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
But makes Mitch McConnell what?? Livid? Secretly pleased? Tearing out his hair (since that seems to be ending the sentence)? Ah, I can't stand the suspense.
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!
Well aside from rudely pointing out that a consistent life ethic is not an original idea to this substack, I really like this comment. I hadn't heard of that book, but I will certainly read it! I'm not Catholic, but I find a lot of value in Catholic thought. Two favorite memoirs are My Cousin the Saint and My Sisters the Saints (and I'm only now realizing the similarity of the titles, though they are in fact very different).
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.
I think if we really invested in good, in-depth health education as a society (meaning we as individuals also didn't shy away from talking and learning about it, not just in schools) I think we'd have a lot fewer problems regarding sexual health and dysphoria.
It would be interesting to learn where people learn. I learned at Girl scout with a little movie courtesy of Proctor and Gamble. I still remember the title, "You are a young lady now." I think the focus was on buying their products not the boy part. I sent my daughter to a class at the Unitarian Church when she was 11. But that is the age where girls should begin to understand the effects on their bodies. Not having a brother, a modest father..I was 100% surprised at the boy parts, myself.
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 organized it in this way simply because I thought going from lower level consciousness to higher level consciousness and proximity to natural death made some kind of basic sense. And I’ve grouped them all together because in every scenario, I *personally* have unease about ending a life, even when I find it morally or at least philosophically defensible. In my grand scheme of things thinking, life is rare and precious in the universe (so far as we can tell anyway) and I approach each scenario with similar base-level “respect life” thinking.
I appreciate you bringing up the slippery slope metaphor. I definitely don’t want the government having a hand in healthcare decisions, but the abortion aspect of healthcare is closer to assisted suicide (from my perspective) than, say, when I had my janky gallbladder removed. I think a lot of people (maybe even most?) would have a hard time (emotionally if not philosophically) classifying a 22 week aborted fetus as medical waste alongside said sludgy gallbladder. Just like a lot of people (most?) would have a hard time with the reality of meat eating if they had to see or participate in the process of butchering.
So if both ends got on their respective slippery slopes, we’d end up somewhere in the middle. On the abortion question, I think a lot of European countries have landed there. I’d honestly be fine with what Canada has going (because I don’t think the majority of women are actually flippant about abortion in practice) but the pro life movement is so strong in the US I can’t see that happening any time soon.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful comment! I look forward to hearing more ideas if and when you come back with them.
Ah, I see what you were trying to do with the sequencing now, that's interesting. I don't know how I missed that.
And I'm realizing I wasn't clear at all: by "arbitrary" I just meant how you seemed to be pairing off those four topics. Not the larger effort to focus on the common thread and treat them as a piece, which is actually one of the things that made the post so interesting since normally these issues are discussed in isolation, and you're showing how examining your feelings about each of them can help shed light on your feelings about the others. That's really valuable.
I'm not sure I agree that the slippery slopes would simply meet in the middle, as you suggested. I'm inclined to say that legally implementing a pro-life position, even just partially, in practice leads to a much steeper slippery slope than the one resulting from legally protecting choice. So that's why I was suggesting this should be a huge consideration no matter what. But I suppose pro-lifers would say that's just because pro-choice has already slid so far down the slope that they're already at the bottom where it looks less steep. Anyway, all of this is impossible to prove so maybe I'll go to bed instead. Sleep....the ultimate slippery slope.....
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).
Yes! Of course volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject, but one key point I didn't really touch on is, when it comes to unborn fetuses/babies, we seem to take a very "it's what you want it to be" approach. If you don't want the pregnancy, it's an insensible fetus. If you do want the pregnancy (or for religious reasons you believe) then the embryo is a baby. This is how someone can have an abortion and not feel awful, while others have early miscarriages and feel devastated.
The debate "when does life begin?" is ongoing because we really don't have a good, non-faith-based answer. It's a continuum. And if we all agree that *sometimes* in *some cases* it's *acceptable* to end a human life, then I'd rather it be before the fetus is a highly recognizable, well-on-the-way human.
I don't know for sure, but my understanding is that even those most convinced of the rightness of abortion do often have trauma associated with it, indicating to me that there's something a bit deeper going on than our own projection or created value. Though I would be perfectly willing to grant that a certain amount of communally absorbed guilt or value could be responsible for part of that.
I do wonder if such compromises are a long term viable solution - I'm inclined to worry that they are not, as to some extent, even though I'm very interested in harm mitigation, ultimately, I believe my convictions do call for a complete ban (with exceptions for the life of the mother and cases of absolute non-survival of the baby). And I'm aware that is a hard position, and is likely part of why my opposites have taken their "until birth" approach, knowing that giving an inch is one step on the pathway for my side, rather than a liveable compromise intended indefinitely.
This is the crux of the issue, isn't it? If you truly believe it's murder, then there's no option but banning. If you truly believe it's not murder, then there are no limits. My ethic lets me feel that my views about the sanctity of life have been noted and respected, while allowing for other peoples' views to also be respected, with both sides yielding to compromise. It's in the narrow band of gray area where I'm comfortable letting people sort it out with themselves or their god.
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.
I'm a little familiar with Rorty, but not much. I will definitely look into his thoughts on this subject.
Re: your very last paragraph, upon reading Freddie deBoer's case against utilitarianism recently, I commented that perhaps different philosophical frameworks are useful and appropriate for different questions. So I am very much on board with your suggestion. I think part of my ramblings here and in the post to come is to compare and contrast (thanks public school!) the ways in which questions of life and death can be answered and the how the considerations vary in each situation, and use the differences to help me understand why I'm ok with one thing but not another.
Are you familiar with Jainism? That's about the only religion/philosophy I can think of that is 100% against killing in all circumstances, and as you can imagine, when taken to an extreme, it can be crazy-making. Philip Roth touched on it in American Pastoral.
I had heard of an Indian religion so opposed to killing that its practitioners only eat fruit that has fallen from trees. Maybe that is Jainism? It certainly demonstrates the deficiency of rigid ethical systems.
Rorty is really interesting, and very influential, in part because he's a really good writer (unlike almost every other philosophers whose name isn't Nietzsche). One of the things that makes reading him so electrifying is that he really has the courage of his convictions. You see a man unwilling to shy away from the frankly nihilistic implications of his premises, or cover them up with rhetorical sleights of hand. That habit, by the way, of staking out an ethical framework and then not being willing to honestly face the implications of your claims, is one of the primary complaints Freddie deBoer levels at the utilitarians.
If you are going to dip into Rorty I would recommend the contingency section of his book "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity." It's a three-part thing based on a collection of speeches or talks he gave and the structure of it works really well. In the same way that - even if you are not a Marxist - you need an answer to Marx's criticism of social organization; even if you are not a "Rortian" you need an answer to Rorty's essentially nihilist or post-modern criticism of ethical systems per se. Rorty makes the case that we can have ethical systems, but they will never be grounded in anything more permanent or solid than contingent historical accidents, essentially. Our relationship to them can only be "ironic" - in the sense that we take them seriously while at the same time knowing that they stand on sand. There is nothing privileged or transcendent about them, and we cannot expect them to have claims on future generations, which will operate amongst unknowable and unpredictable historical contingencies of their own.
I'm going off on a tangent here but just on a personal note: Rorty made an observation somewhere that shaped the way I have thought about moral philosophy for my entire life. He posits that what we actually mean when we say "behaves morally" is "behaves like us." Let that sink in for a while! I've essentially never gotten over it. But then he writes: moral development in a society is not the evolution of morals (from "primitive" to "enlightened," for example) but the expansion of the border that separates "us" from "them." It's so interesting to consider it that way! Moral development then focuses on the inclusion of more categories of people (classes, races, ages, ethnicities, neural characteristics, etc.) and possibly even more categories of life (pets, livestock, species, genera, etc.). It's a stunning idea. I've never been able to unthink it.
"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
Thank you for reading! When I learned about those aspects of the heart (literally last week), I was struck once again by how viability is a continuum. lf those areas don't close, the baby has a heart defect. But we wouldn't just shrug and let such a baby die in this day and age, even though they aren't "viable" at birth. That doesn't actually have anything to do with abortion per se, but it sure is fascinating to realize how gray the notions of life and viability actually are.
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 for one am not against whataboutism. Thinking of scenarios in which you'd make an exception to an otherwise firmly held belief are footholds toward understanding and compromise.
I all ready solved all of moral philosophy in my last post.
I know but I had this one lined up already. Gotta ride those coattails.
Did you notice it on the bulletin board in the collage? It's a little Easter egg for readers of both newsletters.
But makes Mitch McConnell what?? Livid? Secretly pleased? Tearing out his hair (since that seems to be ending the sentence)? Ah, I can't stand the suspense.
Oops it said “angry” but then the head covered it up
I prefer it this way, actually, and assumed it was intentional -- up to the viewer's imagination!
That would be a good "angry" emoj if you can shrink it down.
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.
You and your bleeding-heart humans-that-exist axiom! But you warned us: radical.
Wait til you see what I have to say about wild cats v the ones I keep trapped in my house and force to be my friends.
They're all wild, man.
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!
Well aside from rudely pointing out that a consistent life ethic is not an original idea to this substack, I really like this comment. I hadn't heard of that book, but I will certainly read it! I'm not Catholic, but I find a lot of value in Catholic thought. Two favorite memoirs are My Cousin the Saint and My Sisters the Saints (and I'm only now realizing the similarity of the titles, though they are in fact very different).
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.
I think if we really invested in good, in-depth health education as a society (meaning we as individuals also didn't shy away from talking and learning about it, not just in schools) I think we'd have a lot fewer problems regarding sexual health and dysphoria.
It would be interesting to learn where people learn. I learned at Girl scout with a little movie courtesy of Proctor and Gamble. I still remember the title, "You are a young lady now." I think the focus was on buying their products not the boy part. I sent my daughter to a class at the Unitarian Church when she was 11. But that is the age where girls should begin to understand the effects on their bodies. Not having a brother, a modest father..I was 100% surprised at the boy parts, myself.
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.
Great advice. The older I get the more comfortable get with not being sure about things, ironically.
Wait til you're my age! You'll wander around in a moral fog, and be completely fine about it.
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 organized it in this way simply because I thought going from lower level consciousness to higher level consciousness and proximity to natural death made some kind of basic sense. And I’ve grouped them all together because in every scenario, I *personally* have unease about ending a life, even when I find it morally or at least philosophically defensible. In my grand scheme of things thinking, life is rare and precious in the universe (so far as we can tell anyway) and I approach each scenario with similar base-level “respect life” thinking.
I appreciate you bringing up the slippery slope metaphor. I definitely don’t want the government having a hand in healthcare decisions, but the abortion aspect of healthcare is closer to assisted suicide (from my perspective) than, say, when I had my janky gallbladder removed. I think a lot of people (maybe even most?) would have a hard time (emotionally if not philosophically) classifying a 22 week aborted fetus as medical waste alongside said sludgy gallbladder. Just like a lot of people (most?) would have a hard time with the reality of meat eating if they had to see or participate in the process of butchering.
So if both ends got on their respective slippery slopes, we’d end up somewhere in the middle. On the abortion question, I think a lot of European countries have landed there. I’d honestly be fine with what Canada has going (because I don’t think the majority of women are actually flippant about abortion in practice) but the pro life movement is so strong in the US I can’t see that happening any time soon.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughtful comment! I look forward to hearing more ideas if and when you come back with them.
Ah, I see what you were trying to do with the sequencing now, that's interesting. I don't know how I missed that.
And I'm realizing I wasn't clear at all: by "arbitrary" I just meant how you seemed to be pairing off those four topics. Not the larger effort to focus on the common thread and treat them as a piece, which is actually one of the things that made the post so interesting since normally these issues are discussed in isolation, and you're showing how examining your feelings about each of them can help shed light on your feelings about the others. That's really valuable.
I'm not sure I agree that the slippery slopes would simply meet in the middle, as you suggested. I'm inclined to say that legally implementing a pro-life position, even just partially, in practice leads to a much steeper slippery slope than the one resulting from legally protecting choice. So that's why I was suggesting this should be a huge consideration no matter what. But I suppose pro-lifers would say that's just because pro-choice has already slid so far down the slope that they're already at the bottom where it looks less steep. Anyway, all of this is impossible to prove so maybe I'll go to bed instead. Sleep....the ultimate slippery slope.....
Hope you keep writing on this!
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).
Yes! Of course volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject, but one key point I didn't really touch on is, when it comes to unborn fetuses/babies, we seem to take a very "it's what you want it to be" approach. If you don't want the pregnancy, it's an insensible fetus. If you do want the pregnancy (or for religious reasons you believe) then the embryo is a baby. This is how someone can have an abortion and not feel awful, while others have early miscarriages and feel devastated.
The debate "when does life begin?" is ongoing because we really don't have a good, non-faith-based answer. It's a continuum. And if we all agree that *sometimes* in *some cases* it's *acceptable* to end a human life, then I'd rather it be before the fetus is a highly recognizable, well-on-the-way human.
I don't know for sure, but my understanding is that even those most convinced of the rightness of abortion do often have trauma associated with it, indicating to me that there's something a bit deeper going on than our own projection or created value. Though I would be perfectly willing to grant that a certain amount of communally absorbed guilt or value could be responsible for part of that.
I do wonder if such compromises are a long term viable solution - I'm inclined to worry that they are not, as to some extent, even though I'm very interested in harm mitigation, ultimately, I believe my convictions do call for a complete ban (with exceptions for the life of the mother and cases of absolute non-survival of the baby). And I'm aware that is a hard position, and is likely part of why my opposites have taken their "until birth" approach, knowing that giving an inch is one step on the pathway for my side, rather than a liveable compromise intended indefinitely.
This is the crux of the issue, isn't it? If you truly believe it's murder, then there's no option but banning. If you truly believe it's not murder, then there are no limits. My ethic lets me feel that my views about the sanctity of life have been noted and respected, while allowing for other peoples' views to also be respected, with both sides yielding to compromise. It's in the narrow band of gray area where I'm comfortable letting people sort it out with themselves or their god.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
Thank you for your thoughtful post and kind handling of my comments! :)
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.
I'm a little familiar with Rorty, but not much. I will definitely look into his thoughts on this subject.
Re: your very last paragraph, upon reading Freddie deBoer's case against utilitarianism recently, I commented that perhaps different philosophical frameworks are useful and appropriate for different questions. So I am very much on board with your suggestion. I think part of my ramblings here and in the post to come is to compare and contrast (thanks public school!) the ways in which questions of life and death can be answered and the how the considerations vary in each situation, and use the differences to help me understand why I'm ok with one thing but not another.
Are you familiar with Jainism? That's about the only religion/philosophy I can think of that is 100% against killing in all circumstances, and as you can imagine, when taken to an extreme, it can be crazy-making. Philip Roth touched on it in American Pastoral.
I had heard of an Indian religion so opposed to killing that its practitioners only eat fruit that has fallen from trees. Maybe that is Jainism? It certainly demonstrates the deficiency of rigid ethical systems.
Rorty is really interesting, and very influential, in part because he's a really good writer (unlike almost every other philosophers whose name isn't Nietzsche). One of the things that makes reading him so electrifying is that he really has the courage of his convictions. You see a man unwilling to shy away from the frankly nihilistic implications of his premises, or cover them up with rhetorical sleights of hand. That habit, by the way, of staking out an ethical framework and then not being willing to honestly face the implications of your claims, is one of the primary complaints Freddie deBoer levels at the utilitarians.
If you are going to dip into Rorty I would recommend the contingency section of his book "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity." It's a three-part thing based on a collection of speeches or talks he gave and the structure of it works really well. In the same way that - even if you are not a Marxist - you need an answer to Marx's criticism of social organization; even if you are not a "Rortian" you need an answer to Rorty's essentially nihilist or post-modern criticism of ethical systems per se. Rorty makes the case that we can have ethical systems, but they will never be grounded in anything more permanent or solid than contingent historical accidents, essentially. Our relationship to them can only be "ironic" - in the sense that we take them seriously while at the same time knowing that they stand on sand. There is nothing privileged or transcendent about them, and we cannot expect them to have claims on future generations, which will operate amongst unknowable and unpredictable historical contingencies of their own.
I'm going off on a tangent here but just on a personal note: Rorty made an observation somewhere that shaped the way I have thought about moral philosophy for my entire life. He posits that what we actually mean when we say "behaves morally" is "behaves like us." Let that sink in for a while! I've essentially never gotten over it. But then he writes: moral development in a society is not the evolution of morals (from "primitive" to "enlightened," for example) but the expansion of the border that separates "us" from "them." It's so interesting to consider it that way! Moral development then focuses on the inclusion of more categories of people (classes, races, ages, ethnicities, neural characteristics, etc.) and possibly even more categories of life (pets, livestock, species, genera, etc.). It's a stunning idea. I've never been able to unthink it.
Bold move, spreading non-unthinkable thoughts around!
I was once tricked into seeing the film Unity. It certainly brought up a lot of new ideas regarding moral inclusion. It also scarred me for life lol.
Ha! Unity is now on my Recommended Movies list.
"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
Thank you for reading! When I learned about those aspects of the heart (literally last week), I was struck once again by how viability is a continuum. lf those areas don't close, the baby has a heart defect. But we wouldn't just shrug and let such a baby die in this day and age, even though they aren't "viable" at birth. That doesn't actually have anything to do with abortion per se, but it sure is fascinating to realize how gray the notions of life and viability actually are.
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 for one am not against whataboutism. Thinking of scenarios in which you'd make an exception to an otherwise firmly held belief are footholds toward understanding and compromise.
Food for thought: a fetus is a parasite until separated from the umbilical cord
That’s a thought. Though technically a parasite is a different species feeding on a host species.
I wouldn’t define a parasite as a different species, but simply as a different organism.