This whole idea of personal autonomy—I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone to do whatever they want to do, that government should keep our taxes down, keep regulation low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, that we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues, people should be able to do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world
— Rick Santorum (R-PA), in an August 4 NPR interview (reprinted in the Oct Reason)
Santorum’s remarks, when they aren’t being cartooned, reveal an interesting divide in the “conservative” movement that separates—by a wide arc—social conservatives like Santorum from small-l libertarians (in fact, I think social conservatives like Santorum are closer to the secular nannystatists on the left, in terms of their domestic political philosophy, than they are to “traditional conservatives”). Somewhere in the middle, though, are legal conservatives, who, for instance, might find sodomy laws silly, antiquated, and offensive, but who nevertheless agree with Justice Thomas that Texas (in Lawrence) has the right to pass and enforce sodomy laws that have been duly enacted by the state legislature.
Which is precisely why the proposed Indiana law regarding artificial means of reproduction and unmarried persons I posted on yesterday is so interesting to me—even if, as many of my commenters pointed out, this law is not quite so draconian as many of the initial press reports have made it out to be.
Because even if, as many have argued, the Indiana law is merely an extension of adoption screening laws that seek to take into account new technologies (and act, on at least one level, as protection against loopholes that return paternity responsibilities to a sperm donor), a number of questions remain—from the extension of “adoption” to apply to the raw materials that make gestation in the birth mother possible, to questions concerning the state’s asserting regulatory control over the womb of the woman who has received raw material (sperm) that is, in and of itself, nothing more than one half of the potential for a baby.
Which, that seems to me quite an extension of state power. But if it’s passed, should it be binding? If not, why not?
But I’m interested in your thoughts.
****
Other discussions: Ace, Daily Pundit, Vodkapundit, Darleen’s Place, Feministe (Lauren), and Conservative Cat
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update: Tom sends this along via email: “Legislator drops contoversial plan”
I’ve got to run, but I’ll just toss this thought off: This is the precise thing that keeps me from throwing my lot in with the right all together. This divide is really disconcerting to me, and I wish there were some way that we libertarians and classical liberals could carve out our own niche/power base that would separate and distinguish us from both the Republican and Democrat parties.
I know how you feel. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t easier for hawkish Dems to throw in with the social cons—at least on principle—than it is for classical liberals.
For me, this is the kind of thing that’s gotten me to un-throw my lot in with the Right. What has me not throwing my lot in with the Left is that they look pretty much like the same group of opportunistic buffoons, only with a different name brand.
So, I’m kind of adrift. And the longer I’m adrift, the more I think that this is where everyone else ought to be. What if the major parties didn’t have a base?
Given the not-unheard-of phenomenon of lesbian couples having turkey baster babies, there really needs to be some law like this, to prevent inbreeding.
As it stands now, in most states there’s no legal sanction against the sperm donor being a woman’s horny kid brother, as long as they are in different rooms at the time of conception.
In Indiana, this is probably an acute problem.
I have a friend, single, heterosexual, wanted a baby and had despaired of finding an appropriate mate. So her daughter was fathered by a sperm donor. Under this law, she would need to pick up a guy for a 1-night-stand to get a sperm donation. Obviously much riskier, and potentially more complex.
(Which reminds me of a comment I have made before about debates over reproductive technology. Which is that they often seem to work from the assumption that conceiving a baby is universally a technological challenge, and that it is practical to have these limits which you can enforce by controlling access to the technology. When, of course, the main problem we have is that conceiving a child is so easy that 12-yr-olds can do it!)
Somebody over on the other thread suggested that this may be simply a misguided attempt to apply the sort of strenuous process we force adoptive parents to go through to a wider variety of parents. If so, the hoosiers involved need to step back, think things through, and get a grip…
cathy
Which, as everyone knows, happens all the time. Once a law is put through, though, those horny kid brothers will be accompanied by a policeman at all times.
Oh, and it will be illegal to own and operate a turkey baster.
Back (hopefully) to less silly ideas. Please.
TW: member. Sweartagawd.
Unless I am mistaken, all of the concerns that this law is supposed to address can be addressed via contract. And isn’t this being done in other states now via contract?
Jeff,
There is no place for one if one is a Social Liberal and a Fiscal Conservative. You aren’t welcome on the Left if you believe in personal responsibility and you aren’t welcome on the right if you believe in personal liberties. No platform for us – just independent issues.
I make no secret about the fact that I’m a social conservative – essentially, a Clarence Thomas social conservative (Thomas, not Scalia, is my favorite Justice).
Thomas ridiculed the sodomy law in Texas because, like birth control laws, it is inherently silly and unenforceable, and to make it enforceable would require trampling all over the rights and freedoms of law-abiding adults. While Thomas may on his own right believe, as most Christians do, that homosexual acts are sinful, he does not believe that they ought to be illegal. Here, there are many who believe that some of the acts are morally wrong, but that does not mean they must necesarily be illegal.
The real issue here, I think, is whether this law is necessary to protect the rights of the unborn child, the mother, and the donor. While the lawmakers may not get it right the first time, there is a necessity to have the law speak to the adaptation of new technologies for IVF and other methods, ensuring that neither the child nor anyone else suffers as a legal matter because of the manner of their conception.
We are not talking about a contractual agreement, after all – creating a house out of raw material and the like – we are talking about creating human life. That makes the stakes a lot higher. It’s good to keep that in mind.
Has it occurred to anyone else that Santorum may have, at one time, kept a dungeon in his house and chained up young prisoners for the purpose of sodomy, and only with the help of his personal savior can he resist going back to that sinful life, which is why he projects his inability to control his urges onto other conservatives?
Or not.
There are two problems with this story.
1) In adoption cases, the children are wards of the state – the state has a responsibility to ensure foster parents are suitable before transferring custody. This isn’t the case with physician-assisted technology, so the standards and requirements shouldn’t apply.
2) The story was broken by Booman, which is an offshoot of DKos. And since I hate DKos, the site and its news is suspect to me by proxy. This makes me a liberal degenerate, but fuck it.
RE: Indiana (my home state) inbreeding. I’d argue that this isn’t the case, but I was born in Kentucky and this fact greatly reduces my credibility on the topic.
How could a law that protects the rights of an unborn child be passed?
How can you legislate the creation of human life when there’s going to be an area on that timeline where the “creation” doesn’t even have the right to life?
What distinguishes Lawrence from this case, though, JG? We agreed last night that there is (or should be) a Ninth Amendment right to reproduce; to side with Thomas, we now have to explain why that right doesn’t/shouldn’t encompass all private sexual conduct, whether procreative or not.
I’m looking for a theory, I guess.
After reading through the link provided, I don’t think that this is a horrible extension of state power. What I do think it is, is an attempt to clarify and bring some form of process and order to the entire artificial/surrogate birthing and custody process and clarify who has what rights.
One can argue that the state has no business in these matters, but the state is the party that is stuck with the bill and sometimes the child when agreements go bad.
This is a highly charged emotional issue and I have no doubt that many people enter into agreements that upon further reflection they find they can not honor. By forcing all parties involved through these hoops, that further reflection may happen before, not after there is a child who may wind up a ward of the state. I would think that anyone against so-called nanny-state intervention would think this a good idea. They are trying to coerce some serious reflection and responsibility before actions are taken.
There have been cases where sperm and egg donors have been sued for child support. There have been cases where surrogate mothers have sued for the custody of the child. A notable one occurred within the last ten years, I believe in Michign where a 4 year old child was removed from it’s adoptive parents and returned to the surrogate mother. There are cases of breach of contract where surrogate mothers have changed their minds and either terminated the pregnancy or kept the child. Or where the husband of the surrogate mother did so.
My quick reading over lunch may have missed it, but I don’t see this as bad. Far worse, if you want to talk about intrusive state actions are child custody investigations of parents involved in divorces. In many cases the investigator is not qualified. They may be biased. If they take a dislike to you for any reason, your parental rights may be eliminated or severly curtailed.
An anecdotal case in point, a fellow who worked for me in the past was going through an ugly divorce. The court appointed custody investigator happened to be a radical feminist man-hater in the Dworkin/MacKinnon mold. Needless to say, he recieved a horrible parental fitness report. It took two years and tens of thousnads of dollars to correct that. That, in my opinion is far more scary.
Fire away.
I only lived in IN for a little over eighteen years, so my authority is diluted even more than it is due to me being a Yuper by birth. Still, from time to time something bad happens there, and the response is as it should be.
Allah —
Me, too. That’s why I’m having such a hard time with this. As I said at the end of my post, I’m having a hard time saying that the state doesn’t have a right to make the case. It’s going to depend on what we think we’re regulating.
It breaks into two distinct questions, it seems to me: Can / should sperm be regulated to the same degree as an already conceived child, as is the case with adoption (from a Constitutional standpoint)? Or can we just rely on contract law? I tend to believe sperm is not a person, so I would think contract law applies; but others note that we’re dealing with a building block of life, so, it’s an interesting question that goes to legal viabliity.
And second, do we wish to give the state this kind of power?—a question that is more philosophical in scope. And I’m with Lauren on this one, though I understand the impulse that drives the legislation, and I certainly understand Richard Bennett’s concerns raised in the other thread. But it seems to me paternity loopholes can be closed in a way that gives the state far less power than does this legislation in its current form.
Jesus, I need TV cable again. I hadn’t even heard about the Pfaff case.
I’ll bite Tim.
You mention that the pain that this law could bring to the process of conception might force people to reflect on the gravity of what they are getting themselves into and in turn prevent some “change of heart tragedy” down the road.
You then relate a story of a man who enters into the fray of an ugly divorce where there is much anecdotal evidence that ugly divorces are very painful and require much reflection before entering.
Is legislation that adds inconvenience on the front end a good way to prevent bad faith on the back end? (not a sodomy crack)(also not a crack crack)
He’s a major-league asshole in a minor-league job, Lauren. I had a run-in with him in high school; he was beating on his girlfriend. Pet peeve of mine; dunno why. And he presided over family court, no kidding.
I talked with a friend of mine that still lives there; he said that he saw Pfaff while under suspension, highly drunk at one of the local watering holes, wearing a teeshirt with some obscenity on it or other. Must have seen the end coming.
Pregnant Hoosier in the street:
Sherriff Buford: Howdy miss. I don’t see a wedding ring on that thar pretty little finger o’ yern.
Girl: Uh.
Bufe: Fraid I’ll have to see your papers honey, else it’s off to the hoosegow.
Girl: I was doing the dishes and I must have forgo..
Sherriff: DON’T YOU BACKSASS ME!!! UP AGAINST THE CAR!@!@! UP!! AGAINST!! THE CAR!!
I’m not at all into the government hiding under anyone’s bed but as I’ve aged I find myself moving towards moderate conservative. Suppose it’s a natural course of aging, twenty five years ago I was a Marxist-feminist. My move lately is not for any draconian reason, but over the past thirty years Liberalism has moved so far to the Left I’m not confident our legal system can keep up, much less our social system. If our culture moves further Left what will happen over the next thirty years? Some utopian extension of Logan’s Run? Abortion was achieved because of over-population of ‘baby-boomer’ babies, that it was better to abort than to birth a child into poverty. The next thirty years we are facing an over-population of elderly baby-boomers, are we going to be euthanising the eldery because it is better than to let them suffer an impoverished death?
The libertarian’s dream might work if all able-bodied citizens were actually responsible for their own lives and actions unfortunately, generations have been weened on Big Brother and have no clue as to the meaning of personal responsiblity.
The Reagan Revolution was a huge turning point for me because I used to be one of those people who believe the way to care for the poor and downtrodden was through Socialist Liberalism.
When NOW sucked Clinton’s cock, I began my revolt against Marxist-feminism realizing I had embraced for two decades a fraudulent form of feminism which tried to equalize me. Thirty years ago Feminists screamed their hatred of Hugh Hefner’s paradise, today they’re in bed with him. Some Equality. Wow, we can be can rich, powerful, self-sustaining just by having big tits and a bodacious bod, how revolutionary is this idea!
The last thirty years of my political journey has taught me to consider the impact of our decisions made today on those living thirty years from now. It’s not just about Me anymore.
Balls? Cock? Tits?
Susan for Senator!!!!
Seriously Susan..
You are so on the money. People should think for themselves and think a lot.
Well, offhand I can think of three arguments to justify a Ninth Amendment right that would extend to procreative sex but not to sodomy. The first two suck, the third somewhat less so.
1. Procreation is necessary to America’s survival.
2. There’s broad public consensus that a right to procreation does/should exist.
3. Procreative sex has some non-prurient purpose.
Number one sucks because it makes individual rights dependent upon what’s best for the state, which is a pretty Orwellian notion of “rights.” Number two sucks because inevitably we end up in a debate over how “broad” consensus has to be to justify the creation of a new right; it’s the same fishy logic that the liberals on the Court use when they point to foreign law as support for their decisions.
Number three sounds lame too, but I think we can all appreciate an emotional distinction between someone who desperately wants to be a mom/dad and someone who desperately wants to suck dick. No offense to the latter crowd, but I think they might be lacking a certain nobility of purpose that’s present in the former.
The Indiana law makes me queasy because it’s two long steps removed from abortion. Being anti-abortion is easy; no one should have the right to end an innocent life. The next step is being anti-contraception, i.e., no one should have the right to take artificial measures to prevent human life from being created. That’s a bit more draconian. The step beyond that is where Indiana is now: no one should have the right to create human life without the state’s say-so. The interest in protecting human life becomes progressively less and the intrusion on parents’ reproductive freedom progressively greater from one case to the next. Unjustifiably so in the latter two examples, if you ask me.
Anyway. The only workable constitutional theory I’ve ever heard of is Holmes’s “puke test,” and that’s only because it’s no theory at all.
Under this law, she would need to pick up a guy for a 1-night-stand to get a sperm donation.
No, cathyf, as I read it, under this law she would need a bureaucrat’s permission to be artificially inseminated by a sperm donation to become impregnated. Why does everyone assume that means you cannot do so? After all, we get permission from them to keep some of our income every fuckin’ year, so clearly they want us to produce more taxpayers for them.
This law seems designed as an attempt to recognize the legal realities of artificially created persons. In other words, no precedents. A brand-spankin’ new area of law. Paternity law, adoption law … what applies? Not a bad first attempt, in my best I-am-not-a-lawyer opinion. Because frankly, if you are depending on society to provide your child, you should expect society to have the same concern for that child’s rights as your own.
But then, I’ve always thought the federal response to Katrina was timely and efficient, so consider the source.
slartibartfast- you’re a Yuper? That is God’s country! One of my fondest teen memories is of a wedding weekend spent in Menominee (sp).
rls- I agree with every word of your post.
Jeff-
But it seems to me paternity loopholes can be closed in a way that gives the state far less power than does this legislation in its current form. <blockquote>
This I agree with wholeheartedly.
I don’t like the law, I think it is an overreach. But with new technology comes new societal challenges, and as I said yesterday- the debate should be had.
One small point:
Well, technically, in the case of this legislation, it appears to be protecting those rights only after birth.
But as a matter of fact, we have many laws on the books – including most recently the Unborn Victims of Violence Act – which do exactly that.
oops. sorry about that formatting. It’s early.
I’m trying again, because what I had to say was just so darn fascinating…
Jeff-
It seems to me that it isn’t the sperm being regulated so much as the activity that the sperm is going to be used for- specifically for the purpose of creating a child. Under this law, you can still do with your sperm whatever you wish, except artifical means of conception.
This I agree with wholeheartedly.
I don’t like the law, I think it is an overreach. But with new technology comes new societal challenges, and as I said yesterday- the debate should be had.
So with this new law, this “idea of a child” will have a better chance at a “normal” life?
Unless it is aborted.
What Farmer Joe said..
I think there’s a distinction between a woman asking to be impregnated using reproductive technology and the other concerns (sperm donation, egg donation, et cetera)
The woman has no right to demand that state-licensed physicians perform an procedure at her insistence.
Re: the original idea of this post–specific proposed regulation aside
I attempted to express this in another blog earlier today–about a completely different matter, interestingly.
I once felt that government control was a bad thing, feeling that if government was given control to stop “bad” things, they would ultimately be empowered to stop “good” things. That is true, to a degree, but it’s only good within the scope of a pseudo-utopian society. In reality, the liberal mindset of modern government has no problem whatsoever regulating into oblivion anything against their agenda, whether deemed bad or good by society.
In that vein, I don’t personally think that bedroom activities should be subject to public regulation, but neither should they be the objects of public display and discourse. As a culture we’ve lost any semblance of self-control or discretion, and the void left by those qualities’ departure has been filled with brazenness and irresponsibility. Society is incapable of regulating itself when its only benchmarks are self-defined. For government to have a meaningful, yet non-intrusive role in private life shouldn’t be such a balancing act, but the current popular humanistic mindset makes no distinction between what is permissible by government and what is unacceptable in society. Just because something is “legal” doesn’t make it “right,” but it’s very difficult to instill that idea into a person who sees every definition of right and wrong dependent upon context.
(damn, wish I had saved this for my own blog!)
TW: “want”
sense to be more common
Y’know what? I’ll worry about this if the law actually manages to (1) pass, (2) get signed by the local gubnor, AND withstand legal scrutiny by a more-or-less reasonable appellate court.
Any one of these happening is almost a sure bet sooner or later—if not in Indiana, somewhere. Two, slightly less likely but still within the realm of smack-yourself-on-the-forehead-and-wonder-what-the-world-is-coming-to possibility.
All three?
The day Hillary Clinton adopts Laura Bush as her personal heroine and role model.
Yah, shoor, youbetcha. People who think Fargo was heavy-handed stylization haven’t made it up to the UP yet. Born there, but not raised there. Nine months of winter; three months of bad ice. I’ve still got family up there.
Number one also sucks because: the Joy of Sex aside, haven’t we propagated the species quite enough? How many more people do we need before we have the requisite number of people driving 55mph in the left-hand lane with their turn signal on? This crap about replacement rates is one of the many, many reasons why Pat Buchanan doesn’t have a penguin’s chance in an orca pod of getting my vote.
I don’t know Slartibartfast,
Faced with an enourmous overpopulation of aging baby-boomers world-wide, most of whom will require far more care than we have the ability to provide, there will come a time in the near future when people will be wondering why there are not enough people around to care for all the over-populated aging baby-boomers while at the same time providing miltary defense, innovative technology, maintaining and building infrastructure, run small business and big corporations etc, etc, etc.
Since females live longer than males I predict that a high number of females who are convinced that Big Government Daddy is going to take care of them in their old age are going to awaken one day to question which idiots convinced our society the that abortion practice was a wise idea. Millions of aged childless, unprepared females hanging around in bed singing ‘where have all the flowers gone’ will be heard by a generation which has been taught only to satisify simple narcissitic self-pleasures. Do you really believe the next generation of young NOW feminists will give up their boob jobs so that NOW’s old ladies can be provided with care?
As less and less people have children, it becomes harder for societies to learn how to raise them properly. One reason why young females today feel comfortable in having two or three abortions is because their mentors have shown them that it is easier to abort than to breed.
Common-sense, not Pat Buchanan, has convinced me that the next thirty years are going to place an enormous strain upon the under-populated X- generation and it will not be just the strain of high taxation.
I suppose the sayings are true, ‘what comes around goes around’ and ‘we reap what we sow’.
BoDiddley
A quibble with your statement:
Absolutely! I’ve argued this point several times on my own blog.
Ah. Please do reflect on that because what makes something moral/immoral IS CONTEXT. A singular behavior or act is morally neutral without context.
IE an act sexual intercourse…Moral? Immoral? One cannot make such a determination until the context of the act is determined. There is world of moral difference between making love and rape.
It may be a moot point for the moment but the issue will resurface, you can bet on it.
That being said: it appears the intent of the legislation is to regulate the process of in vitro fertilization and the legal rights of its issuance in cases where neither parent (or single parent, as the case may be) has contributed genetic material using current adoption law as a model. There may some rough edges on this proposed legislation, but as an interested party (one international adoption completed, another one started) it appears that the bill sponsors are actually doing the job that many legislators refuse to do: formulate legislation to clarify rights and responsibilities for citizens engaging in certain controversial activities and for those affected by it (the children) before the courts can get their hands on it. They are to be applauded for their foresight.
Or to put it another way, if my wife and I are to be forced to undergo multiple financial, social and psychological anal probes along with multiple fingerprint and background checks, not to mention the sheer hell that the foreign government (which shall remain unnamed) and the U.S. Embassy (who insist on multiple, highly degrading interviews with the birth mother) inflict on the birth mother, all in the name of protecting the baby’s birth and human rights, I fail to see the problem with a few speed bumps for those who wish to procure non-genetically related children using a different method.
A correction:
1) In adoption cases, the children are wards of the state – the state has a responsibility to ensure foster parents are suitable before transferring custody. This isn’t the case with physician-assisted technology, so the standards and requirements shouldn’t apply.
That may be the case for foster children whose biological parents have had their parental rights terminated or are truly orphaned. Infant adoptions in the U.S. are almost exlusively of children who are not wards of the state. The same can be said for international adoptions in countries that have not acceded to the Hague Convention, although that does not necessarily mean that children adopted from Hague Convention countries are wards of the state, either.
Oh, but the generation after that, not having nearly as many of the genX-ers to take care of, should be just fine. Somehow the idea that people might be inconvenienced in the short term isn’t inducing me to go out and reproducing as much as possible (which, for me, isn’t exactly an option, but I’m generalizing) to accomplish a short-term fix at the expense of pretty much everything in the long term. Which, granted, we’re not exactly on the top of the list of countries that could stand to cut back a bit.
I’ve got two adopted kids that were never wards of the state. It’s unclear that China even has such a thing, though.
Darleen,
Step one is not to separate the two points. I was saying that someone who self-defines “right” and “wrong” as entirely dependent upon context can’t grasp that there’s a gap between “legal” and “right.”
I also qualified the latter part of my statement, in an acknowledgement that some words and deeds are dependent upon context, while others are not. This is true particularly when a very generic word is chosen, rather than a word that’s more specific to the nature of the action (intercourse/rape, kill/murder, etc.). But it is inaccurate to claim that every action must needs be considered in its context to judge whether it was wrong or right, as absolutes do exist. It’s wrong to lie in any context. It’s wrong to steal for any reason.
The other complicating factor comes in when people re-define the words to imply wrongdoing, such as Sheehan claiming that Bush “murdered” her son. GWB didn’t personally kill him, nor was he criminally involved in any malicious plot to kill him. She’s assigning a definition to the word that doesn’t exist, in an attempt to vilify an action (declaring war on Iraq) that is legally acceptable, and quite honestly, morally right (although it’s the topic of much debate) that indirectly led to her son’s death.
If a person is left to rationalize through use of context any given action, the idea of things being right and wrong goes away, replaced with phrases like “right for me” and “right for you.” One major symptom of this philosophy is equivocating less civilized societies with societies of developed nations, considering the practices of those primitive societies justified, regardless of how vile those practices may be (don’t call them “wrong” just because they do things differently). Perhaps the most flagrant display of this is in teaching that in bringing civilization to the New World, Westerners destroyed the Indians’ culture. In this light, bringing civilization to savages is destructive. This idea tears at the very foundational elements of civilization.
As a semi-personal question, at what age were you first presented with the question (perhaps in a classroom environment) whether it was ok to steal food to feed your child? For the sake of my point, I’m going to assume that like most folks, you were first confronted with that dilemma at an early age. If you happened to have missed it through your fomative years, the distinction between people in New Orleans “looting” for food and those “looting” jewelry indicates that much of the country has been very well indoctrinated in relativism. Doesn’t that say something about the religion of pragmatism that has permeated our society? Would I let my child starve, rather than resort to stealing food? Certainly not, but I also wouldn’t try to make an argument that because of the circumstances, it wasn’t wrong to take what isn’t rightfully mine.
TW: “island”
no man is
BoDiddly
I disagree with you. Many Gentiles in WWII “lied” when they hid Jews. If you saw the movie Schindler’s list you saw a basically immoral cad, Oscar Schindler, become a more moral man during the course of the film as he LIED to protect “his” Jews.
“Murder” is the death of one person at the hands of another in a specific context. Murder is immoral. Self-defense is moral. Both involve killing. Just because Mommy Sheehan deliberately misuses the word “murder” in order to paint GW as “immoral” doesn’t mean we should abandon using our brains in assessing context to a fundamentalist approach to morality. Indeed, Mommy Sheehan and her cohorts ARE DOING JUST THAT, by trying to make moral equivalents out of American soldiers and Islamist terrorists. For them, it’s all “death” and Americans are even MORE immoral by refusing to see they are exactly like terrorists.
I’m old enough I never got the “steal food” question in school. However, I’m also old enough to remember the profound affect that JFK’s assassination, RFK’s assassination and the Six-day War had on me.
Darleen, you are confusing how wrong something is with whether it is wrong at all. It is always wrong to lie, or steal, or kill. That it is less wrong to lie (to protect Jews) than to assist in murder (their fate if you told the truth) is obvious; you are conflating this with the lie being therefore moral when it is simply less immoral than the alternative.
The “situational ethics” that so many schools taught for the last 30 or so years has severely degraded our national moral compass.
Is is less wrong to lie to do a MORAL good?
It was not only a MORAL good that Gentiles lied in defiance of their government, that others DID NOT engage in such a moral good makes those others only a little less immoral then those that turned Jews in.
While it may be shown that most contexts involving the deliberate telling of an untruth as immoral that doesn’t mean those instances where it was moral are irrelevant.
I am NOT arguing situation ethics at all. There is a basic moral standard—that we act decently to one another. (even as this is the basic tenet of ethical monotheism, one doesn’t have to be religious to hold it). Behavior that either furthers or erodes that standard is moral in the first instance, immoral in the second.
If I kill someone in selfdefense it doesn’t make me only “a little less immoral” than the BTK murderer.
And, you state That it is less wrong to lie (to protect Jews) than to assist in murder (their fate if you told the truth)
WTF is THAT about?? Jews as proper victims of GENOCIDE???
I hope to hell I’m misreading you.
Sheesh.
Please quote me in the entirety, Darleen – my statement was “That it is less wrong to lie (to protect Jews) than to assist in murder (their fate if you told the truth) is obvious”. Leaving out the parentheticals for the sake of clarity, I stated, “That it is less wrong to lie than to assist in murder is obvious”. Clear enough?
If you’re really that interested, I’ll be glad to explain your moral/less immoral conflation error in greater detail, but it’s a faily involved process. Perhaps it’s best if we simply disagree.
Darleen, it’s just as I closed my comment.
I wouldn’t let my child starve to avoid the wrongdoing of stealing food, but I wouldn’t call it “right” just because I did it for a “good reason.”
Perhaps you misunderstood my killing/murder reference, as it pertains to Sheehan. My point is that you can’t make a blanket statement whether “killing” is wrong, because it must be further defined by context. “Murder” however, is specific enough that the definition of the word itself lends enough context for evaluation. That said, I was referring to the violence people such as Sheehan do to the language by “redefining” such terms such that they should no longer carry the connotation that allows such a straightforward evaluation.
You say that you are old enough that you were never asked that question in school, but you seem to be a product of that school of thought. There are absolute wrongs. To deny that is to take the first step down the slippery slope to “absolute relativism” (I know–an oxymoron) in which everything is justifiable by its context, or anything can be declared wrong by its context.
Joe and BoDiddley
You both seem to claim that someTHING, an absolute act or behavior can and of itself, be ALWAYS and ABSOLUTELY WRONG/IMMORAL devoid of context.
Ok. Substantiate your assertion. Give me an act DEVOID OF CONTEXT that is absolutely immoral.
Bo, as you admitted above, murder IS a contextual act…. IE the death of one person at the hands of another within the context of deliberate, unconsented (and most times violent) taking.
I consider myself a student of ethical monotheism, so this is something I have taken great pains and time to reflect on. I also believe in trying to be very precise with my language.
Darleen, I hate to split hairs (even with your attention to linguistic precision), but your ues of the word “absolute” is loaded. To accurately address your question, you must define “absolutely immoral” as either “purely immoral” or “inarguably immoral.”
Let me illustrate this way. A little cyanide in a drink is deadly. A drink that is 100% cyanide is deadly, too. Both are deadly, but only one is “pure” poison.
If your burden of proof is such that an act must be purely immoral to meet your definition, then it is truly difficult to fathom even one act that by context couldn’t be argued “partly” moral. Murder you say? What if someone is holding your family hostage, and their ransom is your cold-blooded murder of an innocent person?
On the other hand, if you accept that lying is immoral, regardless of context, but that it may be the “lesser of two evils” in a given circumstance, we have no point left to argue, as we both would be in agreement that there are absolute moral codes at work. Lying is wrong, but causing the death of an innocent by not lying is more wrong. The context doesn’t sidestep the “wrongness” of lying, but illustrates that a worse wrong would have been committed by not lying.
I’ll try to clarify the two sides of the argument. One says that nearly every act can be contextualized to reflect morality. The other says that some acts are never moral, though in a given situation may be the lesser of two evils. The first view lends itself to sometimes wild interpretations of “morality,” always dependent upon the viewpoint of the analyist; the second view places everything in its own category, according to a strict moral code, but acknowledges that in an imperfect world that code is a goal to work towards, not an absolute way of life.
Another way to look at your holocaust example: To lie is wrong. To not lie not only puts the blood of innocents on your hands, but also aids commission of theft, abuse, and other forms of mistreatment. It’s the choice between one wrong and many. Don’t attempt to deny the wrong you commit, but don’t dwell upon it either, because the alternative was more wrong.
Well said, Bodiddly. It is ALWAYS WRONG (IMMORAL) to lie, or steal, or kill. You can add to these the other Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins. These acts are ALWAYS IMMORAL. The degree of immorality is determined by the context, but context does not transform an immoral act into a moral one.
Another example: let’s say you kill someone in self defense, and stipulate that there is no other way you could have defended yourself except by killing the other person. While this context reduces the degree of immorality to a neutral state (ie, not wrong or evil), it does not make the killing moral (ie right, or good).
The same applies to the ‘stealing bread to feed your starving children’ example. The theft is still immoral, though the context reduces the degree thereof.