How will the future judge us?
If hindsight is 20/20, wouldn't it be nice to see what people in the future would think about us? What present day practices will future generations condemn as "evil"? The New York Times blogger Ross Douthat points readers to K. Anthony Appiah who has some thoughts on the subject. It's well worth some consideration.
The Judgment of the Future
From the New York Times
Today’s op-ed provocation belongs to K. Anthony Appiah, who speculates on what moral evils future generations might condemn our era for tolerating or even blessing. He suggests the following rubric for predicting shifts in moral sentiment: ...
In the spirit of such self-congratulation, I would (predictably) nominate abortion as a presently-tolerated evil that will one day be generally deplored. After all, it fits Appiah’s rubrics pretty neatly: The moral arguments against the practice are well known, its defenders are increasingly likely to defend the social necessity of abortion rights (often along “women’s equality depends on legal abortion” lines) and the impracticality of an outright ban than they are to defend the justice of abortion itself, and the pro-life movement spends a great deal of time trying to confront Americans with the physical realities of abortion, whether via ultrasound images or grisly photos of fetuses held up at protest marches.
OK, I'll play.
I think Douthat is completely wrong---esp. when he compares the efforts to outlaw abortion to the (anti-slavery) abolition movement. The tipping point in abolition WASN'T "abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks" (to the extent those abolitionists were white).
No, the tipping point was those like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, who had themselves formerly BEEN enslaved (and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, who continually risked life and limb to free more African-Americans).
It was African-Americans who gave the eloquent example of their own humanity, in ever greater numbers, who became the "inarguable argument" against slavery.
This, obviously, isn't going to happen in the case of abortion. Enslaved human beings were (and sadly, still are) a witnessed-to REALITY. "Unborn children" is a (tendentious) DOGMA.
Nuff said?
No.
Because Douthat is right about one thing: the historical precedent that technology matters.
Right now, pro-choice and anti-abortion are Zero Sum: to be able to (choose to) end a pregnancy, means to obtain an abortion. But what if, technologically, there was another option? That to end a pregnancy (remove an embryo/fetus from the uterus of the woman who doesn't want it there) did NOT mean to abort (terminate) said embryo/fetus? That there was a mechanical and/or biological option: put the conceptus either into a stasis, or directly to another "womb" (uterus or substitute)?
Yes, that possibility will prove a sticky wicket. Certainly, some women will be GLAD to have that option---but does having the option to NOT terminate a (removed) embryo/fetus, mean that the embryo/fetus CAN'T be terminated? [And what will the (likely extraordinary) COSTS to sustain the conceptus be? Who should be responsible for that cost?]
Future ethical conundrums to consider! ;-/
JC Fisher
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September 30, 2010 3:30 AM