Friday, February 22, 2008
OBJECTIVISTS POSITION ON ABORTION
In order to understand Objectivists, it is necessary to take note of the schism within the philosophy between Leonard Peikoff and David Kelley. Peikoff is Ayn Rand's intellectual legal heir and founder of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a purist in that he believes the only principles of Objectivism which can be embraced are those espoused by Ayn Rand herself. He rejects all attempts to work with others of similar thinking. Peikoff strongly supports laissez faire capitalism.
David Kelley, a philosopher who was formerly associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, prefers to work with others within the Libertarian community who have adopted some, but not all of Rand's thinking. Peikoff claims Kelley is not an Objectivist. Kelley embraces "truth and tolerance". When Peikoff tossed Kelley out of the Ayn Rand Institute, Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies, later renamed the Objectivist Center, and subsequently The Atlas Society. (Source: Wikipedia)
Shades of occultist squabbling?
In any case, both groups embrace abortion.
Peikoff lays out his thinking in an article titled "Abortion Rights Are Pro-Life". The life he has in mind is the life of the mother.
It is a woman's right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy. ...
The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.
We must not confuse potentiality with actuality.
He equates calling the embryo an "unborn child" with calling an adult an "undead corpse", suggesting that by the same logic we could bury the adult alive, indicating to me that he confuses the nature of life and the nature of death. Clearly an unborn child that moves independently in the womb has no relationship with a corpse. This argument is simply bizarre.
Peikoff refuses to grant the unborn with any rights before birth, and offers the following "legitimate reasons" for an abortion: accidental pregnancy, rape, birth defects, danger to her health.
Further fuzzy thinking is evidenced by his claim that a woman who is forced to give birth to a child she does not want "is a death sentence", citing the years of parenthood required until the child is an adult. He completely ignores the fact that the woman who gives birth is not obligated beyond delivery. Others are quite capable of raising the child through adoption. A woman's obligation does not absolutely extend beyond the date of delivery.
He closes the argument with: "Anti-abortionists are not lovers of life--lovers of tissue, maybe. But their stand marks them as haters of real human beings.
Turning to The Atlas Society I found a similar fuzzy thinking.
Ayn Rand held that "abortion is a moral right--which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved."...
Rights are based on the fact that the use of force against others is not a reliable means of gaining values, while dealing with others by production and trade is...
We therefore apply rights principles to a person in virtue of his ability to live by production and trade....To live by production and trade, one must be able to project and pursue alternatives to what is given metaphysically in nature; grasp principles and thereby employ conceptual knowledge; and communicate and learn open-endedly, making possible agreements, friendship, and the transmission of knowledge. Beings that lack these capacities also lack rights: dogs, for instance, or termites.
It is not only the embryo or the fetus who lacks these abilities. It is also the child up to his teen years. Imagine a society in which this law was put in place!
William Thomas, who has written the piece, does make a qualification:
But some humans--infant children, embryos and fetuses--also lack these capacities; if we deny intrinsicism, whatever basic rights or legal claims they may deserve must be explained by an argument that follows from their actual, existing capacities, but from their potential to develop.
If children are to be exempted from infanticide based on potential, the same must apply to the embryo. Otherwise one ends up with a sliding scale of potential that is arbitrary and can easily be used to justify killing a seven-year-old who turned out to be inconvenient. More fuzzy thinking from the Objectivists.
Not content with this muddle, Thomas wades in deeper:
In the Objectivist view, one's fundamental rights are unitary, because they define the freedom that a rational being needs, in a social context, in order to live by production and trade.
Or in simple language, your dollars define you. Children, of course, are notoriously lacking in dollars and production ability.
Thomas writes further:
Because they are unable to support themselves by reason, we cannot extend this right to infants or the unborn in a clear and straightforward manner....it is hasty and cavalier to simply say that a fetus, or even an infant has rights in the sense that an adult does, or for the reasons an adult does.
In an effort to define rights and obligations for the purpose of claiming that a pregnant woman has no obligation to the unborn child, Thomas writes:
Opponents of abortion rights seek to impose obligations in the name of a process that leads to a human being, upon the rights of an actual human being: the mother. This is no small duty, but a long-term obligation to care for her child...
Again this claim that the birth mother must raise the child completely ignores the perfectly legitimate recourse to adoption.
Thomas is willing to concede that
One can incur an obligation without choosing to do so; for instance, if one injures someone in an auto accident, one is responsible for seeing him right, regardless of whether one intended to have a wreck. But there is no reason to deny people choice in accepting great obligations, if choice is both possible and consonant with justice. A secure legal right to abortion ensures that the obligations of pregnancy and parenthood can be faced and chosen on their own merits, and not undertaken unwillingly.
So apparently to the Objectivists one might incur an openended obligation through a car accident, given that the person injured may suffer a life-long incapacity that can never be made right; but the inconvenience of pregnancy--a 9 month affair--is beyond the obligation that any living person should have to endure.
The arguments presented in both of these websites are so shot full of holes as to be laughable. It was hard to ignore that both of these websites were written by men. A woman who has carried a child knows full well the difference between the unborn child and a dead corpse. One cannot look at ultrasound pictures of a three-month-old embryo without acknowledging that it is far more than a lump of cells and that it bears an uncanny resemblance to what appears when we look in the mirror.
Two messages that do come through is the utter selfishness of the writers, and the typical argument of the man who got a woman pregnant and wants no part of the responsibility he has incurred in the name of his sexual gratification. In reading them I could not help but wonder what skeletons lie in the closets of the men making the claims.
