Morality

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Virginia’s “Foolish” Personhood Law? A look under the hood

by Tom Van Dyke on February 20, 2012

Via LoOG regular Mr. Gregniak: Virginia’s House of Delegates has just passed a fetal personhood law.

Virginia’s Foolish Personhood Law

DOUG MATACONIS · SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2012 ·

Virginia’s legislature was very busy last week. Not only did they pass a bill that will require every woman seeking an abortion to undergo an unnecessary and invasive medical procedure, but the House of Delegates also passed a bill that purports to define life as beginning at the moment of conception…

Foolish? Let’s see.

First, it’s interesting to see the left sweating slippery slopes for a change. I rather like the law as an obstacle to “progress” in that monkey-wrench sort of way, granting the unborn a status above zero.

Now, I’m not big on the “personhood” tactic, which failed even in über-right Mississippi—it’s possible to oppose abortion without granting a zygote full citizenship. A zygote isn’t a baby, at least not yet, so it’s wack to pretend it is.

On the other hand, this Virginia law explicitly leaves Roe v. Wade unchallenged:

subject only to the Constitution of the United States and decisional interpretations thereof by the United States Supreme Court

Roe is in the clear, for now, even if the law goes through. This is not a direct, frontal assault by a state against the federal government. This tactic does not work.

What the law’s effect might actually be is hard for even its critics to say.

[Delegate Bob] Marshall said his bill, modeled after legislation in Missouri, would not affect birth control, miscarriages or abortions but would affect the way that courts define a person. For example, parents could receive damages for the death of a fetus in a wrongful death lawsuit.

Which is sort of like the Laci and Connor Peterson trial, where the Laci’s murderer husband Scott was also found guilty of second degree murder for killing Connor, the fetus, their child.

A fetus with a name, Connor, and accordingly, with a certain “personhood” status.

This law is all about philosophical positioning, it seems to me, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I expect the courts won’t allow the fetus all the way to “personhood,” but these things make it harder for the courts to allow the fetus zero status, like a fingernail.

There are very few pro-choicers who would accept the challenge of arguing this exposed position—the less defensible rhetorical and moral ground, the lower ground—and that the baby in Laci’s womb that Scott Peterson killed was a nothing, no more than a fingernail.

That simply will not ring true, no matter how great your rhetorical skill: Scott Peterson killed something of moral status and significance, a someone of some sort.

We’re all aware of the usual arguments about abortion and a “woman’s body” etc. and that line of argument and its accompanying rhetoric have been well-honed and road-tested, and bear up well if we stick to the script.

But I think there are few who would welcome having to argue that what—who?—Scott Peterson killed in his wife Laci’s womb was a nothing, of no moral significance. Few of us believe that, and this is the purpose of this new Virginia law, if I read their intent correctly, to oblige pro-choicers to argue exactly that, and to be put on the moral and philosophical back foot for a change.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:
1. § 1. The life of each human being begins at conception.

Well, actually, that’s indisputably true. This does not say that every zygote is a full-fledged American citizen.

§ 2. Unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and well-being.

That’s rather tame on its face. But rather radical in the present controversy. It’s said that he who defines the debate tends to win it. As a formal debate topic, the Virginia legislature has framed it thus:

Proposed: Unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and well-being.

This explicitly argues the pro-life position, not the anti-abortion one, and from firmer if not higher ground. These country bumpkins in the Commonwealth of Virginia are perhaps not as “foolish” as they look.

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The Best Argument in Favor of Capital Punishment

by Tim Kowal on January 17, 2012

Christopher Carr comments that “if we’re going to have capital punishment, we shouldn’t sugarcoat or whitewash it. We should have public gladiatorial competition or hangings with children in attendance. If we’re going to be barbarians, let’s at least be barbarians with balls. There’s a real deterrent right there.” 

Indeed, it would be a deterrent.  But not a deterrent from barbarism, as Christopher calls it.  A deterrent from acting with moral clarity.  I explained this in response to my cohort’s post, The Best Argument Against Capital Punishment, as follows:

Indeed, the taking of human life—even justifiably—takes a toll on a right-minded person. However, this truth resides in a layer of abstraction that includes other particulars of human political organization. Local police are called upon to use reasonable force, extending often to deadly force, in the discharge of their duties. In some instances, civilians must kill in their own self-defense or in the defense of others, and in so doing are justified by the law.

At a slightly higher level of abstraction, we can also say that jailers who lock up human beings continuously deprive these individuals of their liberty. Sheriffs who enforce on civil judgments must, in the course of their duties, deprive defendants of their property.

What is the common thread in all of these cases? A man who has defrauded another has no moral right to the property he holds as a result of his fraud. A sheriff thus does not deprive the fraudster of “property” in the [proper] understanding of the word. A man who is convicted of crimes of violence has forfeited his moral right to liberty, and thus the jailer deprives him of nothing by locking him in a cage.

Similarly, in a case where a human being has intentionally and imminently threatened the life of another, he is deemed by moral reason to have forfeited his moral right to be free from mortal threat to his own life. A man who kills in self-defense not only has committed no moral wrong: he has saved one innocent life at the expense of none. His courage profits the world an invaluable gift.

What difference is there, then, in the taking of a life forfeited through aggression in the moment of that aggression, and the taking of a life forfeited through aggression at a later time upon conviction through a due process of law? In moral reason, there is none. The decision to kill another in self-defense is no different than the decision to kill an individual convicted of murder and sentenced through due process to death. In each case, that individual has forfeited his life.

Still, your point is well taken: aggression actually perceived by the senses in the moment of passion better satisfies the moral faculty than does a court judgment many months or years later. There is a difference, however, between a moral faculty that is unpersuaded and one that is inoperative. Beings who have moral reason must also have the moral courage to see it carried out. A man who refuses to execute because he is unconvinced the life is truly already forfeit is courageous for the same reason as he who carries out the order who is convinced of the moral forfeiture. A man who does not believe in moral forfeiture, however, lacks moral reason to begin with.

I take it by Christopher’s comment that he is unpersuaded that life can ever be deemed forfeit by acts of mortal aggression against innocent human life.  We will have to disagree on that point.  However, to those who do not share that view, then obviously it would not profit the human race anything to muddy our moral faculties by infusing more violence into the death penalty process.  Assuming due process has been given (this is no small assumption, granted, but let’s not fight the hypothetical), then what good is there in making the ultimate act more emotional, more gut-wrenching, more tormenting to the tender feelings of the community?  Think back to the fraudster who has forfeited his right to a sum of money: should we collect damages by taking his family’s home instead of “sugarcoating” or “whitewashing” it by levying his bank account?  Or the jailer who has to deprive prisoners of their liberty: should he dangle images of the prisoner’s family in front of him to cause the jailer to witness the anguish the prisoner feels?  Or the victim who kills his assailant in self-defense:  does he owe a moral obligation to defend himself in the most violent manner available to him so that he fully appreciates the gravity of what he’s done?

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Abortion and Eugenics

by Tom Van Dyke on December 31, 2011

Eugenics still exists. There’s no nice or PC way to say this, but we abort our imperfects now.

JP Morgan, a rich bastard everybody hated and for good reason, was drug up before the Senate for whatever. A flak for the Ringling-Barnum circus stuck a midget in his lap as a PR stunt.

Lya Graf didn’t like the world spotlight, retired back to Germany. She was decreed a “useless person” by the Nazi state, arrested in 1937, sent to Auschwitz in 1941. The rest is obvious.

In the 21st century, we tend to make sure that such persons are never born in the first place. This is progress.

____________________

At the request of Christopher Carr and Brother Rufus—and spurred by some of the thought-provoking comments, I did think there was interest in discussing this further.

Eugenics, of course, was one of the first very big and very lousy ideas of post-Darwin modernity. When man came down from his self-built pedestal and became just another animal, there seemed no logical or scientific reason why he couldn’t breed himself into something more perfect: smarter, stronger, more beautiful. This also meant that some individuals or groups were considered better breeding stock than others—and it made sense to breed more of the better and less of the worse.

We look back with disgust on the 1927 Supreme Court forced-sterilization case Buck v. Bell, where Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously ruled that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” that

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

Nazism took these modern ideas to the absurd extreme, a self-anointed “master race,” and suppression and extermination of the lesser ones. Lya Graf wasn’t only a midget, she was half-Jewish, born Lia Schwartz. She had no chance.

We are properly revolted at Nazi eugenics, and we are agreed, Never Again.

But as Brother Rufus pointed out, in the Western world, we now routinely abort over 90% of Down Syndrome pregnancies. In the UK, where abortions are more restricted than in the US, spina bifida, cleft palate and club feet are still reasonable grounds for abortion.

And in the developing world, in India and particularly China, pregnancies are aborted for gender selection: in China, so much so that among those under 20, there are now 123 boys for every 100 girls [the natural ratio is 106 to 100].

The Western world is largely appalled. However, under our own rightstalk, abortion is a “choice,” but as we see, it’s only a legitimate and allowable choice if “we” agree with the reasons.

An interesting play of some years back was called “Twilight of the Golds.” In some not-distant future the “gay gene” has been identified [it has not been, so far], and a family is faced with the choice whether to abort.

“Choice” was seen as a solution to our legal and moral conundrum, as if it’s the last word on the subject. But all it has done is mask the dilemma—we have not yet begun to think about the question at all, we’ve simply buried it under a single facile word. We remain moral imbeciles.

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Air Force Ends 20-Year Nuclear Ethics Program

by Tim Kowal on August 3, 2011

An interesting story broke a few days ago when truthout.org released an Air Force PowerPoint presentation used in an ethics training program given to its nuclear ballistics personnel.   The Air Force promptly withdrew the materials after truthout.org’s complaints of the citations to the Bible and other religious sources, as well as a quote from an ex-Nazi SS officer, Wernher Von Braun. 

Particularly after listening to the author Jason Leopold’s radio interview podcast, I was amused—as I always am at anti-religion crusaders—that he could be so irate at the use of religious sources in a discussion about ethics, as well as irate at the use of a quotation attributed to an ex-Nazi officer.  How could he condemn Nazism else by some objective moral standard?  If there are no fixed moral laws, neither Nazism nor nuclear holocaust has any moral quality.  They are simply matters of preference.  If that were the case, we might as well rig the launch sequence to a Facebook poll. 

Clearly, however, Mr. Leopold subscribes to an objective moral standard.  The world is more than mere matter in motion.  There are truths beyond mere observable reality.  But in the strident secularist’s world, such topics are off limits. 

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Biology and Liberalism

by Tim Kowal on May 26, 2011

Kevin Drum wonders:

to the extent that you really do believe that cognitive abilities are (a) important, and (b) strongly biologically determined, shouldn’t you also believe that the poor are more unlucky than anything else, and haven’t done anything to deserve hunger, lousy housing, poor medical care, or crappy educations? If genetic luck plays a big role in making us who we are, then support for income redistribution from the rich to the poor is almost a logical necessity for anyone with a moral sense more highly developed than a five-year-old’s.

Long story short, belief in biological determinism should make you into a liberal. And yet, here in the real world it mostly does just the opposite. Go figure.

One can appreciate that liberals do not accept the conservative claim, but Mr. Drum fails to acknowledge what the conservative claim is.  Conservatives do not deny that unfairness exists in the world.  In the conservative view, however, the justice that humans can guarantee to themselves is limited to redress of injuries cause by one man against another: “injustices” worked by nature and nature’s God are beyond the limits of what man can properly redress.  This is what separates questions of morality, theology, and science on the one hand, from political theory and state power on the other.  Not all issues arising in the former categories are properly answered by the latter. 

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Consistency Check: Torture, Abortion, & the Individual Mandate

by Tim Kowal on May 16, 2011

It’s easy to take an indignant moral position on a single issue.  “Torture is wrong.”  “Abortion is wrong.”  “Coerced transactions are wrong.”  Such positions aren’t rare, and thus not particularly interesting.  What is rare, however, is the ability to demonstrate consistency in taking several unequivocal moral positions.  That is, those who take an unequivocal moral stand with respect to torture, or abortion, or the individual mandate are less likely to purport to take such a fervent an unequivocal a position as to all three.  Yet, if we’re talking about objective morality and deontology—which we almost always are when we’re taking absolute, unequivocal positions—then we really have no excuse. 

For instance, a prototypical conservative might take unequivocal positions against abortion and the individual mandate, yet refrains from taking absolutist positions on the torture question, and instead offers ticking time bomb scenarios and subtle nuances as to why waterboarding isn’t torture, etc.1  Similarly, a prototypical libertarian might take unequivocal positions against torture and the individual mandate, yet offers subtle nuances explaining why a fetus isn’t a person, or why rights do not extend into the womb.  The prototypical liberal, like the libertarian, might categorically reject all mitigating factors offered in support of coercive interrogations, yet makes “the greater good” the centerpiece of his justification of the coercive individual mandate. 

On these and most every other important issue, we scoff at one another for pledging to principle on certain things, and excoriate one another for parsing principle on others.  This phenomenon—at work in many other examples, some of which I’ve listed previously—demonstrates how our underlying judgments about what is objective and what is merely instrumental define our reality.  For example, is economic liberty an end in itself, or merely an instrumentality?  I submit that the deviations in these sorts of judgments are the key to many if not most of our moral and political disagreements, and explain why we parse some principles yet stand indignant on others.  

[1] You can probably put me in this camp as to “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  I acknowledge that certain techniques that cross the line into “torture” are always morally unacceptable.  Assuming an appropriate showing is made that the interogatee is in possession of information concerning a threat to national security, one might say that interrogation techniques that are not torture are justified because, although they amount to coercion, it is coercion against a thing the interrogatee has no moral right to do in the first place: withhold information about immoral and illegal acts to harm or kill others.  This same approach permits one also to say that abortion is wrong (excepting certain extreme cases) because, while it arguably amounts to coercion, it is coercion against a thing no person has a moral right to do: kill an human being conceived through natural consensual relations. 

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Quote of the Day

by Tim Kowal on May 14, 2011

Matt Zwolinski on Rand Paul equating universal health care with slavery:

[P]erhaps it’s inevitable that politicians are going to badly over-simplify moral arguments.  And I suppose that if I had to choose, I’d much rather have a Senator who over-simplified in the direction of Murray Rothbard than, for instance, whatever moral philosopher Al Franken is butchering.

(As an aside, isn’t it finally time we crunched “health care” down into one word?)

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