At the risk of possibly contradicting a number of my prior posts, and also overanalyzing something silly, here’s something that recently crept up in my mind when reading random blogs. I came across someone’s entry about how she recently found out that she was almost aborted as a baby, but she felt indifferent and maintained her stance as being pro-choice. Then there were a ton of comments from random people saying that having an abortion and using a condom is no different, or people accusing her of being indifferent, etc.
So here’s when the thought occured: why is it that people seem to always draw a binary (black or white) line between when it is right to terminate a potential life, and when it is wrong? As I see it, pro-lifers are very rigid with regard to a “moral line” and believe that upon conception, a new life is born. Hence, knowingly removing this life, whether by a morning after pill or by late term abortion, is equivalent to murder. However, some pro-choicers similarly draw a rigid “lawful” line, who believe that abortion at any stage should be tolerated, prior to childbirth. And then we have people in between, the fuzzies: For example, 3rd trimester abortions are wrong, but stem cell research and early stage abortions are ok. Or abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or health hazard should be legal. Or whatever else is out there.
Regardless, this is a very complicated issue, but at the risk of sounding offensive, here are a few things that I’ve been hearing underneath the arguments:
Pro-choice on the surface:
-Nobody’s pro-abortion, but a women should be given the right to make decisions regarding her body and her future, especially in poor economic situations. It’s not something to be taken lightly, but the option should be open.
The hidden assumption:
-A fetus is most likely unaware of its own existence, and thus there is nothing logically different from aborting a fetus (at any stage, morning after or late-stage), versus using a condom. Therefore, what is most important is the impact it has on the lives of cognizant beings, primarily the mother.
-Marginally pro-choice people who also believe in the “sanctity of life” simply believe that the mother’s well-being trumps the life card in most cases, after factoring in subsequent utility losses from childbirth due to anticipated parental neglect or abuse, or financial hardships.
Criticism:
-In a poorer country where safe abortion techniques do not exist, is killing a baby 1 minute after childbirth (due to severe perceived hardships) any different from abortion? A related question is whether the “morality” of abortion and “baby-killing” is contingent upon the technological advances of that community. If so, what is the “guiding principle” behind moral laws?
-Why not reform foster care and adoption agencies instead?
Pro-life on the surface:
Upon conception, the fetus is a life with greater value than any type of pain in and after child-rearing and should therefore be protected.
The hidden assumption:
-There is some intrinsic value placed on human life, given by some greater power or principle such as a moral God. Moreover, this intrinsic value begins at the point of conception.
Criticism:
-Those who don’t believe in the same “God-given right to life” at conception are likely not to reason in a similar manner, and thus convincing the agnostic, and even some of the religious, community in such a manner is meaningless.
-Most arguments that are aimed at making people realize the “faultiness” of the alternative rely on slippery-slope arguments, ironically, similar to the “criticism” I described above for pro-choice (baby-killing).
Solution?
This type of “drawing-the-line” problem occurs not only in abortion, but occurs on many different moral issues as well. Why is this the case?
Well, let’s consider a type of “penalty function” for abortion, a continuous, monotonically increasing function over fetal age, where using a condom and avoiding conception is perfectly moral, and killing a baby after it is born is perfectly immoral (equivalent to a full-scale murder). This reflects a type of “grey scale” morality, where you can be only 40% wrong, or 60% wrong, with respect to abortion.
Somewhere along the line, every person sets a threshold, where above that threshold, the value of morality is quantized to “right”, and below the threshold, as “wrong”, i.e. you are either 0% wrong and 100% wrong. I’m not saying that there aren’t people who are go-in-betweens, who might conceptualize multiple levels of “wrongness” for key stages of development (as they have been so defined by our society), but why is a fluid mechanism design not well accepted in the community? Well, viewing morality as a semi-fluid model is too similar to paying taxes using “tax brackets”. It counts the effect, not the reason, as the basis for moral law.
Fluidity obscures morality simply because morality transcends quantitative analysis. It is at its very heart qualitative: a principle of matters, a spirit of the law, a condition of the heart. It is not so much quantitative, although the effects of immorality can be measured quantitatively. Had there been two Hitlers, one who came into power in Germany, and another who had power only to kill 10 innocent people, would this be a proper metric for evaluating the “badness” of Hitler? Sure the effects of the first Hitler was far more devastating, but at the heart of the matter the two men were the same. One just had a power amplifier attached to him.
Tune in next time as I try to quantify other unquantifiable axioms.
Posted by bkungfoo 