the only necessary argument against routine infant circumcision

Although I’ve lost track of the @replies, I recall that there was significant pushback from a couple of my followers, and so I wanted to say more about the issue.

Basically the argument offered at L’Hôte is this:

“In a free society, individuals are free to make their own choices. And they should particularly be free to make their own choices about their bodies. Any adult man is fully free to go get a circumcision if he wants one. (The fact that none do, outside of the coercion involved in religious conversion in order to get married, should tell you something.) Men who were circumcised as infants are denied that right. One position in this debate increases human autonomy and human liberty, and one restricts it. To oppose routine infant circumcision, you don’t need to be convinced by the arguments against circumcision! You only need to recognize the right of the individual to make his own choice and to have sovereign control over his own body.”

Now let’s recognize at the outset that even the seemingly clear call to give individuals freedom of choice regarding what happens to their own bodies cannot have as straightforward of implications as we might like. On any reasonable moral theory, parents have duties to care for their children, and this will inevitably involve doing things to those children’s bodies well before they are capable of giving informed consent.

Where to draw the line as to which parental actions are liberty-compatible and which are liberty-violating will be tricky and controversial. But to refuse to take a middle position, however subtle, is absurd, given that the remaining options are to claim either that all parental actions towards children are morally permissible, or that none are. The former treats children as mere property, the latter treats children as adults; neither is appropriate.

Using bodily integrity as a guide to which parental actions are morally permissible gives us a way to think about concrete cases, but it doesn’t readily solve them because all of the middle ground between the extreme positions is murky. What constitutes “liberty” is contestable, and even many of the most ardent supporters of individual liberty recognize that it is not the only value worth pursuing. The criteria of bodily integrity definitely suggests, however, that we are to err on the side of leaving children’s bodies alone.

I think it best to understand the permissibility of actions like circumcision as a function of two primary factors: the invasiveness of the proposed action, and what’s at stake in performing it, or not. So, take two examples that readily arise in this context: vaccinations and ear piercing. In the case of childhood vaccinations like that against polio, what’s at stake can be whether or not a child will become immune to a life-threatening disease. There is a risk that the vaccination will have adverse effects, even death, but we can roughly compare the threat of these to the threat of the disease in order to reach a rationally defensible decision regarding the vaccinations. The vaccination is somewhat invasive, being permanent and possibly dangerous, but there is sometimes alot at stake. So vaccinations, depending on the particulars of the vaccine, disease, and child, are often justifiable. The liberty to be free from nonconsensual medical procedures doesn’t mean anything to the victims of easily preventable childhood diseases, after all.

Take now the case of ear piercing. This procedure ranks low both in terms of invasiveness and what’s at stake. Most ear piercings will heal without incident if the piercee later decides (s)he doesn’t want them, but their value is simply cosmetic. Some cosmetic procedures, such as reconstructive surgery for this kid, may stand to dramatically improve children’s current and future quality of life but ear piercing?… not so much. So I would say in this case that parents can and should err on the side of bodily integrity by refraining from piercing their children’s ears until at least such time when the children say that they want the piercings (they may later change their minds, but anyway so do adults). This implication of the bodily integrity view seems ridiculous to some, who take for granted the permissibility of ear piercing and would discount any theory prohibiting it. However, I hasten to add that since ear piercing is minimally invasive and generally reversible, parents do their children no gross wrong in having them pierced without consent.

I understand that the vast majority of parents love their children and have no interest in doing them harm. Of these parents, those who chose routine infant circumcision do so for at least comprehensible reasons: faith, culture, tradition, cleanliness, whatever. But, when bodily integrity is at stake, the bar of justification for parental action is set much higher than these reasons can reach. We do not generally accept religion or culture as properly justifying what would otherwise count as the physical abuse of children, and the procedure by many accounts lacks significant hygienic value. Bottom line: routine infant circumcision — like childhood vaccination — is invasive and irreversible, but — unlike childhood vaccination– is without equally as weighty values at stake. Considerations of religion and culture may explain why so many parents do in fact chose routine male circumcision, and they explain why so few men subjected to it feel victimized, but they do not morally justify the practice.

The value of education is not purely as an investment. Education also provides some degree of consumption value.

This observation kind of throws a wrench in human capital theory, because it will be difficult to decide whether certain forms of education spending were worth it in the absence of information about the value that that education had to students in virtue of merely consuming it, apart from any job they subsequently got or whatever. The consumption value of education is subjective, and will vary widely from person to person. But the fact that education’s consumption value is difficult, or impossible, to observe and measure does not give us good reason to ignore it.

The consumption value of education came to my mind frequently as I recently read “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Throughout the book, the authors stress that college students today emphasize the social value of college to an extreme degree, some of them going so far as to say that the relationships that they form and experience in college are significantly more important than anything they may learn in the classroom. Unfortunately, gaining extensive social experience in college is, to some extent, at odds with performing well academically: for instance the authors show that, while participating in a fraternity or sorority may improve academic performance somewhat, studying in groups is less effective than studying alone. And, because our time is finite, hours spent socializing are mostly hours spent not studying, reading, or writing, activities which occupy less of college students’ time today than in the recent past, apparently to their detriment.

Now, socializing at college may itself have some investment value, particularly at elite colleges (i.e., “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”). But college students engage in many social activities simply because they are enjoyable. As such, social opportunities and experiences constitute much of the consumption value of going to college, and students self-report that this is a very important aspect of college life to them. Yet, practically daily now there is a story in every major news outlet, describing the shock, frustration, anger, and sadness of college graduates upon realizing that they are unable to trade their college credentiala for a high-paying job, or even any job (here’s an example from the NYT).

My assessment of the situation: Stuff doesn’t acquire investment value just because you want it to. Students and parents realize, on some level, that the value of college consists to a large extent in consumption. This is why they speak frequently of the college “experience” and make college decisions taking things like sports, dorms, and dining hall food into account. But then, when it’s time for the degree to hit the fan and for interested parties to see what kind of investment value that expensive education really had, they are unable to bite the bullet and admit that college is greatly about consumption.

Notice that another aspect of the consumption value of education consists in students’ simply enjoying attending classes (your author is the queer sort of creature who often enjoys it immensely) and partaking in other academic experiences available only through institutionalized education. This should be kept in mind when we think about students’ decisions to attend graduate school and pursue careers in academia, despite the dismal job prospects. Many of the requisite educational expenditures should be understood as (maybe) overpaying for educational experiences, rather than as failed investments.

And here’s a quick but thoughtful critique of that summary over at the Quick and the Ed. Its author dispels two common criticisms of the value-added analysis:

1. We shouldn’t criticize value-added analysis simply on the basis that it shows many teachers’ effectiveness as shifting substantially from year to year. It’s possible that teacher effectiveness *does* shift from year to year, for whatever reason.
2. Because this particular method of value-added analysis uses individual students’ own previous scores as a baseline for measuring progress, it does not penalize teachers for having slower students in their classes (at least, the criticism must be more subtle, as a commenter suggests).

Still, the most interesting thing I’ve read on the subject remains cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham’s “3 key factors in teacher evaluation (beyond the hype of value added).” According to him, the key factors are:

1. Figuring out the goals of schooling, and only then crafting assessments to measure teachers’ success at attaining those goals. It’s backwards to assume that whatever we are able to test or assess must be the goal of schooling.
2. Taking into account the ages of students, recognizing that responsibility for students’ learning probably falls more fully on teachers of early elementary schoolers than on those of high schoolers.
3. Remaining cognizant of the limitations of any evaluation system in thoughtfully choosing criteria for firing teachers that balance the costs of keeping bad teachers with the costs of firing good ones.

Each of Willingham’s three key factors gets at what is essentially the major problem with value-added analysis: its results, even if accurate, lead us away from philosophical questions about education and teaching, the answers to which have important practical and policy implications. So I want to elaborate on them, with that in mind.

The goals of schooling are far from noncontroversial. Although most people would agree that proficiency in math and reading are amongst its goals, there is significant disagreement as to what constitutes proficiency and how it ranks in importance as compared to other goals of schooling (character development, socialization, preparation for the workforce — which may or may not require proficiency in math and reading, etc). It’s a mistake to establish teacher evaluation policy based on value-added analyses without having clarified at least some of the goals of schooling and their relative importances. As should be obvious, this value judgment can’t be generated from the value-added analysis itself. Rather, it will be outcome of philosophical discussion regarding the moral value of character development/socialization/preparation for the workforce, the best kind of life for a human to lead, how these responsibilities should be shared between schools and families, etc.

Willingham’s second point, about the ages of students and their respective levels of responsibility for their own learning, also raises moral questions. The discourse surrounding value-added analysis has seemingly taken entirely for granted that teachers ought to be doing all that they can to raise students’ test scores, regardless of their ages. This stands in need of defense. While we may be reluctant to blame 7 or 8 year old students for failing to learn math and reading, it may be appropriate to blame 16 and 17 year olds for failing to progress in those subjects. Some high school teachers may manage to raise teenagers’ test scores significantly, and they will come out looking better than other teachers in the value-added analysis. But, even if raising students’ test scores were of the most pressing importance in their early years, other functions may be more important for teachers to engage in at the high school level — maybe helping students to think about their future educational and career plans, and taking a more laissez faire approach in order to begin acclimating them to the “real world.”

So this ties back into the previous point, about the goals of schooling. If raising math and reading test scores is, literally, the one and only proper goal of schooling, then all teachers should be expected to do so each year. However, there may be many other goals of schooling that are more difficult to test. Teachers will need to make tradeoffs in pursuing these various goals, depending not only on their relative importances but based on what their students are like. Maybe, in some particular class, some of the students are ok at math but have social difficulties. Assuming that social development is one of the goals of schooling, the teacher might reasonably decide to devote more time to group work than to math drills. As a result, the students might progress more slowly in math than in previous years, while having made strides socially that do not show up on any test.

The third key factor, about criteria for firing teachers, raises even more moral questions. There are costs associated both with keeping bad teachers and with firing good teachers. If you keep a bad teacher, many students in his or her classes will fail to learn as much as they could have learned with a better teacher, negatively impacting their future educational outcomes and maybe even significantly harming their life prospects. If you fire a good (or at least adequate) teacher, you unduly harm that teacher and demoralize her colleagues (and the replacement teacher might be an unknown quantity who turns out to be worse). We might privilege students’ well-being over teachers, erring on the side of firing, or we might privilege teachers’ well-being in order to show respect to what many consider one of the most important professions. The methods of economics may tell us how to set teacher firing criteria so as to be financially cost effective, but that’s not necessarily the end of the story from the moral perspective.

None of this to say that value-added analysis is “bad,” or has no legitimate purpose. Its results might be quite accurate and useful to some degree, as is perhaps the case in this Los Angeles situation. But we need to realize how it does — or doesn’t — square with our conception of what education, and teaching, ought to be (and, if we lack such a conception, we need first to develop one). At the end of the day, value-added analysis is a descriptive/evaluative tool, and not a normative one.

You know that song “Santa Clause is Coming to Town?” It contains the lyric: “so be good for goodness sake.” But this is clearly inconsistent with the content of the song, and it drives me crazy.

Being good for goodness’ sake means that you should be good because it has intrinsic value for you, or value not as a means to any other end. But the song is all about how Santa is watching you, and how you won’t get presents if you are bad. This suggests that being good has merely extrinsic or instrumental value, value as a means to some end (the presents).

So, Christmas carolers, if you want to teach your kids that being good has intrinsic value, UR DOIN IT WRONG.

And to all a good night.

In the course I’m TAing this semester, one of the topics we discussed is the nature of value. In virtue of what does anything have value, or what is the source or cause of things being valuable? Most of the students have never taken philosophy before, and it seems that many are pre-theoretical subjectivists about value. Very roughly, subjectivism is the view that things get their value from people valuing them. The main alternative to subjectivism is objectivism about value. Objectivism, again roughly, is the view that all or some things just are valuable, independent of anyone’s beliefs, attitudes, choices, etc.

So, in the class, we do this thought experiment where the professor taps students’ intuitions by asking them about the status of a beautiful planet containing a well-functioning ecosystem. By stipulation, no one knows that this planet exists. Is it better that the planet exists than if it didn’t exist? If you had the power and choice to bring such a planet into existence at no cost to yourself and then would forget about it forever, do you have any reason to choose to create the planet?

You’re supposed to get the intuition that you should create the planet. The bigger conclusion to draw is that it’s at least possible that the planet, and maybe other things, could just be valuable, period, regardless of whether anyone cares or even knows about them. Whether subjectivism or objectivism about value is the better theory, all things considered, is a separate question.

But, when asked: “Is it possible that something could be valuable even if no one values it?,” quite a few students, presupposing subjectivism, say no — it is only possible for things to get value from people valuing them. This is false. What they mean is that it is only plausible to think that things get value from people valuing them.

To correct this, you have to teach the student what “possible” means, philosophically speaking. And before you know it, you’re talking about alternate possible worlds, and the laws of physics, and mathematical truths, and it all goes downhill from there. While I always do my best to help students in this sort of case, I can’t help but conclude that the way critical thinking is handled by conventional educational institutions is just far too little, far too late.

Well, I suppose that depends on who you are. Some people blog to make money on advertising, some people network with business contacts or publicize themselves, some people are looking to share photography, etc.

I am a graduate student in philosophy and education who hopes to make a career, not to mention a well-ordered and successful life, out of the clear-headed exploration of ideas. Preparing for this kind of career and life requires a great deal of practice in reading widely, thinking hard, and then saying something coherent, novel, plausible and interesting about what you’ve read.

It seems to me that blogging provides a good forum for practicing those skills. Of course, one could read and write privately, without publishing to the web or any other place. But I think that having some readers makes one more accountable for engaging in the reading/thinking/writing process. Knowing that one’s writing will be read provides extra incentive to get something written in the first place and, moreover, to write something coherent, novel, plausible and interesting. Comments from others can give you some idea whether you are fulfilling those objectives.

The main concern I have heard raised about blogging is that it is somehow related to being narcissistic. This is a potentially serious objection to the practice. Narcissism is what you would call a “thick” concept. That is, “narcissistic” has both descriptive and evaluative components. First, it describes that a person is rather self-absorbed or has an inflated sense of self-importance. Second, the term in its ordinary usage passes a negative judgment on this personal quality. Competent english speakers know that “narcissistic” has a negative connotation, with narcissism sometimes even elevated to the point of psychopathology.

This brings me to an important distinction frequently made in ethics. Some ethical theories focus on particular actions — whether they are right or wrong, morally permissible or impermissible, when considered alone. This would include standard act utilitarianism and Kantianism, if you happen to know anything about those. But, other ethical theories focus on the more general question of how to live, or what kind of person you should try to become. This includes Aristotelian virtue ethics, which I’m sure I will discuss again later.

So, take the case at hand — blogging. The act-focused ethical perspective would have us ask: is blogging morally obligatory? merely permissible? or even morally wrong? I think this question is kind of uninteresting. An ethical theory that held that blogging (in ordinary circumstances) is either obligatory or outright wrong would be suspect, in my opinion. Pretheoretically, it just seems obvious that blogging is morally permissible, that is, morally optional. You can either not blog, or blog, and be in the moral clear either way.

The more interesting question is — what place can blogging possibly have in living the kind of life that is good for a person? Or, what place can it have in becoming a better person? This is where the narcissism criticism gets some bite. If blogging does corrupt the quality of one’s life or the quality of one’s character, then, from the moral perspective, it should be avoided.

There are two available interpretations for the original objection.

The first is that one should not blog, because people who are already narcissistic tend to blog, and so one would be revealing a vice of character in doing so. I’m not sure what the evidence for this is. Surely there are some narcissistic people who blog, but with the huge amount of blogs that exist, there have to be counterexamples to the objector’s conjecture. And, even if it were true that people who are already narcissistic tend to blog, the solution to the problem would not necessarily be to refrain from blogging; the solution would be to work on one’s narcissism. The narcissism, after all, is the inherently bad thing, not blogging.

The second interpretation of the objection is that blogging makes people more narcissistic than they were before. This, I think, is the more plausible of the two interpretations. It’s easy to see why someone would make this objection. Personal blogs do often seem to focus on aspects of their author’s lives, even minutiae that are unlikely to be interesting to others, and sometimes contain self-aggrandizing content, dramatic plays for readers’ attention, and the like. But, the objection is overgeneralized. A mature blogger who has a healthy perspective on herself and her place on the internet, let alone in the world on the whole, needn’t fall into these unproductive and maybe even psychologically injurious blogging habits. In fact, getting feedback from readers on one’s thoughts and one’s work could just as easily be humbling as ego-inflating. I know that when I read the blogs of really smart people, I realize more than ever that I have a long way to go in my education, and I’m under no illusion that my blog will automatically be of equal or greater importance than theirs. But remember that every blog was once in its infancy. People learn best by doing and, as I observed before, blogs are a good opportunity to practice academic skills. It’s little wonder, then, that so many thoughtful people are giving it a try.  Some of them are probably narcissistic, but that’s preexisting. If their narcissism shows through in their blogs, then either thoughtful commenters will tear them to bits, or almost no one will read their blog.

Thus, I don’t see any compelling reasons to think there is any necessary connection between being or becoming narcissistic and blogging. As such, blogging can have a place in the kind of life that is balanced and good for a person. Beyond being morally permissible, blogging can have some value, particularly to those interested in sharing and developing ideas. It can be a good way of creating a program of reading, writing and discussing regularly, in a fairly low-stakes environment.

So, with all that said, I’m giving blogging another try. Thanks for coming along for the ride.