Interview: David S. Oderberg

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David S. Oderberg is Professor and Director of Postgraduate Research Studies at the University of Reading, in England, and Editor of Ratio, an international journal on analytic philosophy. During his carreer he worked on a wide variety of topics, delving into different fields of philosophy, with a special interest in metaphysics and ethics. His approach to moral philosophy and bioethics falls under the natural law tradition and is based on Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.

1) One of the central tenets of your approach to bioethical issues is the recovery of teleology, specifically of the natural law tradition and of hylemorphic dualism, your view of personal identity. At a time when everything is deemed to be cultural and when all sorts of interventions, from genetic engeenering to human-machine interaction, threaten to alter what we are, do you think there is still a place for human nature?

Human nature always has a place because it cannot be eradicated without destroying the human species altogether. The term “teleology”, for weak reasons going back to the early “Enlightenment”, is viewed with suspicion by philosophers. Isn’t that just bad old Aristotelian metaphysics – final causes, spooky causation, weird pre-scientific concepts? In fact, teleology is fine metaphysics, quite Aristotelian and all the better for that. It is perfectly scientific. It’s just that what counts as “scientific” these days is often less science and more philosophical opinion or even prejudice. If there is no human nature there is nothing that it is to be human other than what someone – maybe that someone is the government, or the scientific establishment, or the global elites – wants it to be, or says is “good for us”. And that opens the road to precisely the things you suggest, such as unregulated genetic engineering, the attempt to fuse man and machine, endless experimentation – beginning usually on animals with all the cruelty that involves, and ending with attempts by some humans, who consider themselves ‘better’ or ‘wiser’ than the rest of us – certainly richer and more powerful – to control and manipulate the rest of us.

Human nature has both a positive and a negative aspect. The negative aspect is that it provides metaphysical boundaries on how people may and may not be treated. That’s why there are human rights, e.g. the right not to be murdered or to be experimented on without informed consent; the right of innocent people to go about their lives freely and without molestation by the state or by some oligarchy bent on using them as instruments for their own desires. The positive aspect is that it provides a kind of template to live by – not a blueprint worked out in every detail, but a kind of framework within which we can and must develop our characters. We must use our distinctively human characteristics – in particular our reason and our free will – to live in a way that promotes and protects virtue, that develops our talents in a fashion that benefits both us as individuals and the wider community. Our human nature inclines us to cooperation, to acts of kindness, to the work of construction and creation of beauty and the destruction of what is base, ugly, and panders to our lowest passions. Ultimately, our human nature directs us to the One who created us, and whose eternal wisdom – whose logos – governs our world. Now that might sound silly or weak-minded to those who think they hold the future of the world – and their own destinies – in their hands, but in fact it is the exact opposite. The alternative to this viewpoint is nothing more than a counsel of chaos and despair. We see more of this with each passing year.

2) In a previous interview you said that you used to be in favor of abortion but now you have radically changed your stance on the subject. What led you to change your mind on abortion?

Well, during my undergraduate university years, and for a short time thereafter, I was a convinced pro-abortionist. I suppose, like many young philosophers of my generation, I was impressed by the writings of Peter Singer, James Rachels, Michael Tooley, and other bioethicists – and also by the much more sophisticated defence of abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson.

Over time, however, and after much reading and discussion with others, I came to see this position as wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, or almost right – but quite wrong, quite bad, and disastrous for humanity. It’s not difficult to put a finger on what changed my mind. When I was pro-abortion, I thought about women’s rights, pure and simple. I thought about the woman carrying the foetus. I didn’t think about the foetus except as an obstacle to the woman’s liberty. Once I broadened my metaphysical and ethical horizons, so to speak – and began to think about the foetus, the unborn child, for what it is, namely a human being just like you, me, or the woman carrying it – it was impossible in every way to hold on to a pro-abortion position.

Over the years I continued to think about the topic, among many others in bioethics, and published a fair bit, including my book Applied Ethics, which contains a chapter on abortion. There I show that every mainstream argument for abortion fails, and that the sanctity of life defence is rock solid. Even Thomson’s argument, with its infamous violinist thought experiment, is really a piece of sophistry – superficially very clever and persuasive, but it falls apart on inspection.

The issue is not difficult at its root. One has to stop thinking about many things for one minute – the woman carrying the child, the father of the child, the wider society, issues such as population, money, liberty, autonomy, self-determination, and so on – and during that single minute, think about the unborn child and learn from both biology and philosophy that it is no more nor less than an innocent human being. Nothing else comes before that in the order of explanation or argumentation. Everything else comes after. So, whatever the solution is to wider problems – if they are problems – to do with autonomy, liberty, women’s rights, and so on – it cannot be the murder of an innocent human being. Otherwise it is game over and morality is no more.

3) In your works, you’ve frequentely spoken in defence of conscientious objection in healthcare as part of a broader defence of freedom of conscience and religion. However, one may wonder how conscientious objection towards practices, whether abortion or euthanasia, that are usually considered either a form of unlawful killing or a form of basic healthcare can be defended. Isn’t conscientious objection just a form of messy compromise?

I agree with you. It is a messy compromise, fit only for the messiness of liberal pluralist societies with all the different viewpoints they instantiate. States that profess to grant religious liberty, freedom of belief and conscience, non-coercion, societies that are non-confessional, secular, officially neutral in all but their liberalism, need institutionalised conscience laws that protect people from coercion or pressured expectation to violate their deeply held ethical or religious beliefs. Without them, individuals will and do find themselves cornered to into violating their principles. It is happening all over the Collective West. Medical professionals who refuse to carry out or assist with treatments to which they have sincere principled objections can end up disciplined or dismissed from their jobs, as in the famous Doogan case in Scotland, on which I published an article a few years ago.

What I have argued, for instance in my book Opting Out, is that the conscience debate has gotten bogged down in the debate over abortion and other life/death issues. What we forget is that medical technology is advancing so rapidly that conscience is becoming a problem across medicine. If a doctor conscientiously objects to performing transgender surgery, should she be disciplined? What about someone who wants extreme body modification of other kinds, such as the radical cosmetic surgery we see increasing in popularity? How about someone who claims to have apotemnophilia1Mental disorder characterised by a strong desire to be mutilated or to have a disability, sometimes associated with sexual arousal (ed.). and asks a surgeon to amputate a healthy leg? Should medical professionals be pressured into prescribing performance-enhancing drugs for sport, vaccinations that many experts believe are unsafe despite the establishment consensus, or neuro-enhancers to help students pass their exams? The list is potentially endless. We will see more and more of these examples in the future. That’s why governments need to act now and move beyond traditional conscientious objection in wartime to comprehensive legislation protecting freedom of conscience in medicine and beyond.

There are, for sure, all sorts of conceptual difficulties with this proposal, especially to do with drawing reasonable boundaries between where conscience protection should and should not apply. I have addressed some of these in my writings. But in a liberal, pluralist society I see no alternative. If this is the kind of society we live in – that we are told we live in by those above us – then those with power should prove what they say by enshrining conscientious objection in law.

4) In your writings you have criticised the neurological and the circulatory-respiratory criteria of determination of death. That seems to lead either to the rejection of most organ donations or to an abandonment of the dead donor rule, that would allow for the donation of vital organs from living human beings. Since you seem to be leaning more towards the first option, when do you think it’s morally permissible to donate organs?

In my article on this subject I argued that the only sure sign of death is decomposition. All other signs are inherently unreliable, not least so-called “brain death”. This was the universal view of mankind for millennia, up to the recent development of medical technology, for detecting the presence or absence of certain fundamental organic processes such as circulation. This coincided with the advent of technology for keeping those processes going artificially when a person could not do so autonomously, along with the invention and refinement of organ transplantation. All of these developments produced a perfect storm whereby the boundaries between life and death became blurred in the minds of philosophers and medical professionals. Once again, as with abortion, the tendency has been to focus on the manifestly visible – the desperate woman carrying the child, the poor patient in need of a liver or heart transplant – and to ignore, or try to avoid focusing on, that which is visible only with some effort – the unborn child as an individual possessing human rights, or the comatose person who also has an inalienable right to life even though they may seem to be “as good as dead” and simply a viable “donor” who can save someone else’s life.

There are in such cases more “ethical stakeholders” than meets the eye of many people. There is no room to go into detail here, but my view – admittedly controversial and certainly not appealing to a large number of people – is that probably every single organ that has ever been removed from another person, with or without consent, has been taken from a living human being. This means that those who were dead after the removal were, purely and simply, murdered for their organs. I don’t know how else to state it without diminishing the truth of what has happened. Maybe I’m wrong, in which case I retract it all… but I can’t see how I’m wrong.

That said, I am not against removing organs from someone who either consents there and then and is able to survive the removal (of, say, a kidney) or from someone who has consented in advance and is now at death’s door. This latter person, an innocent human being, may never be killed for their organs. Rather, if we had technology to preserve their heart, for example, after death – i.e., after the onset of bodily decomposition – say by injecting the organ with some chemical that could preserve it or remove its diminution of function – then I would have no ethical objection to that. Maybe our impressive developments in medical technology could move a little toward solving that particular problem.

5) Another topic you have touched in your writings is animal ethics. Part of society seems to be moving in the direction of considering humans and other animals on similar levels of dignity and of viewing differences in treatment, both between humans and animals and among animals themselves, as unjustified. Do you think we can justify not only a different treatment of humans and animals but also a different treatment of each animal species? There are those who say, for example, that to have no problem with eating a pig but to be outraged at cultures where dogs are eaten is hypocritical.

It is true, there is quite a bit of hypocrisy surrounding animals, and a lot of apparent irrationality. Pigs are, to be sure, intelligent and highly aware animals, like dogs. Unfortunately, the former are historically food in some countries where the latter are not. If this was an issue about rights and equal treatment, we would have a problem of reconciliation: don’t condemn societies in which people eat our favourite household pets, or stop eating ham sandwiches.

On my view, though, this is not a matter of animal rights because animals do not have rights. I used to think so and was a vegetarian for that specific reason. But I got talked out of my vegetarianism on purely philosophical grounds. I have a chapter on animals in the book I mentioned earlier, Applied Ethics. To say that animals don’t have rights sounds outrageous: so we can do whatever we like to them? Of course not! We still have, in my view, obligations in respect of animals, even if those obligations are not due to the possession of rights by any non-human animal. We may eat them, but we are obliged to raise and slaughter our animal food as humanely as possible. We should opt for organic and free-range wherever possible. We should deplore the inhumane conditions in which animals are kept all over the world, whether for food, sport, entertainment, or medical research.

And yes, different kinds of animals require different kinds of treatment depending on their natures. There is a massive globalist push to get us all eating insects, right? Well, I don’t hear much about problems with the intensive farming of crickets or earthworms, about their being bored in their boxes, about their being frustrated and unable to express themselves. I doubt there are such problems. So clearly we need to match our treatment as best we can to the needs and natural behaviour of whatever animal we are using for our purposes.

So am I condoning eating dogs? It’s not for me. It’s not something I’d recommend because it’s not part of my culture or way of seeing the animal world. But that is not hypocritical since I’m free to choose which animals I want to eat or recommend others eat just as I’m free to choose which animals to have as pets or recommend others have as pets, or ride for fun or transport or watch at the circus or in the zoo or use for clothing or for therapy. The only ethical consideration is that such practices be carried out humanely. I have no idea what the humane farming of dogs would look like. I doubt it would work. It can be pretty humane with pigs. But I’m no farming expert and I’m open to persuasion one way or the other. All I know is that I would have to be at death’s door to eat a cricket.

To delve deeper:

Books:

  • Oderberg, D. S. (2020). The metaphysics of good and evil. Routledge.
  • Oderberg, D. S. (2018). Opting out: Conscience and cooperation in a pluralistic society. London Publishing Partnership.
  • Oderberg, D. S. (2007). Real essentialism. Routledge.
  • Oderberg, D. S. (2000). Applied ethics: A non-consequentialist approach. Blackwell.
  • Oderberg, D. S. (2000). Moral theory: A non-consequentialist approach. Blackwell.

Articles/Papers:

Conferences/lectures:

Interviews:

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