facts, science, muck and what ought to be done

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Sun Feb 6 02:21:32 PST 2000



>Beware thy God. We'd be foolin' ourselves to think that the antiabortion
>arguments aren't driven by an incoherent theological imperative...

What about moral pro-choice arguments? Like the (admittedly problematic) stance that we must be free to take moral choices? No-one said freedom was all beer'n'skittles, after all ...

And anyway, I'm not too sure declaring something free-of-moral-significance is very convincing. Arguments of that nature have popped up in some pretty bad times and places (including our own cultures' tendentiously selective adoption of some of ol' Adam Smith's apparent get-out clauses).

An insistence that something is purely technical is always a worry. So is an insistence that power relations are such as to remove any moral agency on the part of the marginalised or oppressed party. Both have their attractions in the topic under consideration, but dragons lie on both horizons.

As Justin says - this is difficult stuff. For my part, I think it IS a moral choice. Then we're left with the question of where that moral choice is most morally vested. That seems a slightly more practical question, I think, and one I seem to have less trouble answering.

But we've gone down this road a hundred times on this and other lists - and it's always a case of bracing judgemental certainty versus various namby-pamby wishy-washy efforts (like mine). All heat versus but a flickering night-light, I reckon. Gets us pretty well nowhere - and Carrol and I always end up even crosser with each other than we usually are.

Cheers, Rob.



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