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garicker: Stating that such decisions should reflect a determination of what is considered to be in the best interest of the child does not imply anything about prolonging any life at any cost.

I should clarify that I was reading what you posted in conjunction with what Rose cited as the constitutional rights recognized in reference to children. She narrowed those down to three: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and it strikes me that, given the particulars we've been discussing, life has been regarded as a right accorded to children regardless of their opinion on the matter.

On the whole, I find this business about deciding what "the best interest" of any second party might be rather dubious. What is the criteria for making such determinations? Is there a consistent criteria available to a secular judicial body? What are the assumptions upon which such a determination is premised? All of these considerations seem, to me, to have been left rather vague, and I'm not sure that I can back the rationale provided until I have some way of guaging the context in which they've been developed.

Assume a child totally consumed by horrific pain, suffering from a terminal illness for which there is no known cure. Clearly the most humane option, and the one that would be in the best interest of the child, would be to end the child's suffering.

Let's complicate your example a bit. It looks to me as though you're assuming that the child in question is being kept alive through extroidinary means. But suppose that the child is capable of living for several years without relying on artificial support. The illness from which it suffers is likely to kill it eventually, and in the meantime the child lives in fairly constant, excruciating pain. Is it still in the best interests to "end the child's suffering" -- ie. does the same consideration hold true when euthanasia is a matter of direct action rather than the cessation of intervention? Why or why not?

Again, my point is simply that I do not think exclusively religious concerns (usually framed as moral questions) should be allowed to trump the best interests of a child who is too young to make such decisions.

And it seems to me that the real point here isn't about whether or not the child's best interests are being served, but rather, who gets to decide those best interests. What's being called into play here is the state's right (or is it an obligation?) to determine what constitutes the child's best interests along strictly secular lines. The parents aren't ignoring the child's best interests -- they're simply determining those interests according to a different set of criteria than another party would.

If you could successfully aspire to a truly objective point of view, we might find that the state was, in this particular instance, correct. Barring that, though, I'm not sure what justifies the state's decision to trump the parent's interpretation of what passes for the child's best interests.

me: How does a secular society determine what is moral? How does it distinguish between what is exclusively religious morality and what is secular morality? And how does it decide the case when one secular morality stands in contradiction to another secular morality?
Garicker: How does any society determine anything? Usually it's through a combination of biological imperatives, evolutionary history and social negotiation.

That doesn't do much to address the strictly practical question of how a secular society is supposed to sort out its legal system's relationship to morality.

Nor do I think it's entirely necessary to legislate in relation to morality, as some people in this thread have assumed. A secular society need only decide that the purpose of law is to regulate society so as to make full civic participation possible as often as possible. Legal prohibitions against murder, then, can be justified by reference to the civil effect of murder -- ie. the act of murder prevents the murdered citizen from participating in the civic order -- rather than in reference to some moral a priori.

And it seems to me that our current system is a mixture of that rationale and the more traditional derivation of law from morality. You can probably guess which one I think is a more pure expression of the secular ideal. But at the same time, I don't think it likely that many people would unabashedly champion that construction of law once they realized how it effected a great many laws that we take for granted. In fact, adopting the principle that law should protect the civil structure would put a greater burden on moral institutions apart from law; in other words, if law were no longer protecting morality, we'd have to find other ways to protect morality. Which is, incidentally, something I support anyway, but I think I'm likely to form a rather extreme minority so far as that goes.

There is no overarching "religious morality" that is agreed to by the religious. So the difficulty of finding common ground exists there as well.

Of course. I think you may have misinterpreted my point as some form of subversion of secular morality. Don't worry; I'm use to having my post interpreted along those lines.

What I really wanted to get at was the strictly practical question of how a secular institution goes about (or more to the point, how it ought to go about) resolving the difficulties that arise. You've said that they work it out somehow, but what I'm interested in are the specifics of how. Because it seems to me that they're denied access to some of the precedents cited by religious authorities in determining the relationship of social institutions to morality. In a theodicy, the head of state can simply refer to unanswerable "revealed" truth (I say simply because it cuts through some difficulties, but in actual practice, even that solution requires a great deal of theological substantiation), but secular societies cannot fall back on answers of that sort. Which doesn't make secular law any less desireable; it just means the old methods don't work. So what are the new methods?

Rose: So now I'm asking you directly, again, do you or don't you think the state should become involved in the issues I've laid out, to the best of my knowledge, as what typically appears before a court?

Without knowing what criteria the state is going to use in determining those issues, I couldn't give a confident answer.

Do you think parents should be able to choose to withhold insulin for a diabetic child, leading to diabetic shock and death, because of religion? Do you think parents should be permitted to withhold a necessary bowel surgery, again leading to death, because of religion?

Morally, no. Legally is a different matter, and until I feel confident that a secular institution like our judicial system isn't simply deciding intervention on the basis of reference to an implicit moral system that has no particular claim to greater validity than the religious morality of the parents, then the best I can say in defense of government intervention is that keeping the child alive errs on the side of moral caution.

Do you so demand that a clear structure be set (the only possible clear structure would be non-involvement) that you are willing to offer children born into such families as sacrifices to that desired clarity?

Not necessarily; but if preventing their deaths is a matter of morality, then my interpretation of the role of government in these matters is directly related to my suspicion that secular government is not the proper instrument for resolving moral issues. As I see it, the entire issue is clouded by two questions: 1) is it the place of secular government to resolve moral issues through a judicial apparatus? and 2) if a secular government is considered competant to legislate morality, then doesn't it follow that such a government will invariably legislate against any religious morality that conflicts with the secular morality adopted by the government?

Or are you willing to accept that courts have, and will continue to make, all kinds of decisions regarding the "best interests" of a child and should do so without a special accommodation to ideology, particularly religious ideology?

It doesn't strike me as terribly likely that they ever do so without accomodation to some ideology, and I find the idea that all of this functions (apart from any intent on the part of those involved) as a way of imposing one ideology over another fairly worrisome.

If those concerns seem like sleight-of-hand or tangential to what you percieve as the main issue here, I apologize.