I woke up this morning to an NPR discussion with Gary Wills about his in the LA Times today claiming that abortion is not a religious issue and despite having the sort of calm measured voice that makes you want to believe he is being reasonable the arguments Wills made were so bad it was almost physically painful. True most of the callers to the show were even worse but this guy is being held up as if he made an important serious argument while in reality he is making the same kind of illogical incoherent partisan emotional appeal that he thinks he is criticizing others for doing. Of course it’s hard to remember what exactly he said on the show but ‘thankfully’ his op-ed is just as incoherent.
Before we even examine what Wills says it’s easy to see that his conclusion couldn’t possibly be true. If you accept a religious account of morality as every major religion does then
It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.
About 10% of evangelicals according to polls allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.
For starters no one believes that all forms of killing deserve to be punished equally. Evangelicals might reasonably think that falsely believing a fetus wasn’t a person was a mitigating factor in their crime. Arguably it wouldn’t even be murder since they would be lacking the relevant intent to take a human life. Ultimately though at best he has shown that some evangelicals have compromised between the pull of religious teaching and mainstream social belief in an inconsistent way. It is of no relevance to the question of whether abortion is a religious question.
As I’ve already observed if we insisted that only things with clear cut scriptural support counted as religious we would have to throw out almost all the teachings of every modern religion. The dirty secret of modern religious practice is that we decide what teachings we want to believe in and then search for things that support that view in our holy books. This is a compelling argument that religion is an absurd internally incoherent practice but it is misleading to raise a general failure of religion as if it were of specific relevance to abortion. In any case it brings us no closer to the claim that abortion is not a
Much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception — that it is a religious issue that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion. Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law to be decided by natural reason. Well the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.
Gahh huh? So the question of whether a soul is implanted in a just conceived fetus isn’t a religious question? People who would say yes wouldn’t be making theological arguments? This doesn’t make any sense. As far as the pope this sounds like yet another time people take the complex technical statements that characterize catholic theology and confuse them with their natural language notions. Besides the idea that there is some bright line division between natural law and religious fact is just flat out wrong. Whether christ rose from the dead is clearly a matter of religion and theology but whether or not any human body ever ceased pumping blood for 3 days before starting to function again is clearly a scientific one and yet one can’t be true without the other (hence the reason to believe they are both false).
If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law that means we must turn to reason and science the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers neurobiologists embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise not religious conviction. They admittedly do not give one answer — they differ among themselves they are tentative they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.
Huh? Wait is he really arguing because the experts disagree there isn’t actually a clear cut answer? The argument here is so bad I can’t even guess what he is trying to say. I mean I could create a religion tomorow that says right out in it’s holy book. ‘And on the third day god said abortion was immoral,’ and no failure of scientists and philosophers to agree with me could change the fact that my religion said abortion was immoral. I mean short of straight out arguing that religious belief is unscientific and should be abandoned this point has no grip whatsoever.
So evangelicals take shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot be indiscriminately pro-life. …. And if one were consistently pro-life one would have to show moral respect for paramecia insects tissue excised during a medical operation cancer cells asparagus and so on.…. Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized.…. The universal mandate to preserve “human life” makes no sense. My hair is human life — it is not canine hair and it is living. It grows.
God this guy is a fucking idiot. When people talk about “human life” they don’t mean any living human cells they mean the life of a human being. Now of course scientifically this term turns out to be imprecise and kinda meaningless but the central thesis of most religions is that humans poses a unique indivisible soul the presence of which is what they mean by human life. If pro-lifers religious beliefs are true they have a perfectly consistent position.
The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought of speech of recognizing itself as a person or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.
Why is that the question? Why should I give a fuck what Aquinas said? The question is whether it is immoral to abort fetuses not whether they can think do arithmetic or play snood. Animals can think and there are plenty of animals seemingly as intellectually capable as a newborn human. The idea that there is a simple rule that killing is always wrong and that we just need to decide when an abortion is killing is the essential fallacy of the abortion debate. Killing isn’t essentially wrong it’s the harmful effects it causes like grieving relatives and the fear that someone might kill you that make it wrong. Thus birth is a nearly perfect psychologically salient boundary at which to draw the line at which we will no longer accept killing but this is way off the topic supposedly at issue.
It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her not just a fetus.….. Given these uncertainties who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious leaders? They have no special authority in the matter which is not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority is given by the people it represents and the people are divided on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest to the decision.
Gahh there is no natural kind ‘child’ distinct from ‘fetus’ they are just names we choose to apply to stages of development based on our moral classification of them. But ignoring this is he really arguing that because the woman is the most emotional about the issue the most caught up in the events of her life she is the best one to make this decision?
Let’s try this argument elsewhere. Why not say that the decision on whether or not to kill your husband for his money is best made by the woman in question because she is the one closest to it? That’s absurd. In general we recognize that social and moral principles are best formulated by experts given time to deliberate and think. The reason that it should be legal to have an abortion is because on reflection the best arguments show that it is a net societal benefit not because it would be unacceptable for others to step in and stop them if they were doing something that inflicted massive societal harm.
Anyway if you want to argue that abortion should be legal and morally acceptable that’s fine but it really bugs me when someone like this uses laughably absurd arguments to try to pretend they aren’t taking a position on the issue just pointing out that others don’t have standing to really comment. Can there be better evidence that most people aren’t interested in logic but in feel good group affiliation than the fact that a total piece of crap like this piece was published as if it was a reasonable commentary on the morals of abortion?
Note that if you genuinely believe that morality comes from god then common statements of religious dogma to the effect that “god is good” are meaningless (or at least trivial). Moreover to the extent we have any grip on morality at all it is evidently clear that we can conceive of an evil god who nevertheless abides by his own dictates. Ultimately the fact that some really powerful being has told you to do something simply doesn’t give it the kind of moral oomph that true moral facts require.
to match up with biblical prohibitions (murder theft etc..) but there are credible claims that these were only rules about how you must treat other jews. But I could find equal if not better agreement between modern religious teaching and the Bhagavad Gita. But regardless the point is that at best the modern moral teachings of most religions are created by cherry picking the parts of scripture that sound appealing and ignoring the parts that tell you to stone people who work on the sabbath or the parts about how rich people can’t get into heaven.
to avoid detection while in normal human discourse we usually round fairly small probabilities down to zero. Since the harm of people finding out about such a killing particularly one motivated by this sort of cold seeming utilitarian calculus is extremely high even a very very small probability of being caught makes the act wrong since there isn’t a correspondingly great benefit from killing him. Moreover you would need to be confident (tho not as much) that this guy doesn’t have any normal habits that would make people believe his disappearance was the result of foul play and that you would never spill the beans nor be wracked by guilt for your action. In short in a modern urban environment no person will ever be in such a position.
However if we imagine that someone who wouldn’t feel guilty over killing someone gets shipwrecked on a dessert island with literally no hope of rescue (say back before modern shipping) with a crewmate who becomes really depressed over the situation then a real person could be genuinely faced with this situation.
In either this case or the true logical hypothetical my answer is no it isn’t immoral. However the situations where murder is moral will be virtually non-existent in a modern society. Utilitarianism will differ radically with our intuitions in other cases just not in common realistic cases about whether to murder someone.
Now you might doubt that the harms from people knowing about the murder can really be that bad but that’s just because people are very bad at adding up the contributions from many small harms. The best way to see this is to ask about how much extra suffering and unhappiness there would be if murders and revenge killings were as bad here as they are in Iraq and then divide that badness by the difference in the murder rate.
Related article:
http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2007/11/06/bad-amatuer-moral-philosophy-on-abortion/
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