Is it possible to defend the moral permissibility of abortion without deciding on the moral status of the human fetus?

Is it possible to defend the moral permissibility of abortion without deciding on the moral status of the human fetus?

I must begin by stating that I am a sixty-six year old man, who has been married for forty-five years. My children are grown, a daughter and a son,  and we have one grandchild and hope for another.  If I were in a voting booth, I would vote to support a woman’s right to choice in terminating a pregnancy , but because I am a man, I don’t think that I have much weight in this discussion. If we were sitting in a circle discussing this topic, I would probably listen closely, but not say much.

I believe that it is possible to defend the moral permissibility of abortion without deciding on the moral status of the human fetus. This is a noisy subject full of strident voices. Anger, condemnation, even violence frame the public discussion. Millions of words cloud thoughtful discourse, very few of which ring of compassion even though the decision to end a pregnancy touches the deepest of human values and emotions.

I read and re-read Chapter 6 of Dr. Singer’s book and watched each of Singer’s videos lectures and the discussions with Professor Camosy several times, honestly agreeing with both viewpoints,  but unsatisfied, certain that something vital had been omitted from both arguments — the moral obligation for compassion.

Singer outlines the conflicting arguments of liberals and conservatives and offers a solution based on utilitarian logic and science. Professor Camosy offers a theological argument based on a belief in the existence of the soul.  Neither takes into account the contradictory nature and complexity of human existence.  

When the Dalai Lama was asked to discuss abortion he replied: “Of course, abortion, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is an act of killing and is negative, generally speaking. But it depends on the circumstances.”

- Dalai Lama, New York Times, 28/11/1993

“But it depends on the circumstances,” contains the expectation that knowing or not knowing the moral status of the fetus may not determine whether an abortion is morally permissible in many situations because our obligation to compassion supersedes the question. Abortion is often discussed in terms of rights — the fetus’ right to life, the woman’s right to control their own body. Compassion is not a right; it is an obligation, an obligation that an individual and a society must apply to an ever changing stream of circumstances .  I was surprised to find Dr. Singer discussing the trivial situation of a woman who might want to abort in order to mountain climb, yet failing to discuss the millions of possible situations in which an unwanted pregnancy would cause life-altering  distress, hardship, and suffering for an individual or a family. The question of the moral permissibility of abortion can only be answered by applying our obligation to compassion within the specific circumstances of a situation.

The greatest barrier to understanding the primacy of the obligation to compassion when thinking about abortion is the language that we use to discuss the issue. George Lakoff’s early studies of metaphor and reasoning explain that our feelings and our reasonings are based on metaphors commonly held and used for everyday communication within our specific community.(Lakoff, 245)  How can we think clearly about the morality of abortion - or more importantly of a particular decision to terminate a pregnancy -  when the discourse begins with powerful emotionally charged metaphors?

Look at the metaphoric premises Dr. Singer points out as the primary arguments in the issue:

• A human fetus is an innocent human being.
• A human fetus is a potential human being.
• No fetus is a person … Until a fetus has some capacity for conscious experience, (it is) more like that of a plant than of a sentient animal like a dog or a cow.

Each statement draws a boundary that clearly excludes a compassionate assessment of individual circumstance.  To reduce the fetus to a plant, is to enrage those who believe in the soul. To metaphorically speak of the fetus is an innocent child, excludes all compassion for the woman and/or family that will suffer greatly unless the pregnancy is terminated.

So, yes, if we accept the moral primacy of the obligation to compassion for all involved - the woman, the family, the community -  we can defend the moral permissibility of abortion without deciding on the moral status of the human fetus. The question of the moral permissibility of abortion can only be answered by applying our obligation to compassion within the specific circumstances of a situation.

How can reason tell us what we ought to do?

How can reason tell us what we ought to do?

Children, even infants, seem to have a provable sense of fairness. (1) As we grow parents, teachers, and religious leaders try to fill out the details of the right and wrong ways to treat other people.  At some point in life, we encounter a situation where the rules we have been taught seem unclear or contradictory, and the consequences of any available choice of action are unsatisfactory. Do we retreat to common practice, a scriptural authority, or self-interest and just move on, unsatisfied that we have made the right choice? Or is there another option? Can reason help us decide what we ought to do?

According to the philosopher James Rachels, “Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason – that is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing – while giving equal weight to the interests of each individual affected by one’s decision.” (2) Immanuel Kant wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”  (3)  It would seem simple and easy then for a being with an embedded natural moral law to discover the best reasons for an action and give equal weight to the interests of others – until you examine the realities of human nature and human history.

For the last few million years, we’ve gotten by one day at a time by the very skin of our teeth. Each day of history we’ve been lucky if we weren’t killed before the sun went down by a famine caused by greed, a war, a terrorist bomb, or the crazy guy next door with five guns in his garage. Is it possible that Kant could be right - there is “moral law” somewhere inside of us? To tell the truth, I’m not exactly filled with “wonder and awe” when I look in the mirror. I’m not all that proud of the number of times I haven’t chosen the “best reasons” for my actions, and there are plenty of people whose “moral law” doesn’t seem moral at all to me.

If I’m arguing that the right path is to find the best reasons for my actions and always take into account how those actions affect others, what’s my proof? The best proof is that humanity is here today. Okay, yes, we’re here just by the skin of our teeth. We are, in fact, really nasty creatures. We kill every other species we encounter that isn’t useful to us. We are murderous, raging, selfish, clever monsters, who have invented dozens of ways to destroy each other and our entire planet. We'll be lucky if we don't do exactly that tomorrow, but we haven’t done it yet. I propose that we have survived because we not only have the capacity to think about the "best reasons"-- occasionally we act on them.

As further proof of the value of reason, I can offer some artifacts -- the record of the on-going, always lively discussion of morality in literature, art, and philosophy that continues today. (I left out politics for obvious reasons.) While it may not be provable that Kant is right and “moral law” is embedded within our nature, these artifacts are proof that moral law is embedded in our civilization. 

I think one of the greatest contributions to world literature is Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth.  It’s a comedy depicting the horrors of human nature and human history. Yet, it’s not a dark comedy; it’s very hopeful. In the last act one of the actors describes the final scene:“Mr. Fitzpatrick, you let my father come to a rehearsal; and my father’s a Baptist minister, and he said that the author meant that -- just like the hours and stars go by over our heads at night, in the same way ideas and thoughts are in the air around us all the time and they're working on us, even when we don't know it.”  (4.)

Wilder ends the play with a scene set in the aftermath of war. The actors huddle together, having barely survived, while the actor/philosophers cross the stage reading somberly from Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, and Moses. Wilder offers the following as some hope that maybe again, we’ll make it through the night.

Spinoza: After experience had taught me that the common occurrences of daily life are vain and futile; and I saw that all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad save insofar as the mind was affected by them; I at length determined to search out whether there was something truly good and communicable to man.(4.)

Plato: Then tell me, O Critias, how will a man choose the ruler that shall rule over him? Will he not choose a man who has first established order in himself, knowing that any decision that has its spring from anger or pride or vanity can be multiplied a thousandfold in its effects upon the citizens?(4.)

Aristotle: This good estate of the mind possessing its object in energy we call divine. This we mortals have occasionally and it is this energy which is pleasantest and best. But God has it always. It is wonderful in us; but in Him how much more wonderful.(4.)

From Genesis: In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth; And the Earth was waste and void; And the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Lord said let there be light and there was Light.(4.)

______________________

References

1. Paul Bloom,  Just Babies, 2013.

2. James Rachels, Elements of Moral Philosophy, 1986. p.13

3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason,1788.

4. Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942.

A Hindrance to the Solution

I retired last year after serving four decades as an educator in a public school in Ohio serving a low income urban/rural mostly African-American population.

I’ve spent a lot of my time this year trying to figure out why my school failed its community. Our school failed by every measure - test scores, future employment, and student empowerment.

Most of the teachers were white. Some were firmly committed to America's racist traditions and were proud Republicans and Fox News watchers. (Thanks Australia, but you can take your Murdock back. Please!) But the majority of the staff were decent people, who wanted to serve the children in their charge. People who considered themselves "colorblind.” I’ve come to realize that racism runs too deep in my country to just announce that it’s over because we elected a Black President. We missed the most important step of really examining how our minds work. How we really see each other or don’t see each other accurately here, and how those inaccurate perceptions affect how whites and black interact. I’m taking an xEd course"Think101x The Science of Everyday Thinking" that is confirming what I suspected to be true - much of the time we don’t really know WHY we are doing. 

Here’s a quote and a link to an excellent article from Salon:

"A large mass of data has been collected over the past 10+ years showing that roughly 70% of all Americans have an unconscious racial bias, compared to only 20% who are consciously aware of it. That means that roughly half of all Americans are colorblind in a very different sense from how the term is usually deployed: they’re blind to their own color biases. This is one of the most striking findings from the implicit attitudes test, introduced by Anthony Greenwald and colleagues at the University of Washington in 1998, an online version of which has been taken by more than 10 million people." http://bit.ly/1kF9c6I

I’m hopeful that if at least 20% of us know that we are affected by racial bias, then some of those people, like myself, are willing to work on the problem. The other 70% are not just complacent, they are blind to the true nature of their actions and that is a real hindrance to a solution. 

The Persistence of Poverty

The late Pete Seeger sang a song about two maggots that fell off a manure wagon. One fell into a dead cat, the other fell into a dusty crack in the road. After several days, the maggot that fell into the crack is nearly dead. He finally crawls back up to the road where he finds his brother fat and happy atop the dead cat. “What do you attribute your success in life?” he asks. His brother replies, “Brains and Personality, brother! Brains and Personality.”

I’ve lived in Ohio for over sixty years. I’ve never known hunger, never lacked for shelter or comfort of any kind. I’ve never lost a night’s sleep worrying that my children would not be educated to their potential, suffer from violence or crime, or not turn out to be the happy productive middle-aged people they have become. I attribute those things, not to brains or personality or hard work but to the fact that the last six generations of my family - back to the early 1800’s - were white Americans with college educations. Some folks in those six generations were sure they deserved their white skins and their money. Some weren’t so ungrateful.  I’ve always known that I’m like the maggot that landed in the dead cat. Just lucky.

A lot of people in those six generations were doctors or teachers -- professions that deal directly with poverty. I taught for thirty-some years in a district where eighty percent of the students were children who live in poverty and neglect. The lives of minority children in a America are often as harsh and brutal as many in underdeveloped countries. Millions of minority children attend schools which fail to prepare them for a future of beyond poverty. Schools where they are daily subjected to violence, drug abuse, and crime. More than a quarter of the students in my school district were in foster homes. Many in their fourth or fifth placement before they were 18.

Jeffrey Sacks describes the four step progression from a subsistence economy, to a commercial economy, to an emerging-market economy, to a technology-based economy. During the four decades I taught in a low-income suburb outside of Dayton,  I watched as Sacks’ progression steps moved backwards! Manufacturing left, retailing moved out, infrastructure and education funding declined sharply. Personal and family poverty steadily increased along with violence, crime, and child neglect.

I know my efforts had some effects. But I’m not the sort of person who is proud when they have just done a little. In the Nineteen-Forties, one of my grandfathers was the sheriff of a very small county in southern Kentucky. He was troubled that the sixteen black children in his town couldn’t read or write. Unwilling or perhaps unable to fight for their right to go to the public school with white children, he used his own money to build a schoolhouse next to his home and enlisted his grown children to teach there when they came home from college. He never bragged about it, because I think he knew he had only done a little of what needed to be done.

I think Sachs is right - technology and science have given us the tools to end poverty. But we have to accomplish and maintain  all of the four steps to make real progress. A lot of folks in America don’t know that they are just lucky. Somehow we have to convince the people who fell off the wagon into the dead cat to help out instead of stand in the way.

----------------

Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth and http://goo.gl/9U8PBA

American educators were activists

After a half century of teaching in American public schools and much experience to the contrary, I still believe that good teachers are the most powerful individuals in their community and by extension on the planet. In each of the areas that we have studied in this course, poverty, disease, climate change, gender inequality, ultimately the root of a solution to the problem is education. For American students that means the hard facts of the state of human rights throughout the planet and an awareness of the complex connections that bind the well-being of women in repressive cultures to the well-being of every American have to become deeply integrated into the framework of our curriculum.

Here, I need to pause to make a qualification. A missionary teaching in his or her students in Uganda  that the Christian Bible instructs us that all homosexuals must be executed is not part of the solution. A racist white tea-party member teaching in a minority inner-city school in Ohio who sees the girls in his class as “drains on society” is not part of the solution. They are part of the problem,  but they must be taken into account because of the force against social good that they exert.

My generation of American educators were activists. In the early 70’s, we constructed a national revision in the teaching of social studies, history, and literature that emphasized global awareness and a rethinking of America’s historical role in world affairs.  Discussion of America’s support of apartheid in South Africa, and support for South American and Middle Eastern dictators  became part of the standard curriculum. Model UN’s sprouted up across the country - for the first time, tens of thousands of high school students did some deep research into global poverty, hunger, human rights, and gender inequality. Well and good, until conservative forces in the 80’s began to push the country back to “That’s their problem, not America’s problem” complacency.

Rapid globalization of production and the events of 9/11 woke us up. It has become clear now that girls and women like Malala  and the human rights of all women are connected to the peace and well-being of all Americans.Violent, repressive cultures commit violent globally disruptive acts. Repression slows the growth of the world’s economy to which we are now so completely entangled.(1.)

Martha Nussbaum reminds us that, “The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth.” (2.)

I do not want to leave the impression that all is well for girls and women in my country. It is not. The lives of minority women and girls in a America are often as harsh and brutal as in many in underdeveloped countries. Millions of minority girls attend schools which fail to prepare them for a future of well-being. Schools where they are daily subjected to violence and sexual abuse. More than a quarter of the girls in my school district are in foster homes. Many in their fourth or fifth placement before they are 18. Those who do succeed are those who fortunate to meet some of our most effective teachers. Teachers who know how to nurture intelligence and grit.  

My proposals are simple:

• Train, hire, and pay good teachers. To not hire the best is to fail.
• Teach a curriculum framed by global awareness. Ignorance is not acceptable.

--------

1.http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jul/30/phumzile-mlambo-ngcuka-un-women

2. Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach http://www.thenation.com/article/159928/what-makes-life-good#

Art can make arguments without distemper

For almost half a century I was an English teacher. It should not surprise then that Dr Haddad’s statement - that it is art that can make people care - struck a chord for me. Facts, reasons, consequences can be ignored. Art informs the heart, and only an informed heart acts with passion against difficulties.

For decades, since the first “Earth Day” in 1970, American teachers have included units on the environment and conservation of the wild. Most kids grew up hating pollution and loving rare animals. The discussion changed and became heated in the ’80’s when Reagan proposed opening the ancient Redwood forests of California to lumber corporations. Party lines were drawn and people concerned with the state of the planet became “Tree-Huggers” Global warming awareness in the scientific community unfortunately paralleled the rise of Fox News. In my classroom intelligent, science-based discourse ended as Fox News daily defined the battle lines. Students from “Fox News” families knew the Truth: Global Warming was a lie crafted by scientists to get grants, and reacted to any presentation of facts with loud disgust. 

I’m an English teacher, so I turned to poetry to channel the discussion to viewpoints my students hadn’t experienced before. The simple/complex nature poetry of Robert Frost opens up young eyes to their place in nature. I was lucky, my school was within walking distance of a beautiful state forest, so as soon as Frost got their heads in the woods, I took their feet there. An eight mile walk in the woods with a hundred fifteen year olds is more peaceful than you would imagine. The secret is the first five miles to get them tired. They slow down for the last three and start to look around and value what they see.

All of us will suffer the consequences of climate change, but the rich will suffer less than the poor. Some of my students lived in urban slums and others in run down rural shacks. On any given day someone may have laid on the floor all night because bullets had come through the wall of their apartment as they were watching TV, and someone else may have just come back from two days hunting deer with their dad. Deer that would be the main source of meat for their family that winter. Both students were responsive to images of the hunter and the hunted. 

The poets David Wagoner and Gary Snyder give powerful voice to the natural world. We read David Wagoner’s “Nine Charms against the Hunter” http://goo.gl/qWjpJF and Gary Snyder’s “Long Hair.” http://www.wenaus.com/poetry/gs-longhair.html

Art can make arguments without distemper. A great work of art can open hearts and minds that have been closed by lies. 

Therefore first, I am proposing that teachers teach those works that connect us to each other and the earth. Second, if in fact Dr. Haddad and I are right and it will be our artists who open the world's eyes, then they need to pick up their pens, cameras, and brushes and get to work today!

I don’t think you have met Mr. Whitman’s poem let me introduce him to you.

I don’t think you have met Mr. Whitman’s poem let me introduce him to you.

First forget everything you learned at school and just imagine you, yourself are Walt Whitman’s poem – the big poem, the one that contains and encompasses EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and ALL TIME. You are full of lists of everything. “Work-box, chest, string’d instrument, boat, frame, and what not,”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You are full of Walt Whitman, “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You are constantly in contradiction and constantly resolving your contradictions.  You are here and now and then: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem and you are and always have been waiting for you to read you, “I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You have been waiting for you to hear your rhythms, your cadences, “you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”