What’s Wrong with the World

Another possible resolution of the contradiction: customary duties to help the disabled, say, climb a flight of stairs imposed on healthy people's individual autonomy.

Destroying those customary duties made it more likely that solicitude for the weak and the dependent would weaken.

(Businesses are often denied autonomy in this view, but the net result is an increase in autonomy so imposing ADA restrictions is okay.)

Lydia, I'm inclined to agree. I would only add that though the instrumental use of the disabled is no doubt primarily a Liberal phenomenon, I can't help but wonder if whether the reduction of the disabled isn't more than that. It seems to me we all have to fight the false god of perfectionism, both in ourselves and in the public realm. It seems to me the Church will have to do the heavy lifting now more than ever in vigorously defending the value of human life against all comers.

I think you've put your finger on something here, Lydia, but perhaps there's dissonance on the flip side too. The majority of women who find out they're carrying an embryo with a disability may opt for a termination. So, should women be deprived of relevant information and antenatal testing outlawed? Because then you'd have government micromanaging of ordinary women's decisions on a level rather more intimate and intrusive compared to workplace regulation.

If it's a good thing to make sure that every embryo with a disability gets born irrespective of what the woman pregnant with it thinks, then who should bear the cost? It sounds sensible that disabled people capable of gainful employment shouldn't be discriminated against, anyway.

I see ZERO inconsistency. Not even a tension.

How about this: some people freely choose to live with disabilities or give birth to children with disabilities. Those disabled individual's lives should not be made worse as a consequence of their disability, so we have the ADA.

Others will choose differently. Some people will sign DNRs, because they don't like the thought of living with a disability. Others don't like the thought of bringing into being a child that is disabled, so there's an option open to them, too.

Isn't this just a case of giving people options? Where's the tension?

Where's the tension?

A) Aborting Down Syndrome babies is killing people with disabilities. It's bizarre to get up in arms over the fact that a twenty-five-year-old disabled man has trouble ordering pizza because of a lack of accommodation but to care nothing about the fact that a twenty-week-old disabled child is torn limb from limb as a _direct_ consequence of his mother's not wanting him because of his disability.

B) "Signing a DNR" is not the same as being actively terminated. Telling disabled people that, because of their disabilities, we think it particularly understandable that they should want to be killed sends a message that we think their lives with disabilities less meaningful and less worth living than our lives without.

Kevin Jones, could you say more? I'm not entirely following. How does what you describe resolve the tension I describe?

Tod:

Here's the tension. The grounds for treating the handicapped with respect is that they are intrinsically valuable beings by nature and thus are deserving of our concern and care. The grounds for treating them as beings that can be killed without any public justification for whatsoever is that they are not intrinsically valuable beings by nature and thus are not deserving of our concern and respect.

Google Malcolm Muggeridge's essay The Great Liberal Death Wish.

I have no problem understanding liberals, having been one myself. Unlike other former liberals, Lawrence Auster for instance, I don't condemn liberals or their philosophy as Evil or anti-human. So allow me to enlighten you all with my great wisdom.

Tod is exactly right: there's no inconsistency, not even any tension. Liberals believe the following. (1) Fetuses are ontologically different from born humans and therefore do not have the same moral claims on us. (2) Human physical and emotional suffering are great evils, much worse than traditional Christians think they are (because Christians believe in eternal life and in a divine purpose for suffering). Therefore, (3) death is sometimes better than suffering. Furthermore, (4) adults have the right as autonomous persons to decide to end their lives in some cases of suffering. In the case of non-autonomous persons (e.g. children), ending another's life of suffering can often be an act of love.

Lydia fails to see that liberals do not view abortion as "killing people"; see (1) above. A few honest pro-choicers like Camille Paglia admit that, but they're an exception.

Francis Beckwith's mistake is to attribute to liberals the justification that handicapped people "are not intrinsically valuable beings by nature and thus are not deserving of our concern and respect." This is not the liberal justification of suicide and euthanasia in cases of suffering. The justification is love: the desire to end the suffering of a loved one. In terms of policy, the justification is compassion.

Lydia's idea that the handicapped are just a stalking horse for liberal control freaks is totally out of left field. There exist a few control freaks, and bureaucracies famously have their own logic of increasing their scope and power. But liberals in general (not just "some individual liberals") are motivated by concern and compassion for the handicapped, not by a will to control. If you've got any direct evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

Oh yeah, and what's so ridiculous about the Supreme Court deciding the essence of golf? I assume they were deciding whether some general law for the handicapped applied to golf courses in particular. It may be ridiculous to legislate handicapped access in the first place, but given that law the question seems pretty reasonable. Isn't that what jurists do?

I think Aaron's right: the essence of liberalism is wholesale compassion or, as Kenneth Minogue says, goodwill turned doctrinaire. It's a secular attitude that seeks to standardize suffering and relieve it by impartial mechanisms.

Killing the physically disabled, sometimes by consent but 'for their own good', is a liberal duty.

Killing the physically disabled, sometimes by consent but 'for their own good', is a liberal duty.

I detect, Alex, in your comment a bitterness (which I share) at the ideas in question. For some reason I don't detect this in Aaron's.

Killing with kindness. Who was it that said something to the effect that when we base our policies on sentiment we end up with the gas chambers? I had thought it was Ayn Rand (of all people), but Google doesn't seem to support me.

Aaron, of course--The pro-aborts don't admit that the unborn child is a person. I would note two things: First, defining those you want to kill with impunity as non-persons, in the face of extremely strong evidence to the contrary, is...unpleasant. Second, please note how often we are told that at least we should allow abortion past some point in pregnancy in cases of disability in the unborn child. So...it isn't _just_ that the fetus is defined as a non-person. It's that the disabled fetus is considered even more killable than the healthy fetus of the same stage of development.

Aaron, you seem unfamiliar with the Supreme Court case. It concerned whether, in a high level golf competition, a particular competitor with a disability must be permitted to use a golf cart. Golf carts were generally prohibited. The idea was that the general athleticism and endurance involved in walking the course as well as hitting the ball (when partly fatigued by walking the course) was part of what the competition was about. The SCOTUS decided instead that he must be accommodated with a golf cart because walking the course was not of the essence of the game. If this does not seem to you to be trivial-minded busy-bodying into the legitimate determination of athletic standards by an athletic organization, I cannot help you.

As for killing disabled children out of love and kindness, that _should_ creep you out. It's the sort of "kindness" that a normal understanding of love and kindness should preclude. The "love and kindness" that makes us demand special accommodation for Tracy Latimer if she ends up making job applications but allows us to shrug when her father "kindly" gases her to death through his truck window is an extremely twisted sort of love and kindness.

Lydia,

Did you delete my comment?

Nope. I'll go look for it backstage. Maybe it included three links or more.

Mike T., I can't find it anywhere. It's a mystery.

In further response to Aaron, I think there are a lot of other things to note about this supposed "love" the pro-euthanasia crowd bears towards the disabled. Here are just a few:

The contemptuous way severely cognitively disabled people are spoken of. "She's just a vegetable." "She's actually dead already." And so forth. This does not bespeak love.

The repeated question raised as to whether such people have "meaningful lives"--if so, we should hesitate to kill them or to let them kill themselves. If not, less hesitation is required. This is bigotry. This is the way one would speak of a pet or other animal without intrinsic human worth.

The strange and suspicious willingness to assimilate disability to suffering. Latimer exaggerated his daughter's suffering. His fans were happy to believe him. Why? Does it not seem plausible that we are willingly conflating our perception of "loss of dignity" with their experiencing "irremediable suffering," thus justifying putting people out of an entirely invented "misery" or "terrible pain"?

This irrationality becomes especially noteworthy when talking about people who have been diagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state." On the one hand we are told that they feel nothing and know nothing. On the other hand there is the question, "Why not just let him die?" "Who would want to live that way?" "Can you imagine what it would be like to live that way?" And so forth. This is not rational. This is not love. This is not compassion.

@Lydia: A lot these people are stuck with the following tension. On the one hand, they aren't morally monstrous enough to think that "taking care of X prevents me from obtaining certain very desirable goods" is a sufficient reason to think "X should not live". But those are exactly the reasons which are operative, either at an individual level when people want to get rid of a child or elderly or disabled person that will cramp their style, or at the collective level when we start prescribing borderline fatal doses of painkillers to sick elderly because "we" can't afford to pay for their continued existence. There is a selfish, entitled mindset that loathes the thought of being inconvenienced by unwanted children, handicapped children, disabled, elderly. But these seem people know that they need a morally respectable reason to wash their hands of them, and hence we get these absurd sounding "compassion" arguments. The reason is doesn't sound compassionate is because it isn't; it's brutish selfishness adopting the language of compassion in order to justify its actions and enable the murderers and their enablers to live with themselves. We now live in the "Logan's Run" era of social democracy.

And of course our social democratic leftists have defined down suffering so that it is synonymous with inconvenience. Hence the arguments discussed here:

http://the-american-catholic.com/2011/04/06/the-crushing-burden-of-having-a-real-life/#more-29549

These people are infantile and pathetic. For the record: Having bamboo shards shoved under your fingernails is suffering. Having terminal bone cancer is suffering. Starving to death at a concentration camp is suffering. And, apparently, so is having a regular job and a family provided that you would rather spend your twenties living like an undergraduate. From here, it doesn't take much imagination to see how insidious and dangerous the infantilism of the Stuff White People Like crowd really is. Their minimum threshold for what they would consider a tolerable existence is so high, and their ability to deal with inconvenience and frustration is so low, the day will come when they will be clamoring for easy access to euthanasia, eugenicide against special needs kids, etc. Anything less would be horrible, horrible "suffering".

Lydia:

Who was it that said something to the effect that when we base our policies on sentiment we end up with the gas chambers? I had thought it was Ayn Rand...

Oh, no, no - it was Flannery O'Connor. I'll briefly explain the context:

There was a disabled girl in O'Connor's area who was cared for at a local convent because of a large tumor that disfigured her face. The girl, named Mary Ann, died at the age of 12, and the nuns wished to memorialize her in a book. O'Connor was asked to write an introduction to the memoir and, with regard to the ideas we're discussing, she hits the nail on the head. Here's the whole quote:

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. ... Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber. (p. 226-227, from the collection Mystery and Manners)

Ha! Thanks, Kathleen. I've been looking for that for a while.

Oh, golly, Untenured, that's a devastating column.

The thing is, though, people do really work themselves up in this faux compassion. I think it's a kind of projection going on. You feel repelled by the severely disabled person and conclude that _he_ is suffering terribly. Wesley J. Smith calls killing people in such contexts "putting them out of our misery."

Whether overbearing governmental micromanagement is a significant part of the rationalization for these planned death (e.g. abortion, euthanasia) policies, I couldn't say.

I do think Lydia's onto something here, though:

Does it not seem plausible that we are willingly conflating our perception of "loss of dignity" with their experiencing "irremediable suffering," thus justifying putting people out of an entirely invented "misery" or "terrible pain?"

I think there's a significant component of "it's all about me" in every rationalization of a choice to suicide or kill an unborn child. Traditional notions of "the common good" are so far away from people's thinking that, not only do they not fear the consequences of such choices, but it's difficult for them to conceive of any consequences at all. Mark Shea wrote a column several years ago exploring the idea that the selling of 'choice' as the answer to every moral question is really about advocating a metaphysical idea - that choices should not be believed to have any personal or societal consequences. I.e., "You should not condemn my choice because 1) it's my freedom at stake and you can't tell me what to do [::eye roll::] and 2) my choice doesn't affect you anyway - it only affects me. Your sense that my choice affects you is an illusion based on your outdated morality. You control your world, and I'll control mine." It's a latent effect of the radical individualism fostered in our culture.

Perhaps the cognitive dissonance of "my choices and definitions must rule" vs. "my choices must not matter to you" informs the cognitive dissonance Lydia mentions.

I was really relating the micromanagement to the ADA. The thing is, if I were disabled, I think I'd rather be unaccommodated in a job and _not_ killed than accommodated in a job while having to worry about being killed. Or accommodated in a job only because, and only if, I was one of the lucky ones who made it past the killing fields.

The relative trivia of the extreme accommodation required for the handicapped is sometimes nearly insane--the very essence of silly bureaucracy. If a church does any substantial building--builds a wing onto the side of the church, for example--the whole building must be made handicapped accessible, even if it is a very small church with, presently, no handicapped members. We all have doubtless heard the story of Mother Teresa's missionaries offering to carry handicapped people upstairs and downstairs so that they wouldn't have to bear the heavy cost of revamping their building. But of course nothing of the sort is allowed. It's standardized and bureaucratized to the point where good sense and normal, everyday judgment calls are not permitted.

All this for the handicapped whom we graciously permit to walk among us. It seems so bitterly ironic and pointless when contrasted with the sheer brutality of blatantly discriminatory search-and-destroy abortion and making heroes out of the likes of Mr. Latimer.

Faced with this pointlessness, I'm inclined to think that "sticking it to the nasty businessmen in the name of the underdog" must give a lot of satisfaction to the people who get worked up about some local company's lack of an elevator.

If what we call "liberalism" is something like "equality of individual autonomy trumps everything else", then I don't see liberalism as bi-polar and I don't see the tension others describe here. I would add that this understanding of theirs (what's most important) incentivizes them to define a fetus as a non-person.

Bruce, let's put it this way: One of the self-definitional ideas of liberalism is supposed to be that discrimination is wrong. Recently this has been extended to include "discrimination on the basis of disability." Yet insisting that abortions for disabled fetuses should be easier to obtain that those for healthy fetuses is outright discrimination on the basis of disability. Or, a little more subtle, there is this one: Making assisted suicide preferentially available to the disabled implies that the lives of the disabled are worth less than the lives of the healthy. In its own way, it's a form of discrimination as well. But that's supposed to be anathema to liberal ideology. The same mutatis mutandis for sympathy for parents who kill disabled children.

Also, I suspect Alex didn't accurately summarize Aaron's position. I suspect Aaron doesn't believe that the essense of liberalism is wholesale compassion. I think he'd say that choice is a very fundamental aspect of liberalism. Let him speak for himself. Aaron?

But what if the essense of their belief isn't "discrimination is wrong" but rather "equality of individual autonomy trumps everything else?" I fully admit I'm plagarizing Jim Kalb here. I think he's onto something.

Well, even then, I think you're just going to have to define some "individuals" out of the community of those allowed to be autonomous. And not only unborn individuals, either. Tracy Latimer too.

So it has to be gerrymandered.

Moreover, Bruce, I think you'll have to agree that many, many on the left would want to portray their reasons for supporting draconian non-discrimination laws as being reasons of compassion and love--just as Aaron did suggest. That real compassion and real love for person A might have some negative consequences for the individual autonomy of person B is what puts them in this bind and forces them to fudge on (or redefine in creepy ways) the concepts of love and compassion.

'Yet insisting that abortions for disabled fetuses should be easier to obtain that those for healthy fetuses is outright discrimination on the basis of disability.'

You've also got a point here, Lydia. But you also seem to (a) approve of 'micromanagement' where women are concerned, and (b) object to 'micromanagement' where employers are concerned - unless they're women, I guess. If you're right about the 'bi-polarity', then it's equally prevalent in both camps.

Prohibiting murder is "micromanagement". Got it.

Good, Jeff; that you may approve of government meddling doesn't mean the government doesn't meddle!

I think we're probably in agreement, Lydia. I'd say that a child, and especially a handicapped child, can be a huge obstacle to realizing individual autonomy as they understand it and so they have to lie (to themselves as well as to others) and gerrymander as you say.

Ah, but Overseas, it isn't micro-managing. I would keep my anti-abortion laws plain, simple, and easy to understand and follow. Nothing remotely like deciding what counts as "reasonable accommodation" or "the essence of the activity" or "necessary discrimination for the essential functions of the business" or anything of the kind. Just "no abortions." You may call it "macromanaging" if you prefer.

Pro-aborts don't think fetuses have any moral worth outside of what the mothers impute to them, so there isn't an inconsistency in how the disabled are proposed to be treated. The inconsistency is the idea that there is some distinction for pro-aborts between disabled fetuses and normal fetuses. There isn't; it's just an appeal to sentiment designed to confuse the ignorant. Mothers should have the ability to kill any of their children, no matter the circumstances, up until the time they are born.

Before birth; kill it or don't kill it, it is nothing and we don't care.
After birth; he is an individual of moral worth and should not be held back by factors outside of his control.

The inconsistency is the idea that there is some distinction for pro-aborts between disabled fetuses and normal fetuses. There isn't; it's just an appeal to sentiment designed to confuse the ignorant.

Be that as it may, they usually _do_ propose that there should be differential treatment in both law and in practice.

After birth; he is an individual of moral worth and should not be held back by factors outside of his control.

Not necessarily. As I've pointed out, differential treatment in (at least) two areas means that even this isn't the case: First, the extra push for facilitating assisted suicide for the disabled. Second, sympathy raised for parents who kill born disabled children. This adds more weirdness: If a disabled child is taken in a wheelchair to a local business that serves the public, there had darned well better be wheelchair accessibility for that child. Compassion supposedly dictates it. However, if Dad bumps off the disabled child and plays the violin about putting her out of her suffering, we're going to want to cut him some slack.

There's a lot of cognitive dissonance, here, at least as long as the left wants to portray itself as the party of kindness and goodness toward the "little guy."

Aaron writes:

Francis Beckwith's mistake is to attribute to liberals the justification that handicapped people "are not intrinsically valuable beings by nature and thus are not deserving of our concern and respect."

I was referring to the prenatal handicapped human being targeted for destruction because of their handicap. I was not referring to postnatal human beings.

I was not referring to postnatal human beings.

You could have, though, Frank. They go after people like Terri Schiavo all the time.

Hey guys, here are some miscellaneous rejoinders.

I'm not familiar with any of the cases from the news cited here. Are they necessary to understand Lydia's argument? If so, then I disqualify myself. In general, I think people charitably presume that a parent loves his child and intends good for him.

Agreed that sentimentalism can help pave the way to the gas chambers. It sure did in Nazi Germany. (I don't agree with the actual Flannery O'Connor quote, though.) But I don't see any sentimentalism in the liberal philosophy I outlined. Lots of liberals are sentimentalists (as are lots of conservatives), but the philosophy itself is not. Consider this far-left (non-liberal) limit point: Peter Singer is not sentimental.

As I think I understand it now, Francis Beckwith was comparing respectful treatment of already-born handicapped people to treatment of "defective" fetuses. From a pro-choice perspective, that's comparing apples and oranges. There is no contradiction or tension in the different approaches. To Lydia, I'll repeat that pro-choicers see the moral claims of fetuses as different, and weaker - not non-existent (except for the extremists).

To clarify something everyone misunderstood: I meant the justification was love in personal situations (pulling the plug on Grandma), and compassion in policy (voting to allow people to pull the plug on Grandma). I'm not suggesting that people love total strangers, or even claim to, nor that they're always compassionate: hence "she's a vegetable," etc.

Many people say that they would not want to live if they were in a really bad physical state (however they define it). Often they ask their loved ones to promise that they will "pull the plug on them" if they ever reach that situation. This fact makes me extremely skeptical of claims that justifications based on love are really just lies or at best rationalizations. Sometimes they are, partly or wholly, but often they're not.

Bruce is right that I don't think liberalism is based on any single fundamental principle - contra Lawrence Auster and James Kalb (whose fundamental principle keeps changing anyway). Yes, liberals contradict the principle of nondiscrimination all the time. So what?

Jonathan Rauch wrote a really good essay on unacknowledged customary law, what he calls "hidden law." I recommend it; it's relevant to this topic. Christian philosophers will absolutely hate it, as Rauch himself more or less says. Enjoy!

However, if Dad bumps off the disabled child and plays the violin about putting her out of her suffering, we're going to want to cut him some slack.

Lydia, is this really what mainstream liberals believe? I'm sure we can find examples of this kind of thinking but is this typical?

Aaron,
I don’t think Kalb is wrong to try to reduce contemporary liberalism to a fundamental principle and I think his idea pretty well captures the essence of modern thought. I do think that it has other, secondary features that help it to work out the details i.e. “who trumps whom?” Of course, I also think it has the bleeding heart aspect, what Thomas Fleming calls “pornography of compassion” and I still don’t quite understand how that fits with Jim’s definition of liberalism.
I don’t see how Kalb’s definition of liberalism keeps changing. It’s been constant for as long as I’ve been reading him which is several years now.

Many people say that they would not want to live if they were in a really bad physical state (however they define it). Often they ask their loved ones to promise that they will "pull the plug on them" if they ever reach that situation. This fact makes me extremely skeptical of claims that justifications based on love are really just lies or at best rationalizations.

Aaron, I don't think this argument works, because honestly, I think there's a kind of prospective self-contempt and lack of love for one's hypothetical future self in these death wishes. There's really something almost adolescent about it--a kind of shrinking from one's imagined self.

Lydia, is this really what mainstream liberals believe? I'm sure we can find examples of this kind of thinking but is this typical?

Bruce, in Canada, Mark Pickup reports a 70% support level for Latimer. So I think it's just a matter of time in America. Like so many of these things, we're going there. America's just "behind" a bit because of residual Judeo-Christian ethics. Post-birth infanticide for disabled infants is another area I could have cited--accepted in Holland and standardized in the Groningen protocols. Another area would be unrequested euthanasia, which is becoming quite common and accepted in Belgium.

You get the picture.

Liberalism seems to combine in a single perspective points of view that are sometimes opposed to each other. For instance; love of freedom isn't always compatible with the resolve to diminish suffering.

Though I believe that compassion is the political soul of liberalism that doesn't mean that a disposition to alleviate suffering isn't found among human beings everywhere. But as a rule, lots of men and women 'at large' acting on compassionate grounds, haven't transformed their sympathetic concern into a political principle. Their compassion is, or can be, triggered in many apolitical ways.

Aaron writes:

As I think I understand it now, Francis Beckwith was comparing respectful treatment of already-born handicapped people to treatment of "defective" fetuses. From a pro-choice perspective, that's comparing apples and oranges. There is no contradiction or tension in the different approaches.

There is a tension in this sense: the fetus is sequestered from personhood because it has diminished capacities as a consequence of immaturity, whereas the postnatal handicapped person has diminished capacities as a consequence of illness. If a being's diminished capacities requires compassion for that being, then both should receive our care. After all, in the case of the fetus, it will, over time, "recover."

It's Kalb's basic principle of liberalism, not his definition, that keeps changing. This is all from memory, but in the first thing I read he named this one single fundamental principle as (1) tolerance and (2) choice. These were in two places a few paragraphs apart. He defended that from criticism on the grounds that tolerance really comes down to tolerance of choices - in fact, lots of the time it really doesn't - so supposedly it's really just one principle. Then in later essays I think the single basic principle changed to inclusiveness. I've never read his book, just writings he's posted - some of which are pretty good, by the way. I don't think nondiscrimination was ever the principle; maybe Auster has a copyright on that one, I don't know.

It's great to identify the basic principle of liberalism if such a thing exists, but not if it doesn't.

I think choices as he uses the term means how we decide to define ourselves i.e. individual autonomy. Tolerance of choices and inclusiveness aren’t the same thing?

"Prospective self-contempt" is an interesting counter-explanation. It doesn't fit my own experience, though. If I imagine a future scenario of an existence that seems (to me now) worse than death, my feeling is one of horror at the idea of me existing that way, not a cavalier "just kill me/him" dissociation from my future self. The horror prevents any dissociation. How about you, when you imagine your own personal nightmare, which would cause at least a part of you (now) to prefer death? Do you feel "prospective self-contempt"?

Historically, tolerance is often of unchosen identities. Did 18th-century Irish Catholics choose their identity as Catholics? Do homosexuals choose their sexual orientation?

Inclusiveness was shoved down our throats as an "improvement" over tolerance, which is hegemonic and bad. Try going to a LGBT meeting (or whatever initials they use now) and telling people that you tolerate homosexuals. See what kind of reaction that brings.

Most liberals don't think in terms of a fetus "sequestered from personhood because it has diminished capacities." The figure of speech "sequestered from personhood" strikes me as especially bizarre. This may be the way pro-choice philosophers think, the kind of people who imagine someone hypothetically attached to a dialysis machine for nine months to save a stranger's life. But it's just totally removed from the philosophy of real liberalism. Why is a one-cell embryo not a person? A pro-choicer will not say, "Diminished capacities! It can't walk or talk or play the piano!" He'll say instead, "Are you kidding? It's a single cell!" You might argue that he's wrong, based on Aristotle and Thomas and acorns and oak trees, but that's his philosophy, and from his perspective there's very little functional similarity between an embryo and a handicapped person who needs to use a golf cart.

Mark Richardson just put up an entry with a useful statement of liberal principle:

http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2011/04/australian-women-to-be-placed-in-combat.html

According to liberalism, we are human because we are self determining. We do not determine our own sex; therefore, our sex must be made not to matter when it comes to life choices.

Aaron, I suppose you could claim that tolerance applies to that which we can’t choose AND that which we do choose. What we don’t choose has to be “tolerated” because otherwise it can disrupt autonomy and we all equally want what we want so that which we choose has to be tolerated. Now you can call that two principles if you want but I can fit it into a single sentence and call it one principle and I don’t think the two ideas (tolerance of what we don’t choose and tolerance of what we choose i.e. whatever we choose is equally valid) are all that disparate.

Unborn children and the mentally handicapped (and even the physically handicapped in some cases) are incapable or aren’t AS capable of being self-determining and they’re more likely to impede someone else’s self-determination so that’s why they’re (more) disposable. So that’s why they get unequally (bad) treatment Lydia.

from his perspective there's very little functional similarity between an embryo and a handicapped person who needs to use a golf cart.

Well...but. I don't think it's just high-falutin' philosophers who _do_ see a similarity between an embryo and Terri Schiavo. I think plenty of ordinary people increasingly do as well. It's a vague amalgam of "isn't like us," "can't think," and the like. The high-falutin' philosophers simply translate this rejection into high-falutin' terms of "personhood theory." In other words, make the born person's disability bad enough, so that the person lacks a _lot_ of capacities, and suddenly it's "just so obvious" to Joe Pro-choicer' that the person isn't _really_ a person and is killable. Which I have to say does bear a certain resemblance to the attitude toward the unborn child.

Something else Aaron wrote above (describing the liberal position) is interesting and, for what it’s worth, deserves mention I think:

Human physical and emotional suffering are great evils, much worse than traditional Christians think they are (because Christians believe in eternal life and in a divine purpose for suffering).

I’ve heard it said that inequality is particularly intolerable for Marxists since, as atheists, they believe that this life is it for us. Ditto suffering and liberal materialists I suppose.

Compassion is the soul of liberalism? No, sentiment is.

A compassionate man understands the suffering of another and then acts to help him. A sentimental man is disturbed by the suffering of another. What moves him is his own discomfort. The satisfaction he seeks is relief from that discomfort, which may or may not involve helping the sufferer. The compassionate man seeks relief for the sufferer. The sentimental man seeks relief for himself.

This is why we all know sentiment is cheap. It is about how WE feel, not the sufferer. So, it makes no demand upon us on behalf of the sufferer.

Liberalism is the political manifestation of this. Liberals demand that the welfare state must address the suffering of others, so that they can be satisfied that the right thing is being done – without having to do anything. (Jacking your jaw or wringing your hands doesn’t count.) If this were not so, why is it that liberals contribute much less of their time and money to charity than non-liberals? They expect, despite its impossibility, the welfare state to be compassionate in their place.

So, liberals gain banal self-satisfaction by pulling the lever for the welfare state. Whether or not the welfare state actually relieves suffering is the bureaucrat’s job. Any acknowledgment that the welfare state causes suffering is to notice that the emperor wears no clothing, thus puts the onus of compassion back on the liberal. That will not do. Reality must not intrude upon the liberal’s fix for his sentimentalism.

The phrase “pornography of compassion” was used earlier. This is an apt description of the rationalisms that liberals rely upon to keep the awful wreckage the welfare state visits upon their fellow human beings out of mind. Just as pornography perverts the ends of eros towards lust, the liberal’s dehumanizing abstractions of suffering perverts the ends of compassion towards sentiment. So, the unborn are sacrificed to “reproductive health”, the mentally ill to “homeless rights”, the disabled to “death with dignity”, and so on. Whatever blinder keeps suffering out of sight and so out of mind.

This explains the perverse contradictions of liberalism.

Interesting comment and I thought your distinction between sentiment and compassion was very good. But the unborn are sacrificed to an individual women’s freedom not reproductive health. I heard this from a woman at Church! “No one’s going to tell me what to do with my body.”

Bravo, Bill Tingley! Well said.

Bill Tingley, you just knocked it out of the park friend.

Human physical and emotional suffering are great evils, much worse than traditional Christians think they are (because Christians believe in eternal life and in a divine purpose for suffering).

And this is precisely why Traditional Christians suffer far less than their secular counterparts, and why they are far less likely to fall prey to things like divorce, drug addiction, and suicide. It is why they are happier have more children and live longer than nonbelievers. It is why they donate much more time and treasure to the poor than liberls and nonbelievers do. The belief that this life is "all you have" serves to amplify suffering and make it utterly unbearable. I've lived under this belief before, and I remember the constant frustration and anger about the world wasn't satisfying my desires. In that mode of thinking every setback is a personal tragedy and every trivial injustice is utterly intolerable. And this isn't even just about traditional Christianity; I bet most secularists would be a lot less unhappy if they would man up and imbibe a little Stoicism.

Untenured, I have thought for a long, long time now (more than I care to admit) that this life is simply unacceptable if there is no afterlife. The bits and pieces of nice simply do not balance out the plenitude of times of wretchedness. And that goes for at least 90%, maybe 98% of people. Philosophically, there is no reason to try to say that a good time "balances" an evil time: you want good ALL the time, so any evil suffered is just a detraction from what you desire. Getting a good fulfills what you desire, but fulfillment doesn't give you any kind of excess of satisfaction that makes you happy during bad times. Overall, in this life, you suffer an awful lot of detraction from the good, if you do not live your life directed toward the next life. It is only by directing to the next life that you can accept a bad time as meaning something worthwhile for the good, which changes the character of the suffering: even while you suffer, you mold it into "this is part of God's good plan" and receive it as such.

Tony,
Future-oriented living does not require a belief in the afterlife, it does require a certain perspective.
http://vimeo.com/13356701

Thank you, Kathleen and Untenured.

Thanks for the kind words, Bruce.

"But the unborn are sacrificed to an individual women’s freedom not reproductive health. I heard this from a woman at Church! 'No one’s going to tell me what to do with my body.'"

Let's hope she gives some thought to Whose body she is in when she says that at Church.

You are right that "women's freedom" is a shibboleth for abortion. I was citing examples, not a complete list, of the dehumanizing abstractions liberals use to ignore individual suffering caused by the welfare state. "Women's freedom" is another example.

What freedom, distinct from that of anyone else, does a liberal have in mind when he squawks about "womem's freedom"? Her liberty and dignity flow from her humanity not her feminity. So what is this freedom that liberals demand for women but not for men? Answer: Liberation from the nature of her sex -- i.e., to be the bearer of children.

But, of course, it is our human nature to be sexed. We must be either male or female. To be unsexed is to be unhuman. Therefore, to liberate a woman from her sex is to dehumanize her.

Aaron, if Obama were only one cell but gave a damn good speech, his one cell-ness would have nothing to do with saying he's a person. It's diminished capacities that's doing the work in abortion, since the blastocyst does have the capacity to give a damn good speech, but just not the maturity or practice to pull it off.

Oh, wow, Frank. That puts it succinctly.

Aaron, if Obama were only one cell but gave a damn good speech, his one cell-ness would have nothing to do with saying he's a person. It's diminished capacities that's doing the work in abortion, since the blastocyst does have the capacity to give a damn good speech, but just not the maturity or practice to pull it off.

This very nicely captures the difference in view between what y'all are referring to as "liberals" and you folks.

Consider first the counterfactual. I have NO IDEA how to assess that thing. Why not? The nearest world at which Obama is a single cell AND gives good speeches is WAY out there. "Liberal's" views of the mind, etc. just don't fit with that happening. Sure, it's logically possible, but that's a very strange world. I mean, would MY cells be able to give speeches at that world? That'd be really weird. But if so, would I be comprised of persons? I have no idea what I think would be the case about personhood at that world.

Next consider the notion of a capacity. What is that? Is it like a disposition? Early fetuses aren't disposed to give speeches, even with practice. Is a capacity an ability? Early fetuses aren't able to give speeches. Is it something like the future promise of an ability? How is what one will be able to do relevant to what it is (and its moral standing) now? For instance, suppose a person who has the capacity to cure cancer can survive only if I give her my heart. Am I morally required to do so? No. The fact that she has the promise of some future ability seems irrelevant.

My initial suggestion, which Aaron picked up on, was that the folks Lydia is targeting don't share her assumptions. Given the difference in assumptions, there's no tension. Prof. Beckwith's comment, I think, helps to illustrate this nicely.

I'm unimpressed by Bill Tingley's bold mind-reading act. It doesn't match the thought and motivation of liberals I've known, including myself when I was one. Fon one thng, mixed with the idea of compassion is the idea of justice. For instance, liberals in the 1960s felt compassion for African-American poverty, etc. and believed that it was an injustice that needed to be fixed (by government). Calling this kind of thing sentimentalism is unfounded. Bad reasoning, yes, intellectual laziness sometimes, and maybe bad values too.

There is definitely such a thing as liberal sentimentalism and I'm sure there are plenty of liberal sentimentalists, but it's really inaccurate to describe liberals or liberalism in general that way. Sure to please the crowd, though.

The claim that one-celledness isn't directly relevant to the question of an embryo's personhood is an interesting philosophical claim. Even if the hypothetical Barack Obama example were assumed to be convincing - and I think most pro-choicers would dispute it - that still misses the whole point. Lydia's post was not about the true philosophy of disability, abortion,argument etc. It wasn't even directly about liberal philosophy. It was about psychology. What motivates certain liberal positions, given apparent self-contradictions in their behavior? I mean, sheesh, can't you all put philosophy aside even for a minute?!

For most pro-choicers, something that "looks" very unlike a (born) human being cannot be a person. Other supposedly relevant properties include the being's address (inside or outside mother) and other properties that might truly not be directly relevant. But the empirical fact of liberal belief is what this whole topic is about, not the truth value of that belief. Inconsistencies and errors in those beliefs can be relevant, but only to the extent that those problems would be expected to influence the believers themselves.

Bill Tingley's distinction between compassionate understanding and the mere disturbance of sentiment is wise - but it tends to discredit liberal initiatives for the relief of man's estate. It still remains probable that liberalism can express 'true' compassion. To condemn, in the abstract, humane measures on the grounds that their purpose is to make liberals feel good about themselves, is unjust.

The phrase 'the pornography of compassion' strikes me as being a bit glib and, ironically, it can hide self serving incentives similar to those which are supposed to be at the heart of liberalism.

While it's true that liberals expect the state to provide welfare in many cases where people should be expected to look after themselves, there remains a residue of hard cases. And some social problems are too big and too complicated to be addressed by private charity.

To sum up: I don't believe what appear to be acts of compassion (by liberals) usually turn out, on closer examination, to have 'impure' motives. Perhaps sometimes it's true; sometimes it isn't. Alleging that the compassion of liberals is, as a rule, nothing more than a convenient sentiment is itself uncharitable, I think.

Oops, looks like copy-paste ran away with me on that last post. Remove the word "argument." The post was argumentative enough already.

Hi Aaron! I agree it's about reasoning and, given that one holds several values, the value hierarchy, i.e. how to resolve conflict. What are the right values to hold, and how are they ordered? That there's no demonstrably unique answer to that may give rise to an impression of dissonance or 'bi-polarity'. So Lydia's right about the phenomenon but she's not exempt! I'm prepared to reconsider, of course, when she manages to articulate a statement of that 'plain, simple, and easy to understand and follow' anti-abortion law: I wonder, will it be the electric chair 'plain and simple' for the teenager or mother of four who swallow a couple of pills when pregnant and cease to be so?

Perhaps the blastocyst's speech expresses a mathematician's contempt for anything finite before the infinite; or perhaps metaphysics classes are too popular. I'm as perplexed as you seem to over the hypothesis that Obama put himself up for election because he's a compassionate, sentimental guy. I doubt people voted for him so they have someone to love them, but you know better.

Bill Tingley,

Actually the woman at Church (a grandmother) said "No MAN is going to tell me what to do with my body." My wife's response was "It's a good thing Jesus didn't say that to us women" i.e. "No woman's going to tell me what to do with my body."

I love how conservatives are always accused of relying on "folk reasoning" when they do ethics, and yet the best rebuttal that people can come up with to the claim that single celled person is a simply a maximally immature but fully person is "It sure don't look like a person to me!"

Aaron, when I first read one of your above comments, I had a hard time understanding what you meant in distinguishing between definitions and principles. I suppose you could say that principles flow from a defininition/fundamental. So I think we can say that multiple principles can follow from a single definition. So Auster's "Thou shalt not discriminate" is one of several principles that follow from the fundamental definition of liberalism (I like Mark Richardson's term "left-liberalism which distinguishes contemporary thought from classical Marxism and classical Liberalism). Multiple principles/expressions but a single definition, I think.

Do you think liberalism is a loosely related bunch of ideas? An unrelated bunch of ideas? What are your thoughts?

I'm not very philosophically literate. I don't know how to argue about "potential people" or "diminished capacities." I just know that I can't look at a child (my own or someone else's) and say "you're here now, but your mother and her doctor could have prevented that if they had wanted to - it was her right." And I feel like accepting abortion in any circumstance requires me to do this. So I guess I'm guilty of folk reasoning but sometimes there's great wisdom in folk reasoning.

@Bruce: There is nothing wrong with folk reasoning, and I think in moral contexts it is probably more reliable than abstract Kantian or Utilitarian calculi. My point is simply this: some philosophically trained liberals who have sympathies with naturalism like to deride "folk reasoning" on the grounds that it is unreliable and has been superceded by the deliverances of natural science. There are certain patterns of inference that people find intuitively compelling but are misleading nonetheless. For example, people intuitively think that bodies behave in roughly the way that Aristotle's dynamics say they do, but this is misleading. Some liberals try to diagnose traditional conservative morality as an irrational "folk reasoning" based on gut instincts, a morality which should be replaced with something like utilitarianism or liberal egalitarianism. In this respect they think conservative ethics is like Aristotle's physics: intuitive and somehow natural to humans but ultimately misleading. Now, the conservative position on abortion rests on a metaphysics which implies that a person begins to exist at conception. Many liberals reject this because it just "seems" to them as if there is nothing but a clump of cells. The conservative position rests on a principled, rational metaphysics which carries the unintuitive consequence that a single cell can be a human person. The liberal just consults the mere appearances: "don't look like a person to me". The liberal is the one relying on "folk reasoning", which is precisely what some philosophically informed liberals claim they have left behind.

For those who want to look at this issue in moral psychology in more detail, I recommend this.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html

Haidt is confused about the philosophy, but I think he makes some good points. Many liberals will try to exploit certain aspects of this research in order to argue that conservative morality is inherently irrational, and it is good to at least be aware of this.

Aaron,

You are unimpressed with my "mind-reading act". There's no mind-reading involved. The discussion here is about liberals qua political ideologues. What I have to say is predicated upon their words and deeds. If anything, you reinforce my point that liberals are politically driven by sentiment not compassion.

You say that liberals in the '60s felt compassion for African-American poverty and so demanded that the government remedy it. Sentiment! Dehumanizing abstraction! You fix it, not me!

To feel compassionate is not to be compassionate. This liberal sentiment of compassion gushed from an abstraction, black poverty, not for actual human beings who suffered poverty because of segregation. The liberal response was not personal charity but the hiring of bureaucrats to take of it. Sentimentalism through and through. Little wonder then that the leviathan of the Great Society, the great work of liberalism, has ruined and destroyed so many lives in this country.

You married well, Bruce.

Aaron, I think it would be interesting for you to consider a thought experiment. Imagine a college-age young woman who does community service helping dyslexics get lawsuits started against companies that discriminate against them. Maybe she's really passionate about this discrimination against the disabled. It's terribly unfair, blaming them for something that isn't their fault, companies should be forced to accommodate them, etc.

Now imagine that a friend of hers gets pregnant and finds out that the child has Down Syndrome. Let's suppose, in a completely plausible and normal scenario, that the friend doesn't find this out until about 17 weeks into the pregnancy. Even if we waive our hypothetical liberal college student's problem with one-celled unborn children, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a little boy doing somersaults who was unlucky enough to have "something show up" (in some cases, a "suspicious" neck fold) on an ultrasound and even more unlucky when his mother had an amniocentesis and it came back showing the fatal DNA of DS.

Now, let's face it: It's completely plausible that this young woman who was _so compassionate_ about those poor poor discriminated-against dyslexics is just going to have *no problem at all* with her friend's decision to "terminate" this little boy. You can say until you are blue in the face, "But she doesn't recognize that he's a person," but that's about as crazy (it really is) as her refusing to recognize it about him after he's born.

We need some _explanation_ for her having this hyper-sensitivity to the plight of the dyslexics but having so little normal human instinct and compassion that she will go to self-deceptive lengths regarding the unborn Down Syndrome child to deny his humanity and defend her friend's right to have his brains sucked out, his heart stopped by an injection, or to have him killed by dismemberment. And to have that done *because he is disabled* in one of the most brutal and blatant acts of discrimination one can imagine. It's...nuts.

Doesn't it seem to you a little strange to take with deadly serious the supposedly deeply compassionate nature of this young woman?

I'm quite willing to blame her upbringing. I just think her upbringing has really messed up her compassion and that we shouldn't, without some serious qualifications, talk about how wonderfully and really compassionate she is.

"Bill Tingley's distinction between compassionate understanding and the mere disturbance of sentiment is wise - but it tends to discredit liberal initiatives for the relief of man's estate."

Good insight, Alex. That is precisely my intention. "The relief of man's estate" speaks of a massification of the sufferings of individual human beings. This is what is wrong-headed about liberalism. It is the politics of mass society. Individuals are deconstructed into their fundamental elements (as liberals deem them), which are then massified into tidy abstractions that the government can then address. Part and parcel of this dehumanization of suffering is sweeping aside the particular problems of actual human beings and the call upon each of us to personally help one another.

"To condemn, in the abstract, humane measures on the grounds that their purpose is to make liberals feel good about themselves, is unjust."

What is humane about killing children in the womb, letting the mentally ill live like animals in the streets, the Great Society grinding inner city blacks into a permanent underclass, leaving our borders open so that foreigners can be wage slaves, minimum wage laws that deny jobs to the marginally employable? Exactly what is humane about liberalism?

"To sum up: I don't believe what appear to be acts of compassion (by liberals) usually turn out, on closer examination, to have 'impure' motives."

Yes, of course, Alex, good intentions (i.e., sentiments) are always the last resort of liberals.

Lydia, I agree with a lot of what you say about your thought experiment. The vast majority of people believe what they believe without philosophical thought, just based on how they were brought up. That applies to pro-choice liberals and anti-abortion Catholics.

It doesn't strike me as strange that your hypothetical woman would want her friend to get an abortion and would also be compassionate towards dyslexics. It doesn't strike me as strange that a Nazi concentration camp guard, or an Amazonian headhunter for that matter, could be loving towards his family and compassionate to others - those others who are "people." It doesn't strike me as strange that a saint could sacrifice for his fellow man and sit down to a dinner of a nice juicy steak. Frankly, none of these is an anomaly in special need of explanation. I don't see any evidence to conclude that any of these people "knows the truth deep inside."

I never suggested that liberals are more compassionate (whatever "more compassionate" means) than other people. I never said anything about a "compassionate nature" either: those are your words. Instead of explaining behavior by "X is a compassionate person," I'd rather say, "X in this situation is motivated by compassion towards Y."

Bruce, about definitions and principles. I meant that, for instance, you might define classical liberalism as the political philosophy described by Locke's Second Treatise. But you might analyze the fundamental principle as individual autonomy, for instance.

I think that contemporary liberalism (defined as Nancy Pelosi's political philosophy) is based on a mixture of mutually contradictory principles.

Okay, so, Aaron, I think I'm getting that you're a vegan. Or at least a vegetarian. Well, yeah, we probably have some big disagreements, then.

But let's put it this way: Contemporary liberalism (which I certainly am thinking of in terms more of Nancy Pelosi than of John Locke) *does conceive of itself* as particularly compassionate. For example, there's the comparison to the Amazonian head-hunter. Surely you realize how ironic it is to compare my hypothetical young woman to the Amazonian head-hunter! After all, if you asked her or any of her most influential professors, they would tell you that their *entire worldview* is about "the Other," about standing up for the little guy, about opposing the injustice of discrimination, about bringing in out-group members and the "marginalized." That's the way they think of themselves. That is supposedly what lies behind this young woman's community service--a worldview entirely and diametrically opposed to that of the Amazonian headhunter.

Does it not seem to you not only that her cold-bloodedness toward the Down Syndrome child is creepy but also that her passion against the--let's face it, _not_ terribly unjust--attempt of the employers to hire people who can read at normal speed is exaggerated? What's with all of that? There's an exaggeration in both directions, it seems to me, a kind of massive and upside-down reversal of perspective. I don't think simple references to in-group and out-group membership or to Nazis who were loving fathers can explain it. For one thing, her hypothetical dyslexic clients _aren't_ her family members. Her feelings for them do not arise from mere natural affection. For her, they are a Cause with a capital C.

No, I'm not a vegetarian, but I can imagine how a vegetarian might be puzzled or skeptical about one's not seeing the "obvious" moral problem with eating meat.

I agree that many liberals think that liberalism is especially compassionate and that nonliberals are not. They're wrong, and to the extent they're proud of themselves for that, they're culpably wrong.

I'm against aborting Down Syndrome fetuses (I'm not categorically against abortion), but it does not strike me as the least bit creepy that someone could support it while trying to mitigate some much more trivial suffering of strangers. I see two possible instances of compassion: towards the baby who has an "unbearable" life ahead of it, and towards the friend who would be in the "horrible" situation of raising a Down Syndrome child. Nothing in your story contradicts this. On the other hand, of course she really could be a cold-blooded monster who feels "compassion" only for classes of people.

I know many people who would abort a Down Syndrome fetus without giving it a second thought, and they're very compassionate and moral people in other respects. There is simply nothing creepy or strange here, to me. Frankly, no offense intended, but I think you're not really willing to imagine things from certain perspectives.

If the dyslexia thing is a Cause, not natural compassion, so what? Some people who support Causes are also very loving to people in their own lives.

Lydia,

The discussion here has taken a lot of very interesting turns already, but maybe what follows can add some finishing spice to what you're cooking. This is basically the same contradiction at work with the ghoulish pro-abort types who have full funerals for their unborn dead on Saturday and go march for Roe v Wade on Sunday.

It is clear (as you have said before) that liberalism is simply at war with cosmic reality, and especially with the reality that men are not equal, and that they they have inherited natures and individual qualities which are not freely chosen by themselves. Liberalism's increasingly totalizing radicalism, its rapidly mounting blindness and brutality, are a consequence of the infinite number of demons that it has to slay in order to achieve a perfect equality of human wills. Sure, they will say that the quest for "perfect equality" is a straw man and that no actual liberal believes in the perfectibility of human existence, but the obtuseness (or dishonesty) of this riposte is made plain by the actual policies they propose, which always powerfully demonstrate liberalism's lack of an internal limiting principle. If one wants to have a discussion about the limits of the liberal state's writ to perfect humanity, he has to look somewhere outside political liberalism to find it.

(Which, of course, is why liberals will say, angrily and indignantly, that they believe in such limits without ever getting around to telling you what they are or where they come from. Once the discussion turns to the state's limits, one gets only the airiest appeals to common sense and usually something like an indignant huff, about five minutes before the latest supposed limit is happily leaped over. Gay marriage comes to mind, as does the state-subsidized abortion of the disabled.)

The Americans with Disabilities Act is in my opinion the ultimate, even quintessential liberal legislative act because it is 1) completely open-ended, acknowledging no logical limit or end-point and always tending toward greater expansion of state power, and 2) its purpose is to eliminate the impediments to the free exercise of the will which result from characteristics which men do not choose for themselves.

My point, very indirectly got to, is that abortion of the disabled serves exactly the same purpose and has many of the very same characteristics as the ADA. It denies that there are any real limits on the lengths to which we can or should go to eliminate differences among men in society. This works for them psychologically because, of course, an unborn baby is not yet "in society." He is in one sense pre-social, and especially pre-state, and is therefore an object of unarticulated horror for the liberal (who is at war with all things and institutions, such as church and the biological family, which do not depend directly on formalized authority for their existence). Because liberalism makes the freely-exercised choice the only real source of value, a baby is not of value until a conscious and self-actualizing choice has been made by the mother. Thus the bizarre funerals held by pro-abortion women for their unborn babies--what they mourn is not a person, but the frustration of their own wills. Sentiment, not compassion, indeed. (Thanks for that, Bill.)

The child out of the womb, no longer a mere object of the mother's will, is in a wholly different situation. The liberal state swings into action on his behalf to demolish the effects of whatever he may not have chosen for himself--his height, his eyesight, his sex, his race, his strength, his intelligence, and any other thing we conservatives would recognize as endowed by nature.

Obviously, it all comes down to fetal personhood, which liberals generally deny for two basic reasons, the first being that it is an impediment to the will of the mother, and the other that it does not yet rationally and freely exercise its will (which, again, is what life is all about). The unborn baby is not a person but it is a threat to the liberal utopia--in this, at least, the liberal acknowledges that it would be better if the state had nothing to do.

Sage, I missed your sage comment until today, when I came to the thread to post a link. (See below.)

Great point about the unborn child's not being in society. But what about the born disabled whose deaths are also rationalized (more and more) by a surprising number on the left? Here I think that perhaps there is a kind of "now you're in, now you're out" game going on. As long as someone or other whose will is regarded as decisive wants to define someone like Tracy Latimer as being a member of society, she can get the dubious benefits of all of those attempts to demolish the effects of all her non-chosen limitations. But when her father decided to define her out of society, and then act on that definition, there are apparently plenty of Canadians (and I hope I'll be forgiven for thinking of them as mostly if not all liberals) who are quite willing to go along.

To the link:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2011/04/20/seething-hatred-of-sarah-palin-yup-its-trig/

Is Wonkette a liberal? Is she scary, sick, and full of ignorant and bigoted hatred toward Trig Palin, even though he's a born disabled individual? (The answers, judging by the evidence, are yes, yes, and yes.) I wonder if she supports the ADA, and, if so, why?