organizing my thoughts regarding life and death into a coherent philosophy; special thanks to Wilson Sporting Goods and 20th Century Fox for sponsoring a portion of this post
I'm too dumb for philosophy so I leave a lot of questions like this to what seems obvious.
Hurting any creature unnecessarily is shitty. I think we kill too many animals, but I also am not against eating animals. I also think some of the vegan arguments for sustainability are not very convincing or accurate.
Almost no one *wants* to have an abortion. Many people regret having one, even if they felt it was necessary. Even so, I think it should remain an option for exactly the reason you state: a fetus is a potential human. I will always have more empathy and sympathy for the humans that exist.
Last year, I read Charles C. Camosy's book "Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured people." He's Catholic and I'm only kind of sort of vaguely Catholic, so we had plenty to disagree on. But he's a big advocate for making decisions based on a consistent life ethic - figuring out how the principles you apply to one big-ticket issue (like abortion) apply to other issues that implicate human life. And I thought about the book for months after I read it.
Likewise, I really appreciate this post for its thinking-it-throughness. And, just so you know, talking to you about this and seeing your conversations about it has moved my personal needle on abortion in a noticeable way!
What stands out to me is the need to know one's body. Often girls do not. For those who do, this seems impossible to believe, but it is true. I taught junior high school one year and many girls began menstruating. Most were sure they were dying. I have known women who skipped periods and didn't realize they were pregnant. Your observations are philosophical and deep, but a first step is to be sure young women understand how their reproductive system works.
A couple of observations here, all derived from painful life experience.
1. If you find yourself thinking "X is true, but X implies Y, so I have to endorse Y, but Y seems false/wrong", sometimes the best thing to do is just stick a pin in it. Come back to it when you're older. You don't have to get everything right all at once. I know the impatience you feel to get everything all worked out NOW so that you can move on in life and make good decisions. But I don't think life works that way.
2. Remember Emerson: '“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."'
3. Remember Whitman: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)'
Consistency is beloved of rationalists, but life is big and varied and complicated, and just sitting with inconsistency won't hurt (much). Just sit with inconsistency, chat with it, offer it a Coke Zero, then wander off and focus on something else.
I really like the way you approached all this: it's important to spend time talking and thinking through all these different tangled strands and stray floating pieces, and let all the messiness hang out. (Even though you actually wrote about it pretty cleanly). There's always the temptation to jump to a coherent philosophy too quickly: it's frustrating not to able to speak definitively to where we stand, especially when everyone's out there with the picket signs rallying people to action. At the same time, it's useful to hear about your leanings, the first-trimester "coherent philosophy" that's still in the womb slowly developing into a real position. So we as readers can abort it for you!
Not really. Though I do agree with Chris Nathan below that there may be an issue of scale and targeting the wrong level for achieving coherence. There are definitely points of connection and analogy, but also other places there these different examples and analogies don't line up quite so well. Even the arbitrary pairing of abortion with eating animals, and death penalty with assisted suicide, may already be forcing you into certain boxes that don't work so well. I tend to be a pluralist when it comes to very complicated questions like these; not as an actual final position necessarily, but as a stance that helps me stay with all these tensions a little longer and hold the different points of view more lightly.
I may even post again later once I'm more free and had a chance to think about some of this a little more. But one quick observation for now, which is that I think abortion is one of those issues where the "slippery slope" problem becomes especially prominent and must be part of the discussion. Given the way the world is, it is very hard to get the balance right and avoid tipping over into excessive control or overregulation. (And maybe you can make an argument for tipping over in the opposite direction too).
I very much appreciate your strivings in this post. Even though I am pro-life and religious, I've always felt my pro-life beliefs were more connected to my love of babies (I have seven younger siblings, and was extremely excited about having a new sibling all seven times) than to any of the typical Bible verses I've heard attached to the cause. My current belief is that it makes most sense to protect human life from the moment of implantation (rather than fertilization, as many pro-life people say), because I just don't see a cutoff point anywhere else that makes the baby less of a baby. I do believe in harm mitigation, though, so I would love to see our national and statewide laws adjust to where your convictions currently would stop, rather than where most states that haven't chosen to ban stop (which is, as far as I understand it, nowhere until birth).
I listened to an episode of This American Life a couple weeks after I read this and I meant to circle back and leave it in the comments, but it slipped my mind. Thanks the FDB for publishing a link to it and reminding me.
I always enjoy reading along with your thoughts, and here are mine:
I don't believe I've ever reasoned my way into a moral or immoral act, so I assume rational explanations are post hoc.
We can use these explanations for training ourselves to act morally, from developing good manners to elite military warfare, but our actions proceed from instinct.
Crucially, when we use rational theory to make criminal law, we have to be at our most careful because we face ourselves at our ugliest.
Punishment is the intentional infliction of harm on another, and it comes with a sense of righteousness and justice. It's a case where we derive both individual and social *pleasure* from harming others. So it's self-reinforcing and tends to escalate.
The sense of vengeance, relieving our own suffering by causing others to suffer, seems to be at the root of much of what we call "evil", and we have a bad track record (from petty gossip, to torture dungeons, to total war).
Because the next step after formulating an ethical principle is passing judgment, we should always keep compassion, understanding, and forgiveness in the front of our minds.
Aside on eating animals: After about 50 years of subsisting on animal products, from breast milk to the towers of bacon I cooked for years at my job, I gave up eating mammals about six years ago. For no reason other than I could. I know the ethical, health, economic, environmental etc arguments and none of them apply. There was no precipitating event, and I could start back at any moment, and it wouldn't matter.
In one of his essays the moral philosopher Richard Rorty addresses the instinct we have to unify systems of thinking at higher and higher levels of abstraction in such a way that they express consistent logic, categories, rule sets, etc. He use the term "vocabularies" as a shorthand for the various systems that we instinctively feel we should unite or consolidate to eliminate flaws and inconsistencies. I recognize that impulse in myself, and also in your thinking when you write about a "unified ethic of life."
Rorty basically argues for resisting this impulse, and uses a great metaphor to make his case when he says something like "we do not need to reconcile a paintbrush and a hammer." What I've always taken this to mean is that while one can certainly imagine concocting a conceptual scheme which absorbs hammers and paintbrushes into a unified scheme, where each is an expression of a deeper and broader underlying category of utility or function or who-knows-what, the resulting reconciliation gives us very little. In might even reduce or flatten each of the things it subsumes. (Imagine: "A hammer is a type of paintbrush with a single, very stiff bristle that applies nails to surfaces at a gargantuan macroscopic level while a paintbrush does the same thing for paint particle at a microscopic level with hundreds of miniature flexible bristles that apply particles to surfaces." We end up with a more distorted understanding than we started with regarding these two do-not-require-reconciling entities but we have achieved consistency. Philosophers do a lot of this type of thing. Rorty was opposed to it., making him kind of an anti-philosopher.)
Anyway I bring this up because I think that we should consider the possibility that, to use the example in your essay, we must necessarily reconcile our points of view about the value of life across every moral category in which it plays a part. I'm going to sound wishy-washy in writing this but the point isn't to sever all considerations of the value of human life into smaller and smaller boxes until we are left with a purely situational ethic (notice the habit of finding overarching schemes assert itself!), but to check and see if our moral stance might be heightened by the conscious acceptance of distinct moral frames of reference which do not require unification.
"the foramen ovale becomes the fossa ovalis; the ductus arteriosis becomes the ligamentum arteriosum" there were many reasons why I liked this essay, but this revelation might be the most important one to me even though I think it argues against some of the points that you made. what's more important is that your exploration made me stop and think, which is always valuable. thank you
Great post in making me think about my views. On animals, I purposefully put my head in the sand and eat fish and chicken, but not red meat, only because it doesn't sit well with me. It's at best an amoral position.
On abortion, I'm more pro-choice than where you are, but respect the individual views of just about everyone. Most of Europe seems to gave figured this out: ok in first trimester but exceptions for circumstances like those you listed.
I wish above all that abortion was not such a divisive issue. It's bad when each half of the country thinks the other half has laws that are barbaric.
There's an opportunity for a Bilbo Baggins 111th birthday speech pun somewhere in the above sentence but I'm not clever enough to figure one out and even if I was, it would most certainly be in bad taste.
I all ready solved all of moral philosophy in my last post.
I'm too dumb for philosophy so I leave a lot of questions like this to what seems obvious.
Hurting any creature unnecessarily is shitty. I think we kill too many animals, but I also am not against eating animals. I also think some of the vegan arguments for sustainability are not very convincing or accurate.
Almost no one *wants* to have an abortion. Many people regret having one, even if they felt it was necessary. Even so, I think it should remain an option for exactly the reason you state: a fetus is a potential human. I will always have more empathy and sympathy for the humans that exist.
Last year, I read Charles C. Camosy's book "Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured people." He's Catholic and I'm only kind of sort of vaguely Catholic, so we had plenty to disagree on. But he's a big advocate for making decisions based on a consistent life ethic - figuring out how the principles you apply to one big-ticket issue (like abortion) apply to other issues that implicate human life. And I thought about the book for months after I read it.
Likewise, I really appreciate this post for its thinking-it-throughness. And, just so you know, talking to you about this and seeing your conversations about it has moved my personal needle on abortion in a noticeable way!
What stands out to me is the need to know one's body. Often girls do not. For those who do, this seems impossible to believe, but it is true. I taught junior high school one year and many girls began menstruating. Most were sure they were dying. I have known women who skipped periods and didn't realize they were pregnant. Your observations are philosophical and deep, but a first step is to be sure young women understand how their reproductive system works.
Thank you for writing thoughtfully.
A couple of observations here, all derived from painful life experience.
1. If you find yourself thinking "X is true, but X implies Y, so I have to endorse Y, but Y seems false/wrong", sometimes the best thing to do is just stick a pin in it. Come back to it when you're older. You don't have to get everything right all at once. I know the impatience you feel to get everything all worked out NOW so that you can move on in life and make good decisions. But I don't think life works that way.
2. Remember Emerson: '“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."'
3. Remember Whitman: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)'
Consistency is beloved of rationalists, but life is big and varied and complicated, and just sitting with inconsistency won't hurt (much). Just sit with inconsistency, chat with it, offer it a Coke Zero, then wander off and focus on something else.
Castaway is definitely the best Tom Hanks movie!
I really like the way you approached all this: it's important to spend time talking and thinking through all these different tangled strands and stray floating pieces, and let all the messiness hang out. (Even though you actually wrote about it pretty cleanly). There's always the temptation to jump to a coherent philosophy too quickly: it's frustrating not to able to speak definitively to where we stand, especially when everyone's out there with the picket signs rallying people to action. At the same time, it's useful to hear about your leanings, the first-trimester "coherent philosophy" that's still in the womb slowly developing into a real position. So we as readers can abort it for you!
Not really. Though I do agree with Chris Nathan below that there may be an issue of scale and targeting the wrong level for achieving coherence. There are definitely points of connection and analogy, but also other places there these different examples and analogies don't line up quite so well. Even the arbitrary pairing of abortion with eating animals, and death penalty with assisted suicide, may already be forcing you into certain boxes that don't work so well. I tend to be a pluralist when it comes to very complicated questions like these; not as an actual final position necessarily, but as a stance that helps me stay with all these tensions a little longer and hold the different points of view more lightly.
I may even post again later once I'm more free and had a chance to think about some of this a little more. But one quick observation for now, which is that I think abortion is one of those issues where the "slippery slope" problem becomes especially prominent and must be part of the discussion. Given the way the world is, it is very hard to get the balance right and avoid tipping over into excessive control or overregulation. (And maybe you can make an argument for tipping over in the opposite direction too).
I very much appreciate your strivings in this post. Even though I am pro-life and religious, I've always felt my pro-life beliefs were more connected to my love of babies (I have seven younger siblings, and was extremely excited about having a new sibling all seven times) than to any of the typical Bible verses I've heard attached to the cause. My current belief is that it makes most sense to protect human life from the moment of implantation (rather than fertilization, as many pro-life people say), because I just don't see a cutoff point anywhere else that makes the baby less of a baby. I do believe in harm mitigation, though, so I would love to see our national and statewide laws adjust to where your convictions currently would stop, rather than where most states that haven't chosen to ban stop (which is, as far as I understand it, nowhere until birth).
I listened to an episode of This American Life a couple weeks after I read this and I meant to circle back and leave it in the comments, but it slipped my mind. Thanks the FDB for publishing a link to it and reminding me.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/779/ends-of-the-earth
I'll go read Part 2 because I also think, and feel, that abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty are related.
I always enjoy reading along with your thoughts, and here are mine:
I don't believe I've ever reasoned my way into a moral or immoral act, so I assume rational explanations are post hoc.
We can use these explanations for training ourselves to act morally, from developing good manners to elite military warfare, but our actions proceed from instinct.
Crucially, when we use rational theory to make criminal law, we have to be at our most careful because we face ourselves at our ugliest.
Punishment is the intentional infliction of harm on another, and it comes with a sense of righteousness and justice. It's a case where we derive both individual and social *pleasure* from harming others. So it's self-reinforcing and tends to escalate.
The sense of vengeance, relieving our own suffering by causing others to suffer, seems to be at the root of much of what we call "evil", and we have a bad track record (from petty gossip, to torture dungeons, to total war).
Because the next step after formulating an ethical principle is passing judgment, we should always keep compassion, understanding, and forgiveness in the front of our minds.
Aside on eating animals: After about 50 years of subsisting on animal products, from breast milk to the towers of bacon I cooked for years at my job, I gave up eating mammals about six years ago. For no reason other than I could. I know the ethical, health, economic, environmental etc arguments and none of them apply. There was no precipitating event, and I could start back at any moment, and it wouldn't matter.
I think this is basically where I'm at too.
In one of his essays the moral philosopher Richard Rorty addresses the instinct we have to unify systems of thinking at higher and higher levels of abstraction in such a way that they express consistent logic, categories, rule sets, etc. He use the term "vocabularies" as a shorthand for the various systems that we instinctively feel we should unite or consolidate to eliminate flaws and inconsistencies. I recognize that impulse in myself, and also in your thinking when you write about a "unified ethic of life."
Rorty basically argues for resisting this impulse, and uses a great metaphor to make his case when he says something like "we do not need to reconcile a paintbrush and a hammer." What I've always taken this to mean is that while one can certainly imagine concocting a conceptual scheme which absorbs hammers and paintbrushes into a unified scheme, where each is an expression of a deeper and broader underlying category of utility or function or who-knows-what, the resulting reconciliation gives us very little. In might even reduce or flatten each of the things it subsumes. (Imagine: "A hammer is a type of paintbrush with a single, very stiff bristle that applies nails to surfaces at a gargantuan macroscopic level while a paintbrush does the same thing for paint particle at a microscopic level with hundreds of miniature flexible bristles that apply particles to surfaces." We end up with a more distorted understanding than we started with regarding these two do-not-require-reconciling entities but we have achieved consistency. Philosophers do a lot of this type of thing. Rorty was opposed to it., making him kind of an anti-philosopher.)
Anyway I bring this up because I think that we should consider the possibility that, to use the example in your essay, we must necessarily reconcile our points of view about the value of life across every moral category in which it plays a part. I'm going to sound wishy-washy in writing this but the point isn't to sever all considerations of the value of human life into smaller and smaller boxes until we are left with a purely situational ethic (notice the habit of finding overarching schemes assert itself!), but to check and see if our moral stance might be heightened by the conscious acceptance of distinct moral frames of reference which do not require unification.
"the foramen ovale becomes the fossa ovalis; the ductus arteriosis becomes the ligamentum arteriosum" there were many reasons why I liked this essay, but this revelation might be the most important one to me even though I think it argues against some of the points that you made. what's more important is that your exploration made me stop and think, which is always valuable. thank you
Great post in making me think about my views. On animals, I purposefully put my head in the sand and eat fish and chicken, but not red meat, only because it doesn't sit well with me. It's at best an amoral position.
On abortion, I'm more pro-choice than where you are, but respect the individual views of just about everyone. Most of Europe seems to gave figured this out: ok in first trimester but exceptions for circumstances like those you listed.
I wish above all that abortion was not such a divisive issue. It's bad when each half of the country thinks the other half has laws that are barbaric.
There's an opportunity for a Bilbo Baggins 111th birthday speech pun somewhere in the above sentence but I'm not clever enough to figure one out and even if I was, it would most certainly be in bad taste.
Food for thought: a fetus is a parasite until separated from the umbilical cord