MAIL II: Christian soldiers; abortion hypotheticals; marshmallow-smothering; and DC. These are the emails that don’t require major response from me. Later (not tonight, probably) I’ll post some challenging emails on Derrida, cloning, and rock’n’roll conservatism, with replies.

Tom Harmon says I’m wrong, and that soldiers in the army of a democracy cannot morally disobey orders, in general: In a democracy, each man does not constitute a law unto himself. Each citizen does not constitute legitimate authority. The people as a whole constitute legitimate authority. They authorize their elected officials to exercise this authority. So, the elected officials, each in their proper, elected positions constitute legitimate authority in a democracy. So, individual citizens have no business taking official actions against the judgments of properly elected officials in regards to just war unless the Church authoritatively declares a war to be just/unjust.

I’ll dig out the relevant passages in St. Augustine, although I think one of them is in his Letter (138?) to Marcellinus.

I would need to hear quite a bit more on this before I agree, since I don’t see how a soldier could be morally required to commit an immoral act ordered by his superior. Perhaps more on this later.

Jendi Reiter: Your abortion debate with Sanchez highlights how much pro-choice arguments often depend on weird sci-fi hypotheticals that get further and further away from the actual experience of pregnancy. I’m thinking of Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous article in Philosophy & Public Affairs some 20-odd years ago, comparing the woman with an unwanted pregnancy to a person who’s been mugged and unwillingly hooked up to an ailing violinist’s dialysis machine. I mean, really. Has that ever happened? And if not, why are we making moral decisions based on it? Sanchez’s cryogenics and brain-scan arguments, while interesting thought experiments, are similarly remote from real life. Pregnancy may well be sui generis — it’s very hard to find a convincing way to redescribe it as a relationship between detached individuals.

Well, everything’s sui generis on some level; I do think there’s value in hypotheticals and similar uses of analogical reasoning. On the other hand, so much abortion-rights language is about obscuring the physical reality of what’s going on–“a woman’s right to choose” (to choose what?), “terminating a pregnancy,” etc. Similarly, David J. Skal’s The Monster Show had a chapter detailing ways in which horror movies in the 1970s and after have pitted women against monstrous children and fetuses or fetus-like parasites, alien invaders in the body. Attempts to analogize pregnancy so often become attempts to dehumanize pregnancy, to obscure the fact that abortion pits a woman against her own child rather than proceeding on the assumption that we can love and care for both. So yeah, at certain points the “mentalities” discussion leaves Planet Earth, and although there’s value in doing that, it can also get in the way of a more realistic understanding of what pregnancy, childrearing, and abortion are actually all about.

Dennis Gregory: Reading your description of Sanchez and his arguments, I was struck by the fact that he is utterly blind as to where those arguments lead. Taken to their conclusions internal to his logic they lead to unspeakable evil. Take his argument, relax his assumptions, and voila not just infanticide but then euthanasia, and then we’re off to the races cleaning up the “bad” elements! He has reduced humans into a series of abstractions, and in so doing has lost humanity.

It is a very small step from saying that what we value about people are these place holder characteristics to ranking those characteristics in some sort of weighted fashion. The question logically becomes which of those characteristics do we value over others, and thus we begin to rank order people based on those characteristics(or “people” since under this type of argument that becomes just another datum lost in the hell of relativism).

I don’t think Sanchez realizes that his list of what makes us persons, or what we value in people, is not *the* objective list. What quantum of each of those characteristics is necessary to be “human”? Where, then, is the dividing line between human and non-human: worthy and not worthy? Is there some way to rank order human beings? (Actually that’s not quite right, it’s not humanity that he values, it’s personhood.)

…At any rate, after all of that, here is the impetus of my email. I am reminded of a Philip K. Dick story, “The Pre-Persons.” It is one of the (if not the) most savagely anti-abortion stories ever written. The premise is that children are not considered human until they can understand algebra, at age 12 or so. Any time before that they can be “aborted” — taken away by the authorities to the pound. The unwanted who run are picked up by a sort of dog-catcher. Since they aren’t human, these children don’t have any rights. The protagonist, an adult, ultimately forces the moral issue by claiming to not understand higher math and demanding to be aborted. (It’s been years since I’ve read the story, but those are the broad strokes.)

The story, as a rule, makes pro-abortion folks blanche and/or tremble with fury. As I recall, the story made some lefty female sci-fi author (LeGuin? Tiptree?) so angry that she theatened him with violence.

Dick, incidentally, was a Christian of some sort — an eclectic Episcopalian, I believe. Towards the end of his life he thought a laser beam was directing message to him from God… An unusual man to say the least, but a genius and probably the most creative writer of the 20th century.

Speaking of pro-life science fiction, Sandra Miesel writes: Two 1970s SF novels (which are emphatically not great art) that argue strongly for the prolife side are LOVE CONQUERS ALL by Fred Saberhagen and JANISSARIES by Jerry Pournelle (both published, interestingly, by a lapsed Catholic editor). Both books were excoriated in reviews for their prolife position, one reviewer (of JANISSARIES) going so far as to say he couldn’t even imagine a woman with an inconvenient pregnancy being unwilling to

abort.

Saberhagen is a devout Catholic, Pournelle an Anglo-Catholic.

And, final on this subject, from Rob Dakin: It seems to me that, ultimately, the only valid argument against abortion is a religious one. If life begins at conception, and ‘life’ implies the presence of an immortal soul, and if that immortal soul belongs to God (not to the mother, not to society, not even to individual himself), then abortion, like suicide, is not allowable. By that same token, then, abortion is murder. If abortion is murder, it should be dealt with by the legal system in the same way as any other murder. Exceptions for rape and incest make no sense, if the object of our concern is the immortal soul, which belongs only to God.

It further seems to me that if we believe an immortal soul, belonging to God, to be present in all individuals, then, just as abortion is murder and not allowable, capital punishment is murder and should also be not allowable. If what God wants of mankind is reconciliation with every soul, and if Evil triumphs every time a soul is eternally damned, then it is clear that to execute an unrepentant individual, thus cutting off any possibility of that individual being reconciled to God, must be against God’s will and not allowable. The guiltier that individual remains at the time of his execution, the more this is true.

If, however, we stipulate that an individual convicted of a capital offense and sentenced to death becomes reconciled to God while awaiting execution and is saved, then, paradoxically, this individual, who is now blameless in the eyes of God, is the only individual that could be executed by the state without compounding sin with more sin. The case of Karla Fay Tucker comes to mind here. I cannot say what God would think about the execution of a saved person, but I find it to be wasteful and gratuitous at best: all point in such an execution, other than that of stark revenge, is gone.

For these reasons, I find capital punishment to be even more horrendous than abortion, although it would seem that most Americans who favor the former abhor the latter.

Avram Grumer on being “smothered by marshmallows” (leftists who assume that compassion=socialism, good=Democrat, etc.): Good point on “I’m a liberal because I think about the poor!”, but it’s got a parallel on the other side: “I’m a conservative because I don’t want the government telling everybody what to do!”

Well, if you’re a libertarian that’s more accurate (you really do want less state power than other people, whereas I don’t think it’s true that only the left cares about the poor), but still, point taken.

A reader who I think wants to be anonymous, on whether DC is a government factory town: I’m glad someone else out there is willing to defend D.C: It never ceases to amaze me how the D.C. most people describe as “sucking” is not the one I know. I mean really . . . take a break from the Sign of the Whale and the Capitol Lounge, and spend a weekend checking out a go-go show in N.E. or P.G. County on Fri., grabbing some Korean bbq in Annandale and catching the midnight movie at Visions on Sat., and topping it off with frisbee in Malcolm X Park on Sunday when the drummers are out, and then let me know if D.C. is just some soulless “factory town” for political geeks. Oh, unless, that is, one is planning to spend the weekend in NYC in the fashion that I imagine most of the anti-D.C. crowd would spend such a weekend.. . . i.e.,

downing jello-shots as some sports bar on the Upper West Side with investment banker and lawyer friends from college, soaking up all that amazing Manhattan avant-garde “energy.” Puh-leez.