Brian Earp is Senior Research Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center. Brian is co-author of Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (SUP, 2020) and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
At first, I would be confused. I don’t think I knew what a philosopher was—much less that it could be a profession—until later in life. I didn’t encounter philosophy in an academic sense until my first year of college, when I took Yale’s version of a “great books” course (with all the inspiring potential and yet questionable selectivity that phrase entails). In middle school, I had an assignment to imagine my future career. I believe I wrote “circus performer.” I did like doing magic tricks when I was little, and had taught myself to juggle that summer as well as balance various objects on my chin. However, later, when I learned what philosophy was, I could see that I had been engaging in something like it since I was a kid.
For one thing, I read compulsively—whatever I could get my hands on, the newspaper, the cereal box, encyclopedias, the not-always-age-appropriate books my parents or older siblings had stashed around the house. And I asked a lot of questions about things for which adults didn’t always have convincing answers. I was raised in a (fairly fundamentalist) evangelical Christian church and struggled to make sense of God’s alleged goodness in the face of so much horrible, needless suffering in the world. I didn’t like that if you prayed for something, it either happened (in which case God was said to have answered your prayer), or it didn’t happen (in which case God was said to have had a different plan for you). So, no matter what happened, God was apparently sticking to the plan—in which case, what was the point of praying? And if you were bound for Hell unless you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, what about people in, say, the Amazon, who have never heard of Jesus? And why didn’t God accept my gay friends? Not that these were the most sophisticated questions, or that no one had ever thought of them before. But I think my religious upbringing set me off on a question-asking path that has only grown longer over the years, and much more windy.
I also struggled with gender norms throughout childhood and into high school. I was teased for singing, acting in plays, being too sensitive, having long hair, hanging out with girls, eschewing fistfights, not being into cars, not drinking, whatever—supposedly effeminate traits. I played soccer, wrestled, and was (briefly) on the football team, but I generally felt both out of place and ill at ease in male-only spaces (especially the locker room!). Happily, I felt accepted within my friend group, and enjoyed my activities and didn’t ultimately crave approval of those who used to put me down. But I do remember reflecting, early and enduringly, on the role of social norms in structuring our experiences, shaping our sense of self, and suchlike.
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
I tend to read several books “at once”—meaning one chapter of one, then of the next, and so forth, in a circle until I finish one and replace it with something new. Currently I’m reading The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah; The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin Lipscomb; Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan by Janice Boddy; Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis; and Medical Nihilism by Jacob Stegenga. I recommend them all!
What are you working on right now?
I’m working on a book for Chicago University Press provisionally titled Sex and Circumcision: The Case for Genital Autonomy. It explores the ethics of non-consensual genital modifications that are not medically necessary, especially those affecting very young children. This includes penile circumcision for children designated male at birth and socialized as boys/men (the large majority of whom identify as such throughout their lives, but some of whom, depending on their culture of rearing and the available gender concepts or roles, come to identify as trans or non-binary among other possibilities).
It also includes children born with various intersex traits, many of whom are, still today, subjected to risky genital surgeries to try to compel their bodies to fit into a culturally enforced sex binary. And I cover a subset of practices affecting children designated female at birth and socialized as girls/women—with the same caveat as above. In addition to the more severe, commonly known types of female genital cutting, I address some of the physically less-radical forms, including interventions into the clitoral foreskin or hood (but not the rest of the clitoris or vulva). This particular subset is common in parts of South and Southeast Asia, where some Muslim communities practice what they regard as “circumcision” in gender-inclusive terms, seeing both male and female foreskin cutting as religiously recommended or required. This raises a lot of interesting questions about how child genital modification practices operate within gender systems. Interestingly, wherever female genital cutting of children occurs, so does male genital cutting of children—but not vice versa. I argue that both practices serve, uphold, and reproduce patriarchal gender norms, and that where they occur together, they do so in a mutually reinforcing manner.
In terms of ethics, I argue that all non-consenting persons, including children who are not yet capable of consenting, have a strong moral interest in being allowed to decide for themselves, when sufficiently autonomous, whether their own “private” anatomy should be cut or altered for reasons other than urgent medical necessity. To make this argument, I draw on recent work in postcolonial gender studies and feminist philosophy, anthropology, history and sociology of science and medicine, cultural theory, human rights law, medical ethics, and other areas. I hope the book will shed some new light on longstanding debates.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
Related to the last question, I would say it is a 2019 consensus statement on bodily integrity and children’s rights that I helped put together with some 90 colleagues—in law, medicine, philosophy, anthropology, and other disciplines—from many different countries around the world. Genital cutting is usually analyzed in three separate discourses: one for (non-intersex) males, one for (non-intersex) females, and one for children with intersex traits, with very little communication or cooperation across these areas. To get so many people from diverse backgrounds to come together and think about some of the shared vulnerabilities that affect children across categories of sex, gender, race, geography, culture, parental religion, and so forth, was not something I ever thought would be possible until very recently.
What common philosophical dilemma do you think has a clear answer?
The crying baby dilemma. If you don’t smother the baby, the enemy soldiers will hear it crying and—as is stipulated—systematically murder everyone in your group, including the baby. If that really is what’s going to happen, and you know it, it seems to me there is no dilemma—tragically, you must smother the baby … and hope against hope it doesn’t die before the danger passes (although, as I recall, the baby’s death as a result of smothering is also sadly stipulated in the case). As an aside, I am extremely skeptical about the philosophical usefulness of dilemmas that stipulate away certain real-life uncertainties or contingencies that probably apply to the case and which you can’t, in real life, stipulate away.
Name a trait, skill, or characteristic that you have that others may not know about.
People who know me know this, but I used to be a professional actor and singer, for about 10 years starting right after high school. Some of that story is here.
When did you last sing to yourself, or to someone else?
I often sing throughout the day, either alone or with (close) others.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Read, mostly! On a blanket, by the water, under a sunny—but not too sunny—sky, preferably. Visit with friends, mostly one-on-one. Travel and meet people from different countries and cultures (barring the pandemic). Sing, paint, listen to music, watch good films. Go for long walks. That sort of thing.
What’s your favorite quote?
I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but I recently came across this snippet from a letter by John Stuart Mill to a friend of his named David Barclay. I really like the sentiment and I think I feel something similar: “Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then DO IT.”
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
