Abortion and tribal disagreement
Although it has moderated somewhat since the days of my youth, I think it’s still quite fair to say that the abortion debate is one of the most intense in modern American politics. For instance, there seems to be a large number of “single-issue voters” for whom this is their single issue. Since it’s quite certainly a life-or-death issue, I understand why it draws such attention. However, I don’t understand why so many pro-lifers/pro-choicers think that pro-choicers/pro-lifers are necessarily evil. Thinking that getting the right answer on a certain question is important does not mean that you have to think that people who disagree with you are wicked or stupid.
For example, if I walk up to you and your friend on the street and tell you that I have placed a nuclear bomb in the center of Manhattan that I will detonate unless you can tell me whether the number I’m thinking of is even or odd, I’m quite sure both of you will think that getting the answer right is important, but neither of you would think the other evil for wanting to take either guess. When the right answer is hard to come by, getting it right isn’t an indictment of one’s moral compass.
Hence, I’m taken aback by some of the commentary (here and here, for example) about the Mercatus Center’s recent state-by-state freedom rankings. While the writers do criticize some other aspects of the ranking methodology, it’s clear that they really want to take the Mercatus Center to task for ignoring abortion rights in their calculation. Apparently, Mercatus left it out because they think it’s a sufficiently difficult issue about which even libertarians can disagree with one another. (They also don’t include death penalty data in their calculation, but their data on both can be found here.) This makes perfect sense. It’s much better to leave such a factor out of your general metric. People that really, really care one way or the other can look at the raw data and factor it in the way they want. (And in fact, whatever else you might think about the Mercatus Center, they do a good job presenting the data, especially by including a “personal rank” feature that lets you adjust the weights of various issues to generate your own map.)
By my earlier reasoning, one can only sensibly level such harsh criticism against Mercatus for this exclusion if the abortion question is an easy one. Hence, I’d like to take this chance to stress that it is most decidedly not an easy issue. At least, it’s not an easy issue against the backdrop of the average American’s beliefs about abortion. Here are two things that most people agree on:
- destroying an embryo is not murder, and
- destroying a fetus 2 weeks before its due date is most decidedly murder, perhaps the worst kind.
During a relatively short period of time, our opinion about what is morally permissible changes as much as such an opinion could. For the specific debate in the US, you can replace #1 with
- destroying a fetus less than 3 months old is not murder
Who is so confident in his understanding of what level of development constitutes valuable life that he can comfortably draw the line somewhere between 3 and 9 months but basically insult someone who draws it somewhere before 3 months? Someone way, way too confident in our understanding of the brain might try to cite some arcane neuroscience here, but that’s just stupid. First, as I already indicated, such an argument supposes that we understand the brain way better than we do. Second, if the location of “the line” could indeed be so precisely estimated, we would expect cries to update the law constantly with neuroscientific advances. (“Oh, oh, new study out of U of M, we can push it back two weeks!”)
Critics’ strong reaction to Mercatus’s decision here is clearly rooted in something more than their mere disagreement over abortion ethics. Guards and prisoners, perhaps?