Can Culture Justify Infant Circumcision?

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.

Child-rearing With Minimal Domination: A Republican Account

“…For instance, many legislatures allow parents to refuse their children’s vaccination even when the children are not at high risk of negative side-effects, or to circumcise their children as a means to preserve their culture; and, to the best of my knowledge, there are no legal prohibitions against homophobic parents inflicting harmful judgemental attitudes on their gay children. To the extent to which existing parental rights setback children’s well-being interests in order to protect parental liberties, many liberals can and do criticise them, 8 arguing that vaccination ought to be mandatory (Pierik, 2018), that children’s circumcision is impermissible (Sarajlic, 2014) and that homophobic parents lack a moral right to rear (Brennan and Macleod, 2017). Many liberals believe that children ought to be raised in ways that promote their respect interest in future autonomy.…”

“… 3. For recent liberal accounts of child-rearing that are critical of the status quo concerning parental rights and the distribution of the right to parent, see Vallentyne (2003), Clayton (2006), LaFollette (2010), Brighouse and Swift (2014), Sarajlic (2014), Macleod (2015b), Brennan and Macleod (2017) and Pierik (2018). …”

Medically Unnecessary Genital Cutting and the Rights of the Child: Moving Toward Consensus

“…Indeed, such norms, beliefs, or values are often controversial in the wider society and hence prone to reevaluation upon later reflection or exposure to other points of view (e.g., the belief that a child's body must conform to a strict gender binary; that surgery is an appropriate means of pursuing hygiene; that one's genitals must be symbolically purified before one can be fully accepted; and so on). In this, they constitute painful intrusions into the "private parts" of the most vulnerable members of society, despite being of highly contested value overall (Chambers 2018;Sarajlic 2014). This is in contrast to medically necessary interventions (Box 1), which are almost universally valued-that is, valued irrespective of local epistemologies, individual bodily preferences, religious commitments, or cultural background-which explains why such interventions are usually permissible even in temporarily nonautonomous persons (Earp 2019).…”

Children, Self‐knowledge and Cultural Reproduction

“…If this were so, then many otherwise problematic acts of establishing the parent‐child relationship would be justified as well; such as various bodily modifications parents impose upon their children. Ritual genital cutting (circumcision) could contribute to the ways parents build intimate and valuable relationships with their children, but it is not obviously justified (Sarajlic, , pp. 327–343).…”