Whataboutery and moral equivalency - weapons in the war on truth part 1

Something that frustrates me most in the political conversations I see around at the moment is "whataboutery" and "moral equivalency".

I'm going to use some examples that I've seen on Facebook in the last couple of days that were responses to the recent row over the actions of the Prime Minister's advisor Dominic Cummings to illustrate these debating tactics. In fact, they aren't debating tactics. They are attempts to shut down the debate or derail it into the long grass.

I tend to see these more when people are trying to defend the Tories or actions of those even further on the right. They have been very common on the anti-EU side of the Brexit argument, and they are almost universally used by apologists for Donald Trump.

That's not to say they couldn't be used by anyone, from any political ideology, supporting any political aim. Or really any argument at all. You see these arguments all the time in sports when shady, loaded individuals want to take over a football club for example, and fans are looking for a reason to justify their continued support for a club that is now owned by a human rights violater with a reputation for torture.

But I tend to see them deployed most often on the political right. They are used to minimise terrible moral actions and deflect away scandals. They have been very effective in the propaganda wars on social media. They tend to get shared by people who aren't very good at recognising propaganda.

There is a subtle difference between the two."Moral equivalency" is the fancy term for saying "they're all as bad as each other!" Moral Equivalency gets rolled out any time a person's degenerate behaviour is questioned. Here's an example; the first comment left on a post that my friend Sian shared on Facebook about Dominic Cummings.

The joke that Sian shared is that if you 'cut out' the mask and wear it you can drive wherever the f*ck you want during lockdown. This joke incidentally, was ripped off by the Daily Star, and printed on their front page.

The very first comment is a classic piece of Moral Equivalency.

"Or Welsh Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, or the Scottish Dr. Seems it doesn't matter what political party there are idiots in them all who bend the rules to suit them [angry emoji]"

Do you see the attempt to make an equivalency case? Well, says our erstwhile commentator, they're all as bad as each other.

There are so many problems with this approach it's hard to list them all, but we can deconstruct this argument to see what the person using it is trying to do.

1) It casts shade on somebody else from a different part of the political spectrum to try and provoke a defence of that person. (It's a shame for them they can't do better than Stephen Kinnock. I can't imagine anyone jumping to his defence.)

2) If they don't provoke a defence of that person, it is still minimising this as just a political disagreement. They're basically saying 'You are only disapproving because he's an advisor to the Tory Prime Minister.' That's basically invalidating a person's opinion by accusing them of bias. It's an attempt to negate the argument by changing the basis of the argument from examination of a person's actions to debate about their beliefs.

3) It's an attempt to downplay and justify. But justifying bad behaviour by citing another person's bad behaviour is juvenile. That's like me telling my Mum I shouldn't be told off for kicking the cat because my brother forgot to feed the cat last week*.

*this is an analogy. No cats were actually kicked or neglected in the writing of this blog post.

4) This is a good example of someone trying to "kitchen sink" an argument - throwing in all the examples they can to show that there are loads of people breaking the rules out there.

In this case the person doing the 'kitchen sinking' is factually wrong which is counter-productive to their argument. The "Scottish Dr" was an employee of the Scottish Government, not a member of a political party. (As far as I'm aware, anyway. I never saw any party affiliations mentioned when the news cycle was about her.) And, more importantly, she resigned when her rule-breaking was discovered.

That actually shows a level of contrition and acknowledgment of wrongdoing that has been completely absent from Cummings. In fact, the "Scottish Dr" is an example of a high ranking government advisor who owned her rule-breaking and took the consequences rather than trying to avoid them. The commenter either doesn't know this or doesn't care. They just want as much evidence as possible. Facts don't matter. Kitchen sinkers are rarely deep thinkers.

5) It makes all wrongdoing equally bad. It's similar to when the tape came out with President Trump describing his approach to women as "grab them by the pussy" and his supporters replied with whatever bad thing they thought his opponents had done. 'They're all as bad as each other' implies that every action or attitude is of equal standing. 

6) It reduces accountability. "Of course Dominic Cummings ignored the lockdown rules and quarantine restrictions - he's a political advisor, that's what people in politics do..." Such an attitude basically gives people a free pass and doesn't hold them accountable for their actions.

I have some more examples but this has turned into a long post, so I will write about them in part 2.

The Good Place - ethics and philosophy disguised as a sit-com [SPOILERS]

I discovered The Good Place during its first season, and I have loved it, even while it meandered a bit during it's difficult third season. Now that it has concluded I want to write a bit about it.

But first: SPOILER ALERT

I will be talking about the twists and turns that the series took and so IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT ALL, and you want to watch it, DON'T READ THIS POST.

Seriously, there is a really good twist at the end of season one and I don't want to ruin it for you, but there is also a twist in season 4 that I want to write about here, so if you aren't up to date, come back when you are.

Or prepare to have it spoiled. Your choice.

Still reading? OK. Here we go.

The basic premise of The Good Place is that Eleanor Shelstrop (played by Kristin Bell) wakes up in a waiting room and is welcomed by an avuncular older man, Michael (played by Ted Danson), who reassures her that she is in the Good Place. Yes, she's died, but that's OK. Everything is fine. He proceeds to take her on a tour of her new residential environment, the 'Neighbourhood', which has been designed to cater to all her innermost wishes.

There's a problem, though. Eleanor is a selfish, awful person who shouldn't be in the Good Place. Her very presence causes chaos in the fabric of the post-life community she now inhabits. She confides this to her "soul mate", Chidi, who is an ethics professor and asks him to help her become a good person and worthy of her place in the Good Place.

Chidi agrees to help her and from that point on most episodes unpack a particular ethical or philosophical issue in an intelligent and accessible way. This includes serious discussions about whether "being good" out of fear of punishment, or for a reward, is actually good, or, in fact, selfish. What is true altruism? Is moral behaviour moral if you don't want to do it, but feel forced to act a certain way? Those are massive ethical questions and this is the first time I've seen them actually addressed directly in a sit-com.

(I think those are particularly pertinent questions to adherents of religions that offer the faithful the opportunity to escape hell or gain entry to paradise after death. It's coercive morality that makes people comply with expected patterns of behaviour out of fear of either going to hell or missing out on heaven. When scandals erupt from those authoritarian religions, it shouldn't really be a surprise. People in those religious environments don't consent to a certain moral code; they have it imposed on them and that's why they so often try to get away with breaking the rules that are imposed on them.)

The first series ends on a twist. None of the four main human characters had actually earned a place in the Good Place - which came as a surprise to two of them. In fact, the existential, philosophical torments of trying to help someone fake being good was an elaborate ruse. The Neighbourhood is actually part of the Bad Place, and Michael is a demon who has devised this place as a venue for eternal torture.

Unfortunately for Michael, the fake Good Place, was having a reformatory effect on Eleanor and the other characters, which is how they eventually realise they are in the Bad Place. Eleanor had changed so much she had acted in an unexpected way, admitting she didn't belong there, and causing Michael to frantically improvise. Now revealed as a demon, Michael had to resort to a finger-snapping reset of the entire Neighbourhood to end the series.

The beginning of the second series sees the main characters burn through Neighbourhood after Neighbourhood. Each time they see through the ruse. Each time Eleanor and Chidi fall in love. Each time they somehow end up becoming better people. Michael goes frantic with worry that he is about to be exposed as a fraud to his fellow demons and proposes a truce with the humans. His side of the bargain is to learn about ethics. There's a great episode about the Trolley Problem and choice-making when every option is awful. Then at the end of the series, the humans are returned to earth to see if their lives would turn out differently with different inputs into them.

That poses another interesting moral question. Can we really judge people for their actions if their actions are determined for them by their environment, their upbringing, the beliefs inculcated into them? That's a whole other branch of ethics that doesn't diminish the importance of moral decision-making, but begs the question whether it's even possible.

Into season 3, which took a while to get going. In this season the big reveal was that the entire system was broken and it was impossible for anyone to enter The Good Place because the interconnectedness of human beings meant that everyone was culpable for bad things happening. In a way, this was updated original sin, with sin inevitable because we all benefit in some way from things that disadvantage other people. The karmic mud sticks to us. Again, that was an interesting concept. Not quite as accessible as the earlier stuff, but deep nonetheless.

And so to the final season, which has just finished. In this series, the four pivotal humans are tasked with trying to improve four other people to prove that humans can become better. As a result they build an afterlife system that enable people to grow into mature, moral, responsible humans worthy of living in the Good Place. A kind of purgatory system, if you will. The main characters are transported to the real Good Place, where there is a final twist.

The actual Good Place is an eternal bliss-filled existence where you do whatever makes you happy all the time. Except, in a twist, that sort of existence turns your brain to mush. It's actually horrible and the people who are there have grown to hate it.

Eternity is one of those concepts that sounds good in the pages of a holy book, but when you actually think about it, is awful. Unending existence doing the same thing, or even unending new experiences, is not really comprehensible. It would rob existence of meaning.

The solution in the final episodes of the show are to provide a way out; a final door from the Good Place into nothingness. In a very touching final episode, each of the main characters, even Michael, reaches a point where they are ready to leave the Good Place, and cease to exist. They are reconciled to not existing any more and they are ready to go. When he announces that he has had enough, Chidi cites a Buddhist teaching about a wave crashing on the beach, which really resonated with me.

In Chidi's summary, if we see a wave on the ocean, we can measure its height and the refraction of sunlight from it, and then the wave crashes on the beach, and it ceases to exist. But the water is still there. The wave had gone, but the water has returned to its original form. It's how it was before.

I really like that as a metaphor for death. It reminds of a book I read about the universe's origin in ripples of quantum energy, and if we wanted to get all science-mystical about it, we could talk about those ripples having temporary consciousness before returning to the underlying energy grid of the universe.

The final episode was sad, but not tragic. The goodbyes were sincere not maudlin. And the concepts were as important as ever. There are very few programmes, especially comedies, that treat its audience as smart enough to think about mortality and what it means to be human, and live our lives connected to other humans in such a way that we make the world a better place.

The Good Place was a good show. It made me think a good deal. And that is what I enjoyed about it most.

A review of Godless Morality by Richard Holloway

Over a decade ago I was reviewing books for the trade journal of UK Christian bookshops. I was sent a book by Richard Holloway, who had just left the ordained priesthood in the Anglican Church. He had stepped down from the role of Bishop, which is obviously fairly high up in that denomination, and was now embracing life after theism. The book I was reviewing had a write up of Richard that mentioned he was the author of Godless Morality - a title that intrigued me. So when I found a second hand copy recently I bought it to see what he had to say.

It's a short read and I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he wrote. His basic premise is that because theologians and religious leaders can't agree definitively on what constitutes moral or immoral behaviour, this throws the legitimacy of basing morality on religion into question.

He points out that coercing moral behaviour by insisting people behave a certain way is often far less effective than if people consent to certain moral standards. That's a very important point when so many religious people seem to want to make laws for everyone else to follow. You could possibly change the way people behave but you will not make them want to behave that way by forcing them to.

Instead, Richard suggests that authority has to earn respect through the "intrinsic value of what it says", not because it can impose moral parameters on people and make them behave a particular way. The moral philosophy in the book isn't complicated. Richard makes a good case that morality based on preventing harm is pretty much universal and can therefore act as a base for a moral system that does not depend on religious revelations of what is right and wrong.

But harm must be evidenced - and the evidence for harm to the individual and to society is lacking for a number of things that are proscribed by religion. Ultimately, in Richard's view, many religious statements on morality come down to preference because they cannot explain why doing or not doing a particular action will cause harm. He is particularly critical of people ascribing their own preferences to 'God'; with people even sometimes admitting the course of action they claim is divinely mandated, and therefore 'moral', is unfair or defective, and yet because it is labelled as 'God's will' they will not countenance change.

Richard sums this up by saying identifying "transient social attitudes" with 'God's will' has in the past given religions great power, but is now what is frequently rendering religion irrelevant. Enshrining the mores of the past as eternal means that when society changes, religion struggles to keep up. It becomes a living museum of dimly-remembered attitudes that are seen as no longer useable in the world most people navigate daily.

That's all pretty sharp and is still very effective anti-fundamentalist thinking. Unfortunately, in the 17 years since this book was published, there has been a great amount of change in many of the ethical areas Richard looks at in later chapters. The commentary on human fertility has dated badly, while the legislation of gay marriage was not even on the agenda back in 1999 when the book was written.

But over all I felt there were still several important things in the book, particularly that idea of basing morality in a common universal ethic instead of competing truth claims within and between religions, and the idea that moral behaviour people consent to is more binding than behaviour that is coerced.

The book concludes with a 'look ahead' that depicts humanity standing on the cusp of a future that it shapes for itself, through gene technology and other triumphs over the natural barriers that prevent humans from achieving more. It is an interesting vision of the future from a churchman. It isn't the classic eschatalogical hope of Christianity, but it is hope nonetheless. Knowing Richard's trajectory, and how in a few short years he would formally reject the faith he was still ostensibly part of when he wrote Godless Morality makes this final section very interesting. It was also personally quite challenging to find myself agreeing with so much of what he wrote, given the path he was on in his faith.

James Bond Spectre review, or, How to write a sexual predator character who becomes an icon

Spectre is one of the most successful British films ever, and probably the most successful Bond film. It has received rave reviews. It also has the honour of being the first James Bond movie with a theme song that became a number 1 hit single. For a while the news feeds were dominated with news about it. As a film, it is touted as one of those 'must-see movies'. So I went to see it.

Back in 2012 I wrote a review of Skyfall, where I said I was uneasy with the predatory activity of MI6's most well known double-O agent. Specifically, a barely consensual shower sex scene when Bond forces himself onto a frequently-trafficked woman, who is later shot dead in front of him.

The same tropes crop up in Spectre, which for all it's glitz and hype suffers from three key failings: a reliance on magic, conspiracy theory 'explanations' and sexual predation. That last charge is the worst one, but I will deal with the other two first.

What do I mean by magic? Well, we have a massive secret base in the manner of the best Bond films of old. But it suffers from what I call the 'Death Star flaw', by which I mean it can be totally destroyed by one well-placed shot. Seriously. Bond shoots one little gas pipe and the whole place goes up in multiple explosions. At some point that goes beyond good marksmanship and becomes magic.

The conspiracy theory explanation was tiresome as well. I'm pretty sure the Skyfall villain spent some time explaining how he was behind all the terrible things that happened to Bond. Now the main villain in Spectre does the same thing. Apparently the events of all four films starring Daniel Craig were all orchestrated by this one guy as some sort of revenge for the villain's Dad liking James more when his family fostered him. It seems like a lot of effort to go to.

The 'it's all a massive conspiracy' idea is quite popular in movies. I think this is because movie-makers are trying to tell a story and actually the real world isn't set up for stories. Most events don't have a beginning, middle or end, nor are there neat causative processes that can be easily narrated. People want to believe in conspiracies, and large shadowy criminal organisations pulling the strings behind the scenes, because the idea that things happen at random and chaotically is terrifying. There is no way to control much of the random stuff that happens in reality. But you can do it in the movies. Take out the mastermind and the terror stops.

And then we have the third problem. The predation. Bond wastes no time at all bedding a widow the evening she returns from her husband's funeral. He then promises her protection, but not from him, from someone else he knows. I wouldn't put too much faith in that, but it might be better than any protection Bond would offer. In Skyfall Bond spectacularly failed to protect a woman he had just promised to protect. In Quantum of Solace a casual lay from the diplomatic service is found tortured to death in his hotel room shortly after they did the deed there.

But widows aren't enough. Bond soon latches on to a recently orphaned young woman and by the end of the film, has seduced her. Widows and orphans? There seems to be no emotionally vulnerable group that Bond won't exploit.

So, what's good about this film? Well, there are stunts. There is a lovely tracking shot of a train in the North African desert. There are stunts... Yeah, that's about it. The thing is the stunts and cinematography can't mask the sucking hole at the centre of the film, the aggressive sociopathic sexual predator called James Bond, who we, the audience, are meant to root for as the hero.

There is even an attempt at exoneration. Ralph Fiennes, taking over as M now that Judi Dench has moved on, gives an impassioned defence of the Double O programme at one point. To the career civil servant he says that having a licence to kill is a terrible burden because you have to look into a man's eyes and decide whether to kill a fellow human being or not.

I can see that being a difficult thing to do. I don't see any evidence that Bond sees this as a difficult thing to do.

As this film makes clear, human beings are expendable to James Bond, whether its his sexual conquests, or the careers of colleagues who he asks to deliberately disobey orders and operate outside their jurisdiction.(And that's another contradiction in the Bond films - any agent hat goes rogue is presumed to be bad and kill-worthy for 007, but he effectively goes rogue here and takes several important colleagues with him. Talk about subjective morality - it's OK for me to ignore orders that I decide are unjust, but anyone else who doesn't follow orders goes on the death list. Wait, why?)

So, this is where we are. A career sexual predator with a callous disregard for human beings who cross his path is apparently an icon.Quite what this shows about our culture is hard to fathom. The most worrying thing is that very few people seem to question this. We just munch our popcorn, go 'ooh' at the explosions and let James carry on with what he does.

David Cameron's 'Christian country' comments

David Cameron is now on record as saying "Britain is a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so".

He said this in a speech marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. He went on to say “the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today."

Now I am partisan, as this post from a few days ago shows, so it’s interesting to see what David Cameron said and what did he possibly meant by the phrase, a ‘Christian country’.

The phrase ‘Christian country’ seems to crop up regularly, among people bemoaning the state of things, but what does it mean? It’s usually one of those ‘hark back to the past’ phrases, when we recall the ‘good old days’.

So, this would be the Christian country that got rich off the back of the transatlantic trade in human livestock. Eventually, yes we finally stopped selling fellow humans as chattels, but we weren’t done with exploitation. We were a solidly ‘Christian country’ during the Industrial Revolution, which crowded the poor into cities of slums, where most of them died of cholera and typhus. We were a ‘Christian country’ of workhouses, prostitution, gin palaces and opium dens.

Or maybe you’re thinking about the ‘Christian country’ of the twentieth century. The ‘Christian country’ that conscripted teenagers, gave them six weeks training in Ireland, shipped them to France and sent them over the top into the bloody mist of the Somme, where only 1 in 4 kids made it back alive. The ‘Christian country’ that authorised the military to open fire on civilians protesting the working conditions down the South Wales coal mines. The ‘Christian country’ that operated a political Empire for the first half of the century and then repeatedly stitched up the developing world through economic imperialism for the second half.

I’m just saying, our nation’s history ain’t particularly glorious or enlightened and I’m not sure I want my faith to be tainted by association with it. In fact, many of the best examples of British Christians, from Wilberforce, to Barnardo, to Booth, spent their time as outsiders to the prevailing culture of this ‘Christian country’, regarded as annoying, or awkward, or cranks.

But apparently, emphasising our Christian-ness as a country will prevent "moral collapse". David said: "Whether you look at the riots last summer, the financial crash and the expenses scandal, or the ongoing terrorist threat from Islamist extremists around the world, one thing is clear: moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn't going to cut it anymore."

Well, yeah, much as it pains me to agree with a tory leader, I would agree with that. To an extent.

I’m a bit concerned by the phrase ‘moral neutrality’ – I’m not sure what he’s criticising there. It looks to me like a sop to the vocal Christians who believe we would fix everything in society if we just banned abortion and stopped the gays having sex with each other.

But you don’t need to be a Christian to make an ethical distinction between behaviour that is right and wrong. In fact, David knows that – he said being a Christian wasn’t a "necessary nor sufficient condition for morality" but having a faith could be a "helpful prod in the right direction". So we’re a ‘Christian country’, but that’s no guarantee that people who call themselves Christians will do the right thing. Good to know.

He also said: “just as our language and culture is steeped in the Bible, so too is our politics.” I’m sorry, what? I have to disagree with that statement.

What reading of the Bible justifies the persecution of the vulnerable, the widening of the gaps between the haves and have-nots, the granting of favours to the rich and powerful, and the general acquiescence to the amoral profiteering of the markets?

David Cameron’s politics are not “steeped in the Bible”. They have never been seen near the Bible. (Unless he’s reading the list of Israelite kings who “did evil in the sight of the Lord” and has got the wrong end of the stick.)

Okay, I’m in danger of editorialising there, but either living a Christian faith is a radical departure from ‘normal’, acquisitive, selfish human behaviour, or it isn’t. You either love your neighbour or you don’t.

He does say: "The absence of any real accountability, or moral code, allowed some bankers and politicians to behave with scant regard for the rest of society.” That’s a very interesting thing for him to say, considering he has done sod all to challenge that behaviour.

David’s government are just about the only European government to oppose the institution of the financial transactions tax (‘Robin Hood tax’), he has refused to crack down on bankers bonuses, and he has supported the head of his tax division who cut numerous shady deals with financial institutions so they could get off paying tax.

Maybe he thinks a semi-stern telling off will solve the problem. He gets to wag the finger at the banks in the confines of a church and so they’ll all listen to him and sort themselves out – do the decent thing, and all that. No, David, maybe you’ll have to man up and fill that vacuum of “real accountability” and get tough with the city boys who keep screwing everyone over.

To do that you would need a clear sense of right and wrong. The problem is David wants it both ways – he wants a free market system and he wants morality. But markets and morality are incompatible. Markets follow the money, and mammon is amoral. You have to apply your morality to the market – make the market serve your purpose – for the market to deliver any social good. That’s why a planned economy brought about the NHS and affordable housing for millions, and also why market economies have made housing unaffordable and turned our health system into a postcode lottery.

So, he wants a nice moral system, but he isn’t willing to impose anything to make it so. Cameron’s comments about faith indicate his levels of confusion.

“Let me be clear: I am not in any way saying that to have another faith – or no faith – is somehow wrong. I know and fully respect that many people in this country do not have a religion. And I am also incredibly proud that Britain is home to many different faith communities, who do so much to make our country stronger.”

So, basically, we’re a Christian country where “many” people aren’t Christians. Not sure how that works, but okay.

He described himself as a "committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian", or to put it another way, a ‘committed and uncommitted’ Christian. Which explains why he wants everyone to do the right thing, but is too scared to make them.

And finally, he admitted he was "full of doubts and, like many, constantly grappling with the difficult questions when it comes to some of the big theological issues". Presumably that includes big issues like how to live out Christian values you’re only vaguely committed to, and practice politics that are ‘steeped’ in a Bible he’s blatantly never read.

Good luck with that, David.

Why I'm not signing the Westminster Declaration

The Westminster Declaration is up and running, campaigning on those ever so vital issues that Christians get het up about: stem cell research, not letting gay people marry, and being able to wear a crucifix to work in defiance of the dress code. 'Cos that's what Christianity is about.

At the risk of seriously offending people who read this blog and have probably signed up to the Westminster Declaration, I’m going to go on record and say: I’m not signing it.

I have good reasons.

I could shred the moralising inanity of reducing Christian campaigning to a few marginal issues that most people really don’t care about. But why exert myself, when there are statements in the Declaration like this:

“We believe that being made in the image of God, all human life has intrinsic and equal dignity and worth and that it is the duty of the state to protect the vulnerable. … We pledge to work to protect the life of every human being from conception to its natural end and we refuse to comply with any directive that compels us to participate in or facilitate abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, euthanasia, or any other act that involves intentionally taking innocent human life.”

Oh, okay then. So what this boils down to is that we don’t like abortion or stem cell research and we will prolong the suffering of people who are only being kept alive by costly medical techniques regardless of their wishes.

But did you spot what they missed out?

The clue is “embryo-destructive research”. Sounds nasty, doesn’t it. But, then what about embryo-destructive medicine like, er, IVF treatments to help couples have children?

You mean you didn’t know unused embryos were a by-product of the IVF process?

This is taken from a Catholic website, which admittedly will have an agenda in trashing IVF, but it makes the point.

“People need to understand that a major byproduct of IVF is the destruction of millions of lives. In London alone, over one million souls were created and then wasted. … This is a genocide of unbelievable proportions, just for one country. 1.7 million lives created and trashed, over 1 million of those were never even given the chance for life.” (Original post)

Note how if you believe that an embryo is a full and authentic human being, then killing an embryo is the equivalent of murder. This is the position taken by the Westminster Declaration. And this is where things get complicated. Because life is complicated.

Personally I’m not opposed to IVF treatment (please understand that). But my point is that if you are opposed to stem cell research because it is “embryo-destructive research” then you ought to also be opposed to IVF because otherwise you are condoning a process that results in the destruction of many more embryos than stem cell experiments ever have or ever will.

So, why isn’t IVF mentioned in the Westminster Declaration? This is where some people seem to be being a little bit ever so disingenuous.

It may be pure politics. It’s one thing to argue against stem cell research and talk about the wilful destruction of embryos, but it’s another thing to stand up in a pulpit and condemn IVF.

The main difference seem to be that it’s bloody unlikely that there is anyone sitting in that church who is planning to go home, go out to the shed and engage in a bit of stem cell research.

But there will be people sitting in that church, whose kids are out at the children’s group right now, who only have those precious children because of IVF treatment.

And these organisations that campaign against “destructive embryo research” don’t mention IVF. Why? Well, maybe it’s because they know that the majority of their supporters, activists and donors will at the very least have a family member or close friend, in all likelihood in their church, who have personally benefited from IVF.

Or, maybe they haven’t put 2 and 2 together yet. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they’re exhibiting a spectacular lack of logic rather than being deliberately duplicitous. Perhaps omitting IVF from the list was an oversight.

But it still looks like hypocrisy.

Ends and means (-philosophy post)

At work today a friend and I were discussing a situation where someone we both knew had been treated quite badly by a religious organisation, which perhaps should have acted better. In fact, if they'd followed their own 'values statement', they wouldn't have done the things they did to end this guy's employment. But then, I always say, if you need to put your values in a statement, then they aren't obvious enough to people in the way you conduct yourself.

Anyway this drifted into a discussion of 'ends and means' and raised the ethical chestnut of 'do the ends ever justify the means?' After the discussion ended I remembered a quote from Michael Foot, onetime leader of the Labour party, on the subject. A couple of google searches later and I found what I was looking for, although Foot was actually quoting a writer called Ignazio Silone. Here's what he (Foot) wrote:

"Every means tends to become an end," Silone had one of his characters write, and the physical and mental torture of both Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism were known to him as he wrote: "To understand the tragedy of human history it is necessary to grasp that fact."

"Machines which ought to be men's instrument, enslave him, the state enslaves society, the bureaucracy enslaves the state, the church enslaves religion, parliament enslaves democracy, institutions enslave justice, academies enslave art, the army enslaves the nation, the party enslaves the cause, the dictatorship of the proletariat enslaves Socialism."

"The choice and the control of the instruments of political action are thus at least as important as the choice of the ends themselves, and as time goes on the instruments must be expected to become an end for those who use them. Hence the saying that the end justifies the means is not only immoral; it is stupid."

"An inhuman means remains inhuman even if it is employed for the purpose of assuring human felicity. A lie is always a lie, murder is always murder. A lie always ends by enslaving those who use it, just as violence always enslaves those who use it as well as their victims."

In some ways, this reminds me of Nigel Wright's description of 'institutional evil' - when the institution which was set up for the benefit of human beings takes control of those human beings. In terms of religion, it's not a long step to get to inquisitions, crusades and jihads, morality police or Pullman's Magisterium when that starts to happen.