There are two points to this post. The first is as a site map to the important issues that may not have a link on the main sidebar of this site. The second is to take a step back from the issues and themselves and discuss the debate about the debate, such as to debunk “What’s the Matter with Kansas.”

• Abortion and stem cell research. It is biological fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens. You can have abortion and stem cell research, or unalienable human rights. You don’t get both.
• Poverty. In 1965 the Democratic Senator published the Moynihan Report, which showed that the primary cause of black poverty was the breakdown of the married, two-parent family. He was heavily criticized by his own party, which then went into what he said was “denial mode.” Forty years later and black and white families are worse than ever. Get the modern research here.
• Tyranny of the Majority. Liberals design their government with the idea that they will be running it. Conservatives design their government with the idea that their worst enemy will be running it. Government is a tradeoff between protecting liberty, and directly manifesting the will of the majority. Conservatives side with liberty.
• Low Taxes. The reason to support low taxes is not a fatter paycheck, but because economics tells us that you get less of what you tax, and more of what you subsidize. Taxes on gas make people drive less or buy more fuel-efficient cars. Taxes on businesses mean people start fewer businesses. Fewer businesses = fewer jobs.
• School Choice. Cheaper houses, freedom to choose either a secular or a religious education, and improved quality for minorities. What’s not to love?
• Failure of Progressive Economics. Progressive labor laws like the minimum wage, job protection laws, and the 40 hour work week suffer from the law of unintended consequences. They protect some workers, but only by making life more difficult for other, less established (read: non-white) workers.
• Power Corrupts. A government that can regulate industry is a government that will become captive to industry interests. The losers will be the people and small businesses that cannot afford to lobby. Also see here, and here
• Gay marriage and polygamy. Polygamy is the ultimate wedge issue for gay marriage supporters. If marriage is a civil right for all consenting adults, then polygamy should be legalized. This vindicates the slippery slope arguments of the right, and it is hard to argue that all forms of unions of consenting adults is good for raising children. But if you reject polgamy then you have to find some other basis than “marriage is a civil right for all consenting adults.” This removes the most powerful argument for gay marriage; the replacement arguments are arbitrary and contrived.
• Abstinence. Before the birth control pill, legalized abortion, condoms available over the counter, and sex-ed in the classrooms, society had no choice but to use abstinence. And it worked. Out of wedlock childbirths have been skyrocketing since the 1960’s.
• Education. For more than four decades the left has been dumbing down education over the objections of parents who have consistently favored a “back to basics approach.” The result is that test scores have declined for forty years (even among high achievers, which refutes the theory that test scores have declined because more people are taking the tests), while more than doubling per-capita, inflation adjusted education spending.

The Debate About the Debate

• Realignment And Rich Yankees. Yes, the North is richer than the South. But the North has historically been Republican while the South has historically been Democratic. Now that they’ve switched there is a net migration of jobs, capital and labor from blue states to red states.
• Conservatives Are More Generous. Welfare-state hating religious conservatives give more money to charities - including secular charities, donate more blood, and volunteer more time than liberals and secularly-minded people.
• What’s the Matter With Kansas - A Critical Review Debunks every point of Franks’ theory that the working class people in Kansas are voting against their self-interest.

The Framers of our Constitution had a fear of standing armies, and of governments backed by them, that one legal scholar calls “almost hysterical.” A standing army of professionals, they were sure, would eventually do one of two things: agitate for foreign military adventures to keep itself employed, or turn against its civilian masters to create a military dictatorship. To these two political threats they added a third, moral danger: that citizens used to relying on professionals for the defense of their liberties would come to take their freedom lightly.

Politicians and professional military officers might betray the people, but the militia could not because it was the people. And although militiamen might lack the skills and training of full-time, professional soldiers, those defects would be offset by their vastly greater numbers and morale.

The militia system also had an important moral component. By serving in the militia, a citizen said he was prepared to stand up for his rights, even at the cost of his life. Militia service brought together people from disparate social backgrounds and reminded them of their shared citizenship. It also bred a familiarity with military matters that helped to dispel the mystique of professional soldiers, an otherwise potent political tool of the establishment.

The rest of the article can be found here. And a more critical review of the book, which observes that professional armies tend to beat up on militias is found here.

The classic conservative in me think there is a lot to be said for a nation with (1) lots of nuclear bombs and (2) widespread ownership of assault rifles. It would be very strong defensively and it could not easily get involved aggressive conflicts abroad.

Political junkies will endlessly agonize and passionately debate strategies such as “Screw the big spending Republicans, we should all vote for the Constitution Party (or Libertarian Party).” At which point others jump in and point out that this is precisely what the Democrats want.

I hope that conservatives spend their money on something that makes a much bigger difference: making donations. Politics is increasingly dominated by special interest groups, and that is a Good Thing. It is time consuming to do the research on particular candidates and then check to see if they live up to campaign promises. Interest groups are political middlemen. They lower the search costs involved in buying conservative activism by uniting buyers with sellers.
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“In philosophy, it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today” — Quentin Smith (atheist luminary), “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo, no. 2 (2001): 3.

Theistic philosophy - and physics - has undergone an explosion in the past several decades. Set aside your old “Hume, Kant, and Russell proved that there is no God” and make way for the new lines of evidence. If you read just one book on the existence of God, I would recommend God and Design, which is a collection of essays by scientists and philosophers on both sides of the debate, so you’ll get both perspectives. There are plenty of other books by physicists who believe in some sort of a higher power (whether Christian, Jewish, or some other alternative) than you can shake a stick at. A small sampling includes The Faith of a Physicist by J. C. Polkinghorne, The Mind of God by Paul Davies, The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder, and The Language of God by Francis S. Collins.

God? Or an Infinite Number of Unseeable Universes?

The teleological argument is the argument for the existence of God that most people find most intuitively appealing. It also has a lot of force, it was one of the key arguments that led to the atheist poster child, Antony Flew, becoming a deist. If there were just a slight difference in how some of the basic laws of physics were slightly different, then life on earth would be impossible. In this article for Wired Magazine, Greg Easterbrook writes:

In recent years, researchers have calculated that if a value called omega — the ratio between the average density of the universe and the density that would halt cosmic expansion — had not been within about one-quadrillionth of 1 percent of its actual value immediately after the big bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or experienced runaway-relativity effects that would render the fabric of time-space weirdly distorted. Instead, the firmament is geometrically smooth — rather than distorted — in the argot of cosmology. If gravity were only slightly stronger, research shows, stars would flame so fiercely they would burn out in a single year; the universe would be a kingdom of cinders, devoid of life. If gravity were only slightly weaker, stars couldn’t form and the cosmos would be a thin, undifferentiated blur. Had the strong force that binds atomic nuclei been slightly weaker, all atoms would disperse into vapor.

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So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets. — Matthew 7:12

The Golden Rule is probably the most universal of all ethical principles. It can be found in nearly every major religion from Christianity to Zoroastrianism. The Golden Rule is also one of the few ethical principles that can be proven in formal logic - the artificial language that philosophers and mathematicians created to bring rigor and clarity to philosophical debates. Who would have thought that you could prove an ethical principle?
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Science Versus Ethics

Before even starting to make the case against abortion, it is important to get the scientific facts on the table. Science and ethics are two different things. Science can tell us the facts, but it cannot tell us who has rights and who does not. It is the job of ethics to determine what is morally good and what is morally wrong based upon those facts.

It is an objective scientific fact that a fetus ia member of the species Homo sapiens. An acorn may not be the same as an oak tree, but a pollinated acorn is of the same species as an oak tree. Similarly, we all became a members of the species Homo sapiens after the process of fertilization was complete.

This immediately backs pro-choicers into a corner. If you believe that every human being has an unalienable right to life, then a fetus has an unalienable right to life. This makes it very difficult to defend abortion and stem cell research.

Abortion and an Unalienable Right to Life

The best attempt to defend abortion in a manner consistent with unalienable rights was made by the ethicists Judith Jarvis Thompson. Her main argument is simple and compelling. A famous violinist has a kidney problem and you alone have the correct blood type to help him. So the Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and hooks you up to the violinist for nine months. It would certainly be a nice thing if you decide to help the violinist, Thompson argues, but you do not have to. You would be in your rights to walk out of the hospital.

There are two problems with the violinist analogy. The first is that the scenario is more like rape than consensual sex. In the case of consensual sex the parents freely brought the child into the world, so the parents are responsible for the child’s well being. Even if procreation was not the goal, people are responsible for the intentional and unintentional results of their actions. Thompson’s argument by analogy is flawed because the violinist’s kidney problem is not a consequence of a freely chosen actions. The second problem with the argument is that while you are not morally obligated to support the violinist and could freely walk away, you do not have the right to kill him. Abortion is not gently unhooking the fetus unharmed, it typically involves violently dismembering it (even suction abortions result in the dismembering of the fetus).

Abortion cannot be reconciled with an unalienable right to life. This is a steep price to pay to support abortion. As Aristole pointed out, man is a rational animal and with that rationality comes responsibility. We have to choose logically consistent ethical positions. I would hope that people who believe in human rights would reject abortion, even if they may be sympathetic to the pro-choice position.

Read more on the problems with the rights based case here.

Personhood and Infanticide

Unlike being a human, being a person is not a matter of science. It is a matter of taste, and there are may definitions of ‘person.’ Some of these definitions revert back to science: a person is a human. But in the abortion debate the definition of person that you see most often is the philosopher’s definition. John Locke thought that a person is someone who can maintain their identity through time. Other philosophers have homed in on self-consciousness, the capacity for abstract thought, or language use. But regardless of which of these traits you choose, none of them emerge until well after birth. If non-persons can be legally killed, then newborn infants can be legally killed. In fact, infants do not even come close to developing self-consciousness, rational thought, and language use until around a year or more after birth. Most abortion defenders find the legalized infanticide of a one year old baby to be completely unnacceptable.

Of course, you can try to find an alternate basis for personhood that allows abortion while prohibiting infanticide, but this is not an easy task. A newborn infant has the intelligence of a chicken, or perhaps a sea slug. Since personhood means rejecting human rights - the belief that rights are intrinsic to our nature as human beings - we can’t simply declare by fiat that only humans get rights. But there only “tests” that do a good job of separating humans from animals are based upon mental powers that we do not develop until well after birth.

There is another problem that goes much deeper. It is fairly easy to see why someone might argue that all human beings share a basic dignity and worth that makes them equal (at least on paper). And it is fairly easy to see why we might home in on essentially human traits like self-consciousness and language use as the basis for our ethical worth. But it is difficult to see anything special about reaching other, and lesser, landmarks in intellectual development that would vault them to a greater importance than self-consciousness.

Read more about the problem with making the case for personhood while denying infanticide here.

Alternative Ethics

I have found that people who are pro-choice often start debates confident that they are on the side of science and reason. But then when confronted with the basic scientific fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo sapiens they rapidly reject science and adopt mystical positions. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen pro-choicers start talking about “quickening” or “ensoulment.” Feminists such as Naomi Wolf have famously argued that we need to adopt a richer spirituality of sin and redemption that embraces the death of the fetus.

The only honest approach for abortion defenders is to either reject abortion, or accept legalized infanticide (infanticide could still be treated as destruction of valuable property if the baby is wanted).

The Hard Cases: Rape and Health of the Mother

Rape and health of the mother are the “hard cases” for pro-lifers. They are complicated issues and many people who are pro-life disagree. The important thing is to reason your way to an ethical position based upon the fact that both the fetus and the mother have an unalienable right to life. These cases create a more direct conflict between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother. The Principle of Double Effect is how natural rights based ethics handle conflicts of rights. It has given us the right to kill in self-defense, the Just War doctrine, and resolved plethora of other difficult ethical issues hundreds of years before abortion was even an issue. Here is where I do this and conclude that abortion is justified if the life of the mother is at risk, but not in the case of rape or when only her health is at risk.

Pro-Choice Challenges

Here are rebuttals to two of the more effective pro-choice challenges.

• Punishment for women who get abortions (vs. fetal homicide laws). The issue of punishing women who get abortions backs pro-lifers into a corner. Either they appear extreme by wanting to punish women who get abortions, or they concede that killing a fetus is not as bad as killing an adult. This is really an issue of logical consistency. If a fetus has a right to life then killing a fetus should be as bad as killing an adult.

  Pro-choicers face the same dilemma. If a fetus does not have a right to life then there is nothing wrong with killing a wanted baby. Most states have fetal homicide laws, but with legalized abortion they should be repealed. A criminal who causes a happily pregnant woman to lose her baby should only be guilty of destruction of valuable property, not murder.

  These are positions that make both sides seem extreme to the moderate general public - but this is a fault that lies with the moderate general public. They have adopted the position that wanted babies have rights, and unwanted fetuses do not.

• The Burning IVF Clinic. This is Ellen Goodman’s famous thought experiment: an IVF clinic is burning and you can save either a Petri dish with embryos in it, or a little girl. Who do you save? This purportedly backs the pro-lifer into a corner. Choose the Petri dish (or choose randomly) and you look extreme. But choose the little girl and you (purportedly) concede that the life of an embryo is worth less than the life of a more developed human being.

  Suppose you have to choose between rescuing a famous cancer researcher or an obviously homeless alcoholic. Most people would choose to rescue the cancer researcher. But this clearly does not mean that we can freely choose to kill the alcoholic. The strongest conclusion you can draw is that the life of a homeless alcoholic is worth less than the life of a cancer researcher - but it is still valuable enough to have a right to life and legal protections. The same reasoning applies to the embryo. But as it turns out, even that limited conclusion is unwarranted.

  All men are created equal, but then the real world starts separating them. This is one of the great challenges to democracy - maintaining the principle of equality in an unequal world. The beauty and power of the ethics of human rights is that every human being has equal dignity, worth, and moral status. It does not matter what the rest of the world says. It does not matter if you are a cancer researcher or a homeless alcoholic, a little girl, or an embryo.

  However, when the chips are down and your back is against the wall, you have to make a stark choice. Since human rights ethics treats everyone with equal dignity and worth, it is impossible to use their intrinsic value as a way to make a separation. It then becomes acceptable to factor in the value that people provide to the very unequal real world. In these cases we can choose the cancer researcher over the alcoholic and the child over the embryo.

  The potential to abuse this is obvious, so the logical machinery of natural rights is designed to keep the situations in which the unequal real world factors into decision down to a bare minimum. In fact, they are only allowed in these black/white situations in which saving one person means letting another die. The tool that human rights ethicists use for this is called the Principle of Double Effect. Read about double effect here and here.

Further Reading

• Moral Theory by David Oderberg. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for abortion defenders. In the course of debating abortion you will be buffetted with thought experiments and hypotheticals. Unless you understand the machinery of natural rights, you will be driven into accepting the position that some human beings are worth more than others (note that few natural rights skeptics take this to its natural conclusions, which would be that the life of a cancer researcher is worth more than that of a bum). See my review which summarizes the ethical machinery here.
• Libertarians for Life. Website with a great collection of articles from rights-based libertarians.
• Applied Ethics. This book applies natural rights philosophy to questions like abortion and euthenasia, and addresses a wide range of various rebuttals from pro-choicers.
• The Golden Rule. I’ve been making the case against abortion based upon human rights, but the Golden Rule is an even more basic ethical principle that underlies all logically consistent ethical systems.

The basic argument of What’s the Matter With Kansas is this: working class people in Kansas are voting against their own economic self-interest by voting for Republicans because of abortion. I disagree with about every premise. The evidence shows that (1) it is the middle class, not the working class, that are voting Republican, (2) even if they were, it is not against their economic self-interest, and (3) people do not have misplaced priorities if they put morality aissues ahead of economics.
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