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.
The Dish 