Tuesday, August 09, 2005
NRO's pin-dance
Podhoretz at NRO observes this morning:
What astonishes me in the course of this discussion (to judge from the blizzards of e-mails and other blog items done on this debate) is that I, a relatively secular person, am arguing the position that we cannot understand the mystery of life without faith -- and that a great many pro-llfers, whose commitment to life is religious in nature and whose religion plays a far more central role in their lives than it does in mine, are arguing with me on the grounds that the whole business can be discerned entirely through reason and science.
What should astonish him is that he's essentially taking the leftist side in this discussion. The crossover itself shouldn't be astonishing; Reagan discussed it in the early '80s.
Plain fact: Fundamentalists do agree with science on this point, and secularists, or more precisely 'bio-ethicists', disagree with science. The only possible scientific position is that an egg tells us it's human when it starts dividing. After that, it's human until all signs of organismic function are gone.
This doesn't mean we must say that every death is murder. We don't do that with regular macroscopic visible adults, after all; we can separate death by old age, by disease, by accident, by an unintentional act of another human, by a fully intentional act. Within the latter, we also make various fine distinctions. We've been doing this as long as we've had any form of law.
So we don't need to describe a miscarriage, or the normal slough of menstruation, as murder. Those are natural deaths. We unquestionably need to treat a deliberate abortion as illegal, though we don't have to call it murder. Some abortions have the character of self-defense. And so on. Law already contains the mechanism to make these distinctions.
But any definition, whether allegedly 'scientific' or legal, that gives a less-than-human status to any intermediate stage of life, is religious, because it depends on some notion of ensoulment. And any such definition leaves the field wide open for thanatophiles like Felos and Kevorkian.
[I've discussed this overall point before.] ¶ 7:50 AM
What astonishes me in the course of this discussion (to judge from the blizzards of e-mails and other blog items done on this debate) is that I, a relatively secular person, am arguing the position that we cannot understand the mystery of life without faith -- and that a great many pro-llfers, whose commitment to life is religious in nature and whose religion plays a far more central role in their lives than it does in mine, are arguing with me on the grounds that the whole business can be discerned entirely through reason and science.
What should astonish him is that he's essentially taking the leftist side in this discussion. The crossover itself shouldn't be astonishing; Reagan discussed it in the early '80s.
Plain fact: Fundamentalists do agree with science on this point, and secularists, or more precisely 'bio-ethicists', disagree with science. The only possible scientific position is that an egg tells us it's human when it starts dividing. After that, it's human until all signs of organismic function are gone.
This doesn't mean we must say that every death is murder. We don't do that with regular macroscopic visible adults, after all; we can separate death by old age, by disease, by accident, by an unintentional act of another human, by a fully intentional act. Within the latter, we also make various fine distinctions. We've been doing this as long as we've had any form of law.
So we don't need to describe a miscarriage, or the normal slough of menstruation, as murder. Those are natural deaths. We unquestionably need to treat a deliberate abortion as illegal, though we don't have to call it murder. Some abortions have the character of self-defense. And so on. Law already contains the mechanism to make these distinctions.
But any definition, whether allegedly 'scientific' or legal, that gives a less-than-human status to any intermediate stage of life, is religious, because it depends on some notion of ensoulment. And any such definition leaves the field wide open for thanatophiles like Felos and Kevorkian.
[I've discussed this overall point before.] ¶ 7:50 AM
