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.