Four frames

The Commission knew that it was going to find itself faced with conflicting values. With its enlightened approach to making all kinds of fertility treatment available to all kinds of women and men, it wanted to endorse the legitimacy of individually held wishes, to give voice to minority as well as majority views, and to convey the depth of feeling that Canadians have about these important issues.

So they set out to consult a society imagined as heterogeneous at every level. I speculate that it was able to present or manage such a vision through creating a certain kind of person. A third framing device, then, was the figure of the calculating ‘individual’. In the same way as the law posits the individual as a bearer of rights, the Commission posited the individual Canadian man or woman as a decision­maker.

A central goal of our recommendations is to enable individual Canadians to make personal decisions about their involvement with the technologies, confident in the knowledge that mechanisms are in place to assess their safety and effectiveness and to consider their ethical, legal, and social implications.

(Canada 1993: xxxv)

Since they already have ‘views and attitudes’, an oft-repeated phrase, individual Canadians were thus the kinds of persons¹⁹ whom society (‘Canadian society’) could consult.

Externalities in comparative guise 73 channel and celebrate the contrariness of different positions. Its third frame, identifying the individual as a decision-making bearer of views and attitudes, would help do this job.

A final frame - from several others - is considered here: the opinion. Views, attitudes and opinions were at times run together (e.g. Canada 1993: 426). It is assumed that it was through investigating ‘views and attitudes’ that one could elucidate significant values. While views and attitudes are sedimented in the culture of a population, one potent way in which Euro-American people at large, and Canadians proved no exception, give them voice is as ‘opinions’ - and opinions can be surveyed. Moreover, views or attitudes enunciated in the form of opinion give something of an elective quality to values. Heterogeneous values will show up as ‘diversity’, and that diversity as a function of the choice-informed diversity of individual persons. (Individuals are in turn rendered diverse through the opinions that differentiate them.) This frame not only provided an enumerable counterpart to the third frame, the individual decision-maker, but picked out the contours of the second frame, the distilled values of Canadians, as an inevitable precursor to the first, Canada or Canadian society. At the end of the road were the decisions that Canada must make as to its future policy directions, the ‘choices’ over health care treatment facing it as a nation (1993: 103).

Can such an approach also deal with people when they are the representatives of minority groups and lobbies? What about cultural diversity? The answer, it would seem, is yes. The opinion as a common frame appeared to enable numerous ‘groups’ to be accommodated.

The Report by and large favours quantitative summaries (‘most’, ‘many’) rather than statistics, although it points to numerical data collected in its research reports and produces percentages at certain junctures. Either way, opinions can be counted. Instead of imagining the co-creation of diversity and hegemonic cultural assump­tions, then, the Report imagines that differences can be enumerated. Enumeration makes certain trends visible. ‘Along with this greater cultural diversity have come new perceptions and new attitudes toward family, kinship and parenthood’

(1993: 29). So what kind of action does the knowledge require? It requires the Commissioners to recommend guidelines for regulation, the first step of which is weighing up the evidence.

There is no single formula for weighing individual and collective interests that would allow us to resolve all these issues. Rather, we need to look at given situations and consider how individual interests affect society’s values, norms, and resources, and vice versa.

(1993: 65)

So what will the Commissioners ‘resolve’ and how will they ‘look’?

We may ask about the relationship between these regulative intentions and the four frames I have singled out. Will the process of resolution amount to a fifth frame? If so, it is a rather different kind of frame. For I suggest that it points to the contours of an externality that cannot be seen at all because it lies in the eyes of those looking through these other frames. It consists in the normative intentions of those holding the inquiry. It takes the form of moral reasoning.

Producing externalities²⁰

In the last resort, it is the reasoning of those who have encompassed all aspects of the inquiry as such - that is, of the Commissioners - which prevails. One example is deliberation over donor insemination (1993: 431).

We gave great thought to this. guided by. what Canadians said about both their fundamental values and their attitudes towards specific issues.. Where there was divergence on specific policy questions, we decided that our moral reasoning should have greater weight if it was in line with fundamental values endorsed by Canadians, because we had spent much time weighing the evidence and thinking through the implications of different policies on such specific questions.

In making the choice as to what is to be decided, the Commissioners remind the public that they are liberal persons who, in the name of government, do what governments have to do and depend on their own reasoning.

The example of donor insemination, which is about the ethics of making infor­mation public, is worth pursuing further. The issue is that of disclosure to interested parties. We may note the convergence between the value put on openness applied to considerations of anonymity and the value put on openness that characterises

Externalities in comparative guise 75 enquiries of this kind. The Report was emphatic that method of conception should be open knowledge, thereby creating a new category of family (‘DI families’) (Eichler 1996). Several of the comments in favour of openness came from professionals and experts in adoption and other practices: ‘evidence before the Commission shows that secrecy in families can be very harmful’ (Canada 1993: 444). At the same time, ‘many donors’ were in favour of anonymity (1993: 441); in addition, the needs of the DI family had to be taken into account. What had been created through open information (on the technology of conception) had to be held in place by concealing other information (the donor’s social identity). In short, openness had to be balanced against other considerations. In the end, the Canadian Royal Commission determined to allow non-identifying, but not identifying, information to be accessible to DI children.

The Commission believes that this is the best way to balance the needs of children and families. It is a system that acknowledges the need of individuals for social, genetic and medical information about their biological parent, but it also acknowledges the need for DI families to flourish and form a strong unit if the best interests of the child are to be served... [It] accords greater importance to family relationships and actual parenting than to the source of genetic material.

(1993: 445)

In the balancing of the two approaches, we might ask what value was being given to balance itself.

There were a few occasions. when our moral reasoning led us to conclusions that were not strongly supported by the responses to some specific questions in our surveys of Canadians. This kind of situation usually arose when a value that Canadians strongly endorsed... such as equality, was not upheld in answer to a question on a specific situation, such as whether single women should have access to donor insemination.

(1993: 431)

Perhaps their judicious opinion can be understood as an externality: at the centre of this huge field of diverse opinions lay a normative process that could work only according to its own principles. I call it an externality because although the populace would have recognised the process, and would be subscribing to norms themselves, the grounds summoned for adjudication (for the purposes of distilling information about and representing a spectrum of Canadian values) would be different from the context in which such values were normally enunciated. The Commissioners’ knowledge base, for a start, was different from those on whose behalf they were adjudicating (although the Commissioners saw the next step as

sharing as much of that knowledge as possible, hence the publication of the Report). Yet in the end the vast quantity of data was barely used,²¹ and only in rather general terms drawn on to support the Commissioner’s final authority One is reminded of Barry’s (2000) suggestion that in the knowledge economy high levels of information production (‘overproduction’) may displace other forms of action, and ‘evidence-based’ action seems just such an invitation. The mass of data was, as we have seen, certainly pressed into the service of comprehending the diversity of society, underlining its heterogeneity and the differences between sub­populations. For if everyone differs, no one set of differences need be privileged. So difference can be turned into an amenable and governable fact not by reducing the significance of pluralism but by exaggerating it.²²

The Commissioners’ moral reasoning appeared in the Report, I suggest, as an internal externality. They were not simply adding their own voice to the mix; they called down a justification for their views that lay within themselves. What is telling is that this frame had its own overflow. That is, when their own weighing up of evidence (‘we gave great thought’/‘we spent much time’) performed as a frame for them, it inevitably produced its own externalities. I return to the troublesome issue of minorities. For no amount of balancing would ultimately dissolve the uniqueness claimed by certain interest groups, and this led to a dissenting opinion, to a presentation of moral reasoning not consonant with the majority. In the example I give here, we see how the non-discriminatory tenor of the Report blocked the consideration of opinion based on religious conviction.

The Report does not accord religion a basis for values separate from others but treats it as further grounds for a respectful pluralism, with the proviso that religious, like ethnic, affiliation should not be a discriminating factor in the offering of treatment. But, asserts the dissenting Commissioner whose comments are published separately at the end of the Report,²³ if secular jurisdiction overrides religious principle, this would remove the freedom of religious institutions ‘to interpret their ethical policies according to their [own] mandates’ (1993: 1093). So while the main body of the Report acknowledges people’s relationship to certain intermediate groups, including religious groups, she calls the bluff on choice by thereby pointing to an arena (religion, ethnicity) where reproductive values constitute part of a person’s identity. The values at stake are bound up with the very way a person exercises affiliation. They are not the same kind of choice-informed decision-making individual otherwise created by the Commission.

Some of these interest groups are what, in the course of developing the idea of a ‘decent society’ (as against for instance a just society), Margalit (1996: 138ff, 277) calls encompassing. A decent society does not tolerate institutions that put people into humiliating positions. It is encumbent on a decent society to acknowledge the role that ‘encompassing groups’ play in people’s self-placement and self-esteem, or oppression for that matter. He singles out such ‘groups’ by virtue of the fact that they are not in any way voluntaristic or elective. Religious and ethnic affiliations are among his prime examples. A decent society is judged not only by how its institutions treat encompassing groups but also by how such groups treat their

Externalities in comparative guise 77 members. Now while a whole spectrum of such groups might give the illusion that they are many-to-choose-from, for each person there can be only one. Hence ‘Canada’ cannot substitute for any one religious or ethnic group, regardless of how and how many views are distilled. It simply cannot frame them.

The dissenting opinion raised a question about the invidious nature of choice facing those with religious and similar convictions; they run the danger of humiliation. It offers several other points of criticism. First, it is explicit about the social context of values and about the fact that it is not just persons as individuals who are affected by treatment provision or policy decisions but persons in relationship with others. Second, it epitomises its own critique: it makes fundamental values explicit in a way that cannot be regulated or quantified. Third, it draws attention to the problem of choice in an unenlightened society. When society is revealed as conservative, what then? If we really look to choice, many Canadians would deny certain identifiable others their reproductive choices.²⁴ Finally, it pinpoints the conundrum of majority and minority views. What is a ‘minority’ view? The answer would seemingly depend on whether the minority was a self­contained religious group, a disadvantaged sector of the population - or a group of Commissioners charged with interpreting the public will.