Confused Arguments



This is disappointing but not surprising. Like Americans generally, the President seems unfamiliar with the process of making ethical decisions on new questions. People who find themselves in this position may be perfectly decent folks, but they lack training in an important skill. Sometimes that shows.

Bush and his advisors have repeatedly insisted that this was not a political decision for him. No doubt the President is sincere about that. Still, it ended up taking the classic form of a political compromise: Split the difference between two opposed points of view — surely everybody can live with that! Insider accounts of how the decision was reached seem to bear this out.

To call this a compromise is not to berate the man. Being a politician, compromise is what he knows and takes for granted as a fair and reasonable way of settling questions, including ethical ones.

Let there be no mistake either — we would have gotten a worse result from a President Gore. Bush opted for the least evil of the evil options he faced (although he passed up an ethically good option: expanded funding for research on non-embryonic cells). By contrast it’s reasonable to think Gore would have let the more permissive Clinton policy stand.

If this episode did nothing else, it reminded us that Americans don’t agree on when human life begins. I do not mean to belittle those good people for whom the personhood of the unborn from the very start is virtually a matter of faith, but from an authentic ethical perspective the question isn’t very important.

Let me cite some authorities in support of that.

St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that the unborn did not receive human souls until some time after conception — 40 days in the case of males, 80 days in the case of females. He judged abortion at any time from conception on a grave moral evil nevertheless.

Paul Ramsey, a Protestant ethicist who may have been the most distinguished American moral thinker of the 20th century, concluded that wherever the personhood line is drawn, to kill the unborn “after that point will, by definition, be murder, while before that point … would fall under some other species of sin or grave violation.”

Reflecting on “all these distinctions and theories about when germinating life becomes human,” Ramsey remarked, “From an authentic religious point of view none of them matters very much.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran theologian who was executed near the end of World War II, called the destruction of the embryo “a violation of the right to live, which God has bestowed upon this nascent life.”

“To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of life. And that is nothing but murder,” Bonhoeffer wrote.

There was a time when people thought clearly about these things. But not today. The solution is to re-establish a consensus grounded in natural law. Pending that, we can expect more murky, confused arguments with ethically unacceptable results like the one we have had on stem cells. Now, there’s a really depressing thought.


(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)

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Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC. He is the author of more than twenty books and previously served as secretary for public affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference.

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