Out of curiosity, I wonder how this blob of ectoplasm known as a fetus is regarded. What do people think it is exactly, or philosophically? Is it like an appendix, a second-class Siamese twin, or what?
cheers,
mbs
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This isn't about morals, ethics, or philosophy. It is about power, control, and money. Power and money fought over by proxy through a maze of entirely empty phrases that nevertheless fill people with rage, hatred, and psychotic violence. All this emotive charge works like magic to generate the consumption of mass media as pure theater. It's been going on for decades, millennia. What is Medea?
While the great appeal of these packaged screams has waned, and many people simply ignore the issue, since they perceive it as a political ploy to garner money and votes, I am sure given a few years breather, it can be re-vamped and refreshed to magically consume us again.
Abortion and infanticide are as old as pregnancy and birth. As far as I know almost all societies have customary methods of accomplishing both. Some people console themselves with sadness tortured by anxiety while others light a candle and forget it. Which is the morally correct response?
It rarely occurs to anyone in these debates that they are enacting and reproducing power struggles between themselves and the institutions of authority that in the concrete, absolutely control them. They consider it a moral dilemma over choice. But the choice is not theirs to deliberate. It is always, already been decided by institutional authority.
I don't like Butler's approach to ideas and I loath her style, but in this case, much of what she has written in Psychic Lives, applies to this debate. That is, this debate reveals, displays, recapitulates the psychological dialectic between authority and its charges.
Consider that the Church and the State preempt all authority over the means and fate of human life in principle. Such a presumption is their universal founding declaration as institutions of power. With the development of a vast medical establishment (and its newer bio-tech brethren) which together assume dominion over the body, then we have the perfected means to exercise that institutional authority down to the molecular details of the living stuff itself. This is not to mention that simultaneously these means are also the vehicle of an absolute economic exploitation and a whole other dimension of oppression and control.
These are the horrors in my mind. These are the economic and political, the material dilemmas we should be going over. And, I might add that, the moral theater we have been practicing in arguing over whether a fetus is a appendix or soul is obfuscating nonsense.
We really should know better by now.
Hopefully the slope of this debate, that is how it so easily falls into absurd conundrums like, is it appendix or soul, should create suspicion that these arguments are void of determination. The problems and their solutions lay elsewhere.
Chuck Grimes