Hypocracy, judgementalism and nuance

[lavendersparkle]

I've noticed a technique used both by campaigners against abortion and campaigners for greater abortion choice. I think it might best be described as the crowbar method, although I've never used a crowbar so I may have picked the wrong metaphor. Basically how it works is you find a crack in the person you're addressing, stick your argument into it and them try to lever the person into your position. The crack is an example which the audience is likely to agree with them about.

If the speaker is anti-abortion the example will be something like a feckless rich women whose on her twelfth third trimester abortion because she's just got an invite to a fun party and the bump won't go with the dress she wants to wear. If the speaker is pro-abortion-choice the example will be something like a 10 year old whose been raped by her father and the pregnancy will kill her and the embryo has a terrible disorder which will lead to it having a short painful life and she's going to try to perform a DIY abortion with a rusty can opener if she can't get one.

Most people will agree with the speaker about the ethics of each abortion. Then comes the slight of hand disguised as logic. Once you've gained their agreement on your hypothetical/mythical example you then claim that they must apply the same judgement to all abortions otherwise they're a hypocrite. If the speaker is anti-abortion they will ask why you think the life of a foetus should depend upon the circumstances into which she is conceived. Why should a life be less valued because her mother is ill or poor or a rape survivor? If the the speaker is pro-abortion-choice they will accuse you of being sanctimonious for judging which women are worthy of having abortion. They will accuse you of being a misogynist for dividing women into those deserving of an abortion and those to be punished with a pregnancy. If you agree with rape exceptions then you're only punishing women for having sex and if you don't agree with rape exceptions you're a monster.

Of course, this argument doesn't work. Well it might beat some people into submission but it doesn't work logically. Life is complicated and unfair. I generally think that the best we can do is muddle through trying to make the best of it. Few ethical issues are a matter of absolutes. Different ethical aims conflict and compete in many circumstances and this means that the same action may be ethical in some circumstances and not in others. I think that it is generally wrong to steal but in some circumstances it is justifiable, for example I don't see much wrong with someone caught up in hurricane Katrina nabbing some essentials from a flooded shop. I think that killing is wrong but I accept that there are circumstances where its better to kill someone if it's the only way to stop them killing others. It's not hypocrisy to think that the abortion is justifiable sometimes and not other times, it's nuance and it's almost impossible to navigate life without it.

Comments

[loveneverfails.livejournal.com]

I disagree. There are a hierarchy of rights, all of which are dependent upon the simple right to existence. Upholding a dependent right over the right upon which that right hinges does not make sense. Bodily integrity, education, etc all depend on the ability to exist, and this right must be universal and transcendent. It cannot depend on something as arbitrary as the circumstances in which life comes about. The only time I see a solid argument for abortion is when the life of the mother and the life of the child come into conflict, and the life of the mother trumps the health of the child as well such that yeah... you do induce a pregnancy prematurely if the mother would otherwise die.

There are some lines that you don't cross, and destroying the life of any other human being is one of them unless there is a direct and legitimate argument that this is a case of self defense. How could anything short of preserving one's own life trump the right of any human being to simply live?

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

I still think that they can be grey cases even when one holds that the only justification of abortion is to save the mother's life. It's possible that the mother has a medical problem which means that there is a probability that she will die from continuing the pregnancy but it is not certain. In that case there's a judgement call to be made about how high a probability is worth risking. Pregnancies always involve some risk, how much is too much? There are also judgement calls to be made in cases where the mother needs life saving treatment which she can't have whilst pregnant and the baby is delivered prematurely so that she can have the treatment earlier. There can be a trade off between the increase in the baby's chances from waiting against the decrease in the mother's chances. I don't know how those sorts of judgement calls work in Catholicism.

[loveneverfails.livejournal.com]

I think part of the difficulty is that people frequently try to meld together two categories into one. We would say that for every act there is morality and culpability. Morality describes whether the act in and of itself, the act qua act, is good or evil. Culpability takes into account the circumstances in which the act occurs to talk about the specific culpability of the moral agent in that situation.

So, we would say that the abortion because the 12 year old was raped by her father is as evil as the abortion because a socialite wants to fit into a certain dress. No matter what the external, accidental factors surrounding the moral act, abortion as the deliberate killing of innocent human life is equally evil no matter what. HOWEVER, the culpability of the parties is influenced by two things: knowledge and freedom. A bad act can't be rendered good, but the way we treat it depends on how free the parties were to act differently. The culpability for a 12 year old who has an abortion because she has been profoundly traumatized would be very low compared to the socialite mentioned. That's where we take those situations into consideration, but abortion qua abortion remains the same no matter what.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

My hyperbolic pregnant ten year old example did include that the pregnancy would kill her.

How does morality and culpability thing work when an abortion is to save a a woman's life? How does Catholicism deal with cases where continuing the pregnancy probably will kill the woman but might not?

(I'm a partly interested because I went to a talk on Jewish medical ethics today and some of it was about the difference between certainty and likelihood and what behaviours depend on each.)