Hastings Center Series in Ethics – serie

SIDNEY CALLAHAN AND DANIEL CALLAHAN This book, like many other things to do with abortion, is a product of long controversy. Though carried out with cooperation, it was conceived in conflict. The conflict between the coeditors has per­ sisted for years-in fact, for at least half of their thirty-year marriage. One, Sidney, is prolife; the other, Daniel, is prochoice. Ever since the topic of abortion became of professional interest to us, in the 1960s, we have disagreed. At one time, while Daniel was writing a book on the subject, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1970), we talked about the subject every day for the four years of the book's gestation. On many occasions during the 1970s, prolife articles writ­ ten by Sidney were passed out at Daniel's lectures in order to refute his pro choice views. Over the years, every argument, every statistic, every historical example cited in the literature has been discussed by the two of us. As Eliza Doolittle says about "words" in My Fair Lady, "There's nota one I haven't heard. " And yet we still disagree. How can it be, we ask ourselves, that intelligent people of goodwill who know all the same facts and all the same arguments still come down on different sides of the con­ troversy? As we well know, it is possible to agree about many things and have great love and respect for an opponent, and still differ.

A concern for the ethical instruction and formation of students has always been a part of American higher education. Yet that concern has by no means been uniform or free from controversy. The centrality of moral philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum during the mid-19th Century gave way later during that era to the first signs of increasing specialization of the disciplines. By the middle of the 20th Century, instruction in ethics had, by and large, become confined almost exclusively to departments of philosophy and religion. Efforts to introduce ethics teaching in the professional schools and elsewhere in the university often met with indifference or outright hostility. The past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of the interest in the teaching of ethics, at both the undergraduate and the professional school levels. Beginning in 1977, The Hastings Center, with the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, undertook a system­ atic study of the state of the teaching of ethics in American higher education.

OUR AGE IS CHARACTERIZED by an uncertainty about the na­ ture of moral obligations, about what one can hope for in an afterlife, and about the limits of human knowledge. These uncertainties were captured by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he noted three basic human questions: what can we know, what ought we to do, and what can we hope for. Those questions and the uncer­ tainties about their answers still in great part define our cultural per­ spective. In particular, we are not clear about the foundations of ethics, or about their relationship to religion and to science. This volume brings together previously published essays that focus on these inter­ relationships and their uncertainties. It offers an attempt to sketch the interrelationship among three major intellectual efforts: determining moral obligations, the ultimate purpose and goals of man and the cosmos, and the nature of empirical reality. Though imperfect, it is an effort to frame the unity of the human condition, which is captured in part by ethics, in part by religion, and in part by the sciences. Put another way, this collection of essays springs from an attempt to see the unity of humans who engage in the diverse roles of valuers, be­ lievers, and knowers, while still remaining single, individual humans.

1 This book is the product of a one-year project conducted by the Hastings Center, Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, during 1976-1977. The Behavior Control Research Group-an ongoing, interdisciplinary working group com­ posed of philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, social sci­ entists, and lawyers-met four times over the course of the year with special consultants with expertise in the field of mental retardation. At those meetings, participants gave in­ formal presentations, which were followed by group discus­ sion. As the project progressed, formal papers were delivered and subjected to further critical commentary. This volume, in two related parts, represents the deliberations of the group as a whole, and then offers individual papers prepared by some scholars in order to give a sense of the kind of specific arguments on which the general conclusions were based. We undertook the project to examine: (1) questions of competence and consent; and (2) the practical implications, lThe project, entitled "Ethical Issues in the Care and Treatment of the Mildly Mentally Retarded," was supported by the EVI5T program of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 05576-14793. Any Opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. ix x PREFACE in terms of care and treatment, that evolve from differing definitions and models applied to mental retardation.

This volume is one outcome of a two-year study conducted by the Behavioral Studies Research Group of The Hastings 1 Center. It is divided into three parts to reflect the several facets of the interdisciplinary project from which it stems. In the opening chapter Willard Gaylin and Ruth Macklin, who di­ rected the study, describe its basic conception and structure, which centered around three programs to conduct research into aspects of violence and aggressive behavior, programs aborted in the early 1970s because they were politically and IThis project was supported by the EVIST Program of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 05577-17072, and by a joint award by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any opinions, findings, conclu­ sions, or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other published outcomes are the edited transcripts of two of the case-study workshops conducted under this project: "Researching Violence: Science, Politics, and Public Contro­ versy," Special Supplement, The Hastings Center Report 9 (April 1979); and "The XYY Controversy: Researching Violence and Genetics," Special Sup­ plement, The Hastings Center Report 10 (August 1980). Copies of these tran­ scripts are available for purchase from The Hastings Center, 360 Broadway, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. ix PREFACE x socially controversial.

There is widespread agreement among large segments of western society that we are living in a period of hard times. At first glance such a belief might seem exceedingly odd. After all, persons in western society find themselves living in a time of unprecedented material abundance. Hunger and disease, evils all too familiar to the members of earlier generations, although far from eradicated from modern life, are plainly on the wane. Persons alive today can look forward to healthier, longer, and more comfortable lives than those of their grand­ parents. Nevertheless, the feeling that life today is especially difficult is rampant in government, in the media, in popular books, and in academic circles. Western society is perceived in many quarters as wracked by crises of all sorts-of faith, of power, of authority, of social turmoil, of declining quality in workmanship and products, and of a general intellectual malaise afflicting both those on the Left and the Right. A tone of crisis permeates the language of public life. Editorials in major newspapers are full of dire warnings about the dangers of unbridled egoism, avarice and greed, and the risks and horrors of pollution, overpopulation, the arms race, crime, and indulgent lifestyles.

I Several years ago, when the Carter administration announced that it would support congressional action to end the public fund­ ing of abortions, the President was asked at a press conference whether he thought that such a policy was unfair; he responded, "Life is unfair." His remarks provoked a storm of controversy. For other than those who, for principled reasons, opposed abor­ tion on any grounds, it seemed that the President's comments were cruel, violating what was thought to be an American com­ mitment to providing equal access to health services to all citi­ zens, regardless of their capacity to pay. Those sentiments had, in fact, been reflected in public opinion polls that had, for at least three decades, indicated that Americans supported the propo­ sition that the government should guarantee health care to all. Ultimately, those beliefs had been translated into the oft-ex­ 1 pressed political demand for a one-class system of health care. This commitment to equality is rather remarkable. American society evidences a striking willingness to tolerate vast inequal­ ities with regard to income and wealth. While it guarantees ed­ ucation to all children, there is not even a pretense that the children of the wealthy and the children of the poor ought to get precisely the same kind of schooling. While some commitment 'Hazel Erskine. "The Polls: Health Insurance," Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXIX (Spring, 1975), 128-143.

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif­ ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In some cases, the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the find­ ings and the policy is easy to see. In other cases, perhaps most, its influence is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally the findings of social scientific studies are explicitly drawn upon by policymakers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, the categories and theoretical models of social science provide a general background orientation within which policymakers concep­ tualize problems and frame policy options. At times, the in­ fluence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policymakers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to le­ gitimate preestablished goals and strategies. Nonetheless, amid this diversity and variety, troubling general questions persistently arise.