This is the ninth entry in the Atheist round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test.  This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.  

Polyamory

There are purely practical reasons why any scheme to recognise and give legal impact to polyamorous relationships should be considered very carefully. There are however no moral arguments against it with a general and secular force. As in my view any religion’s sacrament of marriage is entirely their business and I have no religion, it is irrelevant to me, and I will be discussing only civil marriage in the below.

For example, in the case where four adults are married, two have children together, and then divorce – should the adults in the household who are not biologically parents to those children have any expectation of visitation rights? Presumably so – how though should these be balanced with considerations of stability for the child? If A and B are married, then later add C to their marriage, before A dies, then B and C add D to their marriage, to what extent is this the same marriage in a legal sense? If D is the last survivor of this marital group, should any spousal pension which went to B and C in respect of their marriage to A carry on to D?

Essentially do we treat a case where A and B and C are married as one marriage including three persons, or as three separate marital relationships, each involving two people? To what extent should the law try to recognise the fine shape and structure of a poly blob, and therefore specify it (A and B are the primary couple, with C, D and E as their secondaries; D is part of a primary couple with F while C and E are otherwise single) – and to what extent should it be more of an anything-goes “If you people A-F specify yourselves as a poly marriage, you are”?

Should there be any upper limit on the number of people who can join a poly marriage? Can close relatives both be members of one poly marriage? If yes, what proportion of close relatives as members of a poly marriage should be permitted?

If I could see a clear and consistent way of answering these questions, I would be in favour of poly marriage on those terms. At present I have not seen one. Permitting gay marriage requires only that one strike out “man and woman” write in “two people”, and leave the rest in place (freely consenting, not married to another person, not related, of age, etc). The structure of marriage remains, just who gets to jump through the initial hoop has changed.

Poly marriage is a much more radical change in the terms of marriage, and while I think poly relationships are a morally neutral choice in general (better for some people, worse for others), legal recognition and support for them is a non-trivial demand to make. A demand of “poly equality” is justified, but insufficient, without an idea of what that equality would look like, and I do not expect civil marriage to include poly marriage at least until a somewhat-coherent vision of poly marriage in a legal sense has been developed.

Euthanasia

There is a difference between not administering medical treatment and actively ending life. Administering medical treatment against the wishes of the patient is morally wrong, and refraining from unwanted treatment is obligatory (in the case of an adult of sound mind, whose wishes are known to medical personnel, at least).

Actively ending life is permitted, but not obligatory – if a doctor cannot square euthanising a patient with their own conscience, that is their right, as long as they refer the patient to another doctor who will.
In a broader sense, I value life very highly, so you might expect me to oppose people committing suicide, let alone being helped into suicide. However, I value the life of thinking people who are capable of making their own decisions, and taking the core decision of whether or not their life continues away from people makes a mockery of that. It is more generally recognised that taking away someone’s right to try to continue their own life is a serious moral wrong, only justified under specialised circumstances; but the lesser-recognised corollary is that it is morally wrong to compel someone to continue living when they do not wish to. Life is a right, not a duty.

In the Wheel of Time series, the people of the Borderlands have a saying “Duty is heavier than a mountain; death is lighter than a feather”, recognising that their calling of defending the world against the Blight is of great significance and embracing death is running from their duty. Most of us, as important as we are to our friends and loved ones, do not have a calling of such cosmic significance. Our duty is lighter, but death can still be an escape, and I can’t find it in me to judge people who need that escape. It is a failure of society when someone kills themselves out of desperation or mental illness, but it is no failure when someone staring down the barrel of a terminal condition or a degenerative disease chooses their time and manner of their departure.

More broadly, it is possible to have a moral obligation to kill, in a case where this is the only way to save lives. Much more likely is having moral licence to use force in such a way that people may die, most commonly to preserve your own life or those of others. Certainly there is never a moral obligation to kill to preserve your own life – some people would rather die than kill, and that is their right.

Bonus

I think that speculative fiction, and especially science fiction, is the best genre to explore and express my form of secular humanism. Science fiction at its best is about what it is to be human, and what humans are, and how humans flourish.

And this links back into humanism – whose focus and aim is on humanism and how humans flourish. An author who can write a good science fiction novel will show you a lot of their worldview and what they think makes people tick. Ken McLeod is a good example of this, writing techno-utopian/anarcho-libertarian/Trotskyist novels that give a really good sense of that worldview. David Brin gives a different one, and Ursula LeGuin a different one again. I don’t fully agree with any of them, but to show a worldview I fully agree with in a novel I would have to write it myself.
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This is the fifth entry in the Atheist round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test.  This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.  

Polyamory

As the world currently stands, I think limiting state-recognized marriage to two people might be reasonable, but on logistical grounds rather than those of justice or rights, and less so than is commonly thought. To elaborate, I’d like to make a distinction between state-sanctioned approval and the system of rights, responsibilities and benefits that are currently considered part of marriage.

The first question is primarily one of state-supported social approval; we are asking ourselves what kinds of models for families we’d like to promote, encourage and support. When we answer such a question, we must admit that we are implicitly deciding that there are certain types of families and unions that do not deserve our approval. Some would declare the very existence of such a hierarchy unjust and immoral; it is in fact a grave thing to tell people who have bonded themselves to others in ways we disapprove of that we wish never to encourage others to be like them. That said, there is an understanding that in general, long-term, committed relationships are on average good for the people in them and any children they may produce. Furthermore, it seems only reasonable that only relatively longer term relationships and unions would receive any kind of official sanction, since those in short-term relationships would have little use for it. Under this model, there are no grounds for denying state recognition to polyamorous groupings on the sole basis of their polyamory except perhaps legal, logistical difficulties (though these seem minimal – write down a list of people, everyone on the list signs it, the end). Polyamorous groups can be and are often: stable, incredibly committed, beneficial and joyous for the people in them and totally capable of raising children. Let us celebrate them!

The question of the rights and responsibilities that come with marriage is a trickier one, but again my answer is that logistics are the primary concern. Yes, the availability of a polyamorous option would make tax benefits and breaks more difficult to adjudicate, there would be more opportunity for insurance, immigration and other kinds of fraud, hospital visitations and name changes would be less obvious, and so on. Perhaps that’s enough of a reason not to allow polyamorous marriage; I’m not a tax lawyer, so I don’t know how much of a burden it would be.

But on several of those issues, and other common arguments against the recognition of polyamory, I am left unconvinced that the problems are insoluble. In fact, some of these changes would force important legal questions (who is actually responsible for the raising of a specific child?) to be dealt with more deliberately and intentionally. This would be a benefit, not a drawback. I would be thrilled for name changes to be less of a given and more of a decision. Hospital visitation could be a chosen list instead of an assumption that blood relatives are in the best position to provide care. And so on and so forth.

The potential negatives, such as fraud and abuse, are orthogonal to the question of which relationships benefit their communities more when given access to rights, benefits and responsibilities. I hold that the problem with outposts of Mormon polygamists in which adult men marry 14 year old girls is that adult men are marrying 14 year old girls, not that the girls are to become second wives. Using polyamory as a proxy for these issues is reasonable only in the Bayesian Empire (which, if we’re starting, sign me up), not in a country where we acknowledge that sometimes expanding rights comes with inconveniences. Now, if in fact these concerns are absolutely insurmountable, and there is no way to eradicate or minimize grave crimes without outlawing a system of marriage, so be it. This challenge is not the foremost of our generation, and I can understand it being set aside in favor of other issues. And in the end, it may be that the effort is not worth the few it will help. But we should not be fooled into thinking that there is something intrinsic about polyamory that makes it incompatible with our current system of marriage.

Euthanasia

It is permissible to end a life when a person on reflection and after a reasonable amount of time with a consistent desire to end their life asks that they be helped to end their lives, and if the person who is being asked feels that there is no better way to satisfy this person’s desires. If a person is in the kind of chronic, constant, misery-inducing, unresolvable pain that is the worst case scenario of the above, and someone else is in a position to give them a safe and painless death, I think that the permission could rise to the level of obligation. The definition I’ve laid out here preserves our understanding of consent and the autonomy and dignity of the person in question while also acknowledging that life can become so painful that it is reasonable to desire to end one’s life. On the other hand, it allows us to admit that sometimes people can want to end their lives in circumstances where we would not want to grant such a wish, such as in cases where there is a good chance of getting better and being in less pain, physical or emotional.

There is, in this case, not much of a moral difference between intervening to kill and refusing to take active action to extend life. It may be that a treatment is incredibly difficult or costly to administer, and this must be taken into account in the decision, just as all decisions involve a cost-benefit analysis, but no one should consider themselves more moral because they let someone choke or asphyxiate naturally instead of providing them with a painless morphine overdose. If there is a way to extend someone’s life which you choose not to take, that is a decision to have their life end earlier. If that is within the purview of the above definition, this is moral; otherwise, not. The action/omission question does not seem relevant here.

You can vote on whether you think these answers were written by a Christian or an Atheist here.  Comments are open to discuss the substance of the post and for speculation about the true beliefs of the author, so please vote before looking at the comments.

This is the fourth entry in the Atheist round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test.  This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.  

Polyamory

The morality of all relationships can be reduced to three notions: kindness, fairness and consent. When relationships exit morality, they violate these virtues: infidelity disrupts informed consent; abuse epitomizes the violation of kindness; control, by nature, eliminates equity. As such, the morality of any consensual, equal, benevolent union is inherently moral – including the polyamorous.

Sacramental marriage, like all ritual, celebrates valued action. Today, Christian denominations hold wildly varied rules for sacramental marriage, as they should. Doctrine-infused sacraments logically enforce doctrinal requirements — protestant baptism celebrates and requires a confession of faith, and Catholic Last Rites provide absolution and blessing to only dying Catholics. Sacramental recognition of marriages depends on a church’s definition of marriage, its boundaries and requirements.

Historically, the notion of marriage included just two parties. As such, centuries of legal statues were crafted for the betterment of a male-female union. Polyamorous marriages have simply not been considered or afforded for in statutes and case law around custody, inheritance, medical rights, divorce, bigamy, and finances.

In the same vein, some polyamorous marriages may involve multiple parties entering into a single union together, while others would involve simultaneous, separate unions – making informed consent central. Bigamy laws aim to protect unwitting spouses – something extremely difficult to discern and prove without the witnessed signature of the prior spouse in coinciding unions.

Such areas of the law would need to be developed to prevent harm to spousal health and well-being were polyamorous marriages legalized.

Another difficult aspect of legalizing polyamorous unions involves restriction of number of parties. A marriage with 50 partners hardly preserves the selection or effective partnership of marriage, but arbitrarily suggesting a cap opposes the mindset behind the legalization of such unions. Making polyamorous marriage more difficult via additional, detailed prerequisites or laborious dissolution could provide a solution – though hardly one that would feel equal to two-person legal unions.

Historically, many polyamorous marriages have also lowered rights of female parties while magnifying power held by males. While modern polyamory seems to strive for equity (at least in ideal), legal and societal consideration would need to be made to preserve equal rights when involving a lone male with multiple female partners (who naturally dissolve the strength of marital legal benefits through fractioning).

We idealize all forms of marital love, many of us desiring to preserve those ideals – even when they are ones we can’t quite reach personally in iteration. Being beautifully human, we fall short of our own standards, even within unions we’ve self-declared as definitively moral. We have the right to define love and sacrament as we please. The government has the obligation to ensure the safety and interests of those entering unions its sanctions (and their offspring). Until it can do so effectively, it simply shouldn’t.

Euthanasia

When time is exceedingly short and pain runs excruciatingly high, we are not only justified – but compelled – to perform euthanasia. However, forms of euthanasia should be restricted to lack of extraordinary medical intervention and necessary pain management, always complaint with patient wishes and performed under strict regulation.

In terminal cases, the body faces multiple, simultaneous and varying threats. A single, terminal patient may face potential kidney poisoning (considered one of the most peaceful, gradual and painless deaths), internal hemorrhaging and pulmonary edema. In such cases, measures such as dialysis might extend life by days or weeks, only to assure a more distressing death — hardly an act of benevolence. Physicians opting for these “good deaths” should not be opened to criminal charges for denying such care.

Informed consent should be paramount in patient-directed euthanasia. Those wishing to end their own lives should — after undergoing counseling, education, mandatory second opinions and “waiting periods.” Euthanasia should never be imposed or disallowed against the patient’s pre-stated wishes. Suffering is a personal measurement, often misperceived via bias and projection (less than 5% of hospital deaths involve unmanaged pain).

Euthanasia should require hard, measurable standards – the visible shutting down of systems in the body, excruciating, unmanageable pain, small life span (perhaps measured in weeks), or pre-ordered, informed wishes. This would prevent euthanasia from being imposed with negative motivations upon the powerless — mentally ill, infants, elderly, and the uninsured (in actuality, minorities and the poor).

In some cases, medical intervention such as surgery, is the route to least pain (such as cauterizing internal hemorrhaging). Physicians need to work from a primary equation of harm vs. help, not merely the factors of percentage chance of long survival and medical cost. If a patient’s quality of life will vastly improve (e.g., increased consciousness or alleviation of pain) for a notable period, medical intervention should be performed.

Legalized euthanasia would need informed, specific consent that reaches far beyond today’s advanced directives – currently covering lifesaving measures, not situations. Those signing may not imagine the complexity and timing of medical situations – including those where a low percentage of recovery still might mean full recovery. Likewise, a 0% of 5-year survival is drastically different than a 0% chance of 30-day survival; one might have 0% chance at living a year, but 100% chance at 6 months, with a given procedure.

Similarly, current “quality of life” measures ask the patient questions and then calculate such quality. Such assessments can only be made by the patient himself (or those who know what he most cherishes about life) – not by state-imposed equations. To some patients, the ability to hear loved ones and music – even if they cannot speak back – makes life worth living. To others, cognitive ability trumps even the senses. To still others, being bedridden itself would be enough motivation to trade time for escape.

Additionally, the quality of life sometimes includes the business we finish in our lifetimes. Euthanasia could disrupt the last stages of personal development — repaired relationships, confessions of love and crime, and religious conversions in final days.

Euthanasia should remain an option for “good death” – but its legalization doesn’t guarantee it. Only with high standards of regulation and review can legalized euthanasia ensure benevolent – rather than malevolent – rescue from suffering.

Bonus

My faith is like an epic haibun – a hybrid, alternating between the journey recounted in unrestricted prose punctuated by short, bursts of art, memory and epiphany in 17 syllables of haiku.

The haibun divides the books of my life into chapters. I see my life in stories, scenes, exemplified by the haibun’s prose-poems. These scenes are selected and told to record and illuminate some truth, captured or motioned toward in the understated haiku. Those haikus – short, descriptive, vibrant, often praising something – mirror the container I find in ritual I still return to, even as a non-theist, as I attempt to contextualize an expansive world.

How can an atheist hold faith? I manage to. It’s a dedicative faith in the “fruit of the spirit,” “the golden rule,” the occasional miracle, testimonies of transformation, the power of compassion, and the strength of fellowship. It’s a persisting love for the scriptures I can’t unmemorize and people I don’t know but want to help. It’s a wonder in what I can’t explain, and a belief that anything is possible in the presence of belief itself (where every action begins).
Faith acts as a container for all of these beliefs. It’s the structure I learned to hang them on, the metaphor in which I learned to understand. It’s the haiku in the haibun: a small window, a snapshot of deeper concepts and a vast world.

You can vote on whether you think these answers were written by a Christian or an Atheist here.  Comments are open to discuss the substance of the post and for speculation about the true beliefs of the author, so please vote before looking at the comments.

This is the third entry in the Atheist round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test.  This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.  

Polyamory

There is no good reason to oppose polygamy. None whatsoever. Most media coverage of polygamy these days concerns sensational cases with arranged marriage, patriarchy, misogyny, incest, and paedophilia, but that does not mean that polygamy necessarily entails any of those crimes and abuses. The polygamy you need to go out of your way to find, the polygamy that is practised by more-than-couples who are living together as if they had the plural marriage they cannot legally gain, is often surprisingly egalitarian. Women appear to take multiple husbands just as often as men take multiple wives. Children have more role models to follow and all family members receive ample support. The informal communities that grow around this lifestyle value consent, honesty, and accountability. Of course this is anecdotal information gleaned from those few secular polygamists who reveal their lives to journalists. There is little information to go on. And that is just the point: we have insufficient and inconsistent data. Until we have evidence that secular legal polygamy results in sexism or paedophilia, people must be legally free to choose to polygamy. (See my defence of autonomy in the euthanasia section, which does double duty as the moral-political foundation of both arguments.)

The section title asks us to discuss polyamory, which extends much further than polygamy. Polyamory is having romantic relationships with multiple people simultaneously. This is not only morally acceptable but also quite common. Many people casually date multiple people at a time. Moreover, there isn’t always a clear divide between polyamory and monoamory. Even if romantic relationships are discrete and countable and you have no more than one of them, your emotional situation may not be so clear. Is flirting with multiple people monoamory? Is dating when you still have feelings for your ex-partner monoamory? There is no clear demarcation. It is unfair to expect people to have romantic feelings for only one person at a time. It is fairly common for people to love and be in love with two or more people, and such feelings cannot be unethical because they are not chosen. Of course many people do not want to share a romantic partner, and that’s fine too. What is important is emotional honesty, autonomy, and informed consent. Conforming to arbitrary and inherited norms about what a romantic relationship should look like is not important. As a friend of mine says, not understanding another person’s feelings does not give you a license to condemn those feelings. I would add that it makes your condemnation even less justifiable because you cannot condemn what you do not understand. Isn’t that the idea behind this Turing Test?

Euthanasia

I want to get a common argument against euthanasia out of the way immediately. Very few people who oppose euthanasia actually support policies which recognize the supposed “sanctity of all life” on which they base their opposition to euthanasia. If someone truly believed that all life was sacred, they would be a vegan. If someone truly believed that all human life was sacred and that taking a human life could only be acceptable in extraordinary circumstances, they would much more frequently oppose military and police use of deadly force, and they would support radical environmental, anti-poverty, and universal health care policies. Thus we can reject that argument. Life is not intrinsically sacred and almost no one thinks so in an actionable way, especially not the social conservatives who usually oppose euthanasia.

What we must defend before life is autonomy. Obviously there must be limits to autonomy: we cannot use our autonomy to act in ways that unreasonably limit another person’s autonomy. We can say this because autonomy isn’t an intrinsic right. There are no such things as rights; what we call rights are necessary politico-legal fictions. We must fight for maximum autonomy, even when it allows us to do things which might harm us in the long run, because if we allow political power to curb our autonomy we would become vulnerable to politicians or factions which would impose a perverse morality upon us, which would be much more likely to inflict much more serious harm on more of us than would result from our own indiscretions. However, if we fight for maximum autonomy we must not do so in the way of libertarians. A laissez-faire state is not free because economic and educational inequalities would result in radically limited autonomy for many people. Good legal policies—for instance, taxation or gun restrictions–might appear to limit autonomy at first, but if successful they would promote an equal distribution of maximum autonomy across the system. So in order to oppose euthanasia, we must have evidence to suggest that a person choosing euthanasia would significantly limit other people’s autonomy. As far as I can tell, we have no such evidence. Therefore, we cannot oppose euthanasia.

However, all I have so far argued is that euthanasia must be legally allowed. The implied question is whether euthanasia is morally permissible. That sort of thing would need to be decided case by case. I doubt, however, that a person in extraordinary pain which will never be alleviated could be doing more harm to others by dying than they would do to themselves by living, so I predict that euthanasia is often morally permissible, maybe an active good.

And what of euthanizing someone incapable of consent because they are a minor, incapable of communication, or incapable of conscious thought? If I am arguing for euthanasia on the grounds of autonomy, could I support euthanasia when the patient’s family or guardian has chosen it for them? By my reasoning euthanasia is permissible in these situations if either 1. the patient’s known wishes are consulted as much as possible or 2. the patient is incapable of exercising any agency and will likely remain this way, on the grounds that under 1. autonomy is still being upheld as much as possible and under 2. autonomy is no longer at issue.

Bonus

Card’s idea factor would probably be most important to me. However, my answer for the best genre is the near-future dystopian novel, which would suggest that the milieu factor might be important, too. Since my ethics are concerned primarily with the maximization of autonomy and the minimization of harm, I would need a political dimension to my novel. Since I am also interested in the conflict between political decentralization, which I consider desirable, and the need for strong government to override popular prejudices, such as the legal and political machinery around Prop 8, a dystopian world with a strong government and violent extremists would be a good place to explore ideas that interest me and shape my concerns. This means that milieu would be necessary to explore the ideas. You could say that the idea factor would arise in the conflict between the characters and the milieu. I might be cheating in this answer, though. I suspect that most people could use a dystopian novel to illustrate their political opinions. The difference might be that, while some people would focus more on social dissolution or anarchy, I would focus on oppression.

You can vote on whether you think these answers were written by a Christian or an Atheist here.  Comments are open to discuss the substance of the post and for speculation about the true beliefs of the author, so please vote before looking at the comments.