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01 May 2008 06:45 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You wrote about abortion:

"The argument is that life-taking of the innocent is the deepest moral evil."

Actually, this is false--and false for a reason that bears on our political culture.

Suppose that through no fault of your own you fall from a great height and that I happen to be beneath you.  Looking up, I see that you are headed straight for me and will crush me to death when you land. Suddenly I notice off to my left a red button and a nearby sign that reads "Push red button to disintegrate any object above you."  Thinking fast, I push the red button, you are disintegrated, and I am spared from being crushed to death.

Have I done anything wrong?  No:  morality permits me to kill you in order to save myself--this is a self-defense killing.  But notice that you were completely innocent.  The conclusion, then, is that morality permits, at least in certain cases, the killing of innocents.

So "life-taking of the innocent" is *not* "the deepest moral evil." Some life-takings of the innocent certainly are, but not all.

This matters for a *hugely important* reason.  Pro-lifers, when pressed to explain themselves, almost always say that they oppose abortion because abortion is the taking of innocent life.  This argument usually leaves pro-choicers stammering about a woman's right to control her own body, a consideration which strikes pro-lifers as beside the point--after all, innocents are being killed!

A better response to the pro-lifer is to point out that his premise--that "life-taking of the innocent is the deepest moral evil"--is false:  sometimes the killing of innocent human lives is morally permissible.  Are any abortions among the cases where morality permits killing the innocent?  *That's* the issue.  Here is where the hard work of arguing, case-by-case, for the morality of abortion comes in.  But it only comes in once the pro-lifer appreciates that moral grandstanding about "killing innocents" rests on an inadequate conception of what morality demands of us.

What do you think, Andrew?  Are any cases of abortion--which is, no doubt about it, the taking of innocent life--among the cases where morality permits killing the innocent?  It's a hard question, isn't it?

If this simple point, a point which has been a staple of the philosophical literature on abortion for decades, were more widely known, the abortion debate--and hence the entire political climate--would be transformed.

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