unprogrammed worship) is famously minimal. But could we de-clutter even further?

What is the minimum we need to do as a community in order to:

• befriend each other and those around us
• worship together
• share our truths
• find our visions
• and act on them?

Imagine you’re washed up on a desert island. What would you do first to build spiritual community?

I have some experience in this, as I’ve been part of a young Quaker Bible study group for a couple of years now. We asked no questions and made no plans at the beginning, but gradually evolved graceful and helpful practices which enable us to get on with the main thing- deepening our shared spiritual life.

This came to mind recently as I spoke to a friend who is thinking about starting a similar group. I had to keep racking my brains about what made our group ‘special’. What kept coming back is that we made hardly any assumptions about how we needed to do stuff, and preserved a very minimal level of organisation. We just got on with it.

That’s where the title of this post comes from; perhaps there’s a new way of practising faith together, ‘Getting to God’.