"There's glory for you!"
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't-till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,' " Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
"The question is, " said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty. "which is to be master-that's all."
I usually dont know what you are talking about but my guess is that you are claiming that some issues that would be moral issues in some societies are not in others , or that were moral issues at one time in one society are not at other times It is not a moral issue for us whether we stir a pot clockwise or counterclockwise but it is in some societies. Stirring in the wrong direction is believed to cause serious harm. But how would this work out for abortion? A considerable number of people in our society think that a fetus has the same right to life as any adult of our species. Are u saying that like Humpty-Dumpty you are going to legislate that it is nonetheless not a moral problem because you as a liberal are not going to use moral discourse re the matter?
Well of course Habermas actually says something approaching this degree of arbitrary semantic legislation re what is moral within his own set of distinctions between ethics and the moral. And Finnis is pointing out what an evasion this is. It has been assumed not proved that the fetus doesnt have status as a person. Of course this is really a weird thing for Habermas to assume since he has just admitted that the conservative has an equally good arguments to liberals on these matters.
Both Habermas and Finnis present arguments. Why don't you examine them and evaluate them critically. I mean any post on anything is going to make assumptions about language. If your position is that we ought no longer use moral discourse to talk about abortion give us an argument for that. I would like to see it.
Cheers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message -----
From: Ian Murray <seamus2001 at home.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2001 11:42 AM Subject: Re: Habermas on Abortion and Finnis's critique
> Why are we so cognitively and emotionally locked into calling abortion
> a moral dilemma at all?
>
> H. is making one hell of a lot of assumptions about language in that
> extract, as is Finnis.
>
> Wasn't one of the points of liberalism that we can choose to be free
> from using moral discourse in contexts we previously thought were
> ineliminably about morals and ethics?
>
> Ian
>