Infanticide and the Pater Familias

If every child conceived and then killed by abortion had been allowed to live another year before being murdered, not only would the epidemic of infanticide which already exists be essentially unchanged in its character, the moral stakes would be clear to all, beyond muddlement.  We know better than to kill six month old children.  We know that even in infancy the nature of a person - that he or she is a person - does not change.  To question this seems absurd: am I unable to be identified with myself in college?  In highschool?  As a five year old?  I have pictures, memories, of all those times, and so do many who know me.  Why then can I not reasonably identify with my unborn self?  (I have pictures of that too.)  As a young adult, my rights go unquestioned: but go back far enough in my life, and I have people telling me they mysteriously vanish.

When?  Oh, um... well, definitely sometime before, um... let me get back to you on that one.  I have a partial-birth abortion advocate on line two and my argument feels kind of queasy right now because I don't quite know how to draw a definite line between my much more civilized opinion and whatever he wants.

In short, the denial of the personhood of the unborn person is arbitrary: while cloaked in sometimes valid-seeming babble about viability and the survival (to take the highest the case is put) of the mother*, these serve merely to obscure the issue.  That issue is that a person, a unique human being, is  under certain conditions - which they can not, as a criminal could, be held responsible for - considered liable to the whims of another person in all things, even on the question of life and death.

This is not consistent with the developed theories of natural law morality as put forth either by Christian culture or the Enlightenment, which both insist on the universality of human rights, whether considered God-given and obvious or merely patterns that can be deduced.  As far as I know they are not consistent with any such theories of universal morality.  Whether or not such other constructions provide justifying exceptions is beyond my knowledge; that such exceptions, if they exist, are not logically consistent I am confident.  (And in fact, a double-standard exists legally: while maintaining a bizarre "right" to kill a child outright, various products, most notably alcohol and tobacco, carry warnings against risks to the unborn child.  Obvious morality cannot be brushed so easily out of our consciousness.)


What might serve to justify abortion is an ancient principle long since rejected in theory: we might recognize it best in feudalism or the rights of the pater familias.  In either case, a power of life and death was given up in many cases to a person with some legal responsibility over or for others.  This aspect of feudalism - like many others - is seen as backward and barbaric by most modern commentators, but it is the Roman custom which really draws their ire, as an example of subjugatory patriarchy.

Yet under what other logic can you justify the common refrain, "Leave my body alone!"?  A moralist railing against the capricious whims of the patrician slave-owner or concubine-keeper would be met equally vehemently by an appeal to the custom and to the fact that slave or woman was dependent on him for such well-being as he or she had, and therefore was subservient to him - thus ignoring equally with the abortion advocate the fact that another human is affected by his decisions.

In case you have not yet noticed where I am going with this, let me state my thesis plainly: a justification of abortion can logically only be that of the hypothetical justification of the worst excesses of any other time when some people have power over others by accident of culture or nature.  It is nothing more or less than the justification of power: I have power to do this, therefore I may.

* It is an unfortunate fact that it may sometimes be necessary to take measures to save one person's life, measures by which another person must die.  Where the line lies in medical ethics I am not prepared to dispute, but it is obvious that this is not the situation I am addressing.  Exceptions can be made to a negative: it is very difficult indeed to make exceptions to a positive, as the legal strategists trying to limit abortions bit by bit have found.

Moderation, Tolerance – and Reality

A liberal friend was lamenting on facebook today the state of affairs where Newt Gingrich is a moderate.

Frankly, and as a conservative, I'd have to agree.  There's no question he fits the category reasonably well: his own views seem to be more or less in line with a conservative ideology, but he doesn't seem to be over-committed to any of them, is in many ways a "DC insider", and has proven more than willing over his political career to play ball with the big-government kooks.  Hardball, sometimes, but Verlander doesn't stop being a pitcher because no one can hit him.  When conservativism (at least supposedly) favors small government, that all makes him either a hypocrite or a moderate or perhaps both – but I'm feeling polite.

And this is one of the guys supposedly headlining the supposedly conservative Republican candidate selection?  Sheesh.

There's a simple problem with moderation: some topics simply don't allow for it.

If my family are pacifists, and your family believes in a universal draft, and we agree to "compromise" and just draft one person per family, that's not a compromise – your agenda has won in principle, and the rest, as Churchill said, is just haggling about the price.

If some crazy professor thinks we should force abortions to prevent population growth, and some priest thinks abortion is evil – occasionally a medically necessary evil to save more life, but still not a good thing – and the "compromise" is that people can kill infants if they want to, that's not a compromise: the side that thinks killing the babies is okay has won in principle, and the only question is who gets to decide who has to die.

Are we seeing the problem here?

Sure, there are issues on which compromise is possible, but in order to compromise some level of agreement is necessary.  If, for example, I think a car is worth five thousand dollars, and the dealer thinks it's worth sixty-eight hundred, we can eventually compromise, perhaps at six thousand.  But it's only possible because we both agree the car is worth something.  If I'm a Luddite who thinks cars are a deception of the devil, the car has what can only be described as negative value, and any possible sale – even if I were to frustrate the dealer so much he convinced me to buy the car for $1 – is a net win for the dealer who thinks it's worth something.

If you say you think that all violence is always wrong, and I'm in favor of executing petty thieves, but you get argued into justifying self-defense, you've lost the logical argument – only the degree is in question, not the fact of retribution.

Which is why recent politics show up as a lot of nonsense.  For example: One side – supposedly extreme – wants to stop spending money we don't have.  The other side – supposedly backed up by the ivory towers – wants to spend even more money we don't have than we're already spending.  And the supposed "compromise" positions have, at their most conservative, suggested that we should spend less money that we don't have than we're currently spending, but really there's nothing wrong with spending money we don't have… which is a net win for the people who want to spend money we don't have.

In case you've somehow missed the point to this point, here's the short version: if the choices are "all" and "not any ever", "some" is not a compromise: it's a logical victory for the side of "all" and future choices will move further and further towards "all" unless actively overturned.  Political Exhibit A?  Growth of the United States Federal government since... let's say since World War One at the absolute latest.

On the "Christian Nation"

Let's say there is a person who knows the Absolute Truth about how the world should be run. Let's say he thinks he has a good chance to shape the world – or at least his own town, state (or province), country – in that image. Let's say that he believes even if he can't accomplish his own goals entirely, his efforts will at least yield an improvement.

The above paragraph describes everyone who has honestly held a political opinion, ever. Everyone. Ever. Can we accept that much?

Now a favorite modern bogey-man is the idea that the "far right wing of American politics", whatever it calls itself at the moment and whatever it says its goals are, wants to impose a "Christian nation" scenario on the United States. In this rhetoric, the phrase "Christian nation" suggests, not merely that the nation as constituted pursue morals and policies consistent with a Christian ethos (which, for the record, is what most Christians in politics want, and the majority would likely be satisfied even with a consistent natural law ethic), but that the "Christian vote" wants to reconstitute America as a direct theocracy – or at best, a caricatured medieval-style polity where the church says what goes.

On any consideration, that caricature falls to pieces. Even the most hide-bound traditionalist Christian recognizes that this goal – even if any significant number actually have this goal – would falter on the simplest question of, "Which church?" The 1st Amendment was written to prevent that sort of authoritarianism. What the First Amendment doesn't say, however, is that an opinion is politically invalid just because it is religiously based. In fact, it protects the right to express your opinion: and bearing in mind the time period of writing, we have to realize that what the Founders were primarily protecting was religious, and religious political expression. Even if there were a vast conspiracy of loonies proposing to establish the rules of order of the Southern Baptist Church (or whatever) as the law of the land, they're completely allowed to say so: just vote them down.

As I mentioned, however, that's not what anyone – okay, almost anyone – is proposing. Politically active Christians, like anyone else who applies their beliefs to politics, think that their ideas are the best ones to put into practice. At the same time, almost all Christian politicians – it might even be fair to say especially Christian politicians – believe in working with the system of government as it is. If this means political movements largely made up of Christians want a "Christian nation" then we have to apply the same logic to other movements. Liberals want a "liberal nation". Neo-cons want a "Neocon nation". And so on and so forth. Communists want a "Communist nation".

If the ideas these groups advocate are goofy ideas, expose them as goofy ideas. If Christian ethics are goofy – I obviously think they're not, but then I'm Christian – then attack the ideas of the Christian ethics themselves. Debunk Christianity and its morals, if you can. But don't act as though it's ludicrous that Christians think Christian ethics are good for everybody: that's a logical fallacy from the ad hominem family. "Christians want an essentially Christian law code," is neither news nor a good reason to vote for or against such a code, any more than, "Homosexuals want a sexually free law code," is unusual or reason to vote one way or another on the subject.