On Dec 12, 2008, at 7:05 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Abortion is a philosophically really hard question...there are
> really good arguments that it is morally wrong...the arguments tend
> to be reductios: if you accept these premises, we can't stop sliding
> down a slippery slope and ending up with conclusions we do not want.
>
> Briefly to give examples:
>
> If you say abortion is OK because fetuses are not conscious or self-
> conscious beings, what's wrong with infanticide? Why is passing
> through the cervix a morally significant event that makes murder to
> kill you on the outside but a woman's right on the inside?
This whole line of argument begs the question, because it assumes that the taking of human life is per se immoral. Yet the Church has its whole "Just War" doctrine,and few antiabortionizers are absolute pacifists. Far fewer, if any, are vegans, and this points to the real philosophically hard question: what is the ground for a speciesist morality that treats *human* life as morally privileged versus all other forms of life? How one answers this question reveals whether one is an absolutist religionist with certainty in a divinely ordained set of moral rules or a relativist naturalist who realizes that morality is a social phenomenon grounded in the answer to the question "what is the Good for *human* society?" By what right can someone who has not thoroughly examined that question and come up with an explicit and defensible answer claim objective validity for his arbitrary "moral" judgments? How, for instance, can one raise as a club the "question" "what's wrong with infanticide" except on the basis that, as a "Christian country," we are morally superior to all those ancient societies for whom infanticide was not only morally acceptable but often actually morally desirable? One ends up like Parson Malthus who condemned the human race to endless misery because the only means (in his opinion) to rise above misery are morally excluded, are "vices."
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos