Richard Spencer asks, Did George Tiller Deserve to Die?. While Megan McArdle has A Really Long Post About Abortion and Reasoning By Historical Analogy That is Going to Make Virtually All of My Readers Very Angry At Me. Though Spencer’s critique is of the pro-life, while McArdle’s of the pro-choice, they point to sometimes confused presuppositions and logic of both groups. I would say that no matter how much some abortion rights folks try to turn the killing of the fetus into destruction of the fetus, that is, another medical procedure in a long line of medical procedures, they will fail. Similarly, despite the rhetoric of pro-lifers that the fetus at 1st trimester fetus equals a 2 month old infant, most people do not accept this. That is because much of the thinking on this logic is implicit and subconscious, not explicit and reflective. The term “pro-choice” is preferable to “abortion rights” because those who support abortion rights know that there is less unease about freedom than about the killing of a fetus in the minds of the public. Similarly, the simultaneous rhetoric of genocide but a disavowal of any violence to stop said genocide makes more sense if one presumes a model where the fetus does have less worth for most people than the infant.
In other words, people have as many or more aliefs about abortion as they do beliefs. In fact the public’s aliefs are less diverse and varied than their avowed beliefs.
Back to the logic, Richard notes:
Mike Huckabee (among others) often like to compare abortion to slavery—both being brazenly immoral acts that should not be allowed to occur anywhere in U.S. territory. OK. But if abortion were outlawed, would pro-lifers want to charge every woman who gets one on the black market with murder? Would they want to start having federal agents investigate miscarriages, to make sure that no foul play was involved?
When I pose such questions to friends and colleagues who are pro-life, the usual response is something on the order of, “No one in the movement wants to arrest the women, only the doctors.” Yet would these people say the same for someone who hires a hit man to take out a rival, essentially arguing, “The hit man is solely responsible, the person who paid him money to do the deed is the real victim here”? Of course not.
McArdle states:
Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like “If you think abortions are wrong, don’t have one!” If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.
Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong. Or at least it’s arguably not wrong–if Africans occupy some intermediate status between persons and animals**, then there is at least a legitimate argument for treating them like animals, rather than people.
The difference between our reaction to the two is that now we know Africans are people. It seems ridiculous to think that anyone ever thought they might not be people. They meet all the relevant criteria for personhood in twenty-first century America.
An alief sure looks like an “innate idea”. Are you sure that you want to go there? :).
its lineage is acknowledged in the paper.
Didn’t read it all the way through.
never mind. the author was more explicit in a talk about the relationship to the ideas of plato, the scholastics and early modern philosophers.
The guys whose books David Hume said should be committed to the flames? :). (Except for the math book, which I don’t think the original David Hume realized is a chapter in the metaphysics book).
j mct, empirical conservatism updates itself to the information on hand 🙂 in any case, as you know i don’t agree with a lot of what hume thought. his works are great prose, but there’s plenty to disagree with from where i stand.
I didn’t say David Hume II wasn’t an improvement on David Hume 1.0. :).
Fact of the matter, I think other than his thought that we impose cause on our experiences rather than get it from our experiences, I’d say v 1.0 was quite bad to awful as a philosopher.
I’m pro-life, think the vast majority of abortions should be outlawed and that women who procure them should be considered guilty and punished. The punishment however should generally be less harsh than for the doctor.
McArdle is wrong in her analysis IMO. Slave owners had long understood that slaves were persons, often not substantially different from themselves. How else to account for the concept of manumission? Would you free a dog or a horse into society?
Athenians strongly believed in freedom and yet found this compatible with keeping slaves (in fact felt slavery was necessary for free men to truly comprehend their freedom). Romans enslaved Greeks yet at the same time held Greek culture in high esteem. No, slave owners’ conceptions of slavery were far more complex than McArdle’s cartoon depiction.