Sure. All rather understandible. But to me unclear. ‘Fragmented’ and ‘fractured’ are very dramatic words. Presumably right now there is no abortion choice close to him. IOW he does not for personal reasons right now need to weigh in on a romantic partner or family member’s decision to abort or not. So it is not pressing in that sense.
‘I have strong mixed feelings.’ ‘It truly bothers me that I cannot find a way to resolve this issue.’
Sentences like that I understand in relation to the issue.
If he had a girlfriend right now who was considering an abortion and he felt torn on the issue, I could begin to understand F & F, more at least.
And to be fair it is not a one issue thing, even if what I quoted above might lead one to believe that. I assume he is F & F because he does not know how to resolve a wide range of moral issues, not just the abortion one. Fine, it certainly can be disturbing to feel like one has no way to resolve moral issues WHILE AT THE SAME TIME one feels on must do this - (for moral reasons??? for non-moral reasons???).
But right now I have no idea if this means he walks around most of the time feeling F & F. Or it comes up when he thinks about an issue like abortion.
If the latter then to me he is being melodramatic. To posit his psyche as fragmented and fractured, rather than some other more mundane and concrete way of describing his reaction.
In any context where value judgments clash. He lives in the US I think so if that counts as a context, then there is an ongoing clash between value judgments on the issue. But it’s not really his context anymore. There are political contexts. Of course it is not his job to reconcile these value clashes. One immediate reaction is that if those dramatics words ‘F&F’ really account for his internal state well, then he should withdraw from contexts, if he can, where these values are clashing. Online discussions of those issues, for example. Just out of self-care. Perhaps also start to see what the justification is for the pressure he is putting on himself.
Notice how in his response to you issues like a lack of God and whether there is an afterlife get conflated with conflicting goods.
Obviously God might reconcile conflicting goods. But here he is suffering F & F due to conflicting goods and always trying to get people to prove one side or the other. That is not going to help him figure out the afterlife.
Sitting around thinking about abortion and other value clashes is not going to help him understand the afterlife.
There are two really quite different issues - will his self continue or will it end? and how can be use reason to demonstrate the correct moral attitude on all issues?
He claims that the latter is enough to fracture and fragment him. Not just bother him. Not just something that can, on occasion, raise anxiety or frustration. But ongoing he is F&F. And by the way those terms are the kind of self-description used by people in psychotic breaks. Now we all have different meanings with descriptions of internal states, but he is steadfast in that self-description and uses it instead of more mundane, less melodramatic terms.
And yet, he wants to discuss abortion with everyone.