01.01
It was with some trepidation that I recently downloaded and listened to an mp3 called, simply, “Abortion” by Walter Block. I had been perusing mises.org’s media archive and stumbled upon it, so I went ahead and gave it a shot. I pride myself on not shying away from any argument so I have to make myself put my money where my mouth is sometimes. Well, let’s just say it was bizarre. Walter can be classified as libertarian first, anything else second. That’s the way I describe people who aren’t willing to change their mind to fit intuition and common sense because of an a priori commitment to some cherished worldview. No human system of philosophy is comprehensive. In order to be good thinkers we need to amalgamate the best, most rational ideas from wherever we can find them. Dogmatizing one philosophy is eventually going to get you into some silliness, and that’s what has happened to Dr. Block.
I’m not saying that Walter is silly. He’s a brilliant man and I respect his expertise in economics and many other areas immensely. But applying capitalistic ideas like demand to human value is going way beyond the capabilities of the theory. So let me just try to sum up the argument in a way that I think Dr. Block would agree with:
He sees two issues at work in the abortion debate – eviction and killing. Under the libertarian view, killing would be wrong but eviction is ok. This is because of the libertarian belief in absolute property rights, but against positive obligations. Thus, the conclusion is that it’s wrong to actively kill an unborn baby, but it’s ok to evict the baby from the womb. It’s not the woman’s fault that medical science isn’t advanced enough yet to keep the baby from dying once evicted. She is therefore just in evicting the baby on the grounds that it’s a trespasser. This leads them to conclude that this view is a “compromise” position between pro-life and pro-choice since it splits the argument in two and agrees with one and not with the other.
Believe me, that’s the sanitized version. That lecture was full on wierd. I kept asking myself the whole time where he was storing his moral intuition. He evidently keeps it in a lock box. The main problem with that whole argument should be staring you in the face right now. There is a transcendent obligation at work when a mother conceives a child. That obligation is evident in the design of a woman’s body. The child bearing capactity of a woman is not a function tacked on anachronistically. It’s the defining aspect of the female gender. A woman’s entire body is built to do that one job in a miraculous way. Yet, this teleological, intuitive understanding is wholly missing from Block’s argument. A baby in the womb indeed does have a “positive” right to be cared for by it’s mother. Simply saying “we don’t believe in positive obligations” is putting a movement before morality in the face of common sense.
Really, when it’s boiled down to it’s base parts, Block’s argument is a libertarian variation of the the violinist argument. He even quotes it en masse. He kind of meshes it with a capitalistic twist. Take these excerpts:
…an individual’s property rights to her womb transcend the so-called “right to life” of anyone else. No one has a “right to life.”
Individuals only have a right not to be aggressed against. The fetus is not being aggressed against by eviction from a woman’s womb, which is her property; that is, this “facility” is owned by the woman not the fetus. On the contrary, the fetus aggressor, albeit not purposefully, is the initiator of violence.
…
Must A agree to stay attached to B, who has no functioning kidney, for the rest of his life? Hardly. Individual B is a parasite, no matter how personally innocent. Must A agree to maintain this bizarre experiment for nine months, if that is how long it would take to uncover a new donor for B? Not at all. Any such requirement would entail slavery of A, for whatever the duration.
Again, common-sense and intuition has taken a back seat to adherance. The idea that nobody has a right to life, but everyone has a right not to be agressed against seems made up entirely out of whole cloth. Why should I buy that reasoning. Where, exactly did this right not to be aggressed against come from? It flies counter to my moral intuitions that say: life is more precious than comfort. Maybe I don’t mind putting up with some amount of agression in order to go on living. This line of reasoning informs the later craziness that leads him to make the argument that whether a person is “wanted” or not determines their value. Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s supply and demand, applied to human life. It’s capitalism applied to the human condition.
The second part of the argument – the violinist nod – is flawed. Saying that a baby is a fetal “aggressor” intiating “violence” against the mother is like saying that your lungs are a pulmonary aggressor that enslave you by making you breathe even when you don’t want to. A baby is supposed to be in a womb, just like your lungs are supposed to breath whether you like it or not. That’s where it’s designed to be. That’s what a woman’s body is designed to do. That’s what wombs are for. Again, the teleology cannot be ignored here. Greg Koukl has one of the finest arguments spelling out the fatal flaws in the violoinist argument. He says it this way:
Are there important differences between pregnancy and kidnapping? Yes, many.
First, the violinist is artificially attached to the woman. A mother’s unborn baby, however, is not surgically connected, nor was it ever “attached” to her. Instead, the baby is being produced by the mother’s own body by the natural process of reproduction.
Both Thompson and McDonagh treat the child—the woman’s own daughter or son–like an invading stranger intent on doing harm. They make the mother/child union into a host/predator relationship.
A child is not an invader, though, a parasite living off his mother. A mother’s womb is the baby’s natural environment. Eileen McDonagh wants us to believe that the child growing inside of a woman is trespassing. One trespasses when he’s not in his rightful place, but a baby developing in the womb belongs there.
This post is getting long so I’ll pick it up next time. Block’s paper is long and I have more to say about it.
