> >What makes the question X "hard" and the question Y "easy"? The nature of
> X & Y independent of social relations? Or the ensembles of social
> relations that we live?
>
>Neither. It's the logic of the arguments. What makes abortion hard is that if
>we want to say it is OK to kill fetuses, it is difficult to avoid commiting
>ourselves to principles that would appear to make it OK to kill newborn
>infants. As our recent discussion of Singer illustrated, that is a position
>that few of us will swallow. I know of no plausible answer to this problem.
>So people like Marta and I who support abortion rights and oppose infanticide
>are stuck in an awkward bind.
Should logic be the arbiter of morality, however? The threshold of personhood has been historically determined, and it cannot be determined otherwise. Why should this fact be unacceptable to a philosopher? Singer says that "a location of a being -- inside or outside the womb -- should not make that much difference to the wrongness of killing it" (_Practical Ethics_ 139), but he never explains _why_ it shouldn't. We have to draw a line somewhere, so why not here? Certainly, birth is a clearer, more visible, & more commonly accepted threshold than Singer's alternative (non-personhood for newborns for the period of 28 days after birth). BTW, in such statements as the one quoted above, Singer reduces a woman's body to a "location." Even though Singer is pro-choice, he never considers abortion as a right necessary for women to gain personhood on a par with men. Marxists & feminists, however, cannot assume a perspective on abortion that reduces women to "locations" and fails to consider the effects of reproductive politics on gender oppression.
> > To be more specific, what makes abortion a "hard"
> moral question, while leaving the majority of the world impoverished &
> dying due to lack of clean water, sanitation, etc. is seldom perceived to
> be a "moral" question even, much less a "hard" moral question?
>
>You are now talking perceptions. Of course it is a moral question,a nd it is
>an easy one. A major task of ideology in bourgeois society is to make it seem
>like a natural fact and nor a moral question. If it is perceived as a moral
>question,a nd one about which we can do something, then it becomes apparent
>that there is no plausible justification that can be given for it. A task of
>the left is therefore to denaturalize and moralize the issue.
Moralizing an issue has a consequence of making it seem like a matter of private choice & responsibility. Why not politicize it (= make it a question of social relations)? The opposite of naturalization, it seems to me, is politicization, not moralization. Also, based upon the logic of your argument, it seems to me that there is no plausible justification for making X a moral issue while leaving Y a non-moral one. However, moralizing anything & everything is impossible; if everything is moral and equally so, nothing really is.
>No. "Free thought" protects disagreement, but I think that views are to be
>defended because we think they are true, which means that it would be an
>error to adopt a contrary view, hwoever supple and dialectical. Of course we
>don't know the true views for sure, which is part of the raeson that we never
>get rid of disagreement.
Sometimes we do. Nowadays, no one believes in geocentrism. What's politically important must be which disagreements should be tolerated.
>> Well, "people" didn't think that slavery was OK; pro-slavery whites did.
>
>Oh, go back far enough and you will probably get near universal consensus.
>Euripedes thought that slavery was wrong, but I bet most ancient Greeks,
>including slaves, thought that while slavery was an unfortunate fate, it was
>an OK institution. Anyway, suppose only the slaveowners thought taht slavery
>was wrong. They were wrong. I can say that. Relativist can't. You are stuck
>saying that slavery was OK--for salveowners, if not for slaves.
Well, there is a historical reason why in ancient Greece there was a near-universal consensus that slavery was not wrong, while the same consensus did not obtain in America. First of all, slavery in ancient Greece was not the same as modern American slavery.
> > Moral indignation does have its place in politics --
> for instance, agitation -- but Engels is saying that the notion of
> transhistorical standards of justice doesn't help us in, in fact prevents
> us from, understanding how capitalism arose, how it works, and how it may
> be abolished.
>
>I don't think so. Can you imagine that Marx woiuld ever have investigated
>where capitalsim came from, how it works, and how it might be abolished if
>not for his burning, Old-Testament prophetic moral indignation that leaps
>from every line he ever wrote?
Surely you can have burning moral indignation without being committed to a belief in the existence of transhistorical standards of justice?
Yoshie