Andres' 1st comment on Pregnant Addicts

Hi Everyone,

First of all, thanks for all the comments thus far. Thanks Oliver for your latest considered thoughts on the virtues of idleness, but I think I would struggle to sustain a dialogue of much substance on that topic, and I think we might as a group find it hard to fill 20 minutes of a presentation with it. On the other hand, as both you and Helen have thus far intimated, we may all find the subject of Policy Approaches to Pregnant Addicts (addressed in the article by I.M. Young) a good deal richer, so I'm now going to make my first comment on this:

Helen, in your first set of arguments, owing to your sympathies lying with the child rather than the mother, and your desire to make the mother's life comfortable only insofar as it is instrumental in the welfare of the child, you seem to be implying that the Punishment Approach, either in its Deterrence form or in its Retribution form, as long as the welfare of the child could be assured, would be the policy option you currently prefer; and this because you see the mother as fundamentally culpable for her actions.

In the first paragraph of your entry you say you doubt you will change your mind on the matter. This is such a wonderfully rich subject and I hope that some of the arguments I will offer may start to make you reconsider your position. Not on the basis of this posting alone, certainly not! But perhaps by the end of our dialogue and the presentation.

You are in some very esteemed company with your passionate belief that we all have the power to make our own decisions in life, or at least that we ought to have such a power. As you rightly mentioned, Satre is perhaps the most famous of the advocates of this position. Nonetheless, allow me to offer some potential problems that may confront this way of thinking.

The first and most obvious thing that might be said is that these people are addicts! - the very concept of addiction connotes some degree of powerlessness to behave otherwise. And in which case, what would ought to have the power to do otherwise actually mean? Will-power, especially in its most raw form - in relation to 'kicking' a habit for example - does seem to be an attribute that varies in strength from person to person; and so the question invites itself, how would one go about succeeding in willing that one had more will-power?!

Though one could argue that the addict should not have gotten herself into the process of developing a drug addiction, there are undoubtedly some (although admittedly a small minority) 'recreational' drugs that have such an intensely addictive quality that the user can be 'hooked' from the very first exposure - I believe the worst forms of 'crack' cocaine are amongst them. We all can make mistakes, and we tend to attenuate our feelings of blame towards those who fall off the rails just once, and maybe even twice - so then the crack cocaine addict who has another 'accident,' and gets pregnant may, perhaps, not be so worthy of our unmitigated reproach.

Having said all this however, I think this counter-argument is very much a side issue. The truly philosophically interesting matter concerns the broader question of Satre's radical conception of freedom:

Satre said: "It is ...senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are" (Being and Nothingness). For Satre, a person who claims that she is forced into some particular action or form of behaviour is doing nothing other than refusing to recognize herself a free, as she truly is. So we are free, he would seemingly argue, to chose to do the right thing, to make the morally correct choices in life. If we do not make those morally correct choices then it is because we have chosen, either consciously or subconsciously, in that manner. Now a presupposition of this viewpoint, or at least a presupposition of it in its application to issues of culpability, is that we all have intellectual, or cognitive, if you will, access to moral truths: universal moral truths - moral truths that apply to all of us equally and which we all have the capacity to see. Now this is a very dubious suggestion indeed, I would be so bold as to argue. And if it is indeed a mistake; if we do indeed acquire our moral compasses in very different ways to that in which the Satrean would assert; if we do not each of us work out the right way to act by going through some sort of rational procedure to uncover it (compare the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, and Kant's - of whom Satre was a great admirer - moral perspective) then the arguments for punishment based on free will are surely lost.

These universalist moral theories strike me as profoundly parochial and even perhaps at times deeply insensitive to the realities of the disparatenss of the forms of moral life that humans lead. To suggest for example that it is unequivocally and universally immoral for a Indian man to commit suicide, and thereby render his family without a bread-winner, in response to his deep sense of shame at his daughter's failure to marry the husband he had arranged for her, or perhaps for an ancient people such as the Aztecs to sacrifice a virgin girl in order to procure the good favour of the gods, is, whilst deeply disturbing to you and me, a profound mistake: these people do not act in such ways because they are fundamentally morally inferior to you and I; they do so because they have grown up in a very different moral tradition, with very different moral vocabularies. And so - AND HERE IS THE HEART OF MY ARGUMENT! - pregnant drug addicts who have grown up with parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts who openly take drugs in front of them, who openly have endless processions of sexual partners come to the home, and with whom they engage in explicit sexual activity in front of them, who feed their babies a bottle of milk at the very same time as smoking dope or injecting heroine, have grown up with extremely different views of what constitutes normal behaviour, of what constitutes morally permissible, morally legitimate behaviour. And so Satre's radical conception of freedom is as deeply insensitive as it is thoroughly misguided. Thus to punish pregnant addicts on the basis of culpability is, on my view, a mistake.