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Jun. 22nd, 2010 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbMy 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 himselfinverarity. (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 thatinverarity'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 toinverarity, 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 withininverarity'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 takeinverarity'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.
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.
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Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-23 05:14 pm (UTC)Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-23 08:33 pm (UTC)The most important thing to understand is that there is no instinct that the species should be preserved. Nobody ever gave a damn about the species and nobody ever will. What we do want is to have other human beings. It is not that there should be vast numbers in a future we cannot and should not imagine, but that we should meet other individuals, today, tomorrow, and the day after. If - to name four astoundingly beautiful women - I should think of Katie Melua, Trine Michelsen, Katie Carr or Nicola Cowper, I do not think of them as specimens of something more abstract than themselves; rather, I should want to have more individuals, in the hope that some of them might turn out to be as wonderfully lovely - and with the proviso that any of them, even as foolish as some of the opponents in this debate, would be worth having for their own sake. Even if, in some cases, at a certain distance from me.
Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-23 11:10 pm (UTC)To some degree I think we're on the same page--what you describe certainly makes sense, but I would see it as an unconscious reaction, too. I've never heard anyone say they wanted to have kids to make something beautiful! ;) We humans, do certainly relate to each other much more in the individual--I'm reminded of a study where it was found that if a person appeared to be hurt or unconscious on a city street, they were more likely to be helped if there was only one bystander--if there was a group of people, the attitude prevailed that 'someone else would help'. And the prisons are full of people who rebelled against the instinct not to murder fellow humans.
The ideal would not be to be completely lacking in emotion, like a Vulcan, but to recognize when one needs to step back and see what is emotion and what is reason, applying this to both good and bad things. Something that sounds wonderful at first feeling or whim, may not be all that great when taken to it reasonable conclusion. In the case of other people, wanting to have more individuals that you (or I) would perceive to be ideal, really needs to be balanced by the realism that no person will ever be a carbon copy of someone else. Which is where I think the emotional aspect trips some women up--they love the idea of a child, but the reality may be nothing what they expected.
I think, too, that you're much more of an idealist than me, after 25 years of working with the public I've seen just about everything I can be cynical about. It's a lot like working in law enforcement, minus the gunfire. (Well, most of the time.)
Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-24 12:16 am (UTC)Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-24 03:09 pm (UTC)I disagree with you on the police thing, though--one of my fascinations is criminology and police work, and cops see pretty gruesome things on an everyday basis. Have you ever read anything by John Douglas or Robert Ressler? Police are the first responders in the wake of the likes of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, the guy down the street who stabbed his girlfriend's daughter, the accident scene where a drunk driver hit another car head on, and the carnage is so bad they can't even tell how many people were in the car...and so on. Cops do see mass murder too, though it's not an everyday occurrence--Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, James Huberty, John List, Richard Farley--those are just the mass murderers I can come up with off the top of my head. I've never been a victim of a crime (thank God), the closest I've been to any of this stuff was seeing a gang throwdown in the wing of the mall I worked in (lots of knives), and going in and out of the mall under the eye of police snipers on the roof (there was a serial rapist haunting the parking lot one summer). I have no doubt that priests see/hear a lot of the worlds' evil, but I think the worst sociopaths don't confess until they have to, in an interrogation room surrounded by detectives and confronted with the evidence, and a lot of times not even then.
But when I consider man as a whole, the wonder is not all the evil it has done, but all the evil it routinely refrains from doing. I agree with you 100% on this one! I think where everyday people really fall short is in the little hurts and cruelties they inflict on people around them. How hard is it to start out by being nice instead of mean? Don't be rude to the waitress or sales person. Hold the door for the old lady or the mom with her kids behind you. Give the homeless guy out in the cold a coffee and a bagel. These little things make more of a difference than a lot of people think they do.
Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-24 04:07 pm (UTC)Re: Differences, differences
Date: 2010-06-24 05:25 pm (UTC)