>> There is no existing religion that says that a
> woman who aborts is acting according to God's will.
>
>Traditional Judaism does not prohibit abortions--nor, of course, does
>modern Reform Judaism. Neither does Unitarianism (though Unitarians might
>be doubted to be Theists), not United Methodism, or the UCC or most of the
>liberal Christain denominations.
>
>I wasn't going to pitch in here, but I will just say that anyone who
>thinks that moral and/or ethical talk (I doin't distinguish between these
>terms) reduces to Divine Command Theory, i.e., that what's good and right
>is so because God said so, has an immense burden to carry. The standard
>ethical theories, utilitarianism and deontology, make no obvious reference
>to anything theological.
I think you are missing the point of my criticism here.
Ken originally wrote:
>>However, this is *not* what I was saying. My reading goes something more
>>like this: a woman who has an abortion because she takes it to be the WORD OF
>>GOD (a command), and who doesn't want to have an abortion, but does so
>>anyway,
>>because it is the WORD OF GOD, against her desire not to have an abortion,
>>can be said to be is acting in a psychotic manner.
I very much doubt that there has been any "woman who had an abortion even though she didn't really want to because she believed it to be the WORD OF GOD." I'm not arguing against morality per se; I'm arguing against Ken's moral philosophy because it basically disregards empirical reality. Even his examples tell us that his theory has no application to how people actually make ethical choices.
BTW, don't you have anything to say about Habermas versus Rawls? I thought you might want to take part in the Habermas threads.
Yoshie