Credo for Conservatives IV: More Abortion Debate
Two more Arguments, from God and from rationality.
GOD
Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives--general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions. [Cf. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature III.12 ) From the Christian perspective nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality. A face-to-face encounter with nature's Creator is possible only to those who study his Word and participate in his sacraments. If there are sincere Christians who believe that the taking of innocent human life can be justified on any pragmatic grounds, they are mistaken, dreadfully mistaken, ...
and while it is possible for opponents of abortion to respect those secular antagonists who build their arguments on ecological necessity and constitutional law, they can have nothing but contempt for religious leaders who either defend abortion or make the all-too familiar argument that, while they are opposed in principle, they would not want to impose their views on anyone else. This is something new under the sun, the apostles of an evangelizing religion who do not wish to impose their views! This frivolous attitude among many (particularly liberal Protestant) theologians was condemned by the signers of the Durham statement as rebellion against God. Since reverence for innocent life has marked the Christian faith from the very first, distinguishing it from all other religions of the ancient world, a surrender of the Christian position on life is apostasy of the worst sort.
In a secular nation, the Christian position cannot be the basis of law, although individual Christians must recognize that, quite apart from the Old Testament's prohibition on murder, the whole spirit of the gospels is an affirmation of life. If the church has sometimes been unclear on the biological and spiritual status of a fetus, it has never departed from the position that the natural and divine end of marriage is the procreation of children. To frustrate that end is always (to put it as mildly as I can) less good than to fulfill it, and to destroy what we know to be a human life, no matter how "embryonic", can never be justified.
Activists in the pro-life movement do not hesitate to describe abortion as murder, but many Christians refuse to accept that equation. This reluctance may have something to do with our perception that the moral attitude, in the case of a woman having an early abortion, is different from what her condition must be if she picks up a child and dashes it brains out. To some ears, this distinction will sound like blasphemy. Why not call it murder, which is what it was, until recently? Is motivation the sole criterion by which a crime is to be judged? No, not motivation but intent, which can be an important, although not the only criterion. In the case of a brutal mass-murderer--a Jeffrey Dahmer or Richard Speck--a jury would bring in a verdict of innocent by reason of insanity, if they were persuaded that the murderer did not recognize the consequences of his actions, if, for example, he truly believed that his victims would reassemble themselves, as in a cartoon, and walk out the door.
The jurors would bring in a similar verdict if the killer thought he was killing rats, not human beings. In the opposite case of Sophocles' Ajax, the hero slaughtered sheep under the delusion that he was killing the Greek leaders who had dishonored him by awarding the arms of Achilles to his enemy Odysseus. The intended victims, you may be sure, did not pardon their comrade because he had been tricked into butchering sheep. It is generally accepted that "injuries... done in ignorance are mistakes when the person acted on...is other than the actor believed." [Aristotle, Eth. Nic. V, 1135b]
But, it will be objected, this opens the door to a blanket pardon for all genocidal murderers who look upon their victims as less than human. Depersonalization of victims is the hallmark of ideological dictatorships that shave their victims, put them in uniforms, assign then numbers, and deny them their dignity. The concentration camp is only the most grotesque form of bureaucracy, and it is all too easy for functionaries in such a system to grow indifferent to the needs and suffering of the less-than-human. With all this said, a humiliated prisoner with a shaved head remains, for all that have eyes to see, a human being, and if a torturer chooses to believe propaganda, rather than to trust his own senses, he must bear the moral burden of that choice, and even if we assign much of their blame to the system that produced them, torturers are in a morally worse condition than the man who kills for revenge, for lust, or for greed.
However, the moral condition of women who abort their children may be closer to that of Ajax than Eichman. In the common Greek view of murder, of course, the fact of killing is the principal consideration. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, the furies think that Orestes' confession is enough to establish his guilt. There can be no mitigating circumstances. At Athens they put animals on trial who had caused the death of a human being and threw "homicidal" rooftiles into the sea. Yet even the Athenians recognized motive and intent in assigning punishment.
Of course, in treating abortion as a "problem" rather than as homicide, we are putting the mothers who have them on a moral level below animals and rooftiles. In one sense, this is a reasonable position: the morally numb are, in a moral sense, scarcely human. It is, no doubt, the duty of a good Christian (and of a morally responsible pagan) to make sure that women who kill their babies will some day realize, if only for their own good, what they have done. However, it is probably not helpful, from a Christian perspective, to label women who have had abortions as murderers and baby-killers: passionate language may only stiffen the mothers into a self-righteousness from which there is no return. What is important, though, is to bring them to a realization of what they have done, because the mere fact of killing is not nearly so deadly to the moral sense as the coldness and indifference to life that is inculcated by the public acceptance of prepartum infanticide.
REASON
Most modern schools of philosophy base morality on the principles of reason, and the principal accounts of moral development emphasize growth in moral reasoning rather than moral behavior. [Cf. The Morality of Everyday Life] To be a human person in this sense would mean that an individual is conscious of his own existence and capable of making rational decisions, including the decision to remain alive. On this reasoning Michael Tooley concludes that infants, born and unborn, are not persons and do not possess a right to life; mature higher mammals, on the other hand, may well be persons. Some animal rights advocates have reached the same conclusions: It is wrong to kill elephants and primates but not human babies.
When an hypothesis is not only counter-intuitive but contradicted by the experiences of the human race, it is hardly worth the effort to refute it. To comprehend the absurdity of the rationalist position, it is useful to look at at the less extreme form made by some libertarian philosophers, e.g. Tibor Machan, in their attacks on animal rights: only rational creatures are possessed of rights; animals are not rational, therefore... But to define humanity in terms of a few brain functions--analytical reasoning, in the case of libertarians, and "the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences" in the case of Tooley--is entirely capricious. One might just as well define personhood in terms of good looks or table manners. The various uses of the word humane (etymologically identical with human) ought to be a clue. In the intellectual sphere, "humane" refers not to the power of reasoning but to the entire course of studies that use to make up a liberal education--literature, rhetoric, philosophy, history, and so on. Humane letters meant, preeminently, the study of Latin and Greek. Why not restrict full personhood only to the classically trained? (I'm ready, but is Tooley?)
On the other hand, "humane" also refers to those gentler qualities of mercy, kindness, and decency that characterize civilized man at his best. We are kind to animals not because the beasts are possessed of rights, but because it is a fulfillment of some higher nature that is developed under civilization. Is a dog-beater, then, not a human person? Can he be killed with impunity? No sane person would answer, "yes". On any scale we choose--rationality, concept of self, kindness, Latinity--we might plot a graph of human personhood with a cutoff point that includes some but not all people. But what if, for example, I happen to have higher standards than you--much higher standards. What if your cut-off point is, say, fifty points below your own IQ of 130, and what if I have an IQ of 180. I used to put this question in a less extreme form to feminist students, pointing out there IQ was, by my estimate, about 20-30 points lower than my own. If they wanted to justify killing a baby with Downs Syndrome, because it could never go to college, why was I not justified not just in flunking but in annihilating stupid college kids? If a similar scale of kindness or self-concept could be designed, we might imagine a race of beings so far off the charts that they would regard the best of us as pieces of meat that have been trained to stand on their hind legs.
Tooley imagines that mere fact of membership in Homo sapiens confers no special privileges. What is the difference, he asks, (51) between an unborn human and an unborn kitten? It is obvious, he thinks, "that if we encountered other 'rational animals,' such as Martians, the fact that their physiological makeup was very different from our own would not be grounds for denying them a right to life." (54) But what is obvious to professors of philosophy may be opaque to the rest of the species and, indeed, to members of other species. Among the mammalian species to which man is most nearly related, intraspecific killing is not at all common. Competition for power among wolves or chimpanzees rarely results in the death of one of the competitors. Primate species employ a variety of methods to avoid murder and to insure peace within the social unit. (Cf. Franz de Waal). War between chimapanzee (or human) tribes is another matter, and it is one of the features of war that the combatants suspend their ordinary revulsion against killing members of their own kind.
Every human being, born or unborn, child or adult, is a summary record of human evolution; he is a record of our history as a species, a summation of our experiences. We cannot look another man in the eye without seeing ourselves in a mirror, and even chimpanzees and gorillas can make us oddly uncomfortable, as if we can still see something of ourselves but in the distorted shape of a funhouse mirror. Most of us shrink from murder, because all murder is a kind of suicide of the species: We are killing, as it were, a little part of our common humanity. That is why so many human societies have hedged in even involuntary homicide with taboos and purification rituals. Is this all done in recognition of the victim's "concept of self"?
It is possible for human groups to define the species in such a way as to exclude foreigners or the deformed or even female infants, but it would be the most exotic of societies that generally denied human status to all its own infants. To do so at this stage of civilization would be to redefine humanity in strictly academic terms, giving Ph.D.'s with presumed higher intelligence--a very dangerous presumption--a status above the unreflective, the irrational, the stupid. What a comforting reflection this, must be for an unappreciated college teacher.
If Prof. Tooley were to meet his rational Martians, he might be suprised to discover that their only "human" quality is their intelligence. The Martians not only know no Latin, but they are capable of neither mercy nor kindness to any living creature, not even to other Martians. If such creatures invaded our planet, would we really be prepared to grant them human rights? Even if they were less brutal than I have made them out to be, their rights could be based only in covenants made between the two species. Of course, a god could tell us that both species were made in his own image (as in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy), but short of that deus ex machina, we might find the Martians entirely alien and far less "human" and less like persons than the dogs and cats who share so much of our own evolutionary history. [Cf. evolutionary biologists who have made an argument that the species should be redefined in evolutionary terms.]
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Thank you Dr. Fleming for this deep wisdom. It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that English law, with which this country was founded and long guided, was based on and directly inspired by the Ten Commandments. Only in fairly recent times have secularists invented another and false basis of law.
"Humane letters meant, preeminently, the study of Latin and Greek.
Why not restrict full personhood only to the classically trained?"
Persona or mask seem to me to be good words, I don't know about personhood. One thing that all conservatives should agree upon is that no man or woman can really be considered educated without a modicum of respect and familiarity with Greek and Latin. It is like the French calling G. W. Bush a cowboy without knowing what Oklahomans and Texans mean by the phrase " all hat and no horse." So it is with these popular social sciences and hard sciences without any understanding of Greek and Latin. I once consider myself 25% educated because I knew enough Latin to pick through the vulgar church Latin of the old breviary. Befriending Dr. Fleming has made me undersatnd that it is much worse than this probably not educated at all -- actually parents have been defrauded by our State and private Universities for years and should file a class action law suit against these imposters posing as professors and pickpocket administrators posing as lovers of learning. Until this is recognized(and the republican party is destroyed) I see no real future in American conservativism whatsoever.
Upon my insistence my children all took several years of Latin in the Catholic high school they attended. Their teacher was a profoundly politically incorrect guy who insisted on the superiority of Latin over other languages. Occasionally, with no warning, he would march his legion (his class) into the classrooms of other foreign language teachers and "conquer" the barbarians. He also left the windows in the classroom open on 20 degree days under the theory that the cold wind would make his students virtuous. I don't know about that, but I wonder how many teachers there are who even know the word virtuous exists, much less believe they should try to instill virtue into their students?
Mr. Flinn @ 3
The mission of the little school at which I am the current headmaster is to assist the home, the Church and the local community in training the children in our stewardship toward character, with character being the acquisition of, the internalizing of and the living out of the great virtues - cardinal, capital and theological. We stress character, which one has to acquire, over personality with which one seems to be born. Our plight is that those of us charged with this duty are ourselves, being members of the Peter Pan generation, the X generation, etc., struggling with the barbarian embedded in each of us.
As to using weather in order to instill virtue, I suppose that we could turn off the air conditioners. That would, in our climes, put us back to the late sixties during which no school was air conditioned. In mid September, we sometimes have 100+ temperatures with 98% relative humidity. When it is 20 degrees here, we don't have school. It is far too cold. Everybody goes hunting instead!
Another thank you from me, too, Dr. Fleming. Although I am not well-educated (a condition that I spend much of my time trying to correct), I absorbed enough of a traditional Catholic education, before Vatican II, that I am resistant to "modern" ideas. My personal experiences and observations have made me even more resistant. I am continually amazed at some of the ideas my fellow humans come to believe that are clearly not true. Recently, in another thread before you started this series of discussions, a contributor (who seems to have disappeared) brought up the subject of aliens. He assumed that they would be viewed as "persons." When it comes to alien life, I am a doubting Thomas, from Missouri: show me one that I can observe, and then we will discuss if this alien is a person. The Supreme Court decision involving trimesters is, in my view, based on alien thinking. My own experience with the death of my first daughter and the struggle for survival of a nephew, both of whom were born three months premature, only convinces me more of how nonsensical that decision was. Is it possible that modern legal training causes brain damage? I try to read everything that you write, because I always learn something new, or at least come away with a better understanding of what I think about the subject that is under examination. It would be beneficial if you captured your essays, including some of the better comments or questions and your responses, in a series of books, by topic. “Thomas Fleming’s Commentaries on. . .”
@5 Mr. Van Sant has expressed some of my thoughts also Dr. Fleming
regarding your essay. Hope you will continue developing it further.
I also agree with Mr Van Sant. It would be a great anthology. There is more to learn and gain from reading these discussions than there is in most books published today.
Thank you all. This book I have been working on since before the Morality of Everyday Life will treat the necessary nonChristian preconditions for a decent society on which Christians could then improve. It is gone through many titles reflecting many changes--citizens of the world, properties of blood, love and hate, and now, City of Man. The focus is on marriage, the household, parents and children, abortion and euthanasia. What I am posting here are bits of the next-to-the last chapter, mostly as they were rewritten 10 years ago, though where I see where I have to amplify my argument, I am adding in a few sentences.
To Mr. Van Sant, I offer my condolences and also the suggestion that we all live in madhouse. The worst of us think we are the keepers--we call them liberals. We have accepted the ideology that has been drilled into us, though it is based on obviously counter-intuitive principles no Hottentot would fall for. The old commie Woody Guthrie one said he wanted to be known only as the man who told people what they already knew. It certainly wasn't true in his case, but that is the claim I would like to make, that I am trying to restate and prove what every normal person in the West once accepted as truth, whether he lived accordingly or not. I have posted an additional argument separately.
"I am trying to restate and prove what every normal person in the West once accepted as truth"
This reminds me of a movie I once watched, which was called A Man For All Seasons. It was made by the screenwriter of Lawrence of Arabia.
The protagonist, Sir Thomas More, refuses to put a spy under arbitrary arrest, because he must give the Devil the benefit of law; else he would not be safe from the Devil once there were no laws to protect himself.
As I learnt of the terrible things that happen today when people put any spin on law to do what they see as socially "just", like dismissing of certain crimes when they are committed by minorities (as happens in France and Britain), the movie's line echoes in my head. And when I come back to seeing writings of smarter scholars today, I am just reminded that this man, Sir Thomas More, from such backward medieval days when most people lived under bare subsistence, was so ahead of the curve already, so many years back. It's these simple facts of human existence that were once so obvious.
Thank You Dr. Fleming. I am looking forward to your next book.
I have some problems with an anti-abortion agenda. While I have never preformed an abortion involving a live fetus, I certainly have ordered abortions in the course of trying to save a woman's life. I had no problem with that when gestation was less than 4 months. As the laws have become more strict, and in keeping with our system more stupid, I have felt that the government is entering into my sphere and compromising my ability to reason out who is to live. We generally attempt to keep the mother alive if at all possible, but as the fetus matures and appears healthy, it may take precedence. There is no way the government can dictate rules that substitute for these judgement calls. When the issue is elective abortion, I use the same method of analysis. If a woman does not want that child to the point that she is willing to kill it, then forcing her to continue with the pregnancy makes little sense. I saw the consequences of children that were raised in homes that did not want them and the results are horrific. It is really silly to debate the concept of abortion, it is out of the bag and will not go back in. Instead of trying to legislate morality, why don't we go back to preaching what is right and wrong (to counter this argument with the concept that we should use the same method with murder is silly).
I would estimate that most of the conservatives that I know are comfortable with abortion. In fact, if this issue was pushed, it would divide the conservative movement. That is what liberals are counting on. If we push moral issues on a national platform, then we will be stuck with the socialistic agenda that is unfolding right now.
I also have a problem with government forcing moral codes on us as well. A revulsion to abortion is your morals, not that of others. The same can be said for many other concepts. Take the issue of drugs. What logic can come up with the concept that you can not buy any drug you need. Instead, you must see a doctor. I pull my back, need a pill for spasm and pain. I must make an appointment for a doctor 1 to 2 weeks in the future or go to the ER and get charged $2500. I then have to convience the doctor that I am not an addict and truly need medication. I go to the druggist where I am again checked multiple times for excessive drug use and need and again must wait. It makes not sense. There are not that many drugs. Let people take what they want and consult their doctor when needed. The addiction rate will be the same. Most doctors would really prefer this concept. The problem, morals. The same can be said about prostitition and many other "crimes" that we persue that are moral. We need to leave each other alone, reduce government, reduce laws, reduce rules and regulations, reduce taxes.
David, "leave each other alone" itself is based on a moral belief.
There is nothing in the interaction of more than one person that is not a moral matter. There is no amoral and purely objective by which human standards and actions can be weighed and chosen accordingly. Since we have not figured out the bridge between mind and matter, we'll have to assume that human matters and social life are only to be discussed in *subjective* moral terms. Otherwise, we could dismiss any matter of law and order on ground that it is just moral policing. Not a nice road on which one should go down.
But you are correct; such problems can not be legislated. Nothing can be legislated; that's all fundamentally useless. There are always arbitrary provisions, definitions, exceptions, and whatnot. And it is still oversimplifying.
So I think Dr. Fleming's work in at least educating people works. I also think the judgments you make in those difficult situations is for a good moral purpose (to save a life), and the people who teach their families about survival of species and need for human immortality have also a good moral purpose.
I think "David" is really the creation of a pro-life activist who wants to show, in brief, exactly how irrational and dishonest the pro-abortionists are. Let us pretend, however, that this is really a physician defending his record as an abortionist. The most transparent piece of dishonesty is the use of multiple justifications. I call this the adolescent lie. "No, I didn't bang up the car. I never even took it out, and if I did, I had permission, and besides, it was the other guy who ran the light...' Anyone who has known teenagers know this line of defense.
For example, abortions in the first four months are ok if the mother's life is threatened, but abortions should not be outlawed because the issue divides conservatives and no one should legislate morality, and such rules complicate medicine and make it more expensive....Which is it, David? Which is your decision rule?
Now there is the question of ordering abortions to save a mother's life. I remember reading, back in the 1970's, a discussion by the famous Dr. Guttmacher, a supporter of abortion rights, who said that in his long career he had never had to perform an abortion to save a mother's live nor had he ever met a physician who had, yet David acts as if this is routine. One estimate has it that if we eliminated abortion in cases of rape, incest, and when the fetus posed a real threat to a mother's life, this would leave at most 1% of all abortions legal.
So, assuming this is not a prank, what we have is a physician receiving money to kill other people's children. Small wonder if somewhere he lost the power of moral reasoning. If this is the sort of doctors our med schools are turning out these days, it is time to lose weight, quit smoking, work out--anything but to be exposed to such things they have become.
I think the most interesting part of his post was, "I saw the consequences of children that were raised in homes that did not want them and the results are horrific."
It does beg the question: who pays attention to what happens in the privacy of so many people's homes? Who would even know?
And how horrific were those things to determine whether the child should not have been alive?
They couldn't have been that horrific. Generally, unwanted children may not be happy, but they are not exactly tortured in a fully equipped chamber in the basement either, and when they leave home they can lead normal lives. Not being wanted is not the same as, say, being born with a congenital defect that causes chronic agony and then death in five or six years.