Tantamount to Disbelief -- A reader of Arab News asks, with more than merely academic interest, whether anal sex is indeed forbidden(scroll down) by Islam.

The author of the peculiar theological advice column (also touching on whether to punish a teenage girl who prays during her period) finishes his reply by writing:

Besides, several Hadiths confirm this in very clear terms. A man came to the Prophet and asked him whether it was permissible to have sex with his wife from behind. The Prophet answered in the affirmative. As the man was on his way out, the Prophet called him back and said: “Consider what I have said: from behind, but in the front.” I suppose nothing could be clearer than this. In another Hadith, the Prophet mentions ten sinful actions that are tantamount to disbelief. One of these is “anal sexual intercourse with women.” I suppose no expression of prohibition could be stronger than describing an action as tantamount to disbelief.

Now, I'm fascinated by the fact that the Prophet had a considered, undoubtedly God-endorsed, opinion on the propriety of doggy style versus backdoor. I grew up in a church that relies on ongoing prophesy, but the messages that came through the God-phone were always so general. Prophet Wallace B. Smith thankfully never had anything to say about how to get busy. Probably you could rank religions from best to worst in terms of the invasive specificity of their moral commands. (Taoism rules!) Anyway, its always good to be reminded of the stupidity and credulousness of which we humans are capable when in a religious mode. And I would encourage everyone to express their disbelief explicitly, or, if you wish, through actions merely tantamount to disbelief.

Shut Up! -- Helicopter circling College Park. It's 2 am. Looking for sniper? Go to bed.

On the Eve of Personhood -- Eve Tushnet comments on some points of mine (and Julian), thusly:

I think Julian is ignoring the difference between valuing individuals in a rational species, and valuing currently-existing rational mentalities. Will Wilkinson does this too, actually, when he accuses anti-cloners of assigning metaphysical status to a tangle of DNA. (Later, here, Wilkinson conflates not-gonna-be-rational-again individuals with pre-rational individuals. OTOH, he posted more complete notes than Julian did, so he wins in that regard.) The important thing about DNA is not that it happens to be a clump of human DNA--so is a toenail, or a foot, or a cancer, or a corpse. The important thing about the human DNA in, specifically, an embryo, is that it marks the presence of a living human individual. It is that individual whom I value. Individual rational beings go through more and less rational stages; our rationality develops; thus there is a period before we are rational. If I came across aliens who had rational and pre-rational stages, I would value these individual alien lives as I value individual, developing human lives.

First, I didn't conflate "not-gonna-be-rational-again individuals with pre-rational individuals." Regarding the brain-damage case, I was merely offering a counterexample to the position that being an organism with human DNA is sufficient for full moral standing. Nor did I say anything whatsoever about rationality. It may be the case that some live, yet non-sentient, members of our species have full moral standing, even if terminally brain-damaged folks don't. But if so, then it has to be some feature other than having human DNA that accounts for that standing.

Now, notice that "not-gonna-be-x-again" and "pre-x" are fancy ways of saying "not x". Perhaps there are some ways of not having full moral standing that are more important than other ways of not having full moral standing. Eve seems to suggest that"not" in the "not yet" sense is more morally special than "not" in the "not ever again" sense. Eve's talking about rationality, so let's talk about rationality. So, it's true that rationality develops. Well, OK... Getting bored.... So.... It just might be time for an Outrageous Thought Experiment!

Suppose a mad scientist develops an implant that, when installed in a chimp brain, makes the chimp fully rational. (Cyborg chimps! YES!) The implants are mass produced, so that there is one per living chimp. Now, since all chimps that have a plug-in have become rational, all those without a plug-in are pre-rational -- they are potentially rational. Would we therefore be morally obliged to not kill pre-rational chimps? (Or, if you're sentimental about chimps, try wolves, or whatever).

It might be objected that little humans will become rational as a matter of course. We don't have to do anything, like implanting a chip, to make that happen. But that's untrue!

If we were to put an infant in a room deprived of sensory stimulation for a year, it would develop very little cognitively. We have to do plenty for our little humans. We have to allow them an extended stay in the womb, we have to feed them, we have to talk to them, we have to expose them to novel stimuli, we have to carry them around because they can't just follow us around or just hang on like a proper primate, etc. Of course, we do all that for our little humans as a matter of course, because we wouldn't exist ourselves if the disposition to do that sort of thing wasn't pretty well wired in. But can the relevant moral difference really be that we don't install implants in chimp brains as a matter of course, and so that's why pre-rational chimps don't have full moral standing? Suppose that certain human babies have a funny disorder: the won't develop rationality unless they are shown reruns of The Gong Show everyday for their first year. Now, we don't show the Gong Show as a matter of course, but if that would help our babies develop Reason, wouldn't we think that we'd be obligated to do it?

So, either pre-rational chimps have full moral standing, or little humans don't. (I said it was outrageous.)

Alright, sorry... but I do mean the thought experiment with about 65% seriousness.

Let me lay out some relevant opinions about more foundational matters in a slapdash but hopefully comprehensible fashion. I differ from Julian in that I don't think anything is intrinsically valuable. NOTHING! Not being a member of our grand species. Not being sentient, sapient, rational, or what have you. NOTHING! All value is relative... [GASP!] And that doesn't mean bashing baby heads against bricks "might be wrong for you, but might be right for me." That means that values are indexed to valuers.

Value is a n-adic relation, not a monadic property. So, if there's some object, process, event or whatever (let's get creative and call it 'X') and it turns out to be valuable, then that's because there's some person, call her "P", for whom it is valuable. So, for every X, if it's valuable, there is some P that stands in the value relation to X. But wait!There's more... argument places! If X is valuable to P, then P has some purpose for which X is constitutive or instrumental. So, I want to have a happy life. I've got a purpose. Suppose friendship is partially constitutive of a happy life. Well, then friendship is valuable for me. Suppose friendship requires the existence of some friends. Then the existence of some friends will be valuable to me. Friends are other people. So the existence of some other people will be valuable to me. Suppose one of my friends also want to have a happy life. Then I'm valuable to my friend, too.

Look! We've got people valuing each others' existence, and no funny intrinsic values! Qua friend, my friend is not valuable because he's rational, or a member of the human species. Those are surely necessary conditions, as is being carbon based, I suppose, but those things aren't what make my friend valuable qua friend. It's a bunch of other stuff I wouldn't know anything about, because I don't have friends. Rationality's generally like that. It's good for other stuff we want. Lots of our ends have to do with other folks, and other folks figure into our ends quite prominently because of their Very Special Human Cognitive Abilities. But the thing that matters for each of us is how all that figures into our ends. The human world is shot through with value not because some things instantiate the hard gemlike flame of intrinsic value, but because we have purposes, and we figure in to each others' purposes in profoundly complicated ways. I've rather more to say... how tiny tiny humans do and don't fit into the network of human purposes... But I'm becoming loopy with sleepiness... I value sleep. Do cyborg chimps dream of electric genital displays?

Pinker's Natural Approach to Human Nature -- During the audience question period of the AFF biotech debate, I was surprised to discover that some conservatives took Julian and me to be denying that there is a human nature. I was perplexed. I had made a very strong statement to the effect that there is a human nature, and that we learn about it by studying biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and the various sciences that study human behavior. Indeed, I was promoting the picture of human nature, almost to a tee, that is described in Steven Pinker's wonderful new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Now, the naturalistic conception of human nature does radically depart from the Greco-Judeo-Christian conception of human nature. An accurate conception of human nature does not depend on the notion that humanness is an Aristotelian metaphysical essence. Indeed, an unorthodox, but philosophically compelling, view in the philosophy of biology, defended by Hull and Ghiselen, is that species are not natural kinds at all. Species are complexly bounded historically and spatially distributed individuals. Very, very roughly you are a member of a species S, just in case you are the offspring of members of species S. That is, you're a member of S just in case your heriditary line is traced back to a particular ancestral individual who divided off, through mutation or drift, from a different "mother" species. This provides for a kind of essentialism, but one very different from traditional essentialism, since here the essence of humanity has to do with location of a particular branch on the evolutionary tree. If, through a massively improbably series of events, a group of organisms genetically identical to human beings, evolved from, say, chimps, they would not be members of our species, even though there would be no feature whatsoever to distinguish them from humans. (Analogy: To use chimps a different way, if a chimp happened to type out a document word-for-word identical to Hamlet, it would not be Shakespeare.)

Anyway, back to Pinker. Pinker's new book is intended to refute the common liberal dogma that human beings are nothing in particular, but can be socialized into anything at all. However, it is also useful for those who worry that if the religious conception of human nature is false, then there is no human nature at all. Indeed, Pinker's vision of human nature can support a broadly classical liberal politics. Anyone who cares about defending classical liberal values ought to take it as a project to defend those values on the basis of our best scientific picture of humanity, not on the basis of a picture of Man totally devoid of rational merit.

Full Moral Standing and Genetic Humanity -- Here are some notes I wrote in preparation for the AFF debate concerning the logical relationship between having human DNA and having personhood, or "full moral standing" as I'm calling it. I'm riffing off a quote from Ramesh Ponnuru. In a nutshell, there is no relationship, human DNA being neither necessary nor sufficient for full moral standing.

Here are some notes that illustrate why Ramesh is full of shit.

Ramesh:

This being is valuable simply because it is a human being and not because of any traits — sentience, hair, the ability to protect itself — that it happens to possess. (Technically, of course, the "it" is wrong here.) It is a person from the first moment, rather than a mere body that becomes inhabited by a person as it develops (which would imply an untenable person-body dualism). You were once an embryonic human person."

Human DNA is not necessary for full moral standing (FMS):

Imagine that a mist-covered island is discovered in the crater of an unexplored volcanic lake. The excited press calls it Atlantis. Then, the world is stunned to discover that Atlantis is inhabited by creatures that look exactly like humans, and are capable of speaking ,laughing, reasoning, inventing, cooperating, exchanging, loving and so on. However, the world is stunned once more to discover that Atlanteans are not homo sapiens. Atlanteans and humans cannot interbreed. Genetic testing reveals that Atlanteans are descended from the now extinct species that also developed into both humans and chimpanzees. Atlantanteans, it turns out, can not only do everything humans can do, but live to 110, and are especially good at some things, like singing, mathematics, and Yahtzee.

Question: Do Alanteans have FMS? If Atlanteans were mixed into the population at random, no one could tell them apart from humans. It would be absurdly arbitrary to argue that while Atlanteans have all the attributes we humans hold in the highest regard, they nevertheless do not have full moral standing.

Conclusion: Human DNA not necessary for FMS

Human DNA is not sufficient for FMS:

You have human DNA. A piano falls on your head and you sustain massive brain damage. You are taken to the hospital. Although all of your organs are functioning very well (you're in good shape!), there is no activity in the parts of your brain that accounts for consciousness, and there is no prospect of starting it up again. You're declared brain dead, taken off life support, and allowed to die. This sort of thing actually happens a lot.

Now, while it would have been possible to keep you alive indefinitely in a vegetative state, it was clear to all involved that when your ability to maintain an inner life was definitely gone, YOU were gone, and with you, your FMS. But you were still a coherent biological being with human DNA.

Or, you're born with only a brain stem that governs autonomic functions. You are rightfully allowed to die.

Conclusion: human DNA is not sufficient for FMS.

Another argument: You drive around in a van and murder 10 people with a rifle. You are captured and sentenced to death by a court of law. You have human DNA. If having FMS requires nothing more than being human, and requires no other traits, then adding traits, such as being a cold-blooded murderer, cannot negate FMS (If FMS supervenes on nothing more than the simple fact of being human, then [If human, then FMS] is monotonic!). So, either the death penalty is murder, or simply being human is not sufficient for FMS.

More, for fun:

If simply having human DNA is good enough for having FMS, regardless of any other distinctively human attributes, then what exactly is it about human DNA that confers FMS? DNA is a sequence of molecules. What is it about the human sequence that is special. Exactly how does value supervene on sequences, such that it supervenes on the human sequence, and not other sequences? If it's just a matter of the molecular sequence, and not macro properties, that matter for FMS, how do we know that other animals don't also have DNA configured in a way that confers FMS? Maybe snails have FMS conferring DNA. Sure, snails don't have complex mental states, but if it's the molecular pattern that matters, it's the molecular pattern. So, what is the theory of intrinsically valuable molecular patterns? Why should we believe there is such a theory.

On biological classification:

Homo sapiens is a biological species. In virtue of what do members of this species have FMS while members of others species do not? Why is the species level the right place to draw the FMS line. Why not at the Family level. Suppose I say that primates have FMS. What's the argument against that? If the argument against drawing the FMS line well into gestation is that it is arbitrary, and gets us on a slope, so we'd better just draw the line at the beginning, then why not be really sure and just draw the line at primate membership instead. If some primates don't have FMS, how can we ensure that we do. So we better draw an inclusive circle, lest we get on a bad slope (bonobos don't have FMS, we're almost identical genetically to bonobos, so presumably we don't have FMS!)

Suppose I am, in fact, a mutant, the first member of a new species. If that's the case, then the FMS circle clearly goes around homo sapiens plus me, because I'm evidently a person, even if I'm not technically a human. So if you argue for an exclusive circle rather than an inclusive circle, it's going to have to be on the basis of some phenotypic properties, because monkeys and men and mutants are pretty well the same thing looking at it from the genotype. And if I'm a mutant, the thing that makes me a person with FMS bviously ain't my membership in the species. So what does confer FMS? Certain psychological capabilities, clearly.