At the risk of further inflaming emotions on both sides, and knowing that there's no real need to spill yet more words out into the internet debate, I'm going to write down here what I think about two recent items in the news that some are linking together (mainly in order to call their opponents hypocrites), based on the admittedly incomplete and biased material that I have read so far by clicking through on friends' posts in social media.
Dead Lions - the story is, a Minnesota dentist paid for the opportunity to hunt and kill and lion and bring back parts of it as a trophy. However, the people he paid lured a protected lion out of a reserve, and so the lion he ended up killing was a beloved local celebrity, whom researchers had tagged and had been following for many years. The dentist released a statement that everything about the hunt was legal, but the storm of indignation and protest has made him close his dental office and go into hiding.
Dead Babies - some people posed as medical researchers, and recorded a conversation with a high-ranking person at Planned Parenthood, discussion procurement of fetal tissue from the abortions that Planned Parenthood performs, to use for research.
I think these have flamed up so intensely because the people outraged by the one or the other happen to fall on opposite sides of the political spectrum we have today.
I, though, have the advantage of a Ph.D. in Philosophy, which I remember a professor of mine once referred to as the Philosopher's "license to practice", plus I attended as a student and taught as a TA many ethics courses, so I do have some thoughts about these topics, and although I know I won't untangle them completely, I'm going to write them down.
Okay, so after having extensively broken my own rule of not apologizing for a speech before you give it, here we go.
The abortion topic - in practical terms, I think, as clearly we all think, that life begins at birth. That's the date and time they put on your birth certificate, that's when you legally get a name and start to exist. However, everything from the moment of conception is a potential person, and it's no good trying to act like it's not. When I was studying, and around lots more people who were having sex without intending to start a family with anyone, the phenomenon of unwanted pregnancy was much more top of mind for me, In my own mind, as I tried to sort out my own views on when abortion was permissible, I came to think that if you had not intended to create a baby, then it was up to you to decide whether to continue with the pregnancy or not (however, having seen a number of my male friends' lives devastated, I did think that both parents should have a veto, and continuation should take two yesses). However, if you had intentionally tried to get pregnant and create a new life, then you had the obligation to take whatever you got. So I was not a fan of terminations due to a genetic disorder, like Down's Syndrome or Spina Bifida or whatever. And I had read lots and lots of testimonials of parents of Down's Syndrome children who talked about the deep joy they brought to everyone in their world, and of people who themselves had been born with Spina Bifida and were grown up and living full lives and valued their own birth very much. Every human life is equally valuable, and the ground of ethical behavior is to preserve and flourish human experience, and so if you meant to have a baby, you should love your disabled baby.
However, this, what I thought was morally sustainable and intuitively comfortable view on abortion fell to pieces when I learned that in the course of in vitro fertilization, often multiple fertilized eggs are implanted, and then the pregnancy is reduced to like one or two, however many babies the woman feels she can handle. (When the woman gets to this point and morally blinks, and cannot go through with giving up some of those potential babies, then you get John and Kate Plus Eight). I was appalled at this fact, but no one else seems to mind it at all. Women who go through in vitro processes in order to be mothers are held up as the most heroic and virtuous people on the planet. They have invested and gone through lots of trouble to fulfill the ultimate role of being a woman, which is to give birth to a child from your own body, made out of your own parts and those of the one you love (of course there's surrogacy and sperm donation and things, but I feel like those folks are less universally launded and held up as heroes, which is why I'm limiting it to couples using own egg, own sperm). But getting there, on the very obvious path to intentionally creating a child and bringing it into the world, these very heroes do away with other potential babies.
So, my view fell to pieces, and I stopped thinking you could ever get a morally distinct line you could draw between when it's okay and when it's not okay. And I have come to the practical view that probably nobody thinks abortion is a good thing, but sometimes having a baby at a particular time can devastate a life, and so the option should be there.
Okay, so from that position of retreat, what do I think about Planned Parenthood's actions? I did see a piece online that tried to mount a vigorous denial of the claims by the people who posed as researchers and launched the protest, that the claims were not true, Planned Parenthood is not profiting from the sale of baby parts. I clicked through and read the details and they were that PP was not profiting, because the money they received barely cover their costs.
This seems to miss the point entirely. The margins that PP is making or not making doesn't weigh in at all. What people are up in arms about is that baby parts and money are changing hands. At all.
PP says that what they're doing is facilitating the patient's choice to donate fetal tissue from the procedure, which is a good thing. But if you follow the money, the money is coming from neither the patient, or some sponsor of the patient, or PP itself, it's coming from the research facilities who are taking delivery of the fetal tissue. That is buying. That is selling. That is what is making everyone so upset, because human beings should not be bought and sold, even formerly potential human beings. However, I wonder what the model is for donation of cadavers for medical research - of former actual human beings - and if it is structured the same way? Or former parts of still actually living human beings, like amputated limbs or removed tumors? Everyone thinks medical research is important. We want to facilitate it, to help actual presently living human beings more and more. So, as long as body parts for research are traded the same way no matter who the parts came from, no one should object, but we should probably look at it across the board and make sure it feels more like "donation"and not like "buying" and "selling".
Okay, so on to dead lions. The factors about killing that weigh in to this story are whether it is wrong to kill any animal - as a committed meat eater I can't lean on that principle. Whether it is wrong to hunt for pleasure - I am a bit more down with that, I am against causing suffering to another creature for one's entertainment, from bullying to torture to murder. But if you're pro-sport hunting, there's still the principle that you shouldn't hunt protected animals of whom there are very few left. And it's definitely not sportsmanlike, whether morally right or wrong, to bait an animal to walk right in front of you so you can stand very still and shoot it. That doesn't seem like hunting to me, that's just target practice.
But the very worst of all, and here we're just in an empirical realm, is that it is always bad to kill a creature that another human being cares about. Even if you live in a society that eats cows, if a person has a pet cow, with a name and an ongoing relationship and everything, you shouldn't kill that cow, possibly because it's a wrong to the cow, but undeniably because it will hurt the person.
I can't find any independent objective metaphysical difference between the one cow and the other cow, on which we can draw our distinction, and in a society that eats meat you probably have the right to kill any cow you want, but even though it's just as morally permissible as something that happens in a slaughterhouse, you still shouldn't do it. So, in the same way, if a lion has a name and whole large nation of people have a relationship with it, you shouldn't kill it, because it has really hurt those people. The dentist's "But it was all done legally!" holds no weight at all. "I kill lions all the time! It was never a problem before!" will not help his case. He needs to apologize just as you would if you accidentally ran over your neighbor's dog. "Oh, my God, I'm so, so sorry, I didn't realize, I didn't mean to." He needs to apologize just as you would if you just shot your neighbor's dog, for fun. Although I can't fathom how one could actually apologize for something like that, so maybe there's no helping this dentist.
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