Is it justifiable homicide if you kill abortion providers? Is abortion itself justifiable homicide?

 Some states—including South Dakota—consider homicide justifiable when it is an act of self-defense or in defense of another person. But HB 1171 would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include homicide that is intended to prevent harm to a fetus in certain circumstances. Abortion is not only legal in this country, but is a constitutionally protected right. As worded, this bill is an invitation to murder those who provide these legal health care services.

Here. 

Is it wrong to kill abortion providers? I would have thought prolifers would want to keep the range of justifiable homicide narrow. 

For an argument that defends abortion as justifiable homicide, see here. 

Murders, justifiable homicides, and other killings of persons

 What do you mean by murder? There are malicious acts of murder, there are justifiable homicides, but then are there homicides that are not justified, but not murder either?

The grand miracle

 The central miracle of Christianity isn't the Resurrection. It's the Incarnation, according to C. S. Lewis. 

Merry Christmas. 

The resemblance fallacy and the death penalty

  I think it is a fallacy to think that in order to fit the crime, a punishment has to resemble the crime. People think that way about murder, but what about theft, rape, or torture? 

Abortion in the interests of the fetus?

 Well, if a fetus is aborted, it goes to heaven. If it is not aborted, it might live long enough to commit a damnable sin. 

But that isn't the argument that is discussed here.  The child's earthly life is likely to be miserable, so would it be better to abort it rather than condemn it to a short life of suffering. 

utilitarianism and the value of life

 I once knew someone who was such a utilitarian that he thought human life was not a value at all. A friend of mine once asked him "Well, if that is your view, what would be wrong with me killing you now?" His answer was "Only if you could do it painlessly. 

One kind of pro-choice argument

 In the 2005 article “Most Abortions Are Morally Legitimate,” Bonnie Steinbock puts forward an argument stating that abortion is in fact morally justified in most cases. Steinbock begins by declaring that her belief on the morality of abortion is based on two considerations which are the moral status of the embryo and the fetus and the burdens imposed on women through pregnancy and childbirth. Steinbock also puts forward the interests view, which limits moral status to people who have interests in their future and restricts the possession of interests to people who are conscious of the world around them. Following the logic presented by the interest view, Steinbock argues that fetuses are not conscious enough to understand their interests and that it is not morally wrong to kill a fetus when there is an adequate reason for doing so. Steinbock further discusses the view on abortion possessed by Don Marquis and argues that it is wrong because it attempts to claim that a fetus is a conscious living being and that it would be immoral to kill an unborn child even though they have no awareness of their interests and the outside world.

Abortion and future technology

 An interesting sidebar to the abortion issue would be this. People who are pro-choice often say that  the intent of getting an abortion is not the death of the fetus, it is instead the termination of the pregnancy. At the present time we don't have the means to keep fetuses alive, so fetal death is normal inevitable result of abortion, but strictly speaking, it's collateral damage from the pregnancy termination. We can imagine technology developing to where anyone who wanted to terminate their pregnancy could have the fetus removed and then put into an artificial incubator where they will be kept until birth, after which they will by put up for adoption. If such technology develops, would pro-lifers still hold that it is wrong to get abortions? Would pro-choicers still insist that a woman has the right to secure the death of the fetus (Judith Jarvis Thomson says otherwise)?

The faith of President-elect Biden

 Here.  For those who are just interested in the abortion stuff, it's around 13 minutes in. Apparently he had a discussion with Pope Benedict on the issue. 

Can the law punish all wrongs?

 There are certainly things that most of us regard as immoral that we wouldn’t want criminal laws against. For example, I think most of us would consider it wrong to make false promises to someone in order to get them into bed with you. But do you really want the long arm of the law poking into your dating life in order to detect and punish this offense.

Christian political independence

 I think you can make pragmatic and tentative choices of party as a Christian, but Christian ought to be, in an important sense, independent of any party. Parties are coalitions that combine godly and ungodly interests, almost by definition.

A great but neglected Lewis essay is one called Meditation on the Third Commandment. When I was writing a column in the bulletin for the church I worked at back in 1980 (!) the Moral Majority was just taking shape. I wrote an essay in which I basically cribbed Lewis's essay to argue that the Moral Majority was a misguided enterprise. 

Determinism is determinism

Determinism is determinism. There is only one kind of determinism. It is not the case that hards believe in outside forces and softs believe in inner states. No, both affirm that a causal chain going back before the agent was born is causally responsible for every action. The difference is whether that is relevant in determinism moral responsibility. Hard determinists say that this causal chain means people are not free and not morally responsible for their actions. For soft determinists the causal chain is real, but irrelevant to moral responsibility. Same determinism, different implications of determinism.

Determinism and responsibility in the final analysis

 If determinism is true, if one person is a murderer and another person is a law-abiding citizen, the ultimate reason goes back before the people were born. In what sense is it really, ultimately, the murderer's fault, at least in the final analysis?

Substitutionary atonement and intuition

It might seem counterintuitive to some people that punishing an innocent person can satisfy the demands of justice against a guilty person. It may be correct, but there is an intuitive barrier to get over.

The Death Penalty and Exonerating the Innocent

 Although the death penalty is appealing in a lot of ways, it is irreversible, which means that if it turns out there is a miscarriage of justice and someone is executed for something they didn't do, nothing can be done about it. For 30 years Anthony Ray Hinton was on death row for a murder he didn't commit, until the Equal Justice Initiative picked up his case and got him exonerated. Knowing what I know about the tendency to rush to judgment, and the racism inherent in the justice system in our country, I have trouble trusting the system enough to retain the death penalty.

On an eye for an eye

Jesus stated it in order to cancel it and introduce a higher law which rejects vengeance and payback. He instructs us to respond to our injustices with a higher form of response —- love. Jesus then gives illustrations in the passage which indicate how we should respond in love.
One, “But I tell you not to resist an evil person…” (Vs. 39). This doesn’t mean not to defend yourself. The meaning of the Greek text is “don’t payback evil with evil means.” It means don’t be aggressive in retaliating by evil means. Don’t escalate the situation by trying to get even.
Jesus continues, “But whoever slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Vs. 39).
There is of course a limit to this but it means, “be very patient and don’t respond aggressively or rudely”. It means to respond in a positive courteous way to show an attitude and speak in such a way as to show the spirit of Jesus. The Bible say we are to be slow to anger. Jesus forgave even those who crucified Him.

Nov. 22, 1963

 Aldous Huxley died on this date in 1963. So did a couple of other famous people.

Abortion: Something to shout about?

 

It seems to me that there are a lot of situations in which a woman might make a decision to get an abortion. They could be doing it because having a baby would compromise their party lifestyle. They might be doing it because they were raped. They might to do it because they don't want to put off their college degree. They might do it because they know they can't afford to care for the child once it's born, or because they won't be able to afford to get the prenatal care they will need to complete the pregnancy. Or they could choose abortion because they don't want to bring a disabled child into the world (implying that disability makes a life not worth living). The only way you can argue that abortion is OK across the board is to maintain that the fetus, prior to birth, is a blob of tissue that has no intrinsic value. Many people who might not be prepared to equate all abortion with murder might nonetheless think that in an abortion you cause the loss of something of considerable value, and that decision to abort, at minimum, should not be taken lightly. (But others actually think abortions are something to shout about). https://shoutyourabortion.com/book/

Soft Determinism and moral responsibility

 Soft determinism says that even if (and even though) determinism is true, we are still responsible for our actions. What does that mean exactly,  that we are responsible for our actions? Moral responsibility seems to have two distinct meanings, and you might answer the question of soft determinism differently depending on which one you mean.  One meaning it might have is that, even if determinism is true, our motives cause our actions, therefore actions that attempt to correct our motives in order to change our future actions are warranted. Whatever might be causing me to contemplate  committing a cold-blooded murder, if you don't want me committing that cold-blooded murder, then whose motive needs to be modified? Well, mine. So you may want to attach penalties to cold-blooded murder so that have a countervailing motive to whatever my motive for murder might be, and not commit the act. If I do commit the act, then you are going to want to find out who did it, and maybe do something to me that will deter others from doing the same thing. But what if determinism is true, and the fact that I am a murderer and you are a law-abiding citizen is, in the final analysis, the result of factors beyond my control, or yours. If you are trying to correct someone's motives and change their behavior, pushing the question of "responsibility" further back like that doesn't make sense. But what if what you are doing is first and foremost trying to give me what I really deserve, to approximate in human terms what presumably God, if there is one, will be doing at the Final Judgment? Then it seems to me that being concerned about determinism is more plausible, since it seems to be a matter of cosmic luck that I happened to end up on the end of a causal chain that made me a murderer, but made you a law-abiding citizen.

In what sense are we responsible for our actions?

An interesting aspect of the free will controversy has to do with the kind of moral responsibility that is at stake. Is it the kind of moral responsibility that can justify retribution, or maybe even eternal retribution? Or is it something else, such as knowing who to motivate through reward or punishment. I first encountered the free will problem in the context of debates of Calvinism. Calvinists and their opponents agree concerning the sense in which we are responsible for our actions--if someone goes to hell because of sin, they deserve to go to hell because of sin. So, in that context, you have to ask whether being predestined by God to, say, commit murder renders you still responsible, sub specie aeternitatis, for committing that murder. And it seemed to me that if determinism were true, and circumstances, (such as a divine eternal decree) rendered it impossible for me to do otherwise from commit a murder, I am not responsible for that murder, but that whoever issued that eternal decree, as the ultimate source of my action, would be.

Consider the fact that "the devil made me do it" is considered an almost comic example of a lame excuse. The reason we are usually given for this is the idea that the devil tempts us, but we have the free will to resist the devil, in which case the devil will flee. This seems to assume that we have libertarian free will. No one made you do anything.

Later, when I wrote my master's thesis on free will, I realized that many compatibilists were secularists, and who were not ascribing responsibility to agents in the same sense that Christians were. They were asking questions, perhaps, of the utility of punishment in ascribing moral responsibility. And here, I thought, their "compatibilist" position was at least consistent. They weren't saying that people were responsible for their actions in some "last judgment" sense, they were saying that we need to know who to motivate and how when we punish, and that the question of ultimate moral responsibility need not be asked.

However, weakening the sense of moral responsibility can have some potentially dangerous consequences that Lewis notes in his famous essay on the humanitarian theory of punishment. What happens if we say that what someone deserves doesn't matter, and what we must do is simply do what will protect society, deter crime, or rehabilitate the criminal. Will this give us the license to reform criminals any way we see fit, regardless of their freedom and dignity? Do we have the right to brainwash people into not committing crimes? Do we have the right to "fix" people we might think will commit crimes for the benefit of society? Does the abandonment of free will lead to fundamental changes in who we think we are?

This is related to the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."