Category: Abortion

More Reasons Not to be a Libertarian: Abortion and Guns

This from the Libertarian Party Platform:

1.4 Abortion

Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.

1.5 Crime and Justice

Government exists to protect the rights of every individual including life, liberty and property. [. . .]

The contradiction fairly jumps off the page.  Government should be kept out of the abortion matter, we are told,  and yet we are also told that government exists to protect the rights of every individual, including the right to life.  This is contradictory.  Consider a third-trimester healthy human fetus.  If it is an individual, then government exists to protect its right to life by (1.5).  But by (1.4) government has no role to play.  Contradiction. 

Will you reply that the fetus is not an individual?  What is it then, a universal?  Will you say it is not a human individual?  What is then, a canine or bovine or lupine individual?  Will you say that the fetus is not alive?  What is it then, dead? Or neither alive nor dead?  Will you say that it is not a biological individual, but a clump of cells or mere human genetic material?  Then the same is true of you, in which case either you have no right to life, or both you and the fetus have a right to life. Will you say that the fetus is guilty of some crime and deserves to die?  What crime is that, pray tell?

Will you say that a woman has a right to do anything she wants with her body?  But the fetus is not her body.  It is a separate body.  Will you say it is a  part of her body?  But it is not a part like a bone or a muscle or an organ is a part. Nor is it a part like hair or mucus or the contents of the GI tract.  Is it a part like a benign or pre-cancerous or cancerous growth?  No.  Granted, the fetus is spatially inside the mother, but that does not suffice to make it a part of her.  I am spatially inside my house, but I am not a part of my house. 

A fetus is a separate biological individual with its own life and its own right to life.  The general prohibition against the killing of innocent human beings cannot be arbitrarily restricted so as to exclude the unborn.  I could go on but I have said enough about this topic in other posts in the Abortion category.

Now consider this:

1.6 Self-Defense

The only legitimate use of force is in defense of individual rights — life, liberty, and justly acquired property — against aggression. This right inheres in the individual, who may agree to be aided by any other individual or group. We affirm the individual right recognized by the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, and oppose the prosecution of individuals for exercising their rights of self-defense. We oppose all laws at any level of government requiring registration of, or restricting, the ownership, manufacture, or transfer or sale of firearms or ammunition.

This is basically on the right track and vastly superior to what your typical knee-jerk liberal gun-grabber would spout.  Second Amendment rights are very important.  And of course they are individual rights, not collective rights, as even SCOTUS came to appreciate.    But the formulation is objectionable on the ground of extremism.  Look at the last sentence: "We oppose all laws at any level of government requiring registration of, or restricting, the ownership, manufacture, or transfer or sale of firearms or ammunition.

This is just ridiculous.  It implies that felons should be able to purchase guns.  Felons should no more be allowed to buy guns than they should be allowed to vote.  It implies that the sale of guns and ammo to children is permissible.  It implies that there should be no safety laws regulating the manufacture of guns and ammo.  It implies that citizens should be permitted to enter post offices with grenade launchers and machine guns. 

What Does Abortion Have to Do with Religion?

The abortion question is almost always raised in the context of religion.  The Vice-Presidential debate provides a good recent example.  The moderator  introduced the topic with these words: “We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I  would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your  own personal views on abortion.”  Why didn't the moderator just ask the candidates to state their positions on abortion?   Why did she bring up religion?  And why the phrase "personal views"?  Are views on foreign policy and the economy also personal views?  Below the surface lies the suggestion that opposition to abortion can only rest on antecedent religious commitments of a personal nature that have no place in the public square. 

A question that never gets asked, however, is the one I raise in this post:  What does the abortion issue have to do with religion?  But I need to make the question more precise.  Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises? Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infancticide.
Therefore
3. (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument. 

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme  Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban  Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate — also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

Return to the above argument.  Suppose someone demands to know why one should accept the first premise.  Present this argument:

4. Killing innocent human beings is morally wrong.
5. Infanticide is the killing of innocent human beings.
Therefore
1. Infanticide is morally wrong.

This second argument, like the first, invokes no specifically religious premise.  Admittedly, the general prohibition of homicide – general in the sense that it admits of exceptions — comes from the Ten Commandments.  But if you take that as showing that (4) is religious, then the generally accepted views that theft and lying are morally wrong would have to be adjudged religious as well.

But I don't want to digress onto the topic of the sources of our secular moral convictions, convictions that are then codified in the positive law.  My main point is that one can oppose abortion on secular grounds. A second point is that the two arguments I gave are very powerful.  If you are not convinced by them, you need to ask yourself why.

Some will reply by saying that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body.  This is The Woman's Body Argument:

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.


For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

 If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction. Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

I wrote "perhaps (2) is acceptable" because it is arguable that (2) is not acceptable. For a woman's body is an improper part of her body; hence if a woman has a right to do anything she wishes with her body, then she has a right to kill her body by blowing it up, say. One who has good reason to reject suicide, however, has good reason to reject (2) even when 'part' is construed narrowly. And even if we substitute 'proper part' for 'part' in the original argument, it is still not the case that a woman has a right to do whatever she wishes with any proper narrow part of her body. Arguably, she has no right to cut out her own heart, since that would lead to her death.

I am making two points about the Woman's Body Argument.  The first is that  my rejection of it does not rely on any religious premises.  The second is that the argument is unsound. 

Standing on solid, secular ground one has good reason to oppose abortion as immoral in the second and third trimesters (with some exceptions, e.g., threat to the life of the mother).  Now not everything immoral should be illegal.  But in this case the objective immorality of abortion entails that it ought to be illegal for the same reason that the objective immorality of the wanton killing of innocent adults requires that it be  illegal.

Of course it follows that you should not vote for the abortion party, a.k.a. the Dems.  And if you are a Catholic who votes Democratic then you are as foolish and confused as the benighted Joe Biden.

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal — not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

HentoffRelated posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Asserting and Arguing: Analysis of an Example and Response to Novak

In my earlier posts on this topic here and here I did not analyze an example.  I make good that deficit now. 

Suppose a person asserts that abortion is morally wrong.  Insofar forth, a bare assertion which is likely  to elicit the bare counter-assertion, 'Abortion is not morally wrong.'  What can be gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied without breach of logical propriety, a maxim long enshrined in the Latin tag Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.  So one reasonably demands arguments from those who make assertions.  Here is one:

Infanticide is morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and infanticide
Ergo
Abortion is morally wrong.

Someone who forwards this argument in a concrete dialectical  situation in which he is attempting to persuade himself or another asserts the premises and in so doing provides reasons for accepting the conclusion. This goes some distance toward removing the gratuitousness of the conclusion.  But what about the premises?  If they are mere assertions, then the conclusion, though proximately non-gratuitous (because supported by reasons), is not ultimately non-gratuitous (because no support has been provided for the premises).

Of course, it is better to give the above argument than merely to assert its conclusion.  The point of the original post, however, is that one has not escaped from the realm of assertion by giving an argument.  And this for the simple reason that (a) arguments have premises, and (b) arguments that do dialectical work must have one or more asserted premises, the assertions being made by the person forwarding the argument with the intention of rationally persuading himself or another of something.

Our old friend Lukas Novak proposes a counterexample to (b): the reductio ad absurdum (RAA)argument.  If I understand him, what Novak is proposing is that some such arguments can be used to rationally justify the assertion of the conclusion without any of the premises being asserted by the producer of the argument.  Suppose argument A with conclusion C has premises P1, P2, P3.  Suppose further that the premise set entails a contradiction. We may then validly conclude and indeed assert that either P1 is not true or P2 is not true or P3 is not true.  We may in other words make a disjunctive assertion, an assertion the content of which is a disjunctive proposition. And this without having asserted P1 or P2 or P3. What we have, then, is an argument with an asserted conclusion but no asserted promises.

I think Professor Novak is technically correct except that the sort of RAA argument he describes is not very interesting. Suppose the asserted conclusion is this: Either the null set is not empty, or the null set is not a set, or the Axiom of Extensionality does not hold, or the null set is not unique.  Who would want to assert that disjunctive monstrosity?  An interesting RAA argument with this subject matter would establish the uniqueness of the null set on the basis of several asserted premises and one unasserted premise, namely, The null set is not unique, the premise assumed for reductio.

So I stick to my guns: 'real life' arguments that do dialectical work must have one or more asserted premises. Novak's comment did, however, give me the insight that not every premise of a 'real life' dialectically efficacious argument must be asserted.

Now back to the abortion argument.  My point, again, is that providing even a sound argument for a conclusion — and I would say that the above argument is sound, i.e., valid in point of logical form and having true premises — does not free one from the need to  make assertions.  For example, one has to assert that infanticide is morally wrong.  But if no ground or grounds can be given for this assertion, then the assertion is gratuitous.  To remove the gratuitousness one can give a further argument:  The killing of innocent human beings is morally wrong; (human) infants are innocent human beings; ergo, etc.  The first premise in this second argument is again an assertion,  and so on.

Eventually we come to assertions that cannot be argued. That is not to say that these assertions lack support.  They are perhaps grounded in objective self-evidence.

Note that I am not endorsing what is sometimes called the Münchhausen trilemma, also and perhaps better known as  Agrippa's Trilemma, according to which a putative justification either

   a. Begets an infinite regress, or
   b. Moves in a circle, or
   c. Ends in dogmatism, e.g., in an appeal to self-evidence that can only be subjective, or in an appeal to authority.

All I am maintaining — and to some this may sound trivial — is that every real-life argument that does dialectical work must have one or more asserted premises.   And so while argument is in general superior to bare assertion, argument does not free us of the need to make assertions.  I insist on this so that we do not make the mistake of overvaluing argumentation.

To put it aphoristically, the mind's discursivity needs for its nourishment intuitive inputs that must be affirmed but cannot be discursively justified. 

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

It is often assumed that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises. This assumption is plainly false. To show that it is is false, one need merely give an anti-abortion argument that does not invoke any religious tenet, for example:

   1. Infanticide is morally wrong.
   2. There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and
   infancticide.
   Therefore
   3. Abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion must be religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike could make use of the above argument.

And as a matter of fact there are pro-life atheists. Nat Hentoff is one. In The Infanticide Candidate for President, he takes Barack Obama to task:

     But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme
     Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban
     Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a
     professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate – also voted
     against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on
     several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an
     alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a
     horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the
     doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of
     the child.

 

Anti-Intellectualism on the Right

As I write, the 'infanticide is just post-natal abortion' controversy is being discussed by Charlie Sykes who is sitting in for Dennis Prager on the latter's radio show.  Sykes is obviously intelligent, but he just did something that is not uncommon for conservatives to do but is harmful to the conservative cause, namely, display an anti-intellectual attitude.  He used the phrase "academic gobblydegook" to refer to the reasoning in After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?  (My discussion of the issues here.)

The article's reasoning, however,  is clear and free of unnecessary jargon.  For the anti-intellectual, however, any attempt to make necessary distinctions and couch them in a technical vocabulary is dismissed as 'gobbledegook,' 'hairsplitting,' 'semantics,' etc.  It's unfortunate but  it is the way too many conservatives are.  I am not talking about conservative intellectuals, but conservatives that have influence.  Bill O'Reilly is an example.  He does good work, and his influence is mainly salutary.  But when a guest begins to nuance the discussion with a distinction or two, O'Reilly dismisses it as 'theory' using the word in the way of Joe Sixpack.  (That would make a good separate post, "Joe Sixpack on 'Theory'")

Conservatives have the right views but are too often incapable of defending them. This makes them easy targets for leftists.  Liberals and leftists lack common sense including moral sense, but they possess verbal facility in spades.  So if you talk like George W. Bush or dismiss careful, albeit wrongheaded, reasoning as 'gobbledegook' you just make yourself look stupid, not just to liberals but to everyone who values careful thinking.

Abortion and Infanticide: What’s the Difference?

If you agree that infanticide is morally wrong, should you not also agree that late-term abortion is also morally wrong?  Consider this argument:

Infanticide is morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Late-term abortion is morally wrong.

To cast it in a slogan:  Late-term abortion is pre-natal infanticide!

But of course the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety:

Late-term abortion is not morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Infanticide is not morally wrong.

To make a slogan of it: Infanticide is post-natal abortion!

Since the arguments and slogans  'cancel each other out,' the question arises whether we can move beyond a stand-off.  The pro-lifer finds it evident that infanticide is morally wrong, violating as it does the infant's right to life, and extends that right to the late-term fetus, while the type of pro-choicer I will be discussing in this post finds it evident that late-term abortion is morally acceptable and extends that moral acceptability to infanticide.

My response to the problem makes appeal to two principles, the Potentiality Principle, and the Modified Species Principle.  After I lay them out I will ask  whether they help us avoid a stalemate.

The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential descriptive personhood confers a right to life. In other words, the idea is that potential descriptive personhood entails normative personhood.  For present purposes we may define a person in the descriptive sense of the term, a descriptive person,  as anything that is sentient, rational, self-aware, and purposive.   A person in the normative sense of the term, a normative person, we may define as a rights-possessor.  We assume that actual descriptive persons are normative persons and thus have rights, including a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:

RP: All descriptive persons have a right to life.

What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,

PP. All potential descriptive persons have a right to life.

I have undertaken the defense of PP in other posts and I won't repeat myself here.  PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.

It may be that the right to life has multiple sources. Perhaps it has a dual source: in PP but also in the Species Principle (SP) according to which whatever is genetically human has the right to life just in virtue of being genetically human. Equivalently, what SP says is that every member of the species homo sapiens, qua member, has the right to life of any member, and therefore every member falls within the purview of the prohibition against homicide.

The intuition behind SP  is that killing innocent human beings is just plain wrong whether or not they are actual persons in the descriptive sense of the term.  Now late-term human fetuses are of course human beings, indeed human individuals (not just clumps of cells or bits of human genetic material).  And of course they are innocent human beings.    it follows that they have a right to life.

Subscription to SP entails that a severely damaged infant, a Down's Syndrome baby, for example,  would have a right to life just in virtue of being genetically human regardless of its potential for development. Some will object that SP is involved in species chauvinism or 'speciesism,' the abitrary and therefore illicit privileging of the species one happens to belong to over other species. The objection might proceed along the following lines. "It is easy to conceive of an extraterrestrial possessing all of the capacities (for self-awareness, moral choice, rationality, etc.) that we regard in ourselves as constituting descriptive personhood. Surely we would not want to exclude them from the prohibition against killing the innocent just because they are not made of human genetic material." To deal with this objection, a Modified Species Principle could be adopted:

MSP: Every member of an intelligent species, just insofar as it is a member of that species, has a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

The two principles (PP and MSP) working in tandem would seem to explain most of our moral intuitions in this matter. And now it occurs to me that PP and MSP can be wedded in one comprehensive principle, which we can call the Species Potentiality Principle:

SPP: Every member of any biological species whose normal members are actual or potential descriptive persons, just insofar as it is a member of that species, possesses a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

Does the above help us move beyond a stand-off?  Not at all.  No committed pro-choicer will accept the principles I have articulated above. And of course I won't accept his rejection of them.  For they are eminently rationally defensible and free of any formal or informal logical fallacy.  And of course no empirical facts speak against them.  Here as elsewhere, reason and argument can only take one so far.  They are wonderfully useful in achieving clarity about what one's position is and the reasons one has for occupying it.  But no argument will convince anyone who doesn't accept one's premises.

Here as elsewhere reason is powerless to decide the question even when informed by all relevant empirical facts.

In the end it comes down to basic moral intuitions.  Some people have moral sense and some people don't.  I say: Can't you just SEE (i.e., morally intuit) that killing an innocent human being is morally wrong?  If you say 'no,' then I call you morally obtuse or morally  blind.   I throw you in with the color-blind and the tone-deaf.   And then I go on to call into question your motives for holding your morally outrageous view.  I might say: "The real reason (i.e., the psychologically salient motive) for your support of abortion and infanticide is your desire to have unrestrained sexual intercourse without accepting any responsibility for the consequences of your actions.  At the root of it all is your refusal to practice self-restraint, and your selfish desire to do whatever you please."  But even in the cases where such a psychological explanation is  true it will do nothing to convince the opponent.

Here is something to think about.  Would the abortion/infanticide question be such a hot-button issue if  it weren't for our innate concupiscence kept constantly aflame by a sex-saturated society? (Pardon the mixed metaphors.)  Could it be that concupiscence unrestrained clouds our moral vision and makes us unable to discern moral truths?

This post was 'inspired' by After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live? (A tip of the hat to the noble Maverickians who brought it to my attention.)

The title leaves something to be desired as regards felicity of expression.   'Afterbirth' is either the process whereby the placenta is expelled from the uterus after the neonate has exited, or else the placenta itself.  May I suggest 'post-natal'?  And to call infanticide after-birth or post-natal abortion is an egregious misuse of language inasmuch as abortion in this context is the termination of a pregnancy by killing of the fetus.  Infanticide is not the termination of  a pregnancy.  One cannot terminate a process that has come to fruition.   

A Response to Levi Asher on Abortion

In a very brief post I posed a question for those pacifists who are pro-choice: "If you are a pacifist, why aren't you also pro-life? If you oppose the killing of human beings, how can you not oppose the killing of defenceless human beings, innocent human beings?"

Levi Asher answers at his blog, Literary Kicks. 

Asher begins with a point with which I agree: " being pro-choice and being pro-abortion are completely different things." I have made this point myself in disagreement with some conservative friends.  One can support the legal right to abortion without advocating abortion, just as one can support the right to keep and bear arms without advocating that people do so.  It is also worth pointing out that in a civil discussion we ought to respect the labels our opponents choose for themselves.  So if Ron Paul calls himself a non-interventionist in foreign policy, it is somewhat churlish to insist on calling him an isolationist as John McCain did in their 2008 debates.  It is the same with those who label themselves 'pro-choice.' 

But although one can be pro-choice without advocating abortion, one who is pro-choice tolerates abortion.  Tolerating abortion, the pro-choicer tolerates the killing of innocent human beings, innocent biologically human individuals.  The fundamental question is how such killing can be justified — whether or not one is a pacifist.  But if one is  pacifist then the burden of justification will be all the more onerous.  Of course, much depends on how one defines 'pacifist.' Asher does not provide a definition, and without a precise definition a discussion like this won't get very far.

Suppose you hold that in no possible circumstances is the killing of a human being justified.  If so, you must oppose capital punishment, just war doctrine, killing in self-defense, and indeed suicide since suicide is the killing of a human being.  The point of my question above was that if you are pacifist in this, or some closely related sense, then how would it be logically consistent of you to countenance the moral acceptability of abortion given that abortion is the killing of innocent and defenceless human beings?  Simply put, if you hold that in no possible circumstances is the killing of a human being justified, then you must also hold that the killing of unborn (not-yet-born) human beings is unjustified.

Notice that you can't reasonably deny that the unborn are human.  What are they then, bovine?  Lupine?  It is a plain biological fact that human parents have human offpsring.  Even more absurd would be to deny, as Ayn Rand does, that human fetuses are typically alive.  What are they then, dead?

One should also avoid making the silly but oft-heard assertion that a fetus is just a bit of tissue.  That's false.  The fetus, at least in its later phases of development, is a biological individual, a separate human living organism distinct from its mother.

The difference between being not-yet-born and being born is a difference, but not one that makes a moral difference.  A mere 'change of address,' a mere spatial translation from womb to crib cannot transform a morally acceptable killing to a morally unacceptable one.  Or to put it the other way around: if infanticide is morally wrong, then why isn't late-term abortion?  Analogy: if shooting me down in the street is morally wrong, then doing the deed in my house is no less morally wrong.  "Your honor, I shot him all right, but he was in his house with the door closed!"

Or is it the time difference that is supposed to make the moral difference?  Compare a fetus a few days before birth to a neonate  right after birth.  There is a temporal difference, and a very slight developmental difference, but not a difference that makes a moral difference, i.e., a difference that justifies a difference in treatment.

So I am not sure Asher got the point of my question.  If one respects all life, including the life of unborn humans, and this is not an empty avowal, then one must be prepared to defend life especially in cases where the living beings are innocent and defenceless.  The pro-choicer, however, by tolerating abortion shows that he is not willing to defend the life of the innocent and defenceless unborn.

Asher puts the following question to me: "how can you claim to be a libertarian, and yet want the government to outlaw abortion?"

First of all I have never claimed to be a libertarian.  I thought it was obvious that I am a conservative.  Although many liberals confuse libertarians and conservatives there are important differences which it would require a separate post to detail.  Moreover, it is a bad mistake to suppose that all libertarians are pro-choice.  Ron Paul is a nationally prominent libertarian who is pro-life.  He had the good sense to quit the Losertarian Libertarian Party and join the Republicans, but that does not make him any less of a libertarian.  His pro-life position is very clearly defined in the first chapter of his 2011 book, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (Grand Central Publishing, pp. 1-9)  I understand that there are even some Objectivists who take a pro-life position, though their hero was pro-choice, employing arguments as awful as many of her arguments are.  See Ayn Rand on Abortion.

Asher continues:

If you don't believe it the government's place to manage anyone's economy, health care or education, how can it be the government's place to intrude on one of the most deeply personal and difficult decisions a woman or a woman's family has to make? If you're a libertarian, don't you want to reduce the government's power to intrude into private life? You can't be a libertarian and not be pro-choice — the combination of the two would be an oxymoron.

Again, I am not a libertarian.  How could anyone think that I was?  Support for limited government does not distinguish between libertarians and conservatives since both support limited government.  Asher says that a libertarian cannot fail to be pro-choice.  That is plainly false, as witness the case of Ron Paul.  (I'll have to write a separate post to summarize Paul's arguments.)  Both libertarians and conservatives champion the rights of individuals.  Among these rights are the right to life.  It is perfectly consistent for a libertarian to extend these rights to the unborn. 

Asher thinks that laws against abortion "intrude into private life."  He doesn't seem to understand that some such intrusions are legitimate.  If he abuses or kills his own children he will have to answer to the state, and rightly so.  That is a legitimate intrusion into his private family life.  Conservatives, and some libertarians, maintain that there is no difference that makes a moral difference between killing born and unborn children.  If one of the legitimate functions of the state is to protect life, and it is, then that includes all human life. 

I notice that Asher doesn't given any arguments in favor of his position.  One of the arguments he could give is the Woman's Body Argument which I present and refute here.  The gist of the argument is that a woman has a right to do anything she wants with any part of her body.  But unless it can be shown that the biologically human individual growing within her is a mere part of her body, the argument will not establish its conclusion.

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Some opponents of the death penalty oppose it on the ground that one can never be certain whether the accused is guilty as charged.  Some of these people are pro-choice.  To them I say: Are you certain that the killing of the unborn is morally permissible?  How can you be sure?  How can you be sure that the right to life kicks in only at birth and not one  minute before?  What makes you think that a mere 'change of address,' a mere spatial translation from womb to crib, confers normative personhood and with it the right to life?  Or is it being one minute older that confers normative personhood?  What is the difference that makes a moral difference — thereby justifying a difference in treatment — between unborn human individuals and infant human individuals?

Suppose you accept the general moral prohibition against homicide.  And suppose that you grant that there are legitimate exceptions to the general prohibition including one or more of the following: self-defense, just war, suicide, capital punishment.  Are you certain that abortion is a legitimate exception?  And if you allow abortion as a legitimate exception, why not also capital punishment?

After all, most of those found guilty of capital crimes actually are guilty and deserving of execution; but none of the unborn are guilty of anything.

My point,then, is that if you demand certainty of guilt before you will allow capital punishment, then you should demand certainty of the moral permissibility of abortion before you allow it.  I should add that in many capital cases there is objective certainty of guilt (the miscreant confesses, the evidence is overwhelming, etc.); but no one can legitimately claim to be objectively certain that abortion is morally permissible. 

Pacifism and Abortion

If you are a pacifist, why aren't you also pro-life?  If you oppose the killing of human beings, how can you not oppose the killing of defenceless human beings, innocent human beings? 

You call yourself a liberal.  You pride yourself on 'speaking truth to power' and for defending the weak and disadvantaged.  Well, how much power do the unborn wield?

Can One Consistently be Pro-Life and Pro-Death Penalty?

This topic just won't go away.  Recent example:

[Texas Governor Rick] Perry’s identification as a strong supporter of “a culture of life” and what he called the “ultimate justice” of capital punishment, however, raises some potentially thorny questions about the meaning of being “pro-life.” In campaign season, the question is whether American voters, especially voters who identify as “pro-life,” are going to raise concerns about why Perry’s position doesn’t represent what some Catholic theologians call “a consistent ethic of life,” opposition to both legalized abortion and capital punishment.

The above-mentioned Catholic theologians are most likely just confused.  There is no defensible sense in which it is 'inconsistent' to be both pro-life and pro-death penalty.  I prove this here.

Ayn Rand on Abortion

The following quotations from Rand can be found here, together with references.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

If Ayn Rand weren't so popular among adolescents of all ages, if she were an unknown as opposed to a well-known hack, I wouldn't be wasting time refuting this nonsense.  But she is very influential, so it is worthwhile  exposing her incoherence.  If you complain that my tone is harsh and disrespectful, my reply will be that it is no more harsh and disrespectful than hers is: read the quotations on the page to which I have linked.  He who is strident and polemical will receive stridency and polemic in return.  You reap what you sow.

In the first paragraph above Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living.  This implies that a third trimester fetus is not living.  What is it then?  Dead?  Or is it perhaps neither living nor dead like an inanimate artifact?  Obviously, a human fetus is a living biologically human  individual.  Obviously, one cannot arbitrarily exclude the pre-natal from the class of the living — unless one is a hack or an ideologue.

Let me expand on this just a bit.  One cannot answer philosophical questions by terminological fiat, by arbitrarily rigging your terminology in such a way that the answer you want falls out of the rigging.  Would that Rand and her followers understood this.  My post Peikoff on the Supernatural carefully exposes another egregious example of the shabby trick of answering philosophical questions by terminological fiat.

Now consider the enthymematic argument of the first two sentences of the first paragraph above.  Made explicit, it goes like this. (1) Rights do not pertain to a potential,  only to an actual being. (2) An embryo is a potential being. Therefore, (3) An embryo has no rights. 

A being is anything that is or exists.  So if x is a merely potential being, then of course it cannot have any rights.  A merely potential being is either nothing or next-to-nothing.  But a human embryo is not a merely potential being; it is an actual human (not canine, not lupine, not bovine, . . .) embryo.    Indeed it is an actual biologically human member of the species homo sapiens.  That is a plain fact of biology.  So the second premise is spectacularly false. 

If Rand were to say something intelligent, she would have to argue like this:

(1*) Rights do not pertain to potential persons, only to actual persons. (2*) An embryo is a potential person. Therefore, (3) An embyo has no rights.  Unlike Rand's argument, this argument is worth discussing.  But it is not the argument Rand gives.  I have countered it elsewhere.  See Abortion category.

The second paragraph quoted above is as sophomoric as the first — if that's not an insult to sophomores.  It is a clumsy gesture in the direction of what is often called the Woman's Body Argument. Follow the link for the refutation.