On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> It is true
> that if we have the death penalty then we will kill innocents, but some
> might think that the risk, indeed the certainty, was acceptable, as long
> as we took a lot of precautions to avoid killing the innocent, because
> the capital punishment advocare thought that for whatever reason it was
> very important to exercute the guilty. (Incidentally I am not a
> principled abolitionist; I thinj _we_ shouldn't have the death penalty,
> but that's because it is a racist tool of class oppression. If the Henry
> Kissingers ended up on the end of a rope after a fair trial, I could
> live with that.) But notice that with the death penalty, like the
> abortion case and unlike the car case, it's the point of the operation,
> its intention, to kill: no one wants uighway fatalities. They just
> happen. So those cases are not alike.So I don't think the car case is
> helpful with the abortion case, where deliberate killing is also the
> point.
I'm surprised the pragmatist is so hung up on the idea of intent here. It doesn't matter whether or not intentions "animate" a social practice; the person is just as dead, intent or not. Social practices (like high speed limits) clearly cause the death of innocent people, regardless of intent. To say we should draw analytic distinctions between abortion and highway fatalities because "nobody intended the highway deaths" is to accept culturally dominant conceptions of human behavior as a product on individual motives and intentions. To say I'm neglecting the issue of "intent", to me, is like saying my analysis of dawn as a product of the earth's rotation is defective because I don't use the common-sense, plausible notion that dawn is literally the sun rising and moving around the earth.
Perhaps Justin is simply pointing out that my argument will not be effective to persuade many people in our society that abortion is justifiable. I agree. But's that not really a defect in my argument, for most important, creative, and useful ideas in human history challenge culturally dominant values and knowledge.
Miles