Murder vs. Killing

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Aug 25 13:08:47 PDT 1999


In criminal proceedings and legislation I believe the usual terms are homocide, manslaughter, justifiable homocide, etc. Some form of "to kill" might be used in the formal definition of these terms but would never be used as a formal term itself. And the reason for this is not only or not at all euphemism but accuracy. "Kill" in almost all of its senses is paired with "life" (including viruses, anapholes mosquitoes, e. coli, etc). So neither "life" nor "kill" should really be used in discussing human social relations. Almost all positions that begin by ascribing some worth to "life" end by justifying mistreatment of human lives.

So the question of whether the fetus is living or not is simply not a question worth discussing, because there is no moral value to be put on life itself. (As a matter of fact, most uses of the term "life" reify and mystify it. Life is a mode of existence, not a thing. and it is permissible slang but still slang to ask whether "life" has value.)

And "death" is as misused as "life." Over 2000 years ago Epicurus noted (and no one has improved on him) that death was not an injury to the dead person since the dead (not knowing they are dead) have no interests. It is often or usually an injury to the living in one way or another, either individually (as in the death of close friends, relatives, etc) or collectively.

The abortion question is constantly mystified by viewing the fetus in terms of what it might hypothetically become. This is Marta's perspective. She seems to feel that to abort a fetus that might become a disabled person is to do an injustice to that diabled person (and hence to the whole category of actual disabled persons). But a fetus is neither an abled nor a disabled person because it is not a person. No statement one can make about living persons (disabled or abled, male or female, etc.) can have any relevance whatever to discussion of a fetus. (The fetus is no more potential than is a sperm or an unfertilized egg. This mysticism regarding the magic moment of conception bewilders me.)

And "person" can only be historically defined through struggle. Marta speaks eloquently for those disabled persons who (as a result of earlier conscious and unconscious struggles) had been defined in effect as non-persons. I suspect that a working class that cannot honor that perspective, that cannot come to see that disabled members of the class are included in the slogan, An injury to one is an injury to all, is not a working class that will be very fit for struggle in its own general interests. (The same applies to a working class that does not oppose the death penalty or uphold the right of women to abortion.) But when Marta wants to include non-persons (merely imagined persons) who might become (in fantasy) disabled persons, she involves herself in endless contradictions, of which those pointed out by Max and Steve are only the beginning. A fetus has no interests. Any terminology (such as Kelley's slang term "killing") that directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, metaphorically or literally attributes interests to a fetus is obscurantist.

Marta, I think, is too concerned with what might be termed the "slippery slope hypothesis" -- the fear that if Act A implies (or might be construed as implying) Act B, then Act A will necessarily in practice lead to Act B. Whatever may be the case in formal logic, this is not true in historic practice. Nothing touching on the rights of disabled persons (or women) follows from the choice of particular parents to abort for any reason. And the right to abortion ceases to be a right as soon as one begins to list constraints (moral or material) to that right.

Carrol



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