I take it that ethical reasoning involves reasoning. This claim doesn't look contentious, but it has implications that do seem surprising, at least to me.When we reason about a subject we sometimes miscalculate. A mistake in our reasoning leads us to a conclusion that does not follow from our assumptions.
Not only do we miscalculate, we are often led astray by "common-sense intuition." When one studies economics, say, some part of one's education consists of replacing one's everyday intuition with one more appropriate to the subject at hand. Like other subjects, economics has its catalogue of "classical fallacies" – questions to which the right answer turned out to be surprising.
So, too, may we miscalculate in our ethical reasoning. In other words, some of our ethical views may be demonstrably wrong.
Now that does seem strange. If I am told that a view I hold in economics is wrong; well, economics is tricky. I can see how my intuition might be mistaken. For example, it's on the surface plausible that by limiting the number of hours per week that each person can work we can thereby increase the number of jobs available. But, in fact, that is a fallacy – the "lump of labour fallacy." Fine, I'm a grownup, I can change my mind.
But ethical views are stickier. Pick any ethical view you hold strongly – say, that infanticide is morally wrong – and imagine being told that you were wrong in holding this view [1]. Your first rejoinder is not likely to be, "Huh. Well, that was surprising." More likely it will be, "Well, that's just your opinion, and you're clearly bonkers." But if our ethical views are to have any generality at all – to be, in short, useful – not all of our views can be axiomatic: some of them must be deductions from other, more fundamental views. (Otherwise, how would we reason about new circumstances?)
That being so, some of our ethical beliefs are likely to be wrong – in the sense that we have made a mistake in thinking through the issues. It would be shocking if they were not. And it might be worth thinking about how they could be wrong and what we should do about it.
A few words about what I don't mean here. Reasonable people can and do disagree about facts that are relevant to ethical reasoning. For example, you may believe that earthworms feel pain; I may believe that they don't. Whether earthworms do or do not feel pain is (presumably!) a matter of fact which must be determined empirically.
And reasonable people can and do disagree on what ethical principles are to be taken simply as given. You may take it as a principle that certain states of affairs are good in themselves, whereas I may start from the assumption that a state of affairs is good solely to the extent that it increases happiness. We cannot decide empirically between these two viewpoints: we can only chose one or the other and reason therefrom.
But it does seem strange to think that we might be in error about our ethical views because of a calculational mistake.
Well, fine; how then might we be wrong? What would such a mistake look like?
Here's a little argument about a certain ethical issue. I'm hoping that you'll disagree intuitively with the conclusion but agree with each step in the argument. Then we'd know what it looks like to be wrong about some ethical view.
In the UK it used to be the case that sperm donation was anonymous – donors could not later be traced by their biological children. More recently, the law changed so that donation is no longer anonymous. The argument was made that people whose fathers were sperm donors had a right to know the identity of their biological father. They had this right because they had a wish to understand "where they came from," to have a "sense of identity," and that this wish had sufficient force to be a right. Here, for example, is Stephen Ladyman, health minister at the time of the change in the law, quoted by the BBC:
"We think it is right that donor conceived people should be able to have information should they want it about their genetic origins and that is why we have changed the law on donor anonymity."On the face of it, there's a lot to be said for this argument. People do indeed express a wish to know the identity of their biological fathers because they wish to know "where I came from." And that wish to understand one's identity seems pretty understandable and sincere. And sincere wishes should presumably be at least considered in one's ethical reasoning.
Now, it could be argued that the right of the father to remain anonymous must also be considered. It might be argued that, conversely, it is good, all things considered, for the offspring to be aware of health problems related to their genetic makeup. And it might be argued that one could learn a lot about oneself by learning about people who are genetically related to you, and that that's a good thing too. These are all relevant points. But a distinction appears to exist between knowing information about one's genetic father and knowing the identity of one's genetic father. And I'd like to focus here just on the expressed wish of the offspring to know "where I came from" by way of learning the identity of the father. Whatever you think about the broader arguments, it seems hard to deny that this wish is something that should, at least, be taken into account in the moral calculus of the problem.
Yet I'd like to try to deny just that. I claim that this wish should indeed be discounted, for very strong reasons. (If you are the child of a sperm donor, bear with me here. I might, after all, be wrong.)
I claim that the wish should be discounted because there is nothing that is the object of the wish. It is as if I had said: "I have a right to know the identity of my biological father because I wish to know pink banana elephants." I may well sincerely believe that I wish to know pink banana elephants; but since that wish is meaningless it cannot be part of a valid argument whose conclusion is that I have right to know the identity of my biological father.
Well, now I owe you an argument that there is nothing that is knowing "where I come from". Here is that argument (although you're not going to like it). Suppose that for the purposes of artificial insemination some sperm were artificially created, by generating a random sequence of DNA (within certain parameters to ensure that the result is human). Such a thing, I presume, is possible in principle, if not yet in practice. For a person, X, created from this sperm it seems clear that there would be no such thing as "their biological father." There was no father, just a made up sequence of DNA.
But now, suppose a search was undertaken of the entire population and it transpired that, just by chance, a certain man, Y, had a genome identical to the randomly generated one. (Unlikely, I grant you; but, again, not impossible.) Is there, now, a right for X to know the identity of Y on the grounds that Y is "where X came from"? Surely there is not. Y had nothing whatsoever to do with the "origins" of X. If there is any meaning to the phrase "wherever they came from" it cannot apply to Y.
But this situation is functionally identical to the situation in which the sperm was originally donated by Y. I conclude that there cannot be a meaning to "where X came from" in that case, either. Mere identity of genome does not constitute a causal path from one person to another. One might think that it does, but this is simply mistaken.
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Two concluding thoughts. First, just to be clear: it seems to me there are lots of good reasons to study the relations, if any, between a person's genotype and phenotype, and to make that information available. If having a certain gene suggests earlier testing for heart disease, then presumably it is a good thing to know that fact. I'm not suggesting that information about one's "genetic neighbours" is not a meaningful thing. I am suggesting that there is no such thing as "where I am from," at least not simply in virtue of genetic similarity.
Second, and finally, there's the question of what, if anything, to do about all this. I think one's reaction to the argument above is likely to be to pick holes in it, especially if one's intuition is that the conclusion is wrong. This being philosophy, not physics, there's no experiment one can do to settle the matter, so argument is all there is. Typically, one proceeds by inventing, ad hoc, a new moral principle that pushes the argument in one's preferred direction. (That's unfair, of course. What it feels like one is doing is uncovering a moral principle that had previously not been made explicit.)
But it seems to me that this reaction is different to what one's reaction would be if one were morally neutral about the conclusion. Generally, it's a good thing to minimise the number of moral principles. As an experiment, I think it's worthwhile running with arguments that lead to strange conclusions, at least to see where they go.
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[1] See, eg, Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
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