An acquaintance of mine sent me a copy of this article at Gaynz.com by Craig Young. Craig and I have a kind of knack at studying the very same topics at the same time. He wrote a PhD thesis criticising conservative Christian views on abortion around the same time I started writing my PhD thesis defending such views. With this article the timing is somewhat uncanny. One of the main burdens of Craig’s article is to argue for the conclusion that it is not inconsistent to both oppose capital punishment and support abortion "rights". Craig bases this conclusion on the contention that fetuses are not human because they lack sentience. Intriguingly I have just submitted an article for publication rebutting the claim that fetuses are not human until sentient and I have just had word that another article, where I discuss the relationship between feticide and capital punishment, has been accepted for publication. Since Craig has put his thoughts on these issues before the public, I will respond to them here.

Before getting to the nitty gritty is worth noting the deceptive slips in Craig’s post. Craig writes:

Amnesty International opposes torture, harassment organised homophobic violence and the death penalty when performed on the basis of homosexuality. Saudi Arabia demonstrates the complexity of the issue, with formal sharia law but co-existing cruising grounds and private indulgence of what is legally forbidden. However, Nigeria, Sudan, Iran, and Iraq's Mahdi Army all penalise male homosexuality, while Iran also mandates capital punishment for persistent lesbianism, Hezbollah and Hamas also believe that their version of fundamentalist Islamism, whether Shia or Sunni, has no place for homosexuality. They base this on their arguable interpretation of the Qu'ran and particular traditions of interpretation of attributed sayings of the Prophet Muhammed, although the Hanafi school of interpretation is more liberal than others….

Surely no-one could object to the above, especially given that the Christian Heritage Party, which alone supported reintroduction of the death penalty in New Zealand, died after Capillgate in 2005.

Now a couple of things to note here. Craig states that Amnesty opposes capital punishment when "performed on the basis of homosexuality." He then insinuates that only the Christian Heritage Party opposed Amnesty's stance because it supported the reintroduction of capital punishment.

This is deceptive. As Craig knows, Amnesty does not just oppose capital punishment for homosexuality, it opposes it for any crime including murder. It is this aspect of Amnesty that the Christian Heritage Party opposed. As Craig knows, the Christian Heritage Party did not support the death penalty for homosexuality, it supported it only for pre-meditated murder when there were multiple eyewitnesses. Craig is trying to conflate support for Capital Punishment per se with support for executing Gays.

Craig also seems to think that because some countries execute homosexuals it follows that people should support the abolition of the death penalty for any crime. This is a very weak argument. After all,many countries imprison homosexuals so an analogous line of argument would suggest that Craig should oppose imprisonment for any crime yet strangely he advocates imprisonment for murder later on in his article. This demonstrates Craig is quite capable of drawing distinctions between the morality of a practice and the morality of a specific application of the practice.

It is also a weak argument to suggest that because an organisation like Amnesty supports some worthy causes, such as opposition to torture, it follows it should not be subject to criticism for other causes it supports, such as abortion rights. If abortion is homicide then for every person saved by Amnesty thousands, if not millions, are killed with its tacit support.

However, what I really want to comment on is Craig’s argument for the consistency of a pro-abortion stance with an anti-death penalty stance. Craig writes:

However, the Christian Right has piped up with references to embryos and fetuses. There's a vast difference between pre-sentient potential humans and actual, flesh and blood biographical human subjects, not that that troubled Right to Life New Zealand throughout the nineties when it had Graham Capill as one of its patrons, or when Voice for Life Vice-Presidnet Annetta Moran stood on the same Christian Coalition party list as Capill in 1996. And as Amnesty International is a pluralist organisation, why should it support an essentially religious campaign against women's reproductive freedom, in any case?

Now several things are worth noting here; Craig’s key claim is that, unlike capital punishment, abortion does not kill an actual human being. This is because fetuses (up till around 28 weeks) are not sentient and hence not "biographical subjects." There is a serious problem with this argument. It presupposes that a being must be a "biographical subject" to be a human being.

Now while it is true that prior to sentience fetuses are not such subjects, neither are they such subjects for some time after sentience. In fact, for some time after birth infants are not "biographical subjects" either. This point was vigorously demonstrated by Michael Tooley in his monograph Abortion and Infanticide. Sentience is a necessary condition for being a "biographical subject" but it is not a sufficient condition.

To be a biographical subject one needs more than just sentience. One needs to have a concept of an enduring self and to have this, a certain level of cognitive development is necessary. As Tooley demonstrates, the requisite development does not take place until after birth. Hence, if Craig were consistent he would support not just abortion but also infanticide. Craig can maintain a consistent stance on the ethics of killing only if he maintains that serial killers have a right to life and newborn infants do not.

Craig’s appeal to sentience is similarly problematic. In A Defense of Abortion, David Boonin notes that those who attempt to ground humanity in the psychological development of an organism face a dilemma, "Any appeal to what a brain can do at various stages of development would seem to have to appeal to what the brain can already do. Or to what the brain has the potential to do in the future."

Either option leads to problems for a defender of the permissibility of feticide who does not also want to endorse infanticide. This is because "by any plausible measure dogs, and cats, cows and pigs, chickens and ducks or more intellectually developed than a new born infant." Suppose, then, one takes the first horn of the dilemma and appeals to what the brain can already do. However, unless one wishes to affirm that cats, dogs and chickens are human beings, "appeals to what the brain can already do" will "be unable to account for the presumed wrongness of killing toddlers or infants."

Suppose then, one takes up the second horn of the dilemma and appeals to "what the brain has the potential to do in the future". This will entail that feticide is homicide. "If [such an account] allows appeals to what the brain has the potential to do in the future, then it will have to include fetuses as soon as their brains begin to emerge, during the first few weeks of gestation." Again, Craig is forced to either grant the humanity of a fetus or deny the humanity of an infant.

Finally it is worth noting how Craig attempts to pass of his contradictory stance with some really silly inferences. He dismisses support for Capital Punishment on the grounds that the Christian Heritage Party "died after Capillgate." Similarly, in the citation above he notes that some anti-abortion groups were either associated with Capill or had people associated with Capill in them.

One wonders what this has to do with anything?

Both groups had the associations in question before it was known Capill was a criminal. There is no evidence they supported his actions or that they were complicit in his crimes. Given these facts, how is Capill remotely relevant? The only purpose reference to him serves is to encourage people to jump to unwarranted conclusions that certain people support abusing children when they do not.

However, let us suppose, contrary to fact, that these people had been complicit in Capill’s crimes. This would still tell us nothing about the permissibility of capital punishment or abortion. It would merely tell us that some people who oppose abortion are criminals. In the absence of a compelling reason for thinking that no just policy is ever supported by criminals and remember Criminals tend to vote left of centre, the correct response to Craig’s assertion is to ask "and?"

Let me illustrate the problems with Craig’s inferences by turning the tables here. Craig writes for Gaynz.com, a few years ago it was discovered that one of Gaynz’s regular writers, Jim Peron, had been an apologist for the views of NAMBLA. Jim Peron had published paedophile erotica written by convicted child molesters, written articles agressively labelling critics of "man boy love" as "hysterics" for viewing paedophilia as abuse, sold NAMBLA material and had NAMBLA meetings in his store. His visa to NZ was denied on the basis of these facts about his character.

Now, would it be fair of me to insinuate from this association that Craig is a NAMBLA supporter or that everyone who agrees with him on abortion and capital punishment is morally suspect because Craig is associated with a group that was once associated with this man Jim Peron? Could I logically dismiss Craig’s position on abortion and capital punishment merely by pointing this fact out? Of course not!

What I need to do and have done above, is provide an argument against these positions. Similarly, if Craig is to provide a rebuttal of the stances I and others have taken on capital punishment and abortion he needs to provide arguments against those stances but as usual, Craig and the team at Gaynz have none.

Craig Young is shocked by statistics about “bare backing” being prevalent in the Gay community. Bare backing in case you don’t know is the name Craig gives to un-protected anal sex. Young is shocked because it suggests there exists a “parallel world where Paul Cameron tells the truth.”

To understand this you need to understand something of Craig’s methods. Many critics of homosexual conduct have been for some time citing studies and evidence which suggests that homosexual conduct, as typically engaged, in is dangerous. Craig Young’s standard response has been ad hominem; he notes that one source sometimes cited in support of these claims is Paul Cameron and, according to Craig, Cameron was kicked out of the American Psychological Association for falsifying one of his studies. Craig fails to see that this is not an adequate rebuttal. First, even if Cameron’s work lacks credibility he is often only one of many sources these authors use. Contrary to what Craig seems to think you do not refute numerous studies by showing that one of them is false. Second, the fact that Cameron was kicked out of an organization for falsifying his research in a particular a study does not mean that every study he wrote or authored was shonky or bad.

Despite his initial shock at discovering that merely attacking the character of one scholar does not establish the falsity of a thesis. Craig attempts a predictable save. The prevalence of unsafe sex amongst homosexual men is actually the fault of evangelical Christians not of the bare backers who actually do it.

[T]he US Christian Right has had some dark successes in curtailing LGBT rights and mainstream HIV/AIDS prevention programmes. This has meant that the US LGBT communities are far more ghettoised than most other international LGBT communities, so it tolerates distorted antisocial behaviours that are one response to segregation from the rest of one's society. What else could one call the cowboy bareback DVD producers that prey on young gay men barely past the age of consent that appear to be the backbone of barebacking?

Craig here argues as follows: dangerous sexual practises are a response to segregation from society and segregation from society is the result of moral condemnation from Christians in that society. Ergo these Christians are responsible for the dangerous practises. Now something like this argument is common, like many common liberal arguments I reject it. Here is why:

This argument suggests that people (in this case certain Christians) are responsible not just for the foreseeable causal consquences of their actions. But also for other peoples free responses to these actions (or at least such responses which one can be expected to predict) Young suggests that because it’s foreseeable some people choose to respond to Christian condemnation of homosexual conduct by forming a segregated culture, and its foreseeable that this culture will respond to segregation by condoning and engaging in “anti social behaviour”. It follows Christians are responsible for the behaviour.

I think this understanding of scope of moral culpability is false. Consider the following example from Augustine. Suppose a man approaches a woman and tells her that he will kill himself if she refuses to have sex with him. Does that mean that she is a murderer if she refuses?[1] Her refusal would not constitute homicide even though his death is a foreseeable result of her choice. Although she foresaw his or her death, she did not cause it. It was caused by the free decision of the tempter to commit suicide.

In an excellent article, Alan Donagan notes that historically Christian and Jewish casuistry agrees with Augustine on this point. Christian ethicists typically…

limit an action’s effects, and a fortiori what its agent intends to bring about in doing it, to those that follow from it in course of nature and the ordinary operation of social institutions, and not from the free reactions of others to it.
(Thus actions in the ordinary course of business, for example, those of postal officers in delivering a letter that has been mailed, are not counted as free reactions.) The principle on which they do is that a free reaction to an action, is a ‘new action’ (‘novus actus’), the effects of which are their effects, and not those of the action to which they are reactions.[2] [Emphasis added]

If we apply this point to Craig’s analysis his argument falls down. Christians who condemn homosexual conduct do not cause people to engage in bare backing. In fact by condemning homosexual conduct they are explicitly telling them not to engage in it. If a person does it anyway, then they doing so in defiance of their will and hence without their consent consequently any negative consequences that follow are the responsibility of the “bare backer” not the person opposed to bare backing.

I think the same line of argument addresses Craig’s second argument,

And how could the blanket censorship of targeted adolescent gay HIV/AIDS prevention education not have resulted in a situation where there are young men who see nothing wrong in having unsafe sex- possibly because they've been isolated from metropolitan gay communities where they would have gotten that message?

Putting to one side Young’s mistaken definition of censorship, here the same problem arises. The Christian expresses a volition that people not engage in homosexual behavior they believe that such behavior is wrong. Because they believe this they also refuse to help people engage in such conduct, that would make them complict in wrongdoing. A group of adolescents refuse to listen and do it anyway as a result they die. Craig suggests that this means that Christians are responsible for these deaths. This follows only if people are responsible for and culpable for the foreseeable actions of other people even when these other people are acting contrary to their expressed desire and as I argued above this is false.

There is something even worse about this line of argument however: if it were true it would mean that any person can require me to assist them in any behavior they wish merely by threatening to do something worse if I do not. Such a principle essentially sanctions black mail and creates an obligation to collaborate in any wrong no matter how grave in response to a threat to a third party. Even worse, if the blackmailers carry out the threat they make us responsible what happens and not them. I can help but think this is a terrible distortion of ethical analysis

I think it’s clear then that Craig’s analysis is mistaken. I will add a final note: Barebacking is an activity that occurs between consenting adults. Both parties agree to engage in causal unprotected anal sex. Now people like Craig have been arguing for some time that homosexual sex is permissible, precisely because it’s engaged in by consenting adults. Denials of this principle have been denounced by Craig’s news group Gaynz as bigoted, oppressive etc. Hence it’s hard to see how they can consistently oppose barebacking. Of course they may believe that barebackers need to be informed of the dangers of the practice. Such things as the fact that their partner is likely to have had hundreds of previous ones, that there are dangers associated with anal sex etc. The problem is that Craig and Gaynz have decried claims like this as false, as scaremongering etc. So I guess the question we need to put to Craig is this. If people who engage in same sex behavior are typically not promiscuous but enjoy relationships as stable as their heterosexual counterparts. If homosexual sex is not dangerous and there is nothing wrong with any sexual activity between consenting adults. What’s wrong with bare backing?

Craig should stop being bigoted and be celebrating the sexual diversity that exists within his own community. The fact he is not celebrating shows that he cannot consistently live with the ideology he expounds.

[1] Augustine, On Lying, 9.
[2] Alan Donagan, “Moral Absolutism and the Double-Effect Exception: Reflections on Who Is Entitled to Double-Effect?” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16 (1991): 498.

In 2002 I (Matt) publicly debated Dr Bill Cooke from the New Zealand Association of Rationalist Humanists (NZARH). I enjoyed the debate immensely and am confident that I won it. No one whom I know who has watched the debate disagrees with me on this. I was surprised at the time how weakly the arguments he attempted to provide were.

A few years latter Paul Litterick become Spokesperson for NZARH. This I thought was a step down. Cooke was at least a scholar and attempted debate. Litterick appeared to spend his time slagging Christian groups of and launching often dubious and dishonest character assassinations. NZARH after all were supposed to be Rationalists. However, more recently I have read some of Litterick’s criticism of Dr Bill Cookes scholarship I find myself in agreement with much of it.

Litterick and Cooke do not see eye to eye. A few weeks ago Litterick spelt out why here. Dr Cooke it seems has deceived people about his scholarly credentials. Cooke claimed to have a professorship in Philosophy when he did not. In fact Cooke’s Ph.D is not even in Philosophy. NZARH apparently propagated this falsehood and continue to do so even though Paul has repeatedly pointed out its inaccuracy to them. For this and various other reasons NZARH have subsequently expelled Litterick and issued him with a trespass order. Dr Cooke is currently the Editor of NZARH’s magazine the Open Society.

What’s interesting about this is that a few years ago NZARH were all through the News attacking the Maxim institute. NZARH claimed that one of their researchers had passed off other scholars writings as his own ( see their website here). NZARH’s spokesperson appeared on numerous Radio and TV stations condemning this. Maxim’s reputation was damaged by this incident. Now an obvious question can be asked if Maxim lacks credibility because one of its researchers has faked his work. Then it follows that NZARH, by their own logic lack credibility. However, if faking ones credentials is not a serious matter. Why did they attack Maxim for an analogous action?

To add irony to this whole thing Paul has broached the topic of starting a new Secularist society. On his blog he discusses the prospect of doing this with Gaynz researcher Craig Young. (Someone Paul often cites). Craig Young has repeatedly claimed to have a PhD see for example here and here and . The problem is that there is apparently no record of Young’s PhD at Massey library and Massey is where Craig studied as a doctoral student. When an associate of mine enquired at Massey about this he was informed that Craig in fact had never submitted his thesis and hence no degree was ever conferred.

What we have then is an organization, condemning Maxim for faking scholarship which itself fakes the scholarly credentials of its own Editor. This deception (amongst other things) provokes a former member to team up with another academic fake to set up a secularist organization of his own. Welcome to New Zealand Rationalism. I would have thought that it was reasonable to expect a Rationalist society to not contradict itself. Let’s hope this joke of a movement is exposed for what is as soon as possible.