While the religious fuss and fulminate, and non-believers and humanists — including this one – continue their righteous assault on religious idiocy, in the end, of course, we all have a tendency to overlook or marginalise, more often than not, the problem at the very centre of the debate: the problem of revelation. For no reason at all, other than the fact that, at some point in the religious traditions in question – whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, or what-not – someone or some group of people privileged a collection of texts by deeming them a revelation from a god or gods. Holding these texts sacred, people have believed that they stand under the protection of a superhuman or supernatural realm, and that they must, therefore, punctiliously carry out the will of the being or of the truths revealed in those texts.
What else is this nonsense about Adam and Eve and the serpent all about? Where else does the question arise whether young men should blow themselves to smithereens, and take a few of their fellow humans into that dark place where, before long, all of us will follow? Where else do protests against abortion find their immovable justification? Where else the condemnation of various sexual positions and practices? Where else can we find the provenance of the conviction that any who take their lives while of sound mind cannot be buried within “consecrated” ground? Where else did the illusion arise that mere bread and wine can be turned into a sacrificial meal, and that, placed in a monstrance, the bread itself, thus transmogrified, can be used to bless and consecrate those who are minutely faithful to that revealed word? Why else should the genitals of men or women be disfigured, and where else did the myth arise that women’s bodies must be thoroughly covered against the lustful stares of men who, without such concealment, are powerless against the sexual desire stirring in their loins? Why else should a distinguished scientist abase himself before a frozen three-fold waterfall? What other reason could a bishop give for cutting off from an eternal reward those who relieved a nine-year-old girl of the burden of carrying twins in her little body? What other ground could one give for the slaughter of thousands or millions who maintain loyalty to their sacred text in defiance of the sacred words of one’s own?
In a book on the relations between Jews and Christians in the shadow of the Holocaust, an Anglican bishop, widely thought to be a liberal, says:
I would argue that it is dangerous to talk of history being a continuing source of revelation, if new revelation is meant. However, there can be no objection to thinking of history as drawing out implications which lie latent in the New Testament. [Richard Harries, After the Evil, 100]
Not wrong, notice, but dangerous! Another writer says, with no acknowledgement of the problem that lies in these simple words:
Whatever its other responsibilities may be, Christian theology cannot evade the task of biblical interpretation. It is in the biblical texts that the irreplaceable primary testimony to the God acknowledged in Christian faith is to be found. According to Christian faith, this God cannot be directly deduced from general features of the world and our human experience of it, and the effect of this is to emphasise our dependence on a highly particular stream of religious and cultural tradition … [Francis Walton, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, 65; my italics]
In other words, in order to discern the “word of God” we must first advert to these words of men written thousands of years ago. In these words and in their interpretation are to be found words of God directly addressed to us for our belief and submission. On the basis of these words our lives must be planned and lived in faithfulness as though in them we are addressed by a god whose word and will must not be thwarted.
Thus, when, in today’s Telegraph, the Duke of Kent’s son says that abortion is worse than Al Qaeda, and claims that “the world doesn’t have a right to abortion,” and claims that he says this, ”not because (as that brilliant writer Philip Pullman would put it) “the Vatican” told me to. But it became visceral for me once I started thinking hard about the subject.” So, it has nothing to do with the fact that Lord Nicholas converted to Roman Catholicism and is now the Chairman of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, whose declaration is made, in part, in these words:
A. whereas the true nature of Man is that he is not an animal, but a human being made in the image and likeness of God, his creator,
B. whereas it is precisely the imago Dei that Man acknowledges within himself with such profound awe and respect to call human life sacred; and to which the moral sense testifies certain properties as being inalienable; indelible in every single human life from conception until natural death,
C. whereas these properties have come to be known in the modern, secular state as ‘fundamental human rights’,
D. whereas the most complete expression of human dignity is therefore to be found only in recognising Man’s true anthropological and existential nature, and that this recognition lies at the foundation of all that the world calls civilisation,
E. whereas in recognising Man’s rights as intrinsic to his being, and not the product of legal charters is essential to sustaining liberty in a free society, work done to promote such a view of human dignity thereby promotes the foundation of all human rights.
It was just something visceral that happened when he “started thinking hard about the subject.” Nothing at all, then, to do with the sacred words, or deductions made from those words in the form of Christian doctrine as defined by the Roman Catholic Church? This level of open and shameless dishonesty needs to be noted, it being so characteristic of the religious. Of course, it may be, as Richard Harries (retired bishop of Oxford) says, in After the Evil, that all these consequences are merely drawing out the implications latent in the original text of the New Testament, but it is hard to think that Lord Nicholas’ visceral response was not urged by the beliefs of his chosen religion and its particular predilections and preoccupations, or that it was not influenced by the European Christian Political Movement, whose Universal Declaration of Human Dignity is the founding document of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute of which he is the Chairman.
The pretence that human rights have their source in the Christian doctrine that man is created in God’s image, and that no one seemed to have noticed this until the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, but thought it quite appropriate until then that punishments for the common people should be forms of the most heinous torture and mutilation — such as burning at the stake or drawing and quartering the body – until the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted by the National Constituent Assembly in Paris on the 17th August 1789, puts the lie to any suggestion that belief in human rights has a Christian origin.* The Imago Dei had no influence over laws in Christian jurisdictions. It made those laws no less harsh or unfeeling, and did not stop Christians from murdering their Jewish neighbours until, at long last, Christian antisemitism, deeply rooted as it is in sacred Christian texts, played itself out finally in a paroxysm of violence undreamed of even by so violent and vicious a man as St. Ambrose. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of Catholic theology, consigned, without compunction, heretics to be cut off from the world by death. And the same church, which recognises Aquinas as the acme of Catholic thought, similarly shows no compunction when it condemns innocent women to death because of pregnancy, if abortion is the only way to save their lives. Nor does it have any mercy or compassion for those who are dying in great misery. They must die just as their god dictates, even though it is acknowledged on all hands that it would be cruel to conduct surgery without the use of anaesthetics. All this pious idiocy is derived, in the end, from sacred texts, and belief that God has revealed himself most particularly to the Roman Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.
Of course, Muslims and Jews and other Christians, as well as Sikhs, Parsees, Jains, and Buddhists, one and all, repose with confidence in words spoken to them long ago by gods or holy men, and are willing to kill or be killed to defend the claim that gods and holy men have spoken to them in precisely these words, with precisely the shades of meaning that they give to these words as they interpret them. Words do not speak without context, and words do not speak without intonation, emphasis, characteristic turns of phrase, peculiar inflections, idiosyncratic meaning: all against the background of memory, forgetfulness and confusion, limited understanding, misunderstanding, and error. Yet the religious claim that their texts, if not free from such idiosyncracies and singularities, can be interpreted in such a manner as to deliver truths otherwise inaccessible to us. And despite the fact that there are many religions and many texts, and in face of the clearest evidence that these texts are interpreted in a bewildering kaleidoscope of ways, none of the religions seem prepared to acknowledge that it is simply not in the nature of human texts to provide unique or uniquely compelling messages from a realm beyond the human. It is not obvious that it makes sense to claim that human texts could do this. And it is certainly not the case that anyone has ever demonstrated this ability. And even had this been demonstrated, no one has shown that any sacred text is such as to achieve this end. Not only can the religions provide not one single reason — not one — for supposing that their myriad texts and interpretations come from a god or gods, the sheer multiplicity of texts and the inherent ambiguity of those texts, especially when taken from their original context and separated from their original authors, makes every claim that they speak the words of a god simple nonsense. Why is this not obvious to us, and why do we continue to talk about these texts as if it makes sense to think these idiotic things in this pathological way?
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*One of the unique features of the French revolutionaries is that they denominated one punishment for all citizens, whether aristocrats or commoners, a fundamental departure from Christian practice, and devised an instrument, the guillotine, which was fast and “humane” – which, compared to the Christian and other religious practice, it was.
Yes, for revealed faiths, the problem is one of authority, and it’s a big one. No matter how unambiguous a revealed text, if a believer concedes that any part of it is open to more than one possible interpretation then they are admitting that authority doesn’t reside in the text at all, but with the person making the interpretation. They don’t even have to concede that any rival interpretation might be correct, only that one could exist.
Fantastic post, as usual.
I realize as I read this that when atheists write about abortion, what I often see is a rebuttal of the idea that all abortion is immoral or detrimental to society. What I don’t see – and I know this is a tangent to the conversation here – is whether there are some instances of abortion that make you queasy, or that you feel twinges of moral judgement about. I ask, of course, because that is how it is with me. The less a fetus becomes a clump of cells and the more it becomes something not-fully-formed but very human looking, the more averse I become to the idea of an abortion. For example, the abortion of a perfectly healthy 8-month-old fetus, carried out for no other reason than the mother changed her mind about having a child, causes me to feel disgust. Some might say this is an absurd example (and indeed I have no idea whether this sort of thing occurs), but if a person is not against abortion in any circumstance then they simply must be okay with this circumstance, and many others.
So I’m wondering what you think, Eric – and anyone else who would like to comment. I think we all agree that abortion is not across-the-board immoral or problematic. But are there instances of it that people do have a problem with?
I certainly agree with you Tim about an emotional aversion to late abortions. Abortion is not something done easily by women, I’m sure. I have seen it frequently described as a very distressing decision for women.
I strongly suspect that the “abortion of an 8-month-old fetus, carried out for no other reason…” is not a very realistic scenario. You need only exercise a minimal degree of imagination and empathy to see this. That’s why society has divided gestation into trimesters and set legal limits. From my understanding late-term abortions allowed only under strictly set guidelines.
In one case I am familiar with, a gynecologist announced loudly and emphatically that a woman’s pregnancy was past the cut off date and that she therefore would have to carry it to term. A careful check of the numbers showed that he had lied. The woman was still under the wire. I turned out, interestingly, that the gynecologist was Catholic and I suspect made a habit of deflecting as many procedures as he could.
Very insightful, Eric. Thank you.
And despite the fact that there are many religions and many texts, and in face of the clearest evidence that these texts are interpreted in a bewildering kaleidoscope of ways, none of the religions seem prepared to acknowledge that it is simply not in the nature of human texts to provide unique or uniquely compelling messages from a realm beyond the human.
That reminds me of this cartoon, which I saw today.
/@
@Tim
My girlfriend became very interested in the Pro-Choice movement a while back, so I picked up a little info. Late term abortions are very, very rare, and almost entirely based around health concerns for the mother, usually medical, but sometimes psychological as well. Dr. Tiller, the man who was shot dead by an abortion protestor in his own church, was one of the few people in the whole country who could provide them, and many of his patients came from distant places for it. I think the abortions religious people object to, namely where its an accidental and unwanted pregnancy are done pretty early. The later abortions are usually for stillborn, dying or deformed children rather than waiting for a potentially dangerous miscarriage.
So, its not that people are necessarily for abortion in all circumstances, its that we’re for it in all the circumstances that reasonably exist. Just like I’m against the death penalty in all reasonable circumstances, but there could always be a circumstance to change that for a single instance. That doesn’t mean I should support the death penalty to assure that those singular cases of a Ceausescu or a Hussein should have their foundation. Likewise, indulging in ‘maybe some woman will suddenly decide on a whim to get an abortion at 9 months’ is not a good reason to oppose abortion, since there are already regulations in place. Its also worth noting that its not like the people that oppose abortion are out their putting money towards helping young mothers pay their medical costs and give up their children for adoption, or keep them themselves. They just want women to suffer the full consequences of their ‘sinfulness’. Even if its the sin of being raped.
Revelation also demolishes the whole basis for the religious case for “you just have to have faith!”. Obviously the scriptural Gods didn’t think it was just enough for people to just have faith, they had to come down and give proof to the originators. But somehow we people today are just not as important…. why should an illiterate fisherman get to see water turned into wine, people resurrected from the dead, angels flying around, but for a modern scientifically minded person, God can only muster a book, indistinguishable from all other holy books? Its why people flock to ‘miracles’, sad though they might be, because they can’t help but feel ripped off by a divine entity that can’t write a singular book that only has one proper interpretation.
The critique of revelation by Hobbes, Spinoza, Collins, and many others was one of the crucial revolutions of the Enlightenment. The story is told much better than I could in books like Richard Popkin’s The History of Scepticism and Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment. It’s bizarre that we are in the 21st Century now and we are still fighting the Counter-Enlightenment.
The god justification – it’s the perfect excuse for any behavior. We see it in the divine right of kings and American exceptionalism. Just look at the Republican presidential contenders trying to out-christian each other – as if the US couldn only retain its power and prestige through divine action (and not just any god, but “God”). It is a big part of claiming Obama to be Muslim and bringing up Romney’s Mormonism.
Although ‘revelation’ is an important word, it’s not the entirety of the problem.
There are plenty of other words theists use that are either code for something completely different or which they define to mean something quite other than what a disinterested observer would agree was the true definition. Words like:
Hope: Theist code for belief in the after death.
Purpose — especially paired with ‘ultimate’ as in ‘ultimate purpose’: Theist code for belief in the after death.
Faith: Credulity. Swallowing as fact (or as meaningful metaphors) fairy stories just because they’re told in one particular book.
Belief: Unquestioned credulity. The opposite of reasoned belief based on empirical standards.
Metaphor: Fact.
Fact: Metaphor.
Truth: Lies.
Sin: Fun, especially as it relates to sex.
Abomination: Homosexuality (see ‘sin’).
Big questions: Questions that are never answered, especially by religion.
And on and on. I could write a book. The New Bible Code.
Tim (#2), my answer to your question is that, whether or not some cases of abortion make me queasy — and I daresay that the later in pregnancy abortion is carried out the more queasy it may make someone feel — it’s none of my damn business! And no one else’s damn business either! That’s my position. It is women who are pregnant, and for whatever reason they believe that, for them, abortion is the right option, and whatever stage they have reached short, perhaps, of viability without heroic medical intervention, but even at that stage if the child that would have been born would be seriously physically or mentally deformed or challenged, of if the physical or psychological wellbeing of the woman is at stake, it is solely for the woman to decide whether abortion is her life choice, whether it makes other people feel queasy or not. The woman is a person with a life, with life choices to make, plans, hopes, purposes and prospects, and that is the life that counts. And no one else should even get a look-in, whatever they believe.
@Tim:
That’s a straw abortion you’re disgusted with. In the third trimester, abortions are illegal everywhere in the US. See Roe V Wade for the US Supreme Court decision on this issue.
Once past the point of viability of the fetus, the fetus’ rights start to take effect. Someone ‘just deciding’ to abort at 8 months would not find any sympathy, nor any support from the medical community. At that point, you have the baby and give it up for adoption.
But, I suspect, no one has ever tried to have a “just because” abortion of a healthy fetus at 8 months. Because some pretty powerful neurohormones are at work that bond mother to proto-child. Maybe crackheads or tweekers or someone otherwise out of their noggin — but even then, that would be pretty darn rare. Can’t think of a case — and can’t be bothered to prove the rule by finding the exceptions.
Seriously, get another thing to be disgusted by.
Kevin,
Roe imposed a trimester framework, but didn’t make third trimester abortions illegal. It just said that in the third trimester, a state could regulate abortion in the third trimester to promote the state’s interest in potential life, except where the mother’s life was endangered. The trimester framework was rejected in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), and thus is no longer good law. Casey, and two other cases, Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000), and Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124 (2007) are the current state of the law.
On this general subject, I’m with Eric. It’s none of my damn business. The regrets or mental anguish argument strikes me as especially lame and patriarchal.
“the world doesn’t have a right to abortion”
Interesting concept considering that his god aborts 70% or so of all fetuses – each made in his image and with a soul, evidently – every single day. I would have thought this was proof positive that his god has freely and generously given Man this gift, but then again, I am not a Royal sitting on an important committee.
Perhaps miscarriage (aka “natural abortion”) is like “natural death.” It is all about suffering brought to you courtesy of a loving god.
I think the common theme is how is it at all possible to justify imposing religious laws on people when they’re based on metaphors.
It’s a kind of either/or–you can’t have authority unless you have literal revelations from god, otherwise if it’s a metaphor or parable written by artists, then no matter how wonderful you value art, it has no authority.
Like dodgy politicians, moderates want it both ways–they want the authority but they also want to claim it’s obviously not meant to be literal.
Here’s what Thomas Paine had to say about revelation, in The Age of Reason:
“Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.”
Of course, the religious insist that we heathens cannot be moral without the wisdom bestowed by revelation, no matter how obvious it is that our morality has evolved over time. Where once we countenanced kings and slavery we now insist upon democracy and equality, and yet the religious now insist that even these demonstrably anti-biblical values are actually the product of a system of thought which in fact actively opposed them for hundreds of years.
Thanks to those of you who provided info on late term abortions. A little research on my own has confirmed that many countries outlaw abortion (unless there are good medical reasons) even several weeks before viability, with the US being one of the few countries (of the ones I checked) to allow abortion for any reason up to the time of viability. Canada has no legal restrictions on when one can abort, however there seem to not be any doctors or facilities that will perform an abortion past 24 weeks.
The purpose of my question was to see where other people drew the line on abortion. I have seen comments by people who do not draw a line. I had a short discussion with a woman once over at the Friendly Atheist who called fetuses parasites and glibly stated that she would abort one at any age (8 months included). One wonders if she suffered from a terrible inability to imagine what that would be like.
But surely a line, or at least a shaded gradient, must be drawn somewhere. My question was not to ask where the law draws it – because that only leads to the follow-up question, “Is the law a good one?”
It seems that most people here, and many countries, do not draw the line incredibly late in the pregnancy. Certainly before 8 months. Canada draws no line, but doesn’t have the facilities for abortions past 24 weeks anyway. This is a state of affairs I can be happy with.
As for it being “none of our damn business,” I fear Eric and possibly Daniel may have again been commenting only on abortions before a certain period of gestation – which is not the question I was asking. I was asking, regardless of what the current law is in your country of choice, what moral qualms you would have, if any, with abortion at a very late stage in the pregnancy. Past viability, if you will. Because after a certain point, I would think Eric’s reasoning applies less and less:
I think we’ll agree that after a certain point, the life of the fetus also counts. Perhaps after the point of viability? I guess my goal is not to decide on where the line should be, but to check with others to see that they would in fact draw a line, somewhere. Again, I do this because I’ve seen comments from those who don’t.
My point is this, Tim, just so we don’t get confused on the issue. The foetus at whatever stage — and this is my point — does not trump a woman’s physical or mental health, nor does it have rights, however queasy it makes us feel to abort it. But it can be aborted at any stage — and it’s none of anyone else’s business — if the woman’s life or mental well-being are at issue, and the foetus cannot be delivered successfully without endagering the woman’s well-being, or, if, in the opinion of the woman and the physician, the child that would be born would be physically or mentally challenged in unacceptable ways — and that would have to do with the judgement of the mother and/or the physician. So there is no place where an absolute line can be drawn without trespassing on the woman’s rights, and what is done, at whatever stage, must be left up to the woman and the attending physicians. What happens when we draw lines is that immediately the religious get their oars in, and make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to make crucial decisions about her life or about the life of her child, should it be born. And I don’t think that any jurisdiction should give room for the religious to stick their noses into other people’s business. There may be a moral gradient about here someplace, but the moral decision-making should not be able to be determined absolutely by an outside party, and I still think that my reasoning applies right up to the point where a child is born, and perhaps slightly beyond this. I am very very cautious about anything which appears to permit intrusions into the moral space of women, just as I am very very cautious about permitting intrusions into the moral space of the dying. The tendency of the religious to overstep boundaries is one that needs to severely restricted. So, I do not agree that after a certain point the foetus counts as a person, period. The woman’s rights always trump the rights of the foetus, because, once it’s given standing in the moral community, not even the woman’s life can defeat it’s rights. So, I’m for a strict line being drawn at birth, with a reasonably fair assurance that a woman who has carried a foetus into the late term of pregnancy will not wantonly destroy it, and that, if she did, it would be generally assumed that psychological factors were playing an overwhelming role. The common law recognises that infanticide by mother is not as serious as murder, for precisely this reason.
I’m sad to write that Dr. Robert Buckman has died. As Flan O’brien might have observed Buckman promoted atheism in Canada long before it was profitable or popular.
I’ll miss him.
http://www.newstalk1010.com/News/localnews/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10299129
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=e7IoSDKBAMU
Thank you, Jim. Yes, I agree, it is sad to hear of Dr. Buckman’s death. He was certainly a bright light shining in the intellectual darkness of religion. His Can We Be Good Without God? is still worthwhile reading.
Excellent post Eric. A friend of mine recently (two years ago) retired having spent all her working life in nursing and midwifery. In fact she spent the last ten years as a senior lecturer in midwifery at the University of Huddersfield and some the things she told me made even me feel quesy and let me know just how difficult their job can be.
Sperm, of which there are quite a lot in each ejaculation, can be deformed. Some with two heads or two tails, some of which have no heads or tails. some swim in circles or not at all. Some swim slowly others quickly and of course many with defective DNA. The woman’s immune system mops up sperm by the hundreds of thousands.
The woman may be barren. the egg may be fertilised and implanted in the fallopian tube, or not at all.
Faulty genetic switches may mean the processes switch off too soon, as in the case of cleft palate or not soon enough which may result in a conditon known as ‘totally anomalous plumbing’ – blood vessels, which grew from both ends misss each other creating false circuits.
Children are born with untold defects, with a face but no dome, or a face, a brain but no back of the skull. In fact defects almost too numerous to count. My son was born born with a colon that was too long but we didn’t find out until he nearly died when he was 11. He’s now 42.
We all live unnatural lives. We have innoculations, vaccinations, operations and medications. Jerry Coyne made the point that the fact that he wears spectacles has changed his options as he would not be able to live the life that he does without this artifical aid.
If the Duke of Kent’s son wants us to have a ‘natural death’ should we live a ‘natural life’ and not interfere with ‘god’s will’. Let the blind stay blind! I suffered from double pneumonia at the age of six weeks and survived to create havoc for the last 6 decades or so.
Will they ever got it?
I doubt it.
Slightly OT and in a more humerous vein. The serpent was innocent! In the Middle Eastern Bronze age in the Levant, parts of North Africa, Egypt and out towards Iraq snakes were revered as the guardians of knowledge and wisdom, kept in pits and worshipped, which is probably why the Egyptian Pharoahs, as gods, wore a striking cobra on their head dresses. So the serpent in Genesis was merely recognising god’s instructions to Adam and Eve as mistaken and he, the serpent, was just unlocking the library ;o) (Google ‘Ancient Snake Cults’)
Incidentally the guillotine was invented in England!! The first recorded use was in Halifax in 1276. There were several across England and even in Scotland which gave rise to the little saying, ‘from Hull, Hell and Halifax. good Lord deliver us.’ My copy of ’1000 years of Annoying the French’ is worth its weight in doubloons.
As much as Catholics decry consequentialism, the revelation based proceduralism
seems to be the justification of far more atrocities.
I am aware of the irony in using consequences to attack proceduralism, but ignoring consequences entirely is not something I think I can morally do.
As for abortion, I have decided that the rights of a person are correlated to the responsibilities they are assigned. As long as a fetus is fully dependent on its mother, all of its possible “rights” are deferred to the one it is dependent on. Once actually born we can convey some basic human rights, increasing until the child becomes a fully self-sufficient adult.
A woman always shares her body at her own discretion. She should not be trumped by the “rights” of her unborn child, any more than she should be obligated to donate blood or organs against her will after the child is already born. I think a woman has the right to end or continue a pregnancy at any time for any reason she sees fit. Any “ick” factor does not justify meddling in this case.
Ity amazes me the Catholic devotion to doctrine imposed on them by the Eastern Roman emperers during the five eceumenical councils between 325 AD and 553 AD, wherein the emperors declared what was orthodox doctrine and what was heretical, in order to impose order within the empire. The assembled clergy were incapable of determining what was meant by their holy texts, and the decision was made by fiat.
As males are we not just observers to this process. It is a pity that there are apparently no females contributing to this thread to get their perspective
Ian, I agree that it would be good to have women comment on this particular thread, but the discussion of abortion is, really, in the nature of a red herring here. The real question that I addressed was not abortion but sacred texts and the belief that such texts can credibly be thought to deliver the will of a god or gods.
Eric, that I understand and as such men bear the responsibility for those texts. But comments have been made by some as to how they see the issues involved and whilst they may be ethical and well meaning men can only be observers.
This is an interesting link, and relevant, I took from WEIT which relates to a BBC radio programme ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ interesting comments from Francesca Stavrakapoulou. the first half of the recording is the better half.
Eric wrote:
But you allow the moral decision-making to be made by outside parties in all sorts of circumstances. What about murder, drunk driving, assault and the like, which have all been determined to be illegal? In all cases you have one party who wishes to do one thing, and another party who wishes they wouldn’t (granted, a fetus isn’t capable of wishing.) Why should the woman’s wishes take absolute precedence over the fetus? You’ve given no argument for this.
Since I fully embraced the idea that there are no objective morals (in any sense that would be binding on all individuals), I have been struggling to understand how we should make (what would previously have been) “moral decisions” about right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. I have been thinking, vaguely, that whatever rules contribute to the greater health, freedom, and happiness of humans and human societies would be rules worth having. For example, whatever one’s moral theory about abortions, it is a fact that society is made no better by outlawing it outright. El Salvador is a sad testament to this. These are objective facts that trump whatever feelings or biases we may have about certain actions. I cannot see a rational argument being built on anything other than these facts. Yet I don’t think Eric, or John K. for example, have provided any.
Is Canadian society demonstrably better than US, UK, Swedish, etc. because they allow abortion carte blanche? Is there any difference between the US and other developed nations who illegalize abortion from an earlier period in the pregnancy?
Tim, that’s the crucial point. The foetus is incapable of wishing. The foetus is not a person in the moral community. If the foetus were a person in the moral community, then deciding for it would not require making a decision for another person. A person is an independently planning, willing, purposing being. That’s why we make murder, drunk driving, etc. illegal, because these acts either terminate or endanger other persons. Anything which unfairly restricts the freedom of persons, or endangers their well being is for that reason to be deplored.
Is Canadian society demonstrably better than US society because it allows abortions on demand? Yes, because freedom is thereby increased. Is there a difference between US and other jurisdictions which make abortion illegal at an earlier period of pregnancy? Yes, such jurisdictions limit women’s freedom, may put women’s lives in jeopardy, and may require the preservation of lives which should in mercy be ended.
This is the link I omitted to paste: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015bxql