[Peace-discuss] Citizens of Empire and other remarks.

[C. G. Estabrook]

I wouldn't say that I "scoffed at Lisa's remark," Mort.  I have a few
minutes (which I usually exceed) at each AWARE meeting to talk about the
preceding week's "War on Terror"; then others add things that seem to them
important. Immediately I finished on Sunday, Lisa mentioned the "March for
Women's Lives" in Washington; I added that there had also been demos in DC
on the weekend against the IMF and WB.  Lisa then said that there had been
hundreds of thousands of people at the march she mentioned; I remarked
that I didn't think we wanted to equate truth and numbers in today's
America.

I've argued elsewhere ("Abortion and the Left,"
<www.counterpunch.org/estabrook01172003.html>) why I think abortion as
defended in Washington "is a capitalist position that the Left should be
skeptical of, on its fundamental principles."  The ethics of abortion is
not a separate and isolated issue, unconnected to what we might say of the
ethics of war, racism, poverty, capital punishment, etc. -- and it
shouldn't be considered in a different way.

Under the title of a play ("Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" -- I was once
flatteringly mistaken for its star) I posted a summary of a well-known
philosophical paper that takes up that question.  It begins by trying to
say what makes killing someone wrong -- something we do usually want to
say -- and then examining whether that characteristic applies to abortion.

I'm fascinated by the apparent need -- which you share with, among others,
my long-time radio partner, Paul Mueth -- to insist that all discussions
that find abortion unethical must necessarily be religious. We don't
really find the same need when someone asserts that war or the death
penalty is unethical, although some religious people hold those views, for
what might be called religious reasons.  And there is a "divine command
theory of ethics," found in some versions of Protestantism and
particularly Calvinism, that holds that the morality of actions is
determined entirely by divine exhortations or prohibitions in the Hebrew
and Christian foundation documents -- but this is pretty far from anything
being said in the article I quoted (or in my own article). Marquis'
argument -- like most arguments in philosophic ethics -- is entirely
"secular."

Can it be that the need to make these arguments "religious" arises from an
unwillingness to consider them?  If they can be assigned to the general
grab-bag marked religion -- long ago determined to be of no consequence --
then they don't have to be thought about.  No assertion that the arguments
are in no sense religious can be heard, and they need not be considered in
their own terms.

Regards, Carl


On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Morton K.Brussel wrote:

> ...I want to immerse myself in the troubled (murky) waters that
> resulted from Lisa’s addition to Carl’s news-of-the-week report of the
> “March for Women’s Lives” in Washington.  Carl scoffed at Lisa’s
> remark, and has followed that up with an article on the immorality of
> abortion.
> 
> Ricky has already responded to that article with arguments I find
> compelling. I only want to add a little more.
> 
> It is clear that the author of this article and the man he reviews
> have philosophical academic bents, for they talk of “morality” as if
> it has an obvious definition, without qualifications, and purports to
> appear objective and rational. But I find the discussion rather
> puerile, one that does not see the forest through the underbrush. The
> discussion centers on “the moral status of the foetus” and why it is
> wrong to kill “an innocent human being”. These are standard
> anti-choice ratiocinations.
> 
> The thrust of the article is that the moral status of a human foetus
> derives from its potentiality to become a human personage, and that to
> kill it is equivalent to depriving an adult human being of life.
> Quote:  “When I die, I’m deprived of the value of my future”.
> Equivalently, a foetus, embryo, (or sperm plus ovum) is deprived, if
> “killed”, (i.e.  aborted) of the value of its future. This seems
> nothing so much as a tautology, to wit: to be killed is to be deprived
> of life. Is this a novel insight?
> 
> In such discussions, anti-choice folks often pose the presumed dilemma
> that killing a foetus near birth is like killing the baby after birth,
> and then they extrapolate to the embryo and even to the Petri dish
> where sperm and ovum may be brought together in-vitro fertilization.
> So they talk of killing the embryo as if it is “killing a baby”. They
> do so willfully, knowing it may strike an empathetic chord. What they
> fail to appreciate, or refuse to recognize, is that although there is
> indeed a continuum in the development of a human being from conception
> to birth (to old age and death), this continuum has "poles". In
> physics we learn, for example, that there are such things as
> electrical insulators and conductors with properties diametrically
> opposed insofar as practical effects are concerned, but in fact there
> is a continuum in the electrical conductivity of materials, so that it
> is not possible to define absolutely where an insulator starts or a
> conductor ends. Yet, glass is radically different from copper insofar
> as electrical conductivity is concerned. Insulators and conductors are
> two poles of a continuum.  Similarly, an embryo is totally
> distinguishable from a baby even if we cannot specify precisely,
> except formally, the moment when a baby emerges from an embryo or an
> embryo from undifferentiated embryonic cells.
> 
> The Supreme court recognized this when they made the Roe vs. Wade
> decision.
> 
> But what the article most importantly left out, and is relevant to the
> discussion, is the woman bearing the infant. She never enters the
> calculus of embryo-baby--full fledged human being. Indeed,
> anti-choicers posit that the foetus or embryo is equivalent to the
> woman, just as they believe that the embryo is equivalent to the baby.  
> They thus degrade the woman.
> 
> A baby freed of its mother does become more individual, and is granted
> individual "rights". Whether it has the same value or “rights” as the
> mother as far as courts are concerned can only be resolved in the
> context of particular cases. It will always be a matter of opinion,
> although some would say that there is a higher moral authority
> (whose?)  to which we must adhere.
> 
> The authors of Carl’s piece claim to argue on a non-religious basis,
> but the rigidity of their arguments—unwilling or unable to distinguish
> between embryo, mother and their respective “rights” reflects
> religious faith; their morality seems to have been dictated from on
> high—priests, pope, or god.
> 
> _______________________________________________