Anti-Climacus

LINK: Joe Carter thinks Janet Jackson's breast has not been talked about nearly enough in the blogosphere... wait... that's not what he said? Oh.

I always get a little uncomfortable about the abortion question because it's one of those where the normative and pragmatic sides of me differ by quite a bit. In an ideal world, no one gets raped, or has sex outside of marriage, or gets into the position in which they want to get pregnant without being prepared to deal with having a child. I think there's an overwhelmingly strong moral argument on this side.

Howeverrrrrrr, we don't live in that perfect world, and I tend to think this muddies the waters quite a bit*.

*This is my way of saying that my belief here is irrational, and the logical consequences of the argument about abortion can be applied to lots of other things that I desperately don't want the argument applied to. This is the problem with basing your laws on broadly consequentialist ethics when you are (as I am) a deontologist.

Actually, I want to draw this out a bit more, since I think it says something significant about politics. I have the particular set of moral beliefs that says, according to the rules of normative human behavior I accept, that abortion is morally wrong in a serious enough way to legislate against it. However, I also have the pre-rational belief (given to me mostly from my parents) that abortion is a woman's choice about what she wants to do with her body, as well as the ancillary belief that my deontologist ethical system also requires that people have the free choice to make entirely wrong decisions, which would seem to imply that laws should not be made to legislate a portion of my moral agenda. So I have two beliefs, both coming from the same source, that would lead me to opposite conclusions, and I instinctively favor the pre-rational one over the rational one. Interesting.