(no subject)

[fpb]

My argument against abortion has been set out in this LJ some years ago (http://fpb.livejournal.com/69029.html). As it was a response to an agnostic student of medicine, its arguments were not based on religion, although it assumes that morality as such is a common human feature. (I have also written one aimed at Catholics: http://fpb.livejournal.com/63365.html .) It is my view that the arguments for abortion are not only immoral but stupid; that they rest on bad reasoning and invalid connections, and that those who accept them inevitably end up making stupid and absurd statements. Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to go back to those essays and write a rebuttal.

I have recently got more evidence for this proposition than I already had, and at the pen, at that, of a man who is otherwise a genius: the fan writer who signs himself inverarity. (I have, of course, argued that it is perfectly possible to be a genius and stupid - http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/6639.html and especially http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/6828.html; but this particular genius happens to be quite bright too.) And he has calmly, confidently, without even realizing that he was saying anything in any way dubious, said an enormity that cries to heaven for vengeance.

This is the enormity: It is arrogant and selfish to have a baby when you know you are not going to be alive to bring it up.

Let us, first, make sure what kind of statement this is. This is a statement of morals. In fact, it is pretty much a statement of moral law. So, anyone who does not want, for whatever reason, to discuss a moral statement in moral terms, is out of this debate. They have nothing to the point to contribute. The point is morality; good/bad; right and wrong behaviour. I say this because discussion of morality is out of fashion, and many people are so embarrassed by it that they try to bring in materialistic approaches to its discussion - in particular, the nonsense of "evolutionary psychology". Do that if you want, but don't be surprised if I attack your arguments with the purpose of showing they are ignorant nonsense. I repeat: I regard that sort of thing as question-begging, escapist nonsense, an attempt to avoid the discussion of basics of human behaviour in their own terms - which are moral. There is a reason why both Greek and Roman philosophers built the very word for morality from their words for behaviour (ethos, mores); there is no discussion of human behaviour which is not moral in content. If you say that you don't like the way someone behaved, you say that they are behaving morally badly. If you say you do, you are giving moral approval. That is the beginning of any discussion of behaviour; anything that avoids it is escapism.

Having said that, let us move back to the concrete statement itself. Its key words are "arrogant" and "selfish". The meaning of "arrogant" is 95% moral, and to that extent negative; it does describe a way to behave, but describes it with an inevitably negative connotation to do with the way in which it hits other people (and, to some extent, deforms the person who indulges in it). There is an inner as well as an outer dimension to morality; the person who indulges in immoral behaviour deforms his/her relationship to him/herself as much as his/her relation to others. An arrogant person - a person who is proud without reason and who tends to squish and ignore others - is a person, experience will show, who has a misshapen relationship with him/herself; who is shoving the reality of him/herself away from his/her own gaze at least as much as s/he is shoving that of others. "Love thy neighbour as thyself" is not even so much a moral dictate, as a statement of fact: if your relationship with others is on the proper footing, so will your relationship with yourself be. But the more of violence, mendacity, self-deception, there is in your dealings with others, the more you will be doing it to yourself. It is a peculiarity of human beings that we can and do, each of us, treat with our own self as if it were an Other, and our relationship with ourselves is therefore similar to our relationship with others. This strange fact is at the heart of morals.

That is why, moving to the second term, the word "selfish" has a wholly moral meaning. As it means the ignoring of others - their personalities, their needs, their rights - in your dealings, so it ultimately implies a complete abrogation of your own self. Selfishness is almost synonymous with wickedness. You cannot strip it of its moral connotations; there would be next to nothing left. When you qualify anyone or any action as selfish, you are making a purely moral assessment of their reasons. It is therefore not only correct but necessary to assess any statement in which this word is used in moral terms.

My thesis is that inverarity's statement is an enormity, that it reverses moral law, and that it is the tainted result of a diseased moral culture. There are many ways in which I might approach this, but reality itself just provided me an excellent one: reductio ad absurdum, which, as I assume everyone knows, means showing what the proposition would mean if it were taken to its logical extreme. I don't have to invent anything:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/sep/07091405.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/may/08050108.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05121402.html
I know at least half a dozen other such cases. They happen regularly. And according to inverarity, these women are showing the extreme of selfish arrogance. After all, if they knew that either their lives or their children's were lost - that is, that if they let the child live they would violate inverarity's moral law - that it is "selfish and arrogant" to give birth to a child you know you are not going to be able to bring up. They were condemning their child to what seems to him a horrible, motherless life.

I want to underline that there is no stretching or misrepresentation here. These cases fall fully within inverarity's parameters. A woman KNOWS - knows for certain - that she is going to give birth to a child she will not be able to bring up. What is more, it is highly likely that if she aborts the child, she will be cured and perhaps be able to have, or at the least adopt, other children. But if she dies, the child will be motherless. What, in this, does not adhere to inverarity's formula? Nothing, obviously. One of these women was a doctor herself - even better able than the rest to judge the danger or certainty of death if she did not abort her child. No decision can have been more conscious; and being particularly conscious, she must have been, in inverarity's view, particularly guilty.

Now there is a sentence that is burned in letters of fire across the conscience of Western man, a sentence that even the most hardened priest-baiter, the most obstinate atheist, the most committed libertine, will recognize as being as close to the pinnacle of morality as language can get. And the sentence is: GREATER LOVE HAS NO MAN THAN THIS, TO GIVE HIS LIFE FOR HIS FRIENDS. Nobody could possibly deny its moral value. But if we take inverarity's own moral dictate seriously, then we have to reply: Greater love hath no woman than this, to lay down her children for her life. At which point I would suppose that some of us at least might start to see a problem.

Comments

Re: Differences, differences

[anthonyjfuchs.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify, since these are my major points of contention:

Is it noble and loving to bear a child in order to willfully abandon it?

Is choosing not to get pregnant the same as murdering an unborn fetus?

All else is extravagant distraction. The fact that you lack the authority to speak for all of humanity has been settled, so don't expect your insistence that your opinions based on your experiences are universally applicable to persuade me.

Re: Differences, differences

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I already answered.

Re: Differences, differences

[anthonyjfuchs.livejournal.com]

You did. My apologies for the double-post. Feel free to delete the anonymous duplicate.

We will not see eye to eye on this issue. There is absolutely nothing noble or loving in the willful abandonment of a child. On the contrary: it is quite the cowardly, incompetent act.

My question regarding the nature of love was rhetorical. I understand love as well as some, and better than most. I contend that you, however, entertain some massively fantastic delusions about it. For instance: you seem to think that love is some kind of supernatural radiation that can be projected. It is not, and cannot. Love is an emotion, which springs from the human mind, which springs from the human brain. The love that you may experience cannot be projected onto anyone else, or into any other time. No one else can experience the love (or anger, or jealousy, or sorrow) that you experience, because your emotions are a function of your mind. You can ACT on your emotions, and others can experience your actions, and through them deduce that you are experiencing love (or anger, or jealousy, or sorrow), but your love cannot be projected.

Surely you understand that there is a substantial difference between "human hormones" and "human nature." You cannot be so thick as to conflate the two. While all humans may have the same particular hormones, not all humans behave in the same way. Two people with the exact same hormonal condition can behave in two completely different ways; one teenage girl, experiencing strong sexual urges because of her hormones, may choose to abstain (committing thought-abortion in the process, of course), while another teenage girl, experience strong sexual urges because of the same hormes, may choose to have sex. That you could possibly construe a statement about hormones as being the same as a statement about behaviors tells me that you know even less about "human nature" than I might have imagined. And it means that you have just made a fool of yourself.

Telling you that you cannot (not "should not") speak on behalf of humanity is not the same as telling you to shut up. Not unless you're entertaining a fairly potent persecution complex. It simply means that, instead of presuming to speak some universe truth about "human nature" (which you can't even differentiate from "human hormones"), you should stick to offering your opinions for what they are: YOUR opinions, based on YOUR experiences.

As to this: "[I]f this sort of thing is not argued about from the viewpoint of human nature, it cannot be argued about at all." This sort of thing cannot be argued from the viewpoint of human nature. Therefore, I guess I must agree that it cannot be argued at all. Or, perhaps, you could accept that, while there is next-to-nothing constant about "human nature" in general, certain issues still CAN be discussed.

Re: Differences, differences

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You have absolutely no notion of what is contradictory and what is not. In fact, your reasoning is so bad that I strongly feel it is part of a defence mechanism. To talk as though human hormones were in any way contradictory to human nature is like arguing that the existence of feet proves that the human body as a whole does not exist. Feet are a part of the human body, and to speak of them implies the existence of the body of which they are a part. Hormones are a part - a minor part - of human nature, and to speak of them as "human", meaning common to all human beings, is to assume, not to deny, the existence of a much greater thing called human nature, of which hormones are a part. That is what is wrong with your way of talking: that you talk as though you had argued against the existence of an overarching human nature, just by trying to force our attention to a mere part of it. You haven't argued; you have performed a trick. Reductionism is an intellectual crime because it is intended to use a part not to imply but to hide away the whole; it implies intellectual mendacity, conscious or unconscious.

You are also incapable, or rather unwilling, to understand the simplest concepts. There is nothing supernatural about projecting love into the future, loving what has not yet been born or made; any more than there is anything supernatural about projecting your understanding of a horse into the future to put money on your certainty that it will achieve a result. Both things are gambles, but neither thing has anything supernatural. The love for a yet unborn child is the reason why the child is conceived, just as the love for a yet unwritten masterpiece is the reason why an artist starts work on it. When Mozart set out on his three last symphonies (which seem to have been composed without a customer in mind), he was not very likely to be already clear on the stunning tour-de-force he would perform in the forty-first, especially in the last movement; but he was enthusiastic about the idea of composing some new symphonies - so enthusiastic that he wrote three in six weeks. His love of his trade moved ahead of his intellect, and his intellect followed behind; and it is symptomatic that the fourth movement of the Jupiter Symphony, literally the most complex piece of music ever composed, is also one of the simplest to experience - pure, undiluted enthusiasm, from a man who was performing the impossible and making it look easy, and knew it. It is because it is a triumphant and literally incomparable work of the intellect, that the musician can be felt almost literally capering and leaping with joy. That is all the evidence one needs, unless one has some desperate psychic reason to run away from emotion, to understand that emotion and reason, intellect and love, work together and feed off each other.

As for the rest - I will speak about human nature as and when I want, being a human being. If you insist on demanding I should not, kindly leave this blog and don't come back.

Re: Differences, differences

[anthonyjfuchs.livejournal.com]

Oh for the love.

I have not "demanded" that you should not talk about human nature. I have pointed out that you cannot do so, in that you lack the authority to do so. That you cannot do so does not mean that you cannot try to do so, and you will undoubtedly continue to try to do so anyway. And you will make a fool of yourself further in the process.

That is your prerogative, as this is your blog.

I am frankly flabbergasted at how abysmally you have misinterpreted my points about hormones v. nature. Where do you find the absurd idea that I said hormones "contradict" nature? I never implied that human hormones were in any way contradictory to human nature, and I'd advise you not to put those words in my mouth if you are so fundamentally offended by others putting words in yours.

You contended, rather ridiculously, that because all human beings have hormones in common, you can claim that all human beings have their natures in common. That is, your position necessitates that all humans have the same emotional resposnes to the same stimuli. That all humans, in essense, have the same personalities. I objected to that unfounded claim. I offered simple examples of people with the same hormones making different choices, demonstrating that having the same hormones is not the same as having the same nature. You responded with Bob Thiele lyrics and appeals to theological artwork.

Of course, you also contend that it is loving and noble to willfully abandon a child. It is a wonder that you expect your opinions to be taken seriously.

Re: Differences, differences

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Listen, mate, you would have done yourself a great favour if you had admitted that you had never listened to Mozart's 39th, 40th and 41st symphonies and that you had never given any thought to their meaning and content, rather than make yourself ridiculous before all educated people by calling them "theological artwork". Your resolution not to understand, not to even try to hear what is being said to you, not to even accept any challenge to your reductionist obstinacy, joins here with prejudice and ignorance to produce something beyond satire. Just forget it. I am sick and tired of beating myself against a brick wall. I feel sorry for the world you have constructed for yourself out of negation and fear, but I really don't have the time to waste on it. Now please avoid wasting my time with further posts, or I shall close this post.

Re: Differences, differences

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are banned from further commenting. Take your New Jerk Times lies home and masturbate to them. I want nothing more to do with you. Period.