Comments on: Ask Your Doctor About Hetracil

By: karen

karen — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 06:21:43 +0000

oops, I mean Albert. Mis-read who wrote that comment.

By: karen

karen — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 06:19:41 +0000

late to this party, linkjumping got me here, never been here before.

Julian, being gay isn’t the same thing as being the wrong gender for your biology. If you subjected a man who was gay but not transgendered to reassignment surgery, he’d a) be really mad and b) still be a gay man, just with a vagina now.

By: albert

albert — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:25:05 +0000

hey…why use Hetracil when we already have sexual ressignment surgery available to us?
Unless…it’s less expensive.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:26:39 +0000

I think you’ve got it backward: I’m not “straining” to show it is immoral. Rather, my initial reaction was that this was self-evidently immoral on its face, but I then laid out a series of reasons why that obvious-seeming conclusion might not hold after all. The point that parents “affect” their children’s idenities in various ways is one that I myself made, but it’s scarcely dispositive: The whole question is what methods of affecting a child’s identity are morally admissible. Providing an example for your child to follow is pretty much unobjectionable (assuming it’s not a monstrous example). Locking your kid in the basement for electroshock behavioral conditioning is both immoral and illegal. Various ways of exerting psychological and emotional pressure on a child might be legal but immoral, depending on the behavior the parent was trying to change. Obviously (I would think), the same might be true of different sorts of personality-altering medications. Lumping them together as ways of “accect[ing] their children’s identity” elides the cetnral question.

By: Niels Jackson

Niels Jackson — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:15:11 +0000

I’m not sure what you’re responding to. My only point is this: Given billions of years of evolution, people tend to prefer to reproduce themselves. They like to have children. And parents then like their own children to give them grandchildren. (This should hardly be news to anyone who knows parents of adult children. “When are the grandkids coming along, hint, hint?”)

Given this innate and compelling desire, it is hardly surprising that most parents are a bit dismayed to find out that their child is homosexual. For reasons that are too obvious to explain, a homosexual child means a drastically reduced chance that grandchildren will come about.

So if there was a way for the parents to ensure that their child was interested in heterosexual relationships (which are likely to lead to grandchildren), it shouldn’t be surprising that most or even all of the parents would take this path.

And so the overall point is: Straining to find an excuse to deem such conduct immoral is an uphill battle. Why bother? Saying that parents have no right to define their children’s identity is silly. Parents affect their children’s identity in a million different ways, and there’s no conceivable way that this could not be the case.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:14:53 +0000

OK, but I think now you’re acknowledging that the “evolutionary perspective” is morally irrelevant except insofar as it affects happiness (because evolution has hardwired us to have certain patterns of desire). So what you’re saying is that it’s OK because a child who’s made straight is likely to be happier (perhaps for evolutionary reasons). That strikes me as a lot more speculative than the parallel proposition about education, for one because general truths about evolutionary preference patterns aren’t instantiated the same way in each individual, but let’s suppose for the moment it’s true. There are plenty of ways one might increase someone’s happiness that would be immoral. Let’s say someone plans to forego having children so he can devote his full energy to, say, becoming a great artist or musician. You might think he’d be happier in the long run if he lost that desire and had kids. Let’s even say you know for sure this is the case. That wouldn’t make it right to reprogram the person–not as an adult, anyway. Our intuition might be different with children because we don’t think they have the same sort of robust claims to respect for their identity or autonomy, but not because anything you do to make someone happier is per se moral.

By: Niels Jackson

Niels Jackson — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 06:23:17 +0000

Julian –

I’m not saying that the parents are morally OBLIGED to administer the drug. But it is astonishing to me that anyone would consider it immoral for them to do so. From an evolutionary perspective, is it at all surprising that people want to maximize their chance of having natural-born grandchildren? Not hardly. So that’s one heavy blow against the notion that it is somehow morally suspect for parents to administer the drug. One might as well say that it is immoral for parents to give their children a good education, or a nice set of clothing, or anything that improves the children’s status in life.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:56:50 +0000

Gene-
Funny you should mention that; K.A. Appiah cites the same joke (or a variant thereof, anyway) in his book “The Ethics of Identity”–and I found myself thinking of it as I was writing the post.

Niels-
Because it’s silly to make individual decisions from an evolutionary perspective. Natural selection maximizes inclusive fitness over time; there’s no reason whatever that this ought to be the goal of any individual.

By: Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:23:02 +0000

OK, I posted a joke relevant to this discussion here.

By: Niels Jackson

Niels Jackson — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 04:33:20 +0000

Why on earth WOULDN’T parents be presumptively able to give their children a drug that cures a defective condition? On any evolutionary perspective, homosexuality is just as dysfunctional as hyperactivity or depression or suicidal thoughts. Parents regularly obtain prescriptions that help children deal with the latter conditions. Why not the former?