Right Reason

Dr Glenn Peoples on Abortion, Morality and Law

Canterbury student group Prolife UC have organised for Dr Glenn Peoples to deliver some free public lectures at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch on Abortion, Morality and Law.

Thursday 30th July 7.30 pm
“Chasing the Justificatory Goalpost: Public Justification and Religious Beliefs”

There is a broad political tradition that we are a part of that we could call “the liberal democracy.” Some modern thinkers allege that in a liberal democratic society like ours, we should not advocate policies or ideas in the public square that are justified by our religious beliefs (e.g. policies on abortion, marriage, education etc). This is because these people advocate a principle of justification, whereby all policies must be justifiable to our fellow citizen in a certain way, and (as everyone knows, of course!) all policies that are justified by our religious beliefs cannot be justified to our fellow citizens in this way. Dr Peoples will look at exactly what this principle of justification is, whether it is any good (he will argue that it needs improvement), and most importantly, will ask whether or not it is really true that policies that have a religious basis really do fail to be justified in this way.

Friday 31st July 7.30pm
“Abortion, Morality and Law”
Is abortion immoral, and should it be legal? The abortion controversy is a persistent one in New Zealand that has seen revived interest lately. Dr Glenn Peoples will provide reasons for deeming abortion immoral and for its legal restriction. He will also consider some arguments for abortion rights and explain how to address these, demonstrating that they overlook the fundamental moral issues involved.

Where: A3 lecture theatre, University of Canterbury, Christchurch (map and more info here)

Ian Harris tells us (“Honest to God,” Dominion Post, [Dominion Post. Saturday July 11, 2009. Page B5], reproduced at the YesVote website) that we should reject the “harsh views” on child rearing found in the Bible.

Mr Harris, unfortunately, joins many of those who promote the criminalisation of good parents by muddying the waters. He notes, for example, that someone who defends the right to use physical discipline also believes that children (like adults) are sinners. He then announces that since “progressive” Christians (by which he seems to mean those who no longer accept Christian theology) realise that this is based on an antiquated view, we should likewise reject the right to use physical discipline and we should criminalise those who do.

It is difficult to interact charitably with those who support the ban on smacking if this is the contorted way they are going to reason about the subject. Whether or not one thinks the theology held by some supporters of the right to use physical discipline is correct is quite a different matter from whether or not one thinks they ought to be made into criminals, surely!

Unfortunately again, Mr Harris attempts to use his platform as a mouthpiece of liberal (what he calls “progressive) Christianity to give credence to scientific claims that are obviously subject to great dispute. He makes the sweeping claim that this nebulous thing called “modern research” shows that although corporal punishment does help bring about short-term compliance, it does not help a child to “internalise positive values for the longer term.”

Even if what Mr Harris says is correct, the implication is that corporal punishment in and of itself has short term benefits and no obvious (or at least, no necessary) long term ill effects. Hardly something to be prosecuting people for! The reality is that the effects he cites are perfectly compatible with the good of corporal punishment. Such punishment usually is administered to children when they are not willing to reason or reflect on the long term consequences of their actions. It is for when children are being unruly and unwilling to listen. Circumstances in which they are willing to do so are the circumstances under which corporal punishment is less necessary (meaning that the older a child becomes, the less frequent a smack will become). None of this gives the careful reader any reason to think that the occasional smack is immoral, much less worthy of criminal prosecution, even if it is not ideal.

Bereft of compelling moral or scientifically grounded arguments, Mr Harris turns instead to arousing prejudice against the religious convictions of those who disagree with him about child discipline. Unable to find anything strong enough in what all Christians consider their holy book, he reaches into the book of Ecclesiasticus (part of the so-called “apocryphal” writings that did not make up part of the Hebrew canon) to find the claim that “he who loves his son will whip him often.”

But not only has Mr Harris strayed into literature that the so-called “fundamentalists” (most of whom would identify as conservative Protestants) that he attacks do not even regard to be part of the Bible at all, he has clearly sought out the most extreme translation of the verse that he can find. He conjures up grizzly pictures of leering parents towering, horsewhip in hand, over the broken and bleeding bodies of little children with misleading language like this.

But just a few minutes research would dispel this attempt. The New American translation reads, “He who loves his son chastises him often.” The Douay Rheims translation (the Catholic Bible, which does include this book as part of the canon) reads “He that loveth his son, frequently chastiseth him.” The old King James version, the one that “fundamentalists” are most likely to read if the read this book at all, reads “He that loveth his son causeth him oft to feel the rod.” Of course, because it’s a metaphor for physical discipline that’s probably still too much for Mr Harris, but needless to say, it robs him of his “whipping” bogeyman.

After the rhetorical debris is stripped away, all that’s really left is a string of namecalling and fearful language. He calls the views of his opponents “repugnant.” He calls them “fundamentalists” with “antiquated” views that are opposed to “progressive” thought. But where’s the actual substance? Like much of the rhetorical fireworks that is being leveled at those who want the law changed to a common sense view that refuses to place thousands of good parents in the criminal category, Ian Harris offers more heat than light, and manifests just the sort of shallowness and bias that this debate could do without.

In the continued pursuit of its secular socialist state and its rejection of religion, North Korea, according to human rights groups, has stepped up its execution of Christians.

The communist country, the world’s most closed society, views religion as a major threat.
Only the founder of the country, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il, may be worshipped, in mass public displays of fervour.
Despite the persecutions, it is thought up to 30,000 North Koreans may practise Christianity secretly in their homes.

They are correct – Christianity is a threat to their society. In spite of the ludicrous caricatures presented by proponents of the secular (in the sense of “godless” or “purged of all religious beliefs”) state, North Korea’s leaders have recognised, like Stalin and Pol Pot did, that Christian faith and the values that it promotes threatens to undermine the dictatorship they embrace.

Glenn Peoples

2-year-old Dunedin boy Caleb Turner is heading overseas for stem cell therapy. He has cerebral palsy.

Some defenders of the destruction of embryos for stem cell research and therapy use examples like this to bash opponents of the use of embryonic stem cells. Wrong. Yet again in a productive use of stem cells, no embryos were harmed – or needed. Once more, the therapy that offers this hope is an “umbilical cord stem cell transplant.” The cells came from blood from umbilical cords.

Roll on the progress, but don’t bring embryos into it.

Glenn Peoples

Today, as I expected, Clayton Weatherston was found guilty of murdering his then girlfriend, Sophie Elliot.

He took a knife to her place, locked the door after him, stabbed her 216 times (in full view of her horrified mother), then mutilated parts of her body. The defence argued that he was provoked into doing all of this. Predictably, the jury were not persuaded (thank God).

Prior to the verdict, I’ve heard a few people say things like “he must be sick in the head” or “he must be insane. No sane person could do that.” I’m relieved that the court did not think this way. This line of reasoning presupposes that human beings who are not unwell simply aren’t capable of being gratuitously evil. Guess what? We are.

I’m doing some writing on the concept of numerical identity at present, so I thought it might be interesting to consult Google to see what others have said about it. I can usually rely on the contributors to the Standford Encyclopedia of philosophy, but this time somebody (Harold Noonan), I daresay (and I say it cautiously!), got it wrong. He writes:

To say that things are identical is to say that they are the same. “Identity” and “sameness” mean the same; their meanings are identical. However, they have more than one meaning. A distinction is customarily drawn between qualitative and numerical identity or sameness. Things with qualitative identity share properties, so things can be more or less qualitatively identical. Poodles and Great Danes are qualitatively identical because they share the property of being a dog, and such properties as go along with that, but two poodles will (very likely) have greater qualitative identity. Numerical identity requires absolute, or total, qualitative identity, and can only hold between a thing and itself. Its name implies the controversial view that it is the only identity relation in accordance with which we can properly count (or number) things: x and y are to be properly counted as one just in case they are numerically identical (Geach 1973).

I agree with most of this. Yes, there is a fundamental distinction between numerical identity and qualitative identity. Two things can have all the same qualities (e.g. two rubber balls made on the same production line) and so be mostly qualitatively identical, but because there are two balls sitting side by side and not one ball, they are not numerically identical. If they had all their qualities in common (including their position in space and time) then there would be only one thing, and in fact they would be numerically identical, but in this case, there are not. When you’re counting how many balls there are, you have to count two, or you’ve missed one.

But let me go out on a limb (again, cautiously) and say that when Noonan (and the many who agree with him) says that “Numerical identity requires absolute, or total, qualitative identity,” the claim is at best incomplete, and wrong as it stands. It is true in one sense, but not true in another. Recall the ball example: Yes, if they have all things in common including space and time, then we’re talking about the same ball, so there is numerical identity. But consider for example the following scenario, especially the question: “Martha says this is my long lost husband. He looks so different. Could he really be the same man I knew ten years ago?” The question clearly makes sense, and it is clearly a question about identity. But it is not a question about qualitative identity. The questioner already knows that the man she now sees and the man she was married to ten years ago are not qualitatively identical. The man she sees before her looks different, so he has different qualities. The question is whether or not this man is numerically identical with the man she once knew. And this question is one that could quite conceivably be answered in the affirmative: Yes, this is the same man, even though his qualities are now different. This is because – as is perfectly obvious once we see what the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity is – numerical identity over time does not require qualitative identity.

It’s possible that Noonan would grant this claim if it were pointed out to him, and qualify his statement somewhat to say something like: “At any fixed point in time, not allowing for qualitative change, a thing’s being numerically identical with something requires that it have qualitative identity with it as well.”

The reason I was doing the search in the first place was because I’m preparing a piece on the abortion issue where I explain that even though I am not qualitatively identical with a fetus (I’m obviously a lot bigger, I have much more brain function etc), I am numerically identical with a fetus from the past (from 1975 actually). The very same human creature who is now typing this, was a fetus, but this human creature doesn’t have all the same qualities as a fetus.

Glenn Peoples