Wading in Controversy

By Brian Beutler

If I can poke around one insoluble controversy (Israel-Palestine) then, I figure, why not keep at it and--once and for all--solve this whole abortion brouhaha thing that's been bothering everybody.

Ross got me thinking about this today, because of something he wrote a couple days ago that tried to get at what exactly cleaves religious people and secular people--two groups that ostensibly care deeply about human rights--into warring camps when it comes to abortion.

There's some truth to this, but I think something larger is going on here, which has to do with the Christian relationship to rights-based liberalism, and particularly the Lockean tradition that America is (roughly speaking) founded on. To oversimplify egregiously but not, I think, inaccurately, the modern Anglo-American political tradition came into being because Christians were willing to accept the Christianity-lite political settlement offered by social-contract liberalism - and they were willing to accept it because its major premise, that man was endowed with natural and inalienable rights by Nature's God, was broadly congruent with Christian tradition. In a Lockean-liberal society, the law might not do everything that some Christians would like it to do - compel belief, for instance - but neither would it directly violate basic Christian principles.

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However, the Lockean settlement was obviously a long time ago, and most of today's liberals no longer believe in the "endowed-by-their-Creator" theory of human rights. Which is why abortion has become such a flashpoint - because it's the place where modern liberals have instituted a utilitarian approach to killing in place of the older natural-rights-based understanding, and the place where Christians are resisting. This explains, in turn, why pro-lifers make liberal arguments even though the source of their conviction is usually religious: it's not because they're dishonestly concealing their Christianity, but because they still think that rights-based liberalism is the common ground between Christians and secularists, and so they naturally attempt to argue on that ground. And the current pro-life frustration, I think, flows from the fact that pro-choicers have half-abandoned this common ground, but often won't admit it. Hence the constant talk about slippery slopes and infanticide from my side of the debate: it's not because we necessarily think America is about to legalize infanticide, but because we're trying to demonstrate to the pro-choice side that they only have one foot left in rights-based liberalism, and that there are some pretty awful things waiting where they've put their other foot down.

I think that, even though there are a few elements of truth here, this is drastically incomplete. First, I don't know if it's even really important that some of the godfathers of rights-based liberalism were religious people who believed certain liberties were of divine origin. What's important is the liberties themselves. If there is widespread societal agreement about them--and I still think that there IS widespread agreement about them--then their providence doesn't really matter. Whether one camp of people thinks they're God's offering and another thinks they're right because they're just right (or because they create a stable, appealing society) is totally beside the point.

Second, and much more important, though, is that talking about these rights like they're some sort of well-defined philosophical obelisk is massively imprecise. There are a LOT of very common situations besides abortion that bring Christians into disagreement with Christians, liberals into disagreement with liberals, and the two factions into disagreement with each other because sometimes honoring one right means sacrificing another.

Yes, some liberals put forth utilitarian arguments like Matt's and others (including me) have sincere (and not arbitrary and not rigged) beliefs about what human life is, but almost ALL of us are very clear about the importance of women having as much control over their bodies and biological functions as possible. And that's where prioritizing rights come in to play. John Stewart put it approximately this way when he interviewed Ramesh Ponnuru: "some of us feel that conservatives want to legalize rape in order to prevent murder," and on THAT front, when the rights in conflict are so important and so sensitive, enlightenment principles are extraordinarily ambiguous. They don't clearly articulate what is dispensable when ensuring that something else is preserved and for me, the weight of ambiguities  tip to a woman's side. And also for me this dispels Ross's assertion that liberals are somehow trying to shirk their heritage or sneak their way out of a concern for human rights.