Philosophy without thinking

David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton of the very interesting philosophy podcast Philosophy Bites are producing a series of podcasts in conjunction with the Open University, Ethics Bites. The format’s the same in both - Edmonds and Warburton briefly introduce a subject and then work through the major issues with a guest specialist.

Their most recent Ethics Bites interview is with Mary Warnock on the subject, ‘Do we have the right to have a baby‘. Baroness Warnock is probably best well-known for chairing the Commission on Human Fertility and Embryo Research and, as she was a professional philosopher, might have been expected to have been able to offer a slightly more coherent and thoughtful contribution to the show than any other randomly-plucked 84 year-old. I was disappointed.

Edmonds sets the up the show with two questions:

does everybody have a right to have a child; and does the state have an obligation to pay for treatment to achieve this?

Warnock agrees that people cannot be said to have a right to have a baby; but she then asserts that at least three cycles of IVF treatment should be available to all heterosexual couples in the UK and she says that having a baby is more important than a patient’s right to have a drug in the treatment of a particular illness.

Warburton politely challenges her on this, pointing out that just because we may have strong feelings about all sorts of things the State isn’t obliged to indulge us; Warnock agrees that it’s important to distinguish between a right and a very strong desire but that in this case the desire was so strong that assistance is something people are entitled to.

Warburton presses the point. With some illnesses, medical intervention alleviates physical pain but in treating infertility, medicine is at most alleviating psychological distress. Warnock doesn’t budge, pointing out that inability to have children can have profound long-lasting effects such as depression and marriage break-up; she goes so far as to say the comparison is just like weighing up mental illness against physical illness.

So Warnock’s emphatic: the State should be obliged to provide IVF treatment because of the extraordinarily strong desire to have babies that people have, and because of some powerful cultural traditions, and because of the possible ill-effects of not treating infertility. One may not agree with her but she is at least clear in her position.

But then she’s asked whether everyone should have equal access to IVF treatment: lesbian couples, for example. At this point Warnock puts aside her earlier argument completely. Although she thinks that lesbian couples should be allowed to have IVF treatment, she says:

the NHS might want to very reasonably decide to limit treatment to heterosexual couples

Edmonds asks her why that would be acceptable and she defends her statement on economic grounds.

Remember that Warnock’s reasons for obliging the State to pay for treatment in the first place was simply the strength of the desire to have a baby, the probable resulting long-term distress, and the possibility of chronic depression and suicide. It was on the face of it a utilitarian calculation; but at the last moment she effectively says that concerns for the strength of desire of lesbians to have children, or the likelihood of their becoming depressed, may be shrugged away.

It’s an incomprehensible argument, one I can attribute only to an old prejudice.