Principle, pragmatics and honesty (I): cutting bits off babies

I meant to post this last week, but I got distracted, so some of the relevance has gone. Anyway:

I've been sucked into the circumcision debate, despite not really caring. On one side, it's said we can't do this kind of thing without consent, and babies can't give it (put, sensitively and with a title I have stolen, here). On the other, tradition weighs in, with some sidelines about Jews (though really this is about Muslims). Instinctively, I'd side with the latter.

However, apart from alerting me to the fact that Princes Charles, Andrew and Edward are circumcised (who knew?), it's not been a very well argued debate and there are red herrings aplenty. Here are a few:

• Bodily integrity. This won't do: we stab infants with needles, cut off cords and generally do a variety of things for medical benefit. Later in life, we pierce the ears of children too, sometimes not much later, and certainly not for medical benefit. Clearly, benefits need only be trivial or imagined for bodily integrity to be violated (and a jolly good thing too).
• Medical necessity (a). Necessity won't bear the weight its given here - immunisation is not necessary, merely beneficial. Not a reason not to do it, but let's not pretend we can point to medical necessity. Circumcision is necessary in the eyes of Jews and Muslims.
• Medical necessity (b). Did we ask some doctors? Did they put this up the top of child harm? Do we listen when they do raise things? No, no and no. On booze for example, the law explicitly rejects the medical advice about children.
• Racism. Some have claimed that a ban of circumcision is the worst attack on Jewish life since the holocaust. This is obviously not true, but it probably would have been better if it hadn't be a German court.
• Harm. This is a bit of a battleground, with the practitioners claiming it doesn't do any, and others claiming it does. I think the former are being a bit weak here. Clearly, it's not very dangerous, but it's a big deal - it's Abraham's covenant with God. I think reducing the argument to harmlessness rather weakens it.
• Irreversibility. I hesitate to put this down as a red herring, as I think it's the strongest argument for the ban - though of course, it's meant to be irreversible. That's the point. However, although I am open to persuasion, I do think it is a red herring. Firstly, it's a conditional criticism: in the argument irreversibly good is clearly OK, e.g., inoculations. So this is just a subset of the harm discussion. Secondly, I don't think it's unique: some very negative, legal, things are irreversible, for example, damage done by parents smoking in the home. 

So far, so good. But knocking down some messy logic doesn't win arguments. The critical thing for me is that people seem to be arguing about the wrong thing: specifically, they're arguing about whether people should circumcise, whereas they should be arguing about whether there should be a law stopping them. This distinction is important.  The test of a good law is the impact it has: we should be asking if passing a law against circumcision would make the people as a whole better off, and I suspect it won't. Most importantly,  some people will get it done clandestinely, which could be much more dangerous; secondly, it will rip some people away from their roots, which I don't like very much and I think is undesirable socially. One the other hands I think the gains are pretty minimal. That equation may change, but at present I think that's how it stacks up.

I'd also like a bit of honesty about this. The rejection of circumcision is - at essence - one of some people essentially wanting other people to think like them. This is perfectly reasonable, I'd like people to think like me. However, people don't think like them, and they want to do this. In many cases, they really, really want to do it. And this tension is about how genuinely plural we want society to be. I'm not sure I want a very plural society, so I'd force a lot of things down some fairly narrow paths. In principle, this might be one of them (see practical caveat above). I think that would be good for people; I don't think it would be very plural. Those seeking a ban should admit that too.

That was longer than I intended. As an aside, I think the same issues attend Lords reform through a different angle. I'll do that tomorrow.