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Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Let Me See If I’ve Got This “Choice” Business Straight
If I’ve comprehended the matter correctly:
- Choice is good.
- Abortion is a choice.
- Therefore abortion is good.
- Sonograms are also a choice.
- But a sonogram that reveals that her fetus has recognizably human features from very early in gestation might influence a woman away from choosing to abort that fetus.
- Therefore sonograms are bad.
- Therefore choice is bad.
Hm, there appears to be a crossed wire in there somewhere. Let’s try again:
- Choice is good.
- Abortion is a choice.
- Therefore abortion is good.
- Providing or declining to provide some defined service (e.g., assassination for hire) is also a choice.
- But declining to provide abortion-related services, by implying disapproval of abortion, might influence a woman away from choosing to abort her fetus.
- Therefore declining to provide abortion-related services is bad.
- Therefore choice is bad.
Damn! Messed it up again. One more time:
- Choice is good.
- To support the arts is a choice.
- Therefore to support the arts is good.
- Choosing what sort of art to support with one’s money is also a choice (duh).
- But choosing not to support photographers who shoot men with bullwhips up their posteriors or crucifixes in glasses of urine, or performers who display their naked, chocolate-and-sprouts-covered bodies to an audience, or artists who surround drawings of the Blessed Virgin with pornographic photos and clumps of elephant dung might suggest that some forms of art are more worthy of support than others.
- Therefore choosing not to support those artists is bad.
- Therefore choice is bad.
I feel certain that if I just keep trying, I’ll get the hang of this some day…
Comments
"I’ll get the hang of this some day…”
Not without having two-thirds of your ability to reason removed, and subsequently subscribing to patently idiotic ideoligies, you won’t.
Posted by og on 11/23/2004 at 12:05 PMI’ve seen choice described as: “If it’s not pregnant, regulate it.”
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 11/23/2004 at 01:27 PMThat one was most uncommonly disingenuous, Francis. Any kind of silly chain could be constructed using that method, and none would be more meaningful than those three. I happen to believe abortion is morally reprehensible except in extreme circumstances (such as when the choice is between the mother’s life and the child’s), but should be legal at least in the first trimester, and probably until the age at which the baby can survive outside of its mother’s body (right now, I think that the 50% survival rate is at something like 26 weeks’ gestation). I say that only to note that I do not disagree with you morally, just (in this case) logically.
Obviously, to say “choice” is good is meaningless, like saying “water” is good. They’re just things, intrinsically value-neutral. But whether a choice or a use of water is good depends on the consequences of the usage. Some uses are clear-cut, some are not: drinking water is good; using water to drown a baby is not good.
Similarly, some choices are good and some are not good, depending on the consequences or (in hypothetical or impending cases) possible and likely consequences of the choice. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a society that a priori constrained my choices for moral reasons: I’d be as likely to end up under the Taliban or Oral Roberts’ vision of the perfect society as I would under a society whose moral pre-requisites I could live with. Rather than enforcing moral choices through government action (tyranny, in short), I would rather live in a society that enforces moral choices through peer pressure. On average, leaving people free to choose their acts results in fewer immoral acts of lesser scope than does imposing choices upon them (and all of the resulting transfers of power and authority that are commensurate with that).
Equating a choice of whether to kill (sometimes justifiable, sometimes not) to a choice of whether or not to support a particular kind of “art” (always justifiable, if not always in good taste) is pretty bad form, really.
Perhaps a better way of looking at this - both more honest and more likely to lead to a reasonable conclusion - is to start with the line: Choices have consequences. Here’s one:
<ul><li>Choices have consequences<li>Choices whose consequences are good are good choices; conversely, choices whose consequences are bad are bad choices<li>Choosing to murder a child has an immediately-obvious bad consequence: a dead child (less obvious but still significant are the emotional traumas to the survivors, and much less significant are the societal implications of willfully condoning child murder, as well as the lessened population and its effect)<li>Choosing not to murder a child does not have universally bad consequences, but may in some circumstances have bad consequences<li>In truly extreme cases, the bad consequences of not murdering a child match or exceed the bad consequences of murdering a child<li>Except in very unusual circumstances, choosing to murder a child by abortion is wrong because the necessary harm outweighs the potential good</ul>Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 11/23/2004 at 01:48 PMThat’s not quite the point, Jeff. In each of the three sequences I presented, each stroke was either an undeniable, by-definition fact or a tenet of left-wing thought, until the very last line.
Disingenuous? Of me? Then what does it say about the folks who genuinely think that way?
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 11/23/2004 at 02:02 PMI’ve asked all my left-wing friends if they think “abortion is good,” and they all say No.
I’ve asked all my right-wing friends if they think “choice is good,” and they all say Yes.
And everybody is a little creeped-out by Mapplethorpe, Andre Serrano and Karen Finley. Maybe there’s still hope.
Seriously ... This _is_ disingenous. You can’t rightly compare the choice to have, or not have an abortion (protected by law) with the choice by doctors and family planning counselors to:
- Obtain and/or use privileged medical imagery for reasons and in ways not authorized by the party receiving treatment (in this case, for harassment).
- Refuse, for non-medical reasons, to deliver specific services deemed by law to be available on demand.
The severity of these improprieties becomes greater in areas where it’s hard to find affordable, ideologically-neutral health services (i.e., where there’s little “choice of provider.")
What’s so perpetually striking, of course, is the stridency, arrogance and total lack of savoir-faire of folks on both sides of the issue. It doesn’t take a great deal of nuance to think up non-harassing ways that sonograms (obtained properly for diagnostic reasons) might be shared with women. And it doesn’t take a degree in moral philosophy to reason that if you compel doctors to do things they find morally repugnant, you risk compromising quality of care and patient safety.
As far as the artists go: We’ve decided, as a society, that art is good. We’ve agreed that “good art is sometimes transgressive.” We’ve agreed that “choices in art are subjective.” And we’ve created and chosen to fund institutions to promote the arts. We should not then be surprised that these institutions sometimes choose to promote art we find transgressive.
What helps, I find, is to remember that modern art is all about context. Viewed in terms of its substance, the work of a Serrano or a Finley appears trivial. It becomes art only when surrounded by a firestorm of lowbrow journalism, hellfire and damnation. (laugh) Of course, Madonna does semi-offensive things with crosses, too, and she manages to find her way without any NEA grants.
Meanwhile, we should ask ourselves why the city of Berlin can afford to spend $26 million a year ($7 and change per citizen) just on its three opera houses, when the entire NEA budget is just $132 mil. Are we going for the nekulturny prize, or like, what?
Posted by on 11/23/2004 at 04:14 PMAnd it’s $26 million too much.
Posted by Mrs. du Toit on 11/23/2004 at 06:36 PMThis fight is unavoidabe, I fear, as long as we continue to choose to disregard the Constitution. Government money is for buying things government needs, not for distributing wholesale to people or groups that this year’s crop of politicians decides is worthy of promotion. As long as we continue our current policies, there will always be a fight over who “deserves” the money and who doesn’t, and those who find themselves falling into the latter group will scream about discrimination and the deprivation of rights, in spite of the fact that _nobody_ has a right to have their beliefs and practices financed by others against their will.
I do happen to think that, all other things being equal, choice _is_ a virtue. But far too many on the Left simply use “choice” as a code-word for “abortion”, and have lost sight of the notion that it might mean something else when applied to reproductive rights...or that it might have any meaning at all in any other context.
I have a friend who was recently confronted head-on with the natural conclusion of this attitude: “your body is your own and you can choose whatever you want, as long as what you choose is to have an abortion...otherwise, we know best”. I think that experience kind of shook her faith in modern feminism.
Posted by Matt on 11/23/2004 at 11:29 PMOh, I didn’t miss the point: I am far too aware of what passes for logic on the Left. In fact, as far as I can tell “logic” has been as completely redefined by the Left as “rights” - and with similar consequences. (The Incredibles put it very well: “MOM: Everyone is special. BOY: Then no one is special.")
It’s just that Leftists don’t defend choice as an absolute, but only those certain choices that “all right-thinking people agree” on. Attacking a morally odious position on semantic grounds seems to me to be a weak line of attack.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 11/24/2004 at 12:33 PM
