Bush, religion and morality

Is religion a source of morality, or a substitute for it? This is one question raised by Bush's veto of a bill funding stem cell research. Bush says:

It would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others.

As a stand-alone statement, this is a tenable position, held by decent people. But it's inconsistent with other positions held by Bush - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The moral argument for these wars is analogous to the case for stem cell research. In both, innocent life is sacrificed in order that others get benefits - liberty in one case, cures for illness in others. The principle difference is that embryos are options on human life, whilst the innocent Iraqis and Afghans are actual human life.
Now, if embryonic human life is inviolable, and not to be traded off against possible benefits, how can it be different for actual human life?*
Of course, I'm not the first to point this out. Here's the great Peter Singer:

When he focuses on human embryos, he speaks of his obligation to foster and encourage respect for life, but when respect for human life gets in the way of his wish to strike back at those he considers enemies of the United States, he is willing to bring about the deaths of thousands of innocent human beings. These are not the actions of a person of principle.

I mention this not to attack Bush alone. There's a bigger issue. It's that religion can be a substitute for morality, in two ways:
1. Religious people are often assumed to be moral. So they can get away with actions which we atheists can't. Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep till noon.
2. If you draw your morality from some allegedly authoritative source, rather than think about it yourself, you can easily get into sloppy habits.   
* Of course, you could (with difficulty!) argue that the benefits of liberty in Iraq and Afghanistan are greater than the benefits of possible medical breakthroughs, so utilitarianism justifies the wars but not stem-cell research. But this is a point of accounting, not morality - and it doesn't seem to be the point Bush is making.

Comments

[Bob B]

"But it's inconsistent with other positions held by Bush - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Absolutely - not to mention the deterrent argument made on behalf of capital punishment.

[Bob B]

I'm unable to resist the compelling temptation to post this link:

"RORY BREMNER must feel like giving up. For years he’s done his best to parody George Bush’s strangled syntax and Tony Blair’s White House poodle act, yet here he is, on the night, completely outclassed by the guys themselves. The Bush-Blair cross-talk, picked up by a lurking microphone at the G8 summit in St Petersburg, was beyond satire. . . "
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1062-2275991,00.html

The really terrifying thought is that these guys, with their limited comprehension, are making war and peace decisions affecting thousands of lives.

[SteveG]

The distinction between taking human life in the cause of stem cell research (if you see it as taking human life, of course) and in war lies, I think, in the intent. The traditional Catholic argument*, as I understand it, would be that you don't -- or shouldn't -- wage war in order to take the lives of non-combatants, even though you know that civilians will inevitably be killed, and you try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum; presumably, Bush would be absolutely delighted if the insurgents in Iraq all decided to confront the Americans in a pitched battle somewhere in the middle of the desert where there were no civilians around to get hurt, but the buggers won't cooperate.

In contrast, stem-cell research, if you believe that life begins at conception, is the deliberate taking of human life in order to promote medical research and is little from using new-born children for the same purpose. That's not a view I necessarily hold, btw, but I think that's how the argument would run.

It's a distinction that certainly holds in international humanitarian law; it's not necessarily a war crime to kill civilians as a result of military operations, so long as you do your best to avoid it and the military operation is proportionate. However, it most certainly is a war crime deliberately to target civilians (e.g. in order to punish or demoralise the enemy).

*Bush, though, is a born-again American evangelical, so there's no knowing how his mind works.

[Doogie]

Are you quite sure that the hundreds of thousands of victims of Saddam and the Taliban would have found it difficult to argue that stem cell research was worth more than their liberty, or at least more than the possibility of self-determination that Bush's actions have allowed?

[gandalf]

SteveG and Doogie have it right.

Bush is quite consistent - he doen't like the killings of the 40 million babies/embryos since Roe v Wade, he doesn't like Saddam's murder of 1 million Iraqis, and he doesn't like al Qaeda's murder of 3,000 Americans.

Anyway, why the fuss? Bush has only vetoed spending taxpayer dollars on research using bits of babies killed recently. If you pony up your own cash, you can freshly harvest the little blighters without limit. What's a liberal not to like?

[Stephen]

>"The really terrifying thought is that these guys, with their limited comprehension, are making war and peace decisions affecting thousands of lives."

If only they had your limitless comprehension, eh? Better yet, you should be doing their job! Why don't you use your "limitless comprehension" to work out how to be elected President of the US and Prime Minister of the UK simultaneously? Shouldn't be too hard for a man of your obvious talents.

[Bob B]

And your point is what precisely?

A short trawl through today's media in Britain and there's clearly no end of commentators and politicians with similar takes on the Palestine conflict to mine:

"IT IS A CASE of the Blair that didn’t bark. Why hasn’t the Prime Minister publicly condemned the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza? Most British — and many Israeli — citizens are horrified when they see the devastation wreaked by Israeli bombings. There were 80 such raids in the early hours of yesterday alone. By late afternoon, some 327 civilians had died in Lebanon, compared with 34 Israelis. Go figure, as they say."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1071-2279230,00.html

"A rift has opened up between Downing Street and the Foreign Office over Israel's continued bombing of Lebanon and the high civilian death toll. . . "
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1825647,00.html

"Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has joined calls for the UK to press for a ceasefire in the Middle East. . . . Chris Mullin asked [Mrs Beckett] if it wasn't 'a tiny bit shameful that we can find nothing stronger than the word regret to describe the slaughter and misery and mayhem that Israel has unleashed on a fragile country like Lebanon'. . . Former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short accused ministers of 'inflaming' the situation by pursuing an 'unbalanced and morally wrong' policy."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5202216.stm

Iraq is hardly much of a testimonial for Bush-Blair foreign policy initiatives and I'm not the first to reflect on Blair's limited capabilities:

"Honderich is also a consequentialist, which partly explains his hatred towards Tony Blair. 'He is always asking to be judged by the morality of his intentions,' he spits. 'He doesn't understand that no one cares about his fucking morality. We judge him by the consequences of his actions. In any case, his morality is so muddy and ill-considered. I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that Blair's main problem is that he's not very bright.'"
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/profile/story/0,11109,1442709,00.html

The late Roy Jenkins came to much the same conclusion several years ago: "In a display of his occasional intellectual snobbery he declared the prime minister had a second class mind."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2629489.stm

[dearieme]

Bob B: remember that the Chancellor of the University of Oxford was just supporting the decision of the Oxford law examiners. Otherwise he'd have said that Blair had a third class mind.

[Bob B]

dearieme - Since the times of Mrs T, there has been something of a slide in the calibre of front bench politicians, notably so on the Labour side IMO. Whatever else, the academic credentials of Cripps, Dalton, Douglas Jay, Gaitskell, Wilson, Crossman, Crosland, Healey etc were impressive and their like nowadays are hard to discover.

About twenty years back, a colleague remarked that politicians with first class degrees made bad prime ministers. Knowing his predilections, I responded with: What of Harold Macmillan? The exception proves the rule, he retorted. At that level, the banter was a bit puerile but he had a point. In the last century, apart from Macmillan, Asquith and Harold Wilson were not conspicuous successes as prime ministers and nor were Robert Peel and Gladstone in the 19th century. However, Pitt the younger may not have graduated but by many accounts he was certainly stellar bright.

Ted Honderich and Woy Jenkins are not the only political observers to have reflected upon Blair's weak grasp of issues - perhaps little wonder that he gave up a legal career for politics. Among the professional commentariat, Simon Jenkins and Rees Mogg have made similar remarks.

[dearieme]

Well, Bob, we may be about to find out how another chap with a First does as PM.

[Bob B]

dearieme - I'd noticed. Remember that William Hague also has a PPE first. He is transparently bright but while it was very clear when he was party leader that he was opposed to bogus asylum seekers, joining the Euro and higher taxes, it was never clear what he was for. When it came to it, the electorate preferred fuzzy Blair to sharp Hague, who used to run rings round Blair at PMQs.

When an earlier Lord Salisbury once said that Ian Macleod was too clever by half, that was meant as a damning criticism and widely construed as just that.
http://www.commonsleader.gov.uk/output/Page688.asp

I'm unclear quite when this anti-intellectual streak developed in the Tory party but it is definitely there. Disraeli is attributed with saying, "Lies, damned lies and statistics" and also with "Read no history, only biography for that is life without theory" and we wouldn't want too many undergrads taking much notice of either opinion. For all that, Disraeli was a more illustrious leader of the Tories than Peel.