NYT Stanley Fish- Here we go again... (Abortion vs "The Majority Rules")
Mort Zuckerman
afa...@niaid.nih.gov, Spin...@yahoogroups.com, kshe...@calea.org,
fit...@gmail.com, patrick.f...@usdoj.gov,
model...@sbcglobal.net, jdr...@nejm.org, let...@courant.com,
Jgerb...@cdc.gov, michae...@po.state.ct.us,
con...@po.state.ct.us, executiv...@nytimes.com, managing-
edi...@nytimes.com, news...@nytimes.com, the-...@nytimes.com,
biz...@nytimes.com, for...@nytimes.com, nati...@nytimes.com,
dv...@cdc.gov, brigidc...@optonline.net, tr...@hotmail.com,
illino...@aol.com, jle...@courant.com, tinaj...@yahoo.com,
jhorn...@fff.org, thomas...@usdoj.gov,
thoma...@po.state.ct.us, kur...@washpost.com,
georg...@washpost.com, p...@allegorypress.com,
commissi...@po.state.ct.us, brans...@comcast.net,
vts...@comcast.net, o...@po.state.ct.us, freet...@charter.net,
scott....@po.state.ct.us, govern...@po.state.ct.us,
attorney...@po.state.ct.us, randall...@usdoj.gov,
Robert....@yale.edu, edi...@greenwich-post.com,
harol...@yale.edu
Cc: fra...@ucia.gov, dr-ahma...@president.ir,
eugener...@washpost.com, afa...@niaid.nih.gov,
bmi...@newstimes.com, tr...@hotmail.com, rast...@aol.com,
billc...@gmail.com, amcg...@rms-law.com, rjmu...@aol.com,
paulcrai...@yahoo.com, sidney_b...@yahoo.com,
criminal...@usdoj.gov, karla.d...@usdoj.gov,
christophe...@usdoj.gov, richar...@yale.edu,
harol...@yale.edu, james.p...@yale.edu, inq...@aldf.com,
ly...@idsociety.org
Subject: NYT Stanley Fish- Here we go again...
Date: Apr 13, 2009 4:49 AM
(ARTICLE BELOW)
Here we go again.
Bear in mind that lawyers don't know the
first thing about science or how to verify
a fact. If they did, all of their cases would
be competed or matched or tried with greater ease.
And America would have fewer shockingly and
*abominably* stupid "judges."
Here Stanley tries to wrap legal/philosophical
argument around abortion and other medical
matters of controversy. But here is the verified
fact in question:
"But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic
as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto
you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your
heart you know you’re wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/science/01tier.html
There can be no democracy, whether in legal terms
or moral terms, unless one knows how to frame and
verify the facts.
Here the question is abortion; therefore the
way to frame it is, "Would you like the specific
procedures involved in abortion to happen to you?"
If any procedure (including violent democracy-spreading)
is more tolerable when it happens to someone else,
psychiatry has just told us that such thinking is
discrimination- which can't be allowed to occur in
a real democracy:
"But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic
as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto
you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your
heart you know you’re wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/science/01tier.html
Meanwhile, today, coincidentally, is a counter-
article to the Stanley-Fish-isms:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/12/AR2009041202260.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
"As citizens, academics might be considered to have an obligation to
help improve on policy ideas when they can."
Just because we had a previous dictum where
"the majority rules" doesn't mean it applies today
in a world where reality is shut out of the media.
Take for instance the NYT's position on "Lyme
Disease." They have never interviewed CT AG
Richard Blumenthal over the LYMErix and Lyme
lawsuit. The NYT pays a CDC officer (Lawrence
Altman) to screen all out scientifically valid
medical data.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
================================================
April 12, 2009, 8:30 pm
Conscience vs. Conscience
As I write the word has not yet come down as to whether or not
President Obama will revoke the “conscience clause” put in place by
President Bush just before he left office. The clause, called the
Provider Refusal Rule, allows heath care providers to refuse to
participate in procedures they find objectionable for moral or
religious reasons.
It is called the “conscience clause” because it affirms the claims of
conscience — one’s inner sense of what is right — against the
competing claims of professional obligations. Mike Levitt, Bush’s
Secretary of Health and Human Services, said at the time of the rule’s
introduction, “Doctors and other health providers should not be forced
to choose between good professional standing and violating their
conscience.” In good liberal fashion, Levitt assumes two registers of
judgment — public and private — and imagines a conflict between them.
He himself would resolve the conflict in favor of the private
judgment; others would insist that public norms trump and that
conscience must yield; both parties would share the definition of
conscience Levitt assumes .
Were he alive, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes would dissent,
for he has another understanding of conscience altogether, one that
casts quite a different light on this conflict. Hobbes begins with the
etymology of “conscience” — conscire, to know in concert with another
— and proceeds to a definition of conscience that turns the one we
know upside down. Since conscience, correctly understood, refers to
those occasions “when two or more men know of one and the same
fact . . . which is as much to know it together,” it is a violation of
conscience — of knowing together — to prefer their “secret thoughts”
to what has been publicly established.
Hobbes is aware that others take conscience to be the name of the
private arbiter of right and wrong, but he regards this as a corrupted
usage invented by those who wished to elevate “their
own . . .opinions” to the status of reliable knowledge and try to do
so by giving “their opinions . . . that reverenced name of
Conscience.”
Hobbes’s larger point — the point he is always making — is that if one
gets to prefer one’s own internal judgments to the judgments of
authorized external bodies (legislatures, courts, professional
associations), the result will be the undermining of public order and
the substitution of personal whim for general decorums: “. . . because
the Law is the public Conscience . . . in such diversity as there is
of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the
Commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the
Sovereign Power farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes.”
This elevation of private over public imperatives is what Levitt and
those on his side of the issue urge, and they urge it in the name of
traditional American freedoms: “As citizens, we should all be
concerned when freedoms that are enshrined in the constitution (e.g.
freedom of conscience and religion) are blithely swept away” (Susan
Martinuk, Calgary Herald).
But while these freedoms may be enshrined in the constitution, they
have not fared so well when they have come in conflict with laws
passed with an eye toward maintaining order and predictability. In a
series of cases stretching from Reynolds v. United States (1878) to
Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court has ruled that
when the personal imperatives of one’s religion or morality lead to
actions in violation of generally applicable laws — laws not
promulgated with the intention of affronting anyone’s conscience — the
violations will not be allowed and will certainly not be celebrated;
for, says the court in Reynolds, “To permit this would be to make the
professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the
land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto
himself.”
It could be said that such language is too melodramatic for the
current dispute, which does not involve disrupting the machinery of
government, just the granting of exemptions from some professional
obligations. What’s the big deal, for after all, “If a procedure is
legal, a patient will still have the ability to access that service
from a medical professional or institution that does not assert a
conflict of conscience” (HHS News Release, August 21, 2008).
But should patients be asked to add to the problems they already have
the problem of having to figure out (if they have the time) which
providers will be willing to treat them? When a professional hangs out
his shingle doesn’t he offer his services and skills to the public and
not just to members of it who share his morality? Isn’t it a matter of
conscience (in Hobbes’s sense) to abide by the rules that define the
profession you’ve signed up for?
The force of these questions depends on assumptions the proponents of
the conscience clause do not share, chiefly the assumption that
obligations vary with different contexts and that one can (and should)
relax the obligations of faith when one is not in church. This
sequestering of religion in a private space is a cornerstone of
enlightenment liberalism which only works as a political system if
everyone agrees to comport himself or herself as a citizen and not as
a sectarian, at least for the purposes of public transactions.
The conscience clause would permit people to opt out of that
agreement, at least in certain circumstances. It appears that the
pendulum is about to swing back in the other direction, but we can be
sure that the story will have many more chapters.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci