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Rose: Mad, does this mean that you have no intention of addressing the issues this discussion raises?

In my own way, I have been, but I realize that leads to a number of tangents that probably aren't directly related to the chapter this thread is about, so I'm willing to back off. If you're asking whether or not I have any intention of addressing the issues you guys have emphasized, the answer is, I don't know enough about the subject to comment intelligently. If someone wants to give me a summary of the topics involved, I can give it a try, but I'd mostly be spouting bullshit if I really tried to engage some of what you're talking about. I'd even be inclined to look at some secondary sources if you could recommend some. But since I haven't been able to track down a copy of the book (the library copy isn't due back until next month), and don't feel inclined to bother with mail ordering, it looks like my information is going to have to be second hand or not at all.

Outside of condoning or condemning best interest determinations for dependents, do you think such determinations should give religion special accommodation?

What I think is, that there is a potential conflict of interest between a Constitution that protects freedom of religion and a society structured (whether intentionally or not) so as to limit actual religious practice or belief. I'd rather "special accomodation" not be the best available solution to that conflict, but I'm not sure that there are any viable alternatives.

garicker: This discussion has wandered rather far away from the specific question of whether a parent's religious beliefs ought to be allowed to place the life of a minor child at risk.

I recognize that, and I won't feel offended if you decide to remove any point of interest to another thread -- most likely in the politics or religion forums.

The issue involves religious beliefs specifically because that is what the book under consideration is about and that also seems to be the only area in which the state seems willing to tolerate an exception. A parent who simply refused necessary medical treatment for their minor child because of some other reason probably would find themselves in a heap of trouble, legally speaking.

Assuming that this portion of your post is tolerably germaine to the chapter, I do wonder if maybe religion isn't the only exception. It seems to me as though reference to "culture" might also serve as a possible exception, although I'm not immediately familiar with any particular case in which that was so. For example, might not a family belonging to a given culture withhold Western-styled medical care in favor of something more traditional to their culture, as, say, homeopathic medicine? Apart from the strictly moral and religious issues that arise in the case of a Christian Science family, does the state accomodate for differences in opinion about the efficacy of Western medical technique?

I think that's wrong. I'm not sure what you think about it. You seem to prefer to talk around the issue than to address it directly.

I'm not working from the same assumptions that you and Rose are working from, and in the case, the difference appears to be philosophical (specifically political philosophy) as opposed to religious. If you can address the concerns that I raised, then we can talk about whether or not it is wrong for the government to accomodate for religiously motivated departures in child care. If trying to lay a foundation in political theory is "talking around the issue", then I'd prefer to tal around the issue a little before I get to the specifics.

As to the more general question of how we, as a society, make such determinations, I think the best answer is the one I've already given. There is no new approach. Human societies have always dealt with such questions on the basis of biological imperatives, evolutionary history and social negotiation.

I think the novelty of modern approaches is likely masked by the generality of your terminology -- so much could be implied by the tripartate shema of "biological imperatives, evolutionary history and social negotiation" as to make the terms in themselves fairly unhelpful in addressing the question -- but this is one of those topics that we'd probably be better continuing, if your interest permits, in another thread.

After all, human morality had its beginnings long before either idea existed.

On what evidence do you base that claim? I'm not arguing that theism predates morality, but that particular assumption does seem to me particularly unsubstantiated.

Rose: If you really are not able to answer the question of whether religion should be accommodated in a way that other ideologies are not with regard to medical treatment for dependents, without fully discussing the virtue of current judicial "best interest" determinations for dependents, then I understand.

I took "best interest" determinations to be central to the courts justification for intervention. If that's not the case, then I'll gladly reconsider my position on the matter. As it stands, it looks to me as though the question shouldn't be that whether or not religion should be accomodated, but that of how, precisely, religion is taken to be at variance with the aims of secular government. I can see how it might be interpreted thus, but I'd like to know precisely how it's being interpeted by the courts to do so.

Although, Mad, I urge you to find some sort of practical application for this discussion.

I can't find a practical application for others. It's of interest to me because it coincides with a number of other personal interests, but it's probably not worth your while to try to trace the biographical lines that lead to those interests.

garicker: Probably one of the best summaries of research on the origins of human morality that I have read recently is Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil.

Having read Shermer before, I shudder at the thought of reading more by him. He has an ideological agenda, similar to that of Dawkins or Dennett, that makes me suspect the bias of any of his interpretations or conclusions. Personally, I'd think a writer like Richard Wright a more lucid and competant source of information on the biological roots of morality.

That said, I think most authors following that line of thought have erred in conflating morality as a system of beliefs with patterns of bahavior that are assimilable to morality. That a person might instinctually tend to act altrusitically towards other individuals by virtue of their degree of kinship or so forth is certainly an interesting theory in its own right, and we can certainly see evidence that would tend to confirm it. But it does not necessarily have any bearing on the fact that we, in turn, codify such behavior into a system of concepts and imperative language, nor that we consider those codes in making rational, voluntaristic choices. More to the point, the fact that may behave "morally" due to genetic dispositions does little to explain why we should feel the need to abstract those behaviors into cultural forms -- if anything, the fact that we do so by nature would seem to negate the need to impose those behaviors culturally. I put "morally" into quotations makes because, when it comes right down to it, I (and I think this is probably true of most people) don't see any reason to treat instinctual behavior as though it had, de facto, any positive moral content. Behavior is only moral if your decision to behave in conformity with morality was made in reference to morality. Otherwise, we could say that a pig who eats its young is immoral (and example made vivid by Steinbeck's "To a God Unknown") or that an soldier ant who protects its queen from an invading spider is acting morally.

Beyond which, the degree to which theories which have sought to base all moral behavior in genetic evolutionary theory seem, to me, to have the fault of relying too heavily on Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". Needless to say, I have some theoretical problems with the actual thesis Dawkins raises, mostly in terms of the way the retrospective, statistical viewpoint he posits as the most rational way to view natural selection and the best basis for defining the gene as a unit tends towards a distorting interpretive effect.

Many animal species display behaviors that are labeled "moral" in humans.

Which I'm more than willing to admit. What seems decisive to me, though, is that other animal species apparantly have not developed a morality from those behaviors. So pointing out that morality has biological antecedents does nothing to explain how we, first as a species, developed morality in general, and, then as distinct cultures and populations, determine the content of specific instances of morality.

So all of that leads me to conclude that human morality had its beginnings long before we had ideas about things like gods and religions.

Your survey doesn't seem, to me, to indicate as much. It certainly indicates that certain behaviors have their origin earlier than the development of religion, and even that they took on instinctually patterned forms before hand. But as I've argued above, morality isn't simply a pattern of behavior -- it's a codification of concepts and imperatives that form a reference point for voluntary action. We could even suppose that morality as such is a figment -- that no humans actually make decisions about their behavior in reference to such mental constructs -- without illuminating how those constructs first arose.

I don't think it is a different subject. When I talk about laws being made in reference to morality, I'm talking about laws being made by reference to a moral code -- that is, culturally specific expressions of imperatives and proscriptive behaviors, rather than from any recognition of the instinctual patterns human behavior may take. I have very little problem with the concept of drafting secular law from a descriptive view of human behavior, I just don't think it actually happens all that often; to suggest that secular law should be drafted in consideration of the observation that humans will tend to act violently in defense of their close relations doesn't strike me as necessarily involving morality. To draft law in consideration of a moral code that proscribes particular forms of behavior in defense of one's close relations -- for example, laws that take into account Middle Eastern moral traditions of blood vengeance -- is a different matter.

For the purposes of discussing the impact of morality on legislation, I don't see how the biological roots of morality is terribly pertinent. Lawmakers generally do not take into consideration the speculative accounts of how natural selection censured certain non-moral behaviors. They are, however, likely to consider the culturally imparted codes of behavior that have informed their own moral beliefs. If it the point needs clarification: I was not asking about the origin of morality.

What's more pertinent are the specifics of how particular cultures develop and codify morals, and the specifics of how a legislative institution makes reference to that code in drafting its own proscriptive documents. That is not, so far as I can tell, primarily a biological affair, but rather a cultural one. If that's a subject you have no interest in broaching, fine; but unless you can illuminate for me how specifically the work of bioevolutionary theorists relates to the process of drafting law in reference to moral traditions, I'd say it's less a matter of disagreement than one of talking about two related topics with differing degrees of pertinence to this tangent's point of origin.

JulianTheApostate: In my mind, a major goal underlying government legislation and policies should be reducing human suffering, or in other words, serving the best interest of the citizens.

Again, I'm not sure how you'd substantiate a policy that states that a government ought to be in the business of reducing suffering without out an at least implicit reference to moral premises. That may not sound problematic to you, but I think that Garicker and Rose have taken issue with the idea that covert or semi-conscious reference to a moral scheme is at root in determinations of "best interest", and I think it raises concerns in the context of determining the secularity of a judicial position.

In that issue, three moral concerns collided: freedom of religion, parental rights, and the well-being of the child.

I've suggested in a preceding post that at least two of those issues can be resolved -- at least as matters of judicial practice -- apart from reference to a moral scheme.

garicker: You then argued that my conclusion wasn't supported by my survey.

Actually, what I argued was that morality itself is the codification of prescriptions for behavior, and that your survey didn't really touch on that subject. What you talked about were instinctual tendencies towards limited forms of altruistic behavior -- but to my knowledge, no biologist has offered much in the way of explanation as to how instinctual tendencies have determined the content or form of moral expressions. There's a gap here that most people are ignoring, that between the patterning of behavior and the codification of prescriptions. Even if we take it for granted that limited forms of altrusitic behavior (and I say "limited" because biologists have mostly considered such behavior as expanding outward from close kinship groups, with the broadest forms of altruism arising mostly as a cultural extension of the biological impulse) are firmly rooted in evolved biological conditions, that doesn't explain why an imperative for altruism should be taken up by culture and embodied in the codification we call morality, nor does it explain why certain forms of behavior aren't, nor does it explain the variations in morality from culture to culture. And most of those points are germaine to the question I originally posed.

If you don't want to engage in a discussion of this sort, I've got nothing to say against that decision. I just don't want you to drop out because you think I've misunderstood your points, or have willfully misinterpreted them in order to support my own position (which, incidentally, you don't yet know because I haven't explained it).

And now you tell me you weren't asking about the origins of human morality at all?

I wasn't. What I was asking about -- and I think a review of the thread will confirm this -- are the ways in which particular cultures develop the moralities specific to them, and the ways in which they negotiate those moralities as reference points for legal (and other kinds of) institutions.

Honestly, I don't know why you'd think I was asking so general a question as why humans have morality in the first place. What would be the practical import of that question in relation to the subject of this thread? Maybe I relied too much on context to convey precisely what I was asking, but it seems obvious to me that, as we were talking about drafting legislation in reference to established forms of morality, and the ways in which such legislation mediates between the claims and complaints of diverse moralities within a polyphonic society, modern practice and the role of morality in society and culture would be more immediately pertinent than some long-view of the prehistoric origins of morality.

Be that as it may, now I really am finished.

That's a shame, and I'm sorry if you feel that this has been a waste of time.

Rose: No the court's reason for intervention is the state's interest in the life and welfare of its dependents.

Okay, then let's try to backtrack a little. Two questions, one moving forward, and one just to clarify how we got off track:
1) How is the state's interest in the life and welfare of its dependents determined (in specific cases) or defined (in general terms)? And 2) if "best interest" determinations aren't really at issue in cases like this, why were they brought up in the first place, and what part, if any, do they play?

In order to serve these dependents, the courts determine what is in the best interest of the child.

That seems a little roundabout to me. How does that differ from simply making the decision according to best interest determinations? The "state's interest" seems like it could easily be a rhetorical book end for best interest determinations.

Because you take issue with the secular government determining "best interest" for dependents, you seem unwilling to respond to whether or not religion should be accommodated in a way that other ideologies are not.

Again, the question of how "best interests" are determined seems, to me, crucial, because it seems likely to me that such determinations are made in reference to some other ideology or ideologies. If that's the case, then it isn't a matter of the courts refusing to accomodate for an ideology (religion), but rather preference for another, mostly unstated ideology. That, in large part, is why I'm sceptical of best interest determinations. The question of what makes the government more competent in assessing best interests is closely related to the question of why one ideology should be given preference over another. If it's arbitrary that a child should be born to parents who subscribe to an ideology that eschews medical intervention, then it is equally arbitrary that it should be born in a government that legislates in reference to any given contrasting ideology.

Of course, those concerns would be largely mitigated if it could be demonstrated that the judicial system did not make best interest determinations in reference to an unspecified ideology. Garicker (I believe) has asserted that all legislation is related to the moral preconceptions of the social context, which is why I embarked on that avenue -- morality implies (or is a form of) ideology. So if Garicker is right about that, then the answer to the first part of my question is that the judicial system does privilege some unspecified ideology, and so-called unique accomodations to religious ideology are better viewed as concessions to the fact that there is no monolithic, distinctively "American" ideology. Which, to some degree, would make the issue one of representation.

It is a necessary, accepted-and as far as my experience has shown a useful, though not flawless-practice. I see immense value in this method of serving the state's interest in protecting the welfare of dependents.

Actually, I have no problem with that, so long as it's recognized that the interest actually being served is that of the state. To that end, I find the term "best interest" more worrisome than the actual practice. I have yet to see an argument to the end that the state is actually competant to determine what the best interest for any particular individual would be, apart from either a) a statement on the part (and not the behalf) of the individual in question, or b) the assumption of an ideology that may or may not adequately represent what the individual would deem its own best interests. It's much more practical and reasonable to suppose the government capable of determining what its own best interest would be, and serving that end. Admitting as much, and structuring future decisions on that premise, would at least cut down on the inconsistency and confusion that arises when such determinations are made in reference to vaguely outlined or entirely unstated principles contributing to the notion of "best interest". That lack of specificity is how I suppose reference to unstated ideology sneaks into judicial practice.