Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Against "Murder"   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Last week, Tony Snow said, "The president believes strongly that for the purpose of research it's inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder. He's one of them." (Somehow I missed this at the time.) This week Snow backed off: "[Bush] would not use that term." Bush is right not to use the term "murder." There are two reasons I avoid it myself in this context. First, it is a legal concept with technical definitions, and these are not uniform across jurisdictions. Second, even in ordinary parlance, the term has no stable meaning. Plainly not all homicides are "murders" either as a technical legal matter or in ordinary parlance. To the (very limited) extent that the term has a core meaning in ordinary parlance, it connotes a malicious homicide. Even those of us who oppose certain forms of stem-cell research because they involve what we regard as the unjust taking of human life do not believe these unjust acts to be malicious in motivation. (For the same reason, I think it a mistake to describe abortion as "murder.")

07/26 09:54 PMShare