John Derbyshire strikes again--this time on abortion

NOTE: This post has been moved back to the top because of the ongoing discussion in the comments section.

John Derbyshire once again admits of a subject he knows nothing about that he knows nothing about it--and then goes on to talk about it authoritatively. This is the man who reviewed Ben Stein's movie on Intelligent Design without actually seeing it--a feat that he apparently felt comfortable performing on the movie made by someone he claimed to know despite the fact that he had never met him.

This is an approach he also used on John Milton's birthday to discuss Paradise Lost, which he admitted he didn't actually read.

This time Derbyshire directs his lack of knowledge toward the abortion issue. "The whole 'right to life' business is over my head," he says today on his blog Secular Right. "I don't even know what it means," a judgment he then goes on to demonstrate in the rest of his post.

If I fall down the basement steps and break my neck tomorrow, what happened to my “right to life”? I do of course have the legal right to expect that, if somebody wilfully kills me, he will be punished (by the death penalty, if it’s up to me — no inconsistency here!) I’d extend the same privilege to a new-born baby. Back beyond that — five minutes, or five months before the baby is born — the mother is rather intimately involved (and the father somewhat less so), and you are in a different situation.

The assumption, of course, is that the mother is not "rather intimately involved" after the baby is born--the point at which Derbyshire thinks it should be protected with the full force of the law, as opposed to "five minutes" before, at which point it's fair game. Exactly what is the difference other than geographical location? And why should that matter?

I have no patience with the angels-on-pin-heads logic-chopping about “when life begins.”

Well, that's pretty obvious. In fact, Derbyshire seems not to understand the difference between the chopping of logic and the simple application of it--something else that seems to be over his head.

Without a moral metaphysic and a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.

As one of the commenters on the post observed, if he doesn't believe in ensoulment, then why should he care about the life of a baby after it's born any more than he does before it is born?

The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting to normal people, including me. As with other such acts — the eating of corpses, for example — an organized society needs some consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing but those widespread common emotions — disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for unconditional abortion up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the laws.

How can you view the killing of embryos and fetuses "intrinically" disturbing and disgusting to people, unless you have a "moral metaphysic"? And why, outside of some moral metaphysic, can you rationally prefer public consensus as the manner in which this issue should be resolved over any other resolution to the problem? Maybe if you have abandoned the application of reason to something, that's the only thing left.

Worthy and admirable civilizations can co-exist with all sorts of attitudes to fetuses, and even to newborns. The ancient Athenians exposed unwanted babies on the Acropolis. Were they not civilized? Abortion has been a human universal everywhere, among civilizations high and low, and also among primitives.

So has slavery.

And what do the right-to-lifers want? A total nationwide ban on all abortions, at any time? Yes, that seems to be what they want. Do they really imagine that’s going to happen? What a waste of political energy!

Yes, I'm sure the abolitionists could have been accused at some points of being in the same position.

...as an intellectual construct, [the right to life argument] loses most of its point once you drop ensoulment.

Yup. And so does any acknowledgment of human rights.

I wish, though, that some of the time and energy that conservatives give to thinking about fetuses could be diverted to real problems of governance.

And why are these "real problems of governance" any more amenable to rational treatment than the issue of abortion?

Yes, I know the arguments to the contrary. I never heard a non-believer make them, though.

It's fairly evident that he doesn't know the arguments to the contrary, and what difference would it make if no non-believers make such arguments? And anyway, non-believers have made these arguments. Has he really never heard of Nat Hentoff?

Of course not--one of the many pieces of evidence that this issue is over Derbyshire's head.

John Derbyshire, Moral Philosopher

At his blog, Secular Right, John Derbyshire is currently wrestling with the abortion problem, and the abortion problem seems to be winning. In a previous attempt at moral philosophy, Derbyshire reduced morality to a "common consensus" based on emotion:

The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting to normal people, including me. As with other such acts — the eating of corpses, for example — an organized society needs some consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing but those widespread common emotions — disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for unconditional abortion up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the laws.

According to this view of morality there is no position from which one can criticize any action or societal condition which commands cultural consensus. Unfortunately, this leaves us a little morally defenseless against things like slavery, or racial discrimination, or oppression in any form. I suppose someone could argue that there is no consensus in these cases, since slaves themselves, or oppressed groups, do not support their oppression. But the exclusion of parties harmed by a societal condition being excluded from the consense could hardly be a rebuttal of this point for Derbyshire, since he is excluding the unborn from his consensus when it comes to abortion.

And of course under this view you couldn't argue that there was some moral imperative to change the consensus, since, according to Derbyshire, the only moral imperative comes from the consensus itself.

Derbyshire expands on his emotive theory in another post, now positing a "module":

[W]e have, as part of our mental equipment, a module that, for any other human being, computes a sort of “potential-for-accumulating-experience” quotient, and assigns the human being a value on that basis. This module likely only kicks in when confronted with an observable human being, though. Probably our brains just didn’t evolve to have valuation modules for embryos and fetuses, which we didn’t much encounter until recently. Following on from that, I’d guess that much of the salience of the abortion issue in modern life is driven by the good-quality medical imaging that’s become available in recent decades. I’d guess, in fact, that really good quality imaging of fetuses, if cheaply and widely available, would lead to public demands for earlier limits on legal abortion terms. The theocons can metaphysic all they want, but further policy/legal changes in this zone will likely be driven by things we can see and hear, and by the effects those things have on our emotions. Metaphysics butters no parsnips.

Where this "module" is in your "mental equipment" is somewhat mysterious, as is the exact evidence for the assertion in the first place, although Derbyshire seems to know an awful lot about it. The only evidence for the existence of this "module" appears to be the fact that these "emotions," which somehow, inexplicably, constitute an ought, exist.

Such is the moral philosophy you end up with when you reject metaphysics--and when you start viewing human beings as simply advanced computers complete with components and computational capabilities. One wonders why advanced computers have any rights at all, whether they can "compute" emotions or not.

What, other than the existence of a soul, makes human beings any more worthy of respect than animals--or computers?

Enquiry Concerning Human Misunderstanding: John Derbyshire's new blog

Is that a smirk I see on David Hume's face? Yes it is. He has just read John Derbyshire's new blog, Secular Right, and he is trying not to laugh.

Derbyshire, the National Review writer who earlier this year reviewed Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed without actually seeing it, has a new blog: "Secular Right: Reality & Reason". Derbyshire and his colleagues will presumably be blogging there about other things of which they have no direct experience.

Reality and reason, for example.

The Derbyshire Method of addressing issues apparently is already in evidence at Secular Right, where in its very first post, on its "What is the Secular Right" page, this comment appears:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

But in the very first comment on the post, "Dan" remarks:

I am somewhat amused. Hume’s whole moral-political thought as premised on precisely the rejection of the ancient way of thinking. On Hume’s view, there is exactly no such thing as genuine human flourishing.

Jeesh.

And then the wheels continue to fall off.

One of the contributors to Secular Right is Razib Khan, a science writer whose pseudonym for purposes of the blog is "David Hume." Khan has several posts about the dangers of scepticism about science--this from someone using the name of a man who spent a whole book arguing against the rationality of inductive reasoning.

Obviously Khan hasn't actually read Hume. Are we surprised? This is John Derbyshire's blog, remember.

This is going to fun.