Abstract
The paper addresses arguments in the recent philosophical and bioethical literature claiming that social and cultural benefits can justify non-therapeutic male infant circumcision. It rejects these claims by referring to the open future argument, according to which infant circumcision is morally unjustifiable because it violates the child’s right to an open future. The paper also addresses an important objection to the open future argument and examines the strength of the objection to refute the application of the argument to the circumcision case.
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Notes
Therefore, I imply what Judaism defines as milah, not periah. See Mazor (2013, pp. 421–428).
Here, I assume a broad (sociological) understanding of religion, with no intention to discuss doctrinal issues. This understanding enables me to group metaphysical (first) with communal (second and third) claims. The distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ form of the cultural benefits argument should not be taken as too strict. It can be also framed as the difference between culture in the ‘broad’ sense and culture in the ‘narrow’ sense of the word. However, I opt for ‘secular’ versus ‘religious’ for the sake of simplicity.
References
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kerem Öktem, Sune Laegaard, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This article is a part of the doctoral dissertation I defended at the Central European University in 2014, and has in part been funded by the Open Society Foundation through the “Signals from the Majority” project. I would also like to thank Central European University’s Department of Political Science, Columbia University’s Department of Political Science and Oxford University’s European Studies Centre for support during the research for this article.
