Professor Dawkins and the increase of the sum total of happiness

Poor Professor Dawkins has apparently caused a furore on twitter after tweeting, to a woman who said that she would face a serious ethical dilemma if she found she was pregnant with a baby who had Down's Syndrome, that she should abort it. He seems suprised by this. His apology, as reported by the Guardian, seems to be an apology for causing a riot rather than for what he actually said, claiming that those who objected did so from an emotional point of view, that twitter did not give him enough space to put his whole argument across and that because of this he left himself vulnerable to wilful misinterpretation.

However, the thing that really bugs me about this is that Dawkins claims that his response is totally down to logic. According to the Guardian, he wrote: "If your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down's baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child's own welfare." I take issue with this, and in fact, I am frequently irritated by people who claim that anyone who disagrees with them is arguing emotionally, and that they themselves are basing their argument purely on logic. 

• If your morality is based, as Professor Dawkins' is, on a desire to increase happiness and reduce suffering you should presumably never say anything that might offend anyone because offense generates suffering, even if this is a subjective response. 
• If you believe that this life is all there is, that there is no life after or other than this one, then the abortion of an unborn child would presumably decrease the sum total of happiness, seeing that without life there cannot be happiness.
• If your aim is to increase the sum total of happiness rather than the happiness of the individual, and given the amount of great joy which those families express regarding their children with Down's Syndrome (and indeed their children without Down's) then presumably the termination of a child would not increase happiness and the reduction in suffering (given the absence of the child and the effects on the family) could well outweigh the non-increase in happiness.
• Given that people who are objectively suffering can experience happiness, and that people who are happy can suffer, suffering and happiness are not necessarily opposed and therefore the aims to decrease the former and increase the latter may, in fact, be conflicting.
• By extension of his argument that it is immoral to maintain life where there is suffering, all those who suffer from any illness, or indeed with the potential to suffer from any illness, however short or long term, should be exterminated because their existence may lead to their own suffering or the suffering of others.

Given the logical outcome of his moral framework, perhaps it is time to reconsider the starting point. If the outcome is outrageous and not what he intends at all, perhaps that is because some of his reasoning is based on an emotional understanding of happiness and suffering. 

A lack of logic is a dangerous thing

One of my cousins sent me a link the other day to a video of a guy defending same-sex marriage. He was calm, eloquent and believed in his cause. And dangerously convincing. No doubt using words like "dangerously convinving" make me a homophobic bigot, but what I'm actually talking about is logic, or a total lack thereof.

The problem is this: no-one is taught logic anymore and therefore very few people can recognise when the flaws in an opponent's argument have nothing to do with the point at stake. These days, hardly anyone bothers to put together an argument which has any more content than maligning the opposition. This guy talks about logic, talks as if he's being logical, attacks "so-called homophobic logic" and you have to really pay attention to see where his logic totally falls apart and reveals itself to be a big pile of...fallacies.

When I clicked on this link, the first thing that happened was that I was asked to respond to the following statement: "I believe that everyone should be treated equally regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation". There is a long-standing, regularly exploited ambiguity of the words equal and same. For example, I believe that men and women were created equal in dignity, but men and women are obviously not the same, whether on a biological, psychological or spiritual level we are clearly different. But when people start talking about gender equality they usually mean that everyone is the same. But "treating people equally" doesn't mean "treating everyone the same" and everyone being equal and treating everyone equally and treating everyone the same are three different things. If they were the same, then I should give money to everyone who asks me for it, whether they need the money for medicines or illegal drugs. I should carry out brain surgery on two people who have fallen down some stairs and injured their head even though one of them is a 92 year-old whose blood pressure medication made her dizzy and the other is 20 and was drunk. Equality comes in ensuring that both get the treatment with the best risk-benefit ratio, giving them the best prospect of recovery. How that is decided, and who decides it, is another issue. As for sexual orientation, everyone is called to live chastity, and for the record that is not something which is lived on a purely physical level. If I don't have a boyfriend, but have sexual fantasies about a good-looking guy I saw on the bus, am I chaste? If I am married and do the same, am I chaste? No: "sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes" (CCC 2351) whether in the mind, the heart or the act.

Returning to the website, I might easily agree with the equality statement, but then I could well be left questioning myself over why, in that case, I don't agree with same-sex marriage (it being obviously discrimination, myself an unknowing homophobic bigot). I might even end up deciding that as I'm not a bigot and I am in favour of equality I therefore had better start supporting same-sex marriage because it's totally in line with my priniciples. You see...dangerous, and the guy hasn't even started talking yet.