The Not-So-Good Samaritans
Aristotle, the Preservation of Families & the Duties of the State
by Patrick Henry Reardon
While few surprises attend the statistical reports about the religious and moral persuasions of this country’s two largest political parties, I suggest that the recent publication of those figures may serve as a suitable occasion for examining more broadly the philosophical foundations of our public and political life. From time to time we truly need to do this, I believe, if only to forestall an intellectual cramping of our political experience.
It is not hard, after all, to lose the larger philosophical perspective on political matters when we are constrained, as most of the time we are, by the narrowed focus of particular political and social problems. Sustained concentration on individual and immediate concerns, especially of a partisan and polemical sort, may easily obscure in our minds the more ample philosophical considerations ultimately essential to those concerns. Indeed, the dynamics and demands of controversy render such a narrowing of view almost inevitable, as we indicate when we refer to somebody’s argument as “incisive” or when we say that so-and-so “drove the point home.” The argumentative value of a narrow perspective is precisely that it is sharper. It assumes the slender contour of the dagger’s edge, the deeper to cut.
Rights Talk
I want to begin with a single example of this polemical narrowing of view, not only as an illustration of the phenomenon itself, but in order to initiate a consideration of our public and political life through a broader philosophical perspective. The example I pick is abortion.
Consider this ongoing conflict, in which our dominant dagger-thrust, in order to go deep, is very thin indeed. Most arguments that we Christians employ against legalized abortion in this country are very narrowly based on the “rights of the unborn.” With all the theological reasons our Christian faith supplies us for opposing abortion, why do we intentionally choose, almost exclusively, a line of argument rooted in Natural Law? We do this, I believe, for four reasons.
First, elementary prudence. This approach to abortion from the perspective of Natural Law, precisely because it is not overtly religious, serves to shield us from the accusation of imposing our own religious views on the rest of the populace. (Our opponents, by the way, are not fooled by this maneuver. Whatever the philosophical considerations we throw at them, they know that our real motives have something to do with heaven and hell, and they resent it.)
Second, the rational, even scientific, demands of the public forum. An argument against abortion based on a point of Natural Law, specifically the human being’s right not to be murdered, places this public controversy exactly where it should be placed—within a rational frame of reference, entirely subject to logical analysis and completely available to anyone who can use his senses and think coherently. This approach, which philosophers call “the principle of intersubjectivity,” is drawn from the discipline of science. It modestly asserts, “Let us all, if you don’t mind, use the same microscope and the identical slide-rule. No tricks or sleight-of-hand, please. Let us eschew arcane runes, magic wands, and special revelations. In this way, at the end of the investigation, we should all arrive at the same verifiable conclusion.”
Third, argumentative rigor and cogency. It is entirely proper and efficacious to contend against legalized abortion on the basis of rights, because it is a fact that certain rights of the unborn child are already recognized and legally safeguarded by the State. By inheritance laws, for example. It is already established that unborn infants may inherit property, and their ownership of such property is both protected by law and subject to challenge by litigation. Thus, on the strength of a legal analogy, opponents of abortion enjoy the considerable leverage of logic when they remark on the incongruity of the State’s protecting an unborn child’s right to property while denying that same child’s right to life. On the other side, the pro-choice advocate is coerced, on the strength of this legal analogy, into declaring that the unborn child, though not possessing the dignity of a legal person, may nonetheless enjoy the prerogatives of a legal heir. In short, a very compelling argument against legalized abortion is made by narrowing the perspective of the case to the simple postulation of rights, or, if you will, a consideration of the child as citizen.
Fourth, rhetorical advantage. The benefits of arguing against legalized abortion in this way are more than logical. An appeal to rights, in the American context, is emotionally persuasive. Those who show themselves solicitous for the rights of the unborn citizen benefit from invoking a very popular and readily admitted premise, a presupposition virtually unassailable in the present culture. Everybody likes rights. Indeed, if there remains a single “self-evident truth” in contemporary American life, it is the primacy and importance of rights. While Americans may be sometimes a bit hazy about the origins and metaphysical underpinnings of their rights, the existence of those rights is everywhere robustly affirmed. Logic aside, then, any public plea based on the narrow perspective of rights enjoys a great rhetorical edge on the American scene. This is all well and good. As long as we are laboring for the very lives of unborn children, let us employ all rational and moral resources that come to hand.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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