A Critique of Roderick Long's Comments on Circumcision

Libertarians claim that institutions and practices are only legitimate if they do not contradict objective property rights. It does not matter if an institution is an ancient tradition common to every society on earth (as, for example, chattel slavery was); if it violates objective property rights then it is illegitimate.

Similarly, it does not matter if a practice has widespread support or acceptance (as taxation has now and conscription has had in the past); libertarians still hold these practices to the standard of objective property rights and find that they clearly violate self-ownership.

The fact that libertarian condemnation of popular practices or institutions is controversial or unpopular is irrelevant. What matters is the veracity of libertarian principles.

With this in mind, it is interesting to review how libertarians have tackled the subject of circumcision. Some libertarians have made the obvious point that circumcision (despite being a widely-accepted practice) violates objective property rights, specifically the self-ownership of the child.

Parents must make numerous decisions on their child's behalf (and even sometimes against the child's will) as part of the parents' responsibility to remove the child from peril by raising him to the safety and self-sufficiency of adulthood. However, cutting off the child's foreskin is in no way justified by this responsibility. Most people accept that a parent has no right to tattoo their child, yet circumcision is a more egregious act of aggression than a tattoo.

The best article setting out the libertarian case against circumcision is this article by Walter Block and Patrick Testa. Other libertarians who have spoken out against circumcision include Wendy McElroy and Bryan Caplan. I have set out my own opposition to circumcision previously here and explained why I think any philosopher tackling issues relating to the family has a responsibility to speak out about circumcision here.

Very few other libertarians have written on the ethics of circumcision, but I did find this comment by Roderick Long in a discussion about what parents may reasonably do to their children:

when it comes to abusive procedures like female genital mutilation (popularly known by the euphemism “female circumcision,” falsely conveying the impression of being comparable in seriousness to male circumcision), we generally think parents do not have the right to do this, even though women who have had this procedure done when young will usually endorse it in retrospect when they are grown, because they have been inculcated with the relevant cultural attitudes and values. - Beyond Patriarchy A Libertarian Model of the Family by Roderick Long

There is a lot to unpack here. Long points out that the genital cutting of girls is an "abusive" practice. This is true: as a matter of principle, any genital cutting of a child by an adult is an act of aggression. No child can consent to such an act, girl or boy. So why doesn't Long also acknowledge that the genital cutting of boys is an abusive practice?

Long argues that the genital cutting of girls is so much more serious an issue that it is false to use the same word to describe it as the word used for the genital cutting of boys. Why is the core issue for Long the need to differentiate the cutting of girls as compared to boys? Whether or not cutting girls genitals is worse than cutting boys genitals is a bizarrely irrelevant distraction to the principle of the matter. All genital cutting is an act of aggression.

Long argues that genital cutting of girls should be called "mutilation". The definition of mutilation is the infliction of a disfiguring injury. This is indeed true for female genital cutting, but obviously it also applies directly to male genital cutting. Why then is it so important to apply this term to girls but not boys?

Lastly, Long makes the argument that if a child grows up to later endorse what was done to her by the parents, this cannot necessarily be taken as consent because the child may have been inculcated into this belief during her formative years. He makes this argument exclusively about girls. However, his argument obviously applies to male circumcision in exactly the same way. If he doesn't accept the later consent of grown girls to what was done to them, how can he accept the later consent of grown boys?

It seems like Roderick Long's aim in his comments on circumcision is both to denounce female circumcision and at the same time signal acceptance of male circumcision. There is nothing wrong with calling the genital cutting of girls "female genital mutilation" and denouncing it, although it takes no courage to do so since it is merely to voice an opinion already unanimously accepted in the West. But Long clearly doesn't apply the same standard to male circumcision. He does not want to call it "male genital mutilation" and he does not denounce it.

Libertarian philosophers should subject all social institutions and practices to the same question: does this violate objective property rights? If the answer is yes, then the libertarian philosopher ought to point this out. This is especially important in cases where such institutions or practices are widely accepted as legitimate, as male circumcision is. This is the most basic responsibility of a libertarian philosopher.

Circumcision: Chesterton's Fence vs. Self Ownership

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." - G. K. Chesterton

There are numerous problems with Chesterton's Fence argument, but the most important one is explained succinctly by a Reddit user:

The logic of Chesterton’s Fence literally says; "If you cannot defend my position, my position must be correct."

This is a fallacy. It is a sophist rhetorical strategy that attempts to transfer all responsibility for argumentation to the person you disagree with. It is not the responsibility of your opponent to make your argument for you.

I understand the motivation behind Chesterton's analogy. He was arguing against those who want to use the power of the State to coerce changes on everyone else. He was opposing the zealous midwits who act as if reality is completely malleable to coercive policy. These are people who have no regard for unintended consequences. But the correct principle to appeal to against such changes is not Chesterton's fence, it is private property rights.

Chesterton's fence argument only works if you ignore the existence of property rights, which solve the supposed problem. Who is the presumptuous busybody in Chesterton's analogy? Is it the person who sees a fence on the road and says "let us clear it away," or is it the person who says "I certainly won't let you clear it away"? It is impossible to say without knowing who rightfully owns the fence or the road.

The principle is that the property owner gets to decide what to do with his property. Obviously his choices are constrained by the requirement to respect other people's property and by any restrictive covenants or contracts that he's agreed to. But other than that, it is nobody else's business. In the case of both fences and roads, any change or continuity should be the choice of the rightful owner (and the State is not a rightful owner).

Neonatal Circumcision

The stupidity of using Chesterton's fence as a principle can be seen by applying it to the example of neonatal circumcision. In his book Circumcision A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery, David L. Gollaher points out that the more you know about the history of circumcision the less sense it makes:

It is far easier to imagine the impulse behind Neolithic cave painting than to guess what inspired the ancients to cut their genitals or the genitals of their young.

I do not understand the motivation behind neonatal circumcision. I find the stated arguments for it to be absurdly unconvincing. It looks like sadism to me, but I don't claim to be able to see into the minds of parents who do this. Yet Chesterton's fence implies that until I can completely explain the institution and show why it exists, I should support it. Gollaher suggested a thought experiment about circumcision that applies the opposite principle to Chesterton's fence:

Imagine, for a moment, that circumcision had never caught on in America as a neonatal routine. In other words, suppose the United States were, say, like Norway. Next, imagine that a physician were to urge, in a talk at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, doctors to begin operating on the genitals of all baby boys shortly after birth in order to achieve marginally lower incidence of urinary tract infections and perhaps some other diseases. Of course no physician would dream of proposing such a thing today. The threshold for demonstrated effectiveness in surgery, particularly surgery on infants, is far too high. Indeed, as the history of female circumcision suggests, if male circumcision were confined to developing nations, it would by now have emerged as an international cause celebre, stirring passionate opposition from feminists, physicians, politicians, and the global human rights community. If routine medical circumcision didn't exist today, no one would dare to invent it.

My objection to circumcision is based on the principle of self ownership- the most fundamental property right. Children are self owners and circumcision is an act of aggression against their bodies. As Walter Block and Patrick Testa put it:

neonatal circumcision is a violation of the right to bodily integrity, an overreach of religious freedom, and a coercive act on the most helpless of us all.

Applying the principle of self ownership also yields the compromise that circumcision is legitimate as a voluntary practice for consenting adults, just not as a coercive act performed on children. Here's Block and Testa again:

All we need do is not eliminate circumcision but rather postpone it. Instead of imposing it on helpless babies, too weak and immature to object to this invasive medical procedure, adults can choose for themselves whether or not to avail themselves of circumcision. Those convinced of its benefits would be free to do so; others need not.

Three Questions Philosophers Do Not Want To Answer About Parenting

Why are most books on the ethics of parenting so boring? Family life is a topic that touches everyone, so this is one area where philosophy could engage with highly relevant moral concerns. Instead, the vast majority of books on the philosophy of the family are horribly dull.

There are many reasons for this blandness, but one reason is that the authors are engaged in strategic omission. They are skirting around a number of contentious ethical questions related to the family. When your writing is hampered by a list of things that you must avoid discussing, it makes your book boring and waffly because you (deliberately) don't get to the point. Instead, you spend a lot of time on uncontentious issues that are far less relevant to everyday life.

The topics that philosophers of the family studiously avoid discussing have two characteristics:

1. They are widely accepted parental practices.
2. They are ethically indefensible.

Here are three questions about topics that share these characteristics and so are strategically omitted by philosophers writing on the family:

1. Is corporal punishment a legitimate practice?
2. Is circumcision a legitimate practice?
3. Is abortion a legitimate practice?

Open any book that claims to be about the ethics of parenting (or any variation on this general theme) and you will probably not even find these topics discussed. Search a digital version of the book for these words and you usually find nothing. Of the three topics, abortion is sometimes mentioned briefly, but even then it is usually only to state that the ethics of this practice are outside the scope of the book.

Philosophers who have written on the topic of abortion have not addressed it from the perspective of the ethics of parenting, but rather from the perspective of the ethics of action towards a stranger who may be a trespasser or aggressor. They don't think of the topic as belonging to the philosophy of the family since they do not even view abortion as an action of a parent.

All three practices- corporal punishment, circumcision, and abortion- constitute acts of aggression by parents that violate the rights of their children. Philosophers who agree with this statement prefer to avoid having to state it openly or defend it. Philosophers who disagree with the statement are also apparently reluctant to defend their views.

In his book Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment, Patrick Lenta discusses the silence of philosophers on this topic:

with very few exceptions philosophers have not engaged in a sustained moral assessment of the corporal punishment of children. … It is reasonable to infer from what we know about the near-ubiquity of corporal punishment that most philosophers will have been subjected to it and many will have resorted to it. This in itself may explain some philosophers’ reticence about confronting the practice. … For some who have experienced it, corporal punishment may be too personally disturbing, too deeply and troublingly a constituent of their psyches, to be confronted directly. …Loyalty towards one’s care-givers and defensiveness about one’s own use of corporal punishment as a care-giver, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, the weight of historical support for it, may make the practice appear natural and not in need of moral justification.

Lenta's hypothesis could equally apply to the silence of philosophers on circumcision and, with minor differences, on abortion. Walter Block and Patrick Testa remark on the lack of ethical debate about circumcision:

The reality of the debate on neonatal circumcision is that it hardly exists at all. … Even for many of those who disdain violence and the struggle to retain archaic social norms, it is almost as if circumcision is a topic off-limits to debate—perhaps out of denial or an appealing sense of conformity. But underneath the guise of culture, neonatal circumcision is a violation of the right to bodily integrity, an overreach of religious freedom, and a coercive act on the most helpless of us all.

In avoiding discussing these issues, philosophers of the family are conforming to regnant intellectual taboos. They understand which topics are not supposed to be mentioned and they comply. This is cowardice and an abdication of the most basic responsibility of a philosopher. In The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture, Brad Stetson describes how the taboo around the topic of abortion works:

Civilized and thoughtful people are expected to step around the violent death of the unborn accomplished by every abortion. To mention it in dialogue or debate is to solicit angry glares, impatient sighs and apparently learned expressions of skepticism about knowing when "human life begins." … There is no such thing, in the agora of public opinion, as being compassionate to the unborn. Not only are they not accorded the legal status of persons, but they are not even admitted into public discourse as legitimate objects of concern.

For anyone not interested in the ethics of parenting, if is fine to choose not to engage in these topics. But if you write a book about the ethics of parent-child relationships and avoid discussing these issues, you are engaging in strategic omission. Any practice that is widely accepted yet ethically questionable is exactly what philosophers of the family should discuss. Even if such topics are not the central focus of their books, they should at least spend a couple of paragraphs explaining why they think these practices are either justified or not justified according to their understanding of the ethics of parent-child relationships.

Here are links to my posts about abortion, corporal punishment, and circumcision.

I highlighted these three topics because they are longstanding practices and therefore even books about the ethics of the family written some years ago should have addressed them. There are many other parenting practices that are widely accepted and ethically unjustifiable which have become prevalent more recently, for example:

• The use of psychotropic drugs on children
• The use of puberty blocking drugs on children
• sex-change surgeries undertaken on children.