Thursday, November 13, 2008

Category Errors   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

A pro-choice blogger writes:

I believe that a fetus is not human. This interpretation is supposedly susceptible to the complaint that defining life as beginning at birth is arbitrary. (This is a principle line of argumentation in Ramesh Ponnuru's book.) Maybe so. The law, however, is a series of arbitrary decisions. . . . I find defining the beginning of life at birth to be remarkably sensible. And though traditionalism is never the last word on things, I think there's a lot of evidence that we have traditionally defined the beginning of life at birth. . . . I think most people are comfortable regarding the fetus as non-human, and while appeals to democracy are never dispositive, they are sort of all we have, when we argue public policy.

Just to clarify, while I do indeed believe that attempts to make birth (or some other event besides conception) the dividing line between having rights and not having them end up being logically untenable, my argument is not that we need a non-arbitrary dividing line, conception is the only one available, and therefore we should use it. The virtue of using conception as the dividing line, in my view, is not so much that it is non-arbitrary as that it is, well, true.

Two other points and a question. When "we" have decided this issue democratically, we certainly have not treated birth as the dividing line. Polls do not suggest that "most people" regard the fetus as non-human. And if a fetus is not human, to what species does it belong?

Update: Forgot to put the link in. Now it's there.

Update two: I responded at length to the claim that it is okay to deny fetuses the right to life because arbitrary lines have to be drawn with respect to the assignment of many rights here and here.

11/13 06:00 PMShare