No Moral High Ground
The big quote below the citation is from a handout my Ethics professor passed out tonight. It's pertinent to a lot of things, not the least of which is this interminable political season. Remember, though:
Do not however suppose that the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair. Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times. (MacIntyre, 5)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. (Notre Dame UP, 1981). pp 6 - 7.
“The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this that such debates go on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”
MacIntyre follows this with this example:
“(a) Everybody has certain rights over his or her own person, including his or her own body. It follows from the nature of these rights that at the stage when the embryo is essentially part of the mother’s body, the mother has a right to make her own uncoerced decision on whether she will have an abortion or not. Therefore abortion is morally permissible and ought to be allowed by law.
“(b) I cannot will that my mother should have had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, except perhaps if it had been certain that the embryo was dead or gravely damaged. But if I cannot will this in my own case, how can I consistently deny to others the right to life that I claim for myself? I would break the so-called Golden Rule unless I denied that a mother has in general a right to an abortion. I am not of course thereby committed to the view that abortion ought to be legally prohibited.
“(c) Murder is wrong. Murder is the taking of an innocent life. An embryo is an identifiable individual, differing from a newborn infant only in being at an earlier stage on the long road to adult capacities and, if any life is innocent, that of an embryo is. If infanticide is murder, as it is, abortion is murder. So abortion is not only morally wrong, but ought to be legally prohibited.
“Every one of the arguments is logically valid . . . . But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one against the other. For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the other, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds.”
More on MacIntyre:
Notes on After Virtue
Bibliography of MacIntyre's Works
The Achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre