Con-on-Con Crime
David Weigel | June 6, 2006, 3:40pm
Whatever your opinions of John Derbyshire or the modern National Review, the conservative writer's review of Ramesh Ponnuru's The Party of Death is a must read. If you expected one NRO scribe to give a colleague a gloves-on treatment, you were wrong. Not even Silas got flogged this bad.
[The Right to Life Movement] is, really, just another species of Political Correctness, just another manifestation of the intellectual pathology, the hypertrophied and academical egalitarianism, the victimological scab-picking, the gaseous sentimentality. that has afflicted our civilization this past forty years. We have lost our innocence, traded it in for a passel of theorems. The RTL-ers are just another bunch of schoolmarms trying to boss us around and to diminish our liberties. Is it wrong to have concern for fetuses and for the vegetative, incapable, or incurable? Not at all. Do we need to do some hard thinking about the notion of personhood in a society with fast-advancing biological capabilities? We surely do. (And I think Party of Death contributes useful things to that discussion.) Should we let a cult of theologians, monks, scolds, grad-school debaters, logic-choppers, and schoolmarms tell us what to do with our wombs, or when we may give up the ghost, or when we should part with our loved ones? Absolutely not! Give me liberty, and give me death!
There's more where that came from.
supermike | June 6, 2006, 11:42pm | #
You guys are pretty impressive.
Let's see:
Ramesh Ponnuru: "If I didn't know he had children I would suspect him not of being gay, but of being a eunuch."
Derb: Gay/english
Way to take this stuff seriously
Seriously. This bewilderment with right to life stuff actually points out some of the more serious flaws of "pure" libertarianism.
One of the reasons that a lot of people think that libertarians are wild-eyed nuts is that libertarian principles are great for full-grown, healthy, sane people, but, for those without the autonomy we all prefer, there seem to be some problems. One of Derb's colleagues described it thus: "I'm not libertarian because I care what happens to other people's children"
Granted, he'll be the first to admit that "for the children" is the first refuge of the tyrant, but libertarianism does have a problem when explaining how to deal with people that are unable, for whatever reason, to rationally look after their own interests.
I don't really subscribe the full RTL argument, but they make a point that an aborted fetus at one point had a pretty good chance of being a full "rights-bearing" person, and it's fairly difficult to determine when the best point to begin protecting those rights is.
Libertarians need to address this to be taken seriously, as we'll always have:
Fetuses
Infants
Toddlers
Children
The insane
criminals
the severely brain-damaged
the senile
and the decrepit
The liberty and rights of all of these depend in some way on the rest of us, and in most cases are curtailed to some extent. So far I have yet to see anything terribly coherent from libertarians about this.
AML | June 7, 2006, 12:15am | #
Fine, people can disagree on these matters. Still, the law must have a standard. The question is: Whose standard prevails, and why? Make no mistake, a standard must prevail. Such a standard can only be justly arrived at by the application of reason and logic, not feelings. Human rights can have no real meaning when based on subjective whims.
So you would argue that bureaucracy is a better arbiter of what is a person and what is not? This would be the bureaucracy that enshrined slavery for millenia, killed millions of German and Polish Jews, and now, in my own country, wants to write bigotry against homosexuals into the highest law of the land?
If you want objective standards, the law is not the place to go. I would argue that, as I discovered, there is no place to go. You would hope, perhaps, for the existance of some wise Philsopher King with a direct conduit to God to make perfect laws, but we've been down that road, and know where it goes.
Perhaps I haven't been clear before, so I'll try saying things simply. NO ONE DERIVED HUMAN RIGHTS FROM OBJECTIVE PRINCIPLES. It's there in the US declaration of independance - "we hold these truths to be _self evident_." There's not ojbective proof that happiness is better than sadness, pleasure better than pain. These may be treated as first principles from which deductions are made, but they are, themselves, unprovable. A priori. Subjective perceptions - but shared ones.
Likewise, when it comes to percieving the personhood of others. Like recognizing your wife, it's evident without deduction or reasoning. Eichmann (in the news again), when he took the stand, never said "Hey, I didn't know that the Jews I 'transported' were were PERSONS." If he had, such a claim would have been treated as a spurious insult to the court. You think that things would disintegrate without a standard, but we haven't needed on yet. Any sucessful murder defenses that you know of where the defendent argued that the victim was not a person? We have a subjective - but shared - perception of the personhood of others. It serves us well 99.9999% of the time, but sometimes, we disagree.
I am uncomfortable with laws drawing firm lines through these grey areas, because when you become dependent on the law to arbitrate who is and who is not a person, you open yourself up to atrocity, as has happened many times in the past. Nature has given us an awareness, imperfect, but damned close to it. And, as Nietzsche said, "What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."
Ron Hardin | June 7, 2006, 7:24am | #
The ``bright line'' unfortunately is ordinary usage, which provides insight that's quickly abstracted away, as if it couldn't matter compared to a theory of everything.
Very hard to tease out what words mean, but worth the effort, if you're of a certain philosophical mindset, say that of a Wittgenstein or Stanley Cavell or even Derrida (the latter being superficially, at least, hostile to the former two, owing to philosophical traditions).
Short result : the soul has to do with making a connection between people, where it operates in reaction to the idea ``has a body,'' the body being what isolates people. The soul fills a grammatical gap. (Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p., oh, say, 411.)
So do not look at the fetus to find a human soul, but rather at, say, parents, at that point.
A nice bright line is the birth event, since it's arbitrary, but also the point when complete strangers think cuteness is obvious and a relation to the child is produced all over the place.
I myself think you don't actually get a full human until about age 35.
Stevo Darkly | June 7, 2006, 12:19pm | #
"So, do you believe that whether you have human rights is dependent on your ability to evoke a favorable emotional response in me?"
Absolutely. Indeed, in a way, that is much of what Enlightenment thinkers concluded, for example, Adam Smith.
That kind of argument from authority doesn't usually convince me. All kinds of very smart people have been wrong about something.
Having human rights is an intrinsic property of being human. Otherwise, the very concept of "
human rights" is meaningless.
An intrinsic property is not dependent upon the perceptions and feelings of other external entities. It's not like I look at you and say, "You are a human being with human rights" and that this somehow infuses you with a humanity that you lacked before. It's just that I recognized it.
You may be speaking of the recognition of human rights, which does depend on others around you. But
having human rights, and having them
recognized, are two different things. A black slave in 1860
was human, and had rights, whether or not the society around him recognized this.
Derbyshire argues that whether or not you can logically argue that certain beings have rights, he will, because of his emotional predisposition, refuse to recognize them. That's fucking ridiculous. Nay, fucking evil.
Stevo Darkly | June 7, 2006, 2:12pm | #
"Having human rights is an intrinsic property of being human. Otherwise, the very concept of "human rights" is meaningless."
That is circular reasoning.
No, it's basic logic. What else can "human rights" be, except the rights that human have? If human beings have rights that dogs, cats and other non-human entities don't have, what would you call those rights?
It's just that I recognized it.
You only recognize it [an entity's humanity, or possession of human rights] because our culture has come to recognize such things.
Maybe, but you are still talking about an external party
recognizing a quality in an entity rather than that entity
possessing the quality. What are you fixated on that distraction? Having a quality is primary; other people's recognition of that quality is secondary.
I mean, there is a reason why people had to argue in favor of the abolition of slavery.
Actually, that example demonstrates that an entity's humanity is independent of whether a culture recognizes it or not. When the consensus of the culture failed to recognize that slavery violated a human being's rights, nevertheless some individuals were still capable of perceiving the humanity of a slave.
Where did the insight of those first anti-slavery individuals come from? It couldn't have come from their culture, which in general did
not see slaves as having human rights. The anti-slavery folks must have been able to perceive a quality in the slaves that most of the rest of their culture didn't. They were able to perceive that quality because it intrinsically existed in the slaves, even before anybody perceived it.
"An intrinsic property is not dependent upon the perceptions and feelings of other external entities."
This begs the question: is it an intrinsic property? Can you demonstrate that it is intrinsic? How are you going to do that? Or are you simply going to shift the locus of debate and state that it comes from God (which is really no answer)?
I never have "reasoned" that way -- "state that it comes from God" -- and I'm not going to start now.
I am not talking about specific intrinsic properties. I am talking about what an intrinsic property in general is. It is a property that an entity would possess, regardless of whether other entities exist. This is basic definitions stuff. I feel like we're arguing about the definitions of "a," "the," and "is." These are the basic assumptions from which logic proceeds.
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