Abortion and moral discourse

The comments on my last article Foetal Tissue Sting made me scurrying for my copy of Alisdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue". In the first chapter he makes the proposition that we as a civilization have lost the capacity for moral argument.

Those theologians who study modernity will point to the European Enlightenment as the time in which this great loss occurred. While that movement gave us many great things, the language by which moral issues were argued was lost. This is apparent in our time by the way moral arguments, for example about the legality of abortion, are interminable. Such discussions consist of the protagonists simply repeating their position and no progress is made. It is like children arguing in a schoolyard: The foetus is a child! It is not! It is! The pro-choice and pro-life camps remain determinedly opposed without either side conceding that they may be wrong.

McIntyre illustrates his thesis by the following arguments for and against abortion.

(a) Everybody has certain rights over his or her own person, including his or her own body. It follows from the nature of these rights that at the stage when the embryo is essentially part of the mother's body, the mother has a right to make her own uncoerced decision on whether she will have an abortion or not. Therefore abortion is morally permissible and ought to be allowed by law.

(b) I cannot will that my mother should have had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, except perhaps if it had been certain that the embryo was dead or gravely damaged. But if I cannot will this in my own case, how can I consistently deny to others the right to life that I claim for myself? I would break the so-called Golden Rule unless I denied that a mother has in general a right to an abortion. I am not of course thereby committed to the View that abortion ought to be legally prohibited.

(c) Murder is wrong. Murder is the taking of innocent life. An embryo is an identiï¬able individual, differing from a newborn infant only in being at an earlier stage on the long road to adult capacities and, if any life is innocent, that of an embryo is. If infanticide is murder, as it is, abortion is murder. So abortion is not only morally wrong, but ought to be legally   prohibited.

These are all arguments with stated premises and rational outcomes. However, anyone living in our time is at a loss as to explain which argument holds and why. It is clear that something more than rationality is required here.

MacIntyre makes the point that in ancient Greek and Latin, the traditional language of European scholarship, there was no word for our word "moral" (you need to read his explanation if this seems strange p38). The early use of "moral" in English was as a noun that referred to the practical lesson taught by a story. It is close to the meaning of "practical." Later, it's meaning was focused on sexual behaviour.

Here is the kicker: "the history of the word "moral" cannot be told adequately apart from an account of the attempts to provide rational justification for morality ..from say 1630-1850 .." It was during the European Enlightenment that the discussion of the "moral" as rules of conduct are "allowed a cultural space of their own." This move was at one with the general dismissal of the accumulated wisdom of the ages, in this case enshrined in the Christian understanding of the world and the resort to pure reason.

The result is the kind of dilemma that we meet in the abortion debate as well as countless other ethical conundrums that we in late modernity face every day. Should we prepare for war in order to preserve peace? Should tax funds be given to private schools? Should healthcare be a shared resource regardless of income? Should we allow desperate refugees to come to Australia?

We are confronted here with criterionless choices. The choices we make are not founded on rationality but on prejudice, practicality, inheritance or a tribal attachment to a political party. Our precious choices, so much lauded by liberalism, turn out to be arbitrary.

This dilemma represents the "epitaph of the Enlightenment's systematic attempt to discover a rational justification of morality." It is now clear that no such thing exists, never has and never will. It is sobering to read the history of the two World Wars to see that the niceties of civilised behaviour were quickly abandoned by both sides of the conflict in favour of utility.

A contemporary example: Rich business men tell us that anyone who does not reduce tax liabilities to the minimum needs their head read. Is it not the right of the individual to manage their money so as to achieve maximum benefit for themselves? Here the freedom of the individual is trumpeted. On the other hand, these people are a part of a community that shares resources such as healthcare, roads, schools, defence, universities and the whole panoply of Government services. Should not they also contribute? Here we have a fundamental dilemma: the rights of the individual versus the responsibilities to community. Our society is riven with such dilemmas that make discussion and resolution impossible. Unfortunately the assertion of competing rights further ossifies the debate. In fact, a society ruled by individual choice is as intolerable as one ruled by forced collectivisation.

The politics of our day is polarised by just such positions and is subsequently frozen. This explains why we have shallow point scoring from both sides of the house and no real political debate. It is the abortion debate all over again. Ground is staked; positions taken, co-operation ruled out and "war by other means" prosecuted. It is not democracy that has failed us but a failure of personal depth. Our politicians have adopted the behaviour of the schoolyard.

It is increasingly apparent that choice is an illusion since we lack the means to decide. Choice is often based on shallow emotivism, habit, fear and self interest, hardly the motives of a rational adult. But choice has been raised to be the pinnacle of freedom and the cause celebre of the Liberal Party. It is also at the centre of the pro-abortion debate.

This state of affairs has come about because of the Enlightenment priority for the isolated rational subject who stands apart from tradition and other voices in order to spin rational positions out of his mind. We now know that this is an illusion; we have no sound basis at all on which to make the choices that determine our lives. The result is a chaos of competing ideas all of which must be respected. This is a democracy of the lost.

So were to we go from here? A return to what was called Christendom is not an option if only for the fact that we find ourselves in a completely different situation that removes that possibility. But a return of sorts is possible but on a radically different ground.

In my last articles I argued that Israel rejected the mythological consciousness of its neighbours. In it's worship it did not rehearse the world's mythological origins but the origin of the nation and the land. That is, it turned to history rather than to the gods to understand reality. It turned to experience. Paradoxically, this was the discovery of the Enlightenment, so what is the difference?

The difference was that Israel as a community pondered its experience in a theological framework and wrote narratives, stories, poetry etc. formed by its experience, as did the early Church. The result is a potent understanding of the human dilemma. That is why the Church has survived for more than two thousand years.

The reason that autonomous reason cannot arrive at a similar synthesis is that it has to hand only the experience of the individual and refuses experience that is not easily formalised i.e. the subjective. It is thus isolated from the voices of community and from the artistic, affective and tradition. As such it can only produce a shallow understanding of what it means to be human and this necessarily produces shallow choices.

Christianity does not offer a system of ethics; it offers a community to belong to who will transform us into a people who will live righteously. That will not save us from ethical dilemmas because they are part and parcel of being human. We may find ourselves in a position in which aborting a child is the best we can do. We may also find ourselves in a position of having an unwanted pregnancy and making ourselves open to receiving a gift that will transform our lives.

We are free to do either. But what I object to is the framing of what we do in a way that disguises our actions. Let us stop using the word "foetus" as a shield for our conscience. I know of no pregnant woman who does not refer to the person growing inside her as a baby. After all, the traditional reference to a pregnant woman is that she "is with child."