“When is the last time a man was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy? A pregnancy that could play havoc with his life?”
And when was the last time a woman was confronted with being that unwanted pregnancy, somehow survives her own mother’s attempt to murder her, and then finally questions her about it in adulthood?
Besides, the funny thing is, men are confronted with unwanted pregnancies that can play havoc with their life all the time, it is just that we have no say in the conversation about letting that pregnancy continue or not, despite it carrying half our DNA.
" Un-oh, another Serious Philosopher! In other words, with me, you’re off to a bad start."
No; nobody hates philosophers more than I do. The existence of another challenges my bid for absorbing the mortis imago, in Ovidian language, into the image of my own morto imaginis and Self-hood; for silencing death, world, and god, in the image of my own EIDEIA.
“Again, a series of assumptions embedded largely in a world of words that make no reference to any specific sets of circumstances in which, once again, we are confronted with arguments passionately embraced by those from the extreme left all the way to the extreme right. And all points in between.”
Just as I explained in the paragraph about heuresis: yes. Well first of all, they aren’t assumptions they’re axioms and definitions: self-evident truths, as our spiritual Fathers would say, assuming you belong, too, to the US; and second, the whole point is to develop a theoretical framework without any reference to any one particular circumstance. Through the abstract moral principle, heightened and abstracted from all particularity: we judge the particular, in such a way as to draw out latent associations between events that would otherwise remain occulted, forever hidden from our sight. This is the point of philosophy, that is,- to conceive extreme cases, or abstract principles, that would allow us to test and find previously inaccessible patterns between apparently unrelated things in the world of our experience. Hence, to something else you said,
“A gigantic general description that just begs for a particular context in which to assess the extent to which the definition you give to these words placed in this order is what all reasonable people are expected to be in sync with.”
I would add that: I do not attempt to keep people in sync with it; just the opposite. I want to disconcert them by using these higher-level abstractions to create absurd, or what would be absurd scenarios at the level of the concrete, which would help to induce a change in perspective for a person, and facilitate their questioning various particulars they thought they knew quite well. My point is to provide a “new set of parameters” to borrow my own expression from the post, through which to force latent associations at the level of the disparate particular into consciousness. For at the highest level of abstraction, on which the famed Socratic equation of Virtue=Beauty=Truth is derived, there are no latent associations, and all is bound up equally by the depths, in which “everything is law”, to cite the poet of the Duino Elegies, Rilke.
“You’re talking about the community or the nation as a whole.”
No, I am talking about the abstract ethical and legal category of the Individual and the nation as a whole, whose members can all be equally conformed to that abstract category.
“I’m talking about an actual individual who becomes pregnant and does not want to be. Perhaps because of a defective contraception, perhaps as a result of rape or incest.”
We can’t legitimize murder for the sake of such extenuating factors; I don’t support the death penalty either. I spoke of the significance of responsibility as applied to that abstract category of the individual, which- although all interaction is an interplay of I and We, is nonetheless granted legal and moral primacy in our Constitution. If the woman cannot take responsibility for the pregnancy out of her own volition in becoming pregnant due to a rape, she still has the potential to accept responsibility that, for whatever reason: a life now depends on her. That trumps any impulse to demand that the fetus takes responsibility for having been so conceived.