Sunday, January 14, 2007
The second to last word on circumcision
The online magazine Salon recently published an excerpt from Neal Pollack’s new book Alternidad. In the excerpt, he recounts a bitter fight within his family over whether his baby son should be circumcised or not. The piece received over 450 responses. Some of them take sides in the family drama, and some of them recycle the various pro and con positions on circumcision. A remarkable number of letters began by expressing dismay that so many people consider circumcision a topic worth discussing, when there are so many more important things to worry about. These letters inevitably proceed, you know, as long as they are posting anyway, to explain why circumcision is obviously either beneficial or horrific.
I will not offer an opinion one way or another, but I would like to show how the intuition that it is frivolous to debate circumcision may be justified logically.
Specifically, I would suggest that it is senseless to argue about two aspects of circumcision. My arguments may require close attention, as they are philosophical in nature, but they have an important benefit over other arguments you’ve heard on the subject. Regardless of what your position is on circumcision, once you’ve read my arguments, you will never have to argue about it again.
One important issue is the question of what value should be placed on the pain the infant feels during the procedure. People who oppose circumcision suggest that this pain must be taken so seriously that only a medical necessity would warrant its infliction. Circumcision supporters do not think pain should be inflicted on infants wantonly, but see the momentary infliction of pain to be a minor cost that is eclipsed by the value they ascribe to the procedure, even in cases when they judge this value to be minimal.
If two people disagree on this issue, there is no sense for them to debate it. The reason is that nobody remembers the pain of infant circumcision, and this fact has a different meaning to different people. This becomes clear when one asks who is experiencing the pain of infant circumcision.
There are many views of selfhood and identity, but many stress the roles of memory or causation in allowing us to assemble the disparate moments of our life into a coherent identity. I am me, I might claim, because I climbed a tree in front of a brick house, cried in bed while wearing headphones, made a classroom full of his students laugh, etc. I remember these things, so they happened to me, and my memory projects this me backward through time, just as my imagination supposes this me will extend forward in time, at least for a while. These experiences also affected me, and I bear evidence of these effects in my psychology and physiology.
The circumcised have no memory of circumcision, and the pain of circumcision leaves no readily identifiable causal effect on them. Even if we suppose some sort of subconscious memory, or the pain has some sort of hidden effect on their post-infant selves, it is not possible to separate the presumed subconscious memory or hidden effect of this pain from the memory or effects of other infant pain, such as that of colic or of childbirth itself.
Those who wish to counter this argument might put forth a theory of identity that doesn’t require memory or causation, or they may simply demand that we embrace the infant in the moment of his suffering as a human, without worrying about whether he’ll remember it in the future. I have nothing to say against these arguments. All I want to do is point out that they routinely make no impact on anyone who doesn’t already agree with them, in the same way that being asked whether the adult remembers the infant pain makes no impression on others.
The situation is comparable to the horror that some people experience when they learn that surgical anesthetic often includes an amnesiac along with a painkiller and a sedative. These people fear the idea of experiencing pain and having no memory of it later. Other people, given the same information, feel that if they will have no memory of having had any pain, then it won’t have mattered. People with different views on this issue generally terminate their conversations about it with disbelief that the other could believe as they do, and then go their separate ways.
Conversations about the morality of abortion that turn on the humanity of the fetus seldom end so amicably, but they share the same result: mutual expressions of disbelief that the other could believe what they claim to believe.
These two arguments share with the argument about infant pain the problem of being conducted across an unbridgeable divide. The opposing viewpoints are grounded in opposing basic, underlying beliefs about the nature of being, beliefs that are themselves located beyond the reach of merely rational inquiry.
Tomorrow, I’ll show how why a second issue central to the circumcision debate is senseless to discuss. ¶ 5:53 PM
I will not offer an opinion one way or another, but I would like to show how the intuition that it is frivolous to debate circumcision may be justified logically.
Specifically, I would suggest that it is senseless to argue about two aspects of circumcision. My arguments may require close attention, as they are philosophical in nature, but they have an important benefit over other arguments you’ve heard on the subject. Regardless of what your position is on circumcision, once you’ve read my arguments, you will never have to argue about it again.
One important issue is the question of what value should be placed on the pain the infant feels during the procedure. People who oppose circumcision suggest that this pain must be taken so seriously that only a medical necessity would warrant its infliction. Circumcision supporters do not think pain should be inflicted on infants wantonly, but see the momentary infliction of pain to be a minor cost that is eclipsed by the value they ascribe to the procedure, even in cases when they judge this value to be minimal.
If two people disagree on this issue, there is no sense for them to debate it. The reason is that nobody remembers the pain of infant circumcision, and this fact has a different meaning to different people. This becomes clear when one asks who is experiencing the pain of infant circumcision.
There are many views of selfhood and identity, but many stress the roles of memory or causation in allowing us to assemble the disparate moments of our life into a coherent identity. I am me, I might claim, because I climbed a tree in front of a brick house, cried in bed while wearing headphones, made a classroom full of his students laugh, etc. I remember these things, so they happened to me, and my memory projects this me backward through time, just as my imagination supposes this me will extend forward in time, at least for a while. These experiences also affected me, and I bear evidence of these effects in my psychology and physiology.
The circumcised have no memory of circumcision, and the pain of circumcision leaves no readily identifiable causal effect on them. Even if we suppose some sort of subconscious memory, or the pain has some sort of hidden effect on their post-infant selves, it is not possible to separate the presumed subconscious memory or hidden effect of this pain from the memory or effects of other infant pain, such as that of colic or of childbirth itself.
Those who wish to counter this argument might put forth a theory of identity that doesn’t require memory or causation, or they may simply demand that we embrace the infant in the moment of his suffering as a human, without worrying about whether he’ll remember it in the future. I have nothing to say against these arguments. All I want to do is point out that they routinely make no impact on anyone who doesn’t already agree with them, in the same way that being asked whether the adult remembers the infant pain makes no impression on others.
The situation is comparable to the horror that some people experience when they learn that surgical anesthetic often includes an amnesiac along with a painkiller and a sedative. These people fear the idea of experiencing pain and having no memory of it later. Other people, given the same information, feel that if they will have no memory of having had any pain, then it won’t have mattered. People with different views on this issue generally terminate their conversations about it with disbelief that the other could believe as they do, and then go their separate ways.
Conversations about the morality of abortion that turn on the humanity of the fetus seldom end so amicably, but they share the same result: mutual expressions of disbelief that the other could believe what they claim to believe.
These two arguments share with the argument about infant pain the problem of being conducted across an unbridgeable divide. The opposing viewpoints are grounded in opposing basic, underlying beliefs about the nature of being, beliefs that are themselves located beyond the reach of merely rational inquiry.
Tomorrow, I’ll show how why a second issue central to the circumcision debate is senseless to discuss. ¶ 5:53 PM
