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1. INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY
KARDINAAL MERCIERPLEIN 2
BE-3000 LEUVEN
A Rational Humanism Against Misanthropy: An
Historical-Philosophical Analysis of Abortion in
Postmodernity
Supervisor: (Prof.) dr. Name of Supervisor
Dr. Professor Luc Ackaert
A thesis presented in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of
Philosophy (MA)
Calvin Michael
Monley

2. 2
Table of Contents
I. Introduction: Abortion and Postmodern Misanthropy (4)
I.A. Purpose and Thematic Overview (4)
I.B. Structural Overview (11)
II. First Chapter: Procedural Definitions. (13)
II.A. Definition of ‘Abortion.’ (13)
II.B. Definition of ‘After-Birth Abortion.’ (13)
III. Second Chapter: Socio-Linguistic Rationality, Moral Exigency and
Enlightenment Deism (16)
III.A. 20th Century Epistemology. (16)
III.B. Moral Unconditionality and Intelligence’s Quest for Meaning (19)
III.C. Enlightenment Deism and Egalitarianism (21)
III.D. Contemporary Rights Discourse’s Potentially Misanthropic Political
Instability (24)
IV. Third Chapter: (Social) Darwinism, Abortion in Ancient Hellenistic Political
Philosophy and the Judeo-Christian Philanthropic Contrast (28)
IV.A. Pre and Post-War Social Darwinist Eugenics. (28)
IV.B. Abortion in the Hellenistic World (29)
IV.C. Abortion in Pre-Christian Judaism (32)
IV.D. Abortion and the Equivocity of Christian Anthropology (34)
V. Fourth Chapter: Animal Ideality and an Anthropological Evaluation of Post-
War Utilitarianism (38)
V.A. Post-War Utilitarian Eugenics as Libertarian and Post-Modern (38)
V.B. Contemporary Utilitarian Ethical Anthropology (40)

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V.C. Animal Ideality’s Surprising Ethical Challenge (43)
V.D. Some Criticisms of Utilitarianism (46)
VI. Fifth Chapter: Abortion Itself(53)
VI.A. A Dark Phenomenological Dimension of Human Sexuality. (53)
VI.B. Relevant Embryological and Neo-Natal Data. (55)
VII. Conclusion: A Formal Thanks (61)
Research Abstract (62)
Bibliography (63)

4. 4
Give me back the Berlin Wall.
Give me Stalin and St. Paul.
Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima.
Destroy another fetus now.
We don’t like children anyhow.
I’ve seen the future, baby.
It is murder.
– Leonard Cohen. “The Future”1
I. Introduction: Abortion and Postmodern Misanthropy
I.A. Purpose and Thematic Overview
Abortion is one of Western late-modernity’s most bitter controversies. There, broadly illegal
(penalties were generally harsher on the continent than in the Anglo-world, at least until the 19th
century,
and early U.S. colonial common law evidenced laxities,2
etc.) from the Roman Empires’ Christianization
onward,3
it was gradually legalized – often initially via significant ‘compromise’ extensions of traditional
‘therapeutic’ casuistries’ (saving the mother’s life) to encompass physical, mental, and socio-economic and
familial well-being,4
and later through secular feminism and humanist autonomy presupposing abortion
1
The title track of the living legend’s ninth studio album of the same name, released in 1992 on Columbia Records.
2
Concerning the laxity of early American law see pages 82-9 of acclaimed American novelist and moral essayist Roger Rosenblatt’s nifty, amazingly
compassionate Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind (New York: Random House, 1992). See also pages 28-9 of George Dennis O’Brien’s The Church and
Abortion: A Catholic Dissent. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2010). Regarding the relative harshness of Anglo-Irish and
Continental penalties, Rosenblatt says: “Local conciliar law diverged depending on location; while in Britain and Ireland reduced penances for very early abortion
2
Concerning the laxity of early American law see pages 82-9 of acclaimed American novelist and moral essayist Roger Rosenblatt’s nifty, amazingly
compassionate Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind (New York: Random House, 1992). See also pages 28-9 of George Dennis O’Brien’s The Church and
Abortion: A Catholic Dissent. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2010). Regarding the relative harshness of Anglo-Irish and
Continental penalties, Rosenblatt says: “Local conciliar law diverged depending on location; while in Britain and Ireland reduced penances for very early abortion
were standard, no distinctions based on fetal age were made in Burgundy, Spain and Cambria, where churches adhered to the ten-year penance … In France,
abortion of the ‘animated’ fetus was considered murder until the revolution and punished accordingly. As late as the first Bourbon period (1589-1793), doctors and
midwives who assisted abortions were sentenced to hanging … A French law of 1791 reduced the penalty to twenty years in prison. The Napoleonic Code of 1810
set the term of punishment as an indefinite ‘limited time,’ without mentioning animation or fetal age. In 1787, Austria under Joseph II dropped its death penalty for
abortion.” (68)
3
In connection with the history of philosophical / theological thought and law concerning abortion in the Catholic and Byzantine Churches up till the early
twentieth century, see pages 7-41 of distinguished Catholic legal philosopher and jurist’s John T. Noonan Jr.’s famous “An Almost Absolute Value in History.” In:
John T. Noonan (ed.) The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard UP, 1970, 1-59. See also pages 135-84 of
intensely respected French-American Conservative Catholic philosopher Germain Grisez’s Abortion: The Myths, the Realities and the Arguments (New York:
Corpus Books, 1970). Finally see pages of 65-8 of Rosenblatt’s Life Itself.
4
This author shall endeavor in this essay to accomplish the perhaps not fully possible task of a long march through highly emotionally charged philosophical
territory with an absolute minimum of ad hominem arguments or judgments. Hence, the following remark is made in all the charitable caution he can muster. He
stands fairly swayed, though hardly fully convinced, by evidenced presented by Grisez in chapter 5 of his Abortion, entitled “The State of the Legal Question,”
(185-266) to the effect that the early 20th
century birth-control movement - which in America (led by figures such as Margaret Sanger, Alan Guttmacher,
Christopher Tietze and Frederick Taussig) initially sharply ethically distinguished contraception from abortion, before joining by the time of the Second World
War the far more politically sophisticated and philosophically clear-minded British movement (F.W. Stella Brown, Janet Chance, Alice Rossi, Alex Bourne, etc.)
in strongly seeking feminism and autonomy based abortion rights for women – was happy to initially seek only such compromises, and to maintain publically
belief in the undesirability or moral weight of abortion, knowing all the while that public acceptance of these initials both depended upon, and would effect, an
erosion of belief in fetal inviolability, which would quickly pave an easy path to abortion on demand. He presumes no right to pronounce on the morality of such
political machinations, if true. For it may well be that the leaders of these movements, and the various legal and medical associations that came to agree with their
advocacy (such as the ALI’s famous 1959 proposal), believed, following a consequentialist morality, such misrepresentations to be in all good conscience justified.

5. 5
rights policies - throughout that whole cultural sphere.5
Most contemporary Westerners have strong
opinions concerning this legalization and the socio-cultural acceptance it bespeaks, making discussion often
tremendously painful. But this is unfortunate, for these opinions can usually be - even if lacking substantive
knowledge of relevant empirics and philosophical principles – articulated with deep compassion and moral
and cultural-historical lucidity. Thus, this author feels comfortable not offering here introductory walk-
throughs of the issue’s philosophical contours, or indeed of the argument surfaces of the major writings
within the fairly linguistically insular ‘tradition’ of Anglo-American literature constituting this work’s
research base (spanning primarily 1970-1991, i.e., the two decades of philosophical-cultural ‘process time’
following this legalization’s fairly contemporaneous realization across the English speaking first-world,6
yet
including a few more recent contributions, judged tremendously salient). Instead, he’ll presuppose, and
demonstrate his possession of, this knowledge by jumping straight into that literature’s marrow: those
approaches’ deep metaphysical and axiological presuppositions and import, especially as linked with recent
centuries’ transformations in Western societies of what legendary Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
designates as their ‘cosmic’ and ‘social’ imaginaries.7
5
Abortion was legalized in various U.S. states in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, before being made nationally licit via the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe vs.
Wade. This ruling, one of the twentieth century’s couple most significant, and certainly the most controversial, is a trimester framework. The procedure’s
permitted in the first two, though states are allowed increasingly stringent health regulations in the second, but admits elective prohibition in the third, around
viability, to preserve the ‘potential’ life which the law professes itself to have compelling interest in, so long as sufficient exceptions for life and health are made.
See “Roe vs. Wade: The 1973 Supreme Court Decision on State Abortion Laws” (In: The Ethics of Abortion. Edited by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum.
Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989, 13-22.) The ruling can be inveighed against on grounds other than those invoked by the traditional Christian (and
secular – Don Marquis) conservative arguments whose underlying rationales this essay explores. Singer himself, for instance, in surprising parallel to typical
conservative Christian thought, believes it illegitimately reduced fetal personhood to the private decision of women, i.e., in invoking as the highest principle the
‘privacy’ guaranteed under the 5th
and 14th
amendments of the U.S. Constitution it had, without argument, effectively decided that question negatively. See page
131 of the 3rd
edition of his Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011). Furthermore, he regards the viability criteria as morally insignificant. In his words:
[the court] “gave no indication why the mere capacity to exist outside the womb should make such a difference to the state’ s interest in protecting potential life”
(Ibid. 126-7) Moreover, though viability varies much from place to place and historical period to historical period, this doesn’t, in his view, change the fetus’
nature, and thus shouldn’t affect its right to life (Ibid). Finally, assuming a fetal right to life, that right he thinks no more negated by bodily dependence on the
woman than that of an injured hiker is negated by their requiring their partner to help them to safety (ibid. – these quotations and ideas are indirectly drawn from
pages 14-16 of Charles Camosy’s Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2012), especially footnote 19). The
concomitant case Doe vs. Bolton (1973) permitted rather broad understandings of ‘health.’ The general result of their combination, along with important
subsequent decisions Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), is that states with heavily conservative /
religious demographics regularly test how much they can chip away - through parental / spousal consent measures, impossible to meet clinic / hospital health
regulations, mandated viability testing, waiting periods and counseling, etc. and outright prohibitory laws - at a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion, while liberal
states employ that therapeutic elasticity to effectively permit abortion on demand. Abortion was effectively decriminalized by the United Kingdom in 1967 and
legalized in Canada in 1969. In Australia through the 1960’s and 1970’s juridical interpretations of health exceptions to the 1861 British Offenses Against the
Person Act generally loosened to the point of allowing abortion on demand. These legal changes can be situated within this larger context: Lenin’s 1920
legalization of the procedure (reversed, for population growth reasons, by Stalin in 1936: and reversed again in 1955), Japan’s legalization in 1948, and Austria
(1974), France (1975), Italy (1978), the Netherlands (1980) and Belgium (1990). An excellent detailed overview of Western legal history regarding abortion,
especially the run-up to widespread legalization since the first decades of the twentieth century, can be found in pages 185-266 of Grisez’s Abortion. Another
worthwhile source is pages 49-98 of Rosenblatt’s Life Itself. Historically theocratic Ireland remains the notable exception, though it’s now passed the Protection of
Life During Pregnancy Act of 2013, allowing abortions to save the woman’s life, including its threat by suicide. The recent impetus for reform was sparked by the
October 2012 death of Savita Halappanavar, who suffered a miscarriage at seventeen weeks and was repeatedly denied her abortion requests, which prompted
promises by the Irish government, under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights, to pass legislation giving real efficacy to a 1992 Irish Supreme Court
ruling permitting abortion in situations where pregnancy continuation seriously endangers the woman’s life. For good empirical data on the attitudes of Irish
people toward abortion’s legal status, indicating that the majority support reform more extensive than what was legislated, but less extensive than “abortion on
demand,” see “People of Ireland wait for abortion law reform - 70 percent want legislation on case X” in the February 12th, 2013 edition of Irish Central
(http://www.irishcentral.com/news/People-of-Ireland-wait-for-abortion-law-reform---70-percent-want-legislation-on-Case-X-190821281.html). For a more
personal take on the current law’s effects, one supporting my contention (presented later in this paper) that the phenomenological experience of pregnancy reveals
the intrinsic value of prenatal life, and for discussion of the present conflict on this matter between pro-life and pro-choice groups in Ireland, and between secular
society and the Catholic Church, see “Irish abortion debate reflects growing church-state tensions” by Sarah Parvini in the March 27th, 2013 edition of The
Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/irish-abortion-debate-reflects-growing-church-state-tensions/2013/03/27/03596fa4-96f6-
11e2-a976-7eb906f9ed9b_story.html).
6
Cf. the above footnote.
7
These concepts shall be unpacked in this essay’s second chapter. Here it suffices to note that they overlap with the more metaphysically systematic, yet hence
historically abstract, and also more agency-driven vision of Leuven’s own world-class metaphysician William Desmond of a 2nd
, or reconfigured ethos, dependent
upon a primal, ‘Metaxological Between.’ See for example, pages 2-3 of God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). This author has read extensively
from both this work and Ethics and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), and shall at various points draw from these texts.

6. 6
Abortion admits several different worthwhile philosophical trajectories, besides the straight-line of
developing and defending moral principles by which certain relevant empirical information can be assessed.8
Admittedly, the latter ultimately fulfills the matter, and the Anglo-American tradition is absolutely saturated
with such strivings. However, while such assessment is relatively straightforward once an adequately
specified principle set is possessed, one’s development requires quite deep metaphysical and axiological
explorations. At least a couple of that tradition’s contributors are veritably great philosophers, and all
accomplished scholars, so the following may well be nothing beyond a detection of their often presupposing
in the works this essay builds on, within what academic philosophical conventions permit, broad
metaphysical and axiological doctrines they’d be prepared to elsewhere vigorously defend: quite often those
texts themselves don’t evince sufficient explorations of that sort. This insufficiency’s correction is here a
primary objective. Obviously, yet unfortunately, that correction cannot itself be anywhere near fully
realized. For this author is naturally only a very novice philosopher, writing a short Masters’ paper. And the
questions involved here, like whether classical theism’s God exists, or objective morality, or a rational soul,
or whether the universe is teleological, far exceed his present research capacities. But it doesn’t exceed them
to detailedly define the questions themselves, in their relationship to abortion’s different moral and legal
layers, and to thus guide the curious through that quite impressive tradition (at least a representation of it).
This researcher, as is perhaps already obvious, believes the issue foundationally divides between the
traditional Christian worldview and modern secular materialist utilitarianism. However, this runs the risk of
superficiality; the tradition, as well as non-Western cultures / religions’ abortion moralities and laws, make
evident a spectrum across the Christian worldview at one end (that, to the degree such is achievable, any
promising philosophical-historical or phenomenological distillation of Christianity’s essence would include
opposition to abortion in all but quite extreme cases, is a point this writer hopes to travel at least toward
demonstrating, intentionally responding to important recent writings by ‘liberal’ Christian thinkers like
Daniel Dombrowski, Robert Deltete and George O’Brien, and to a certain embarrassed weariness of faith
sensed in older Christian ethicists, like O’Brien, H. Tristram Engelhardt and Joseph Fletcher)9
running
8
Among all the literature this author has read, distinguished American philosopher Michael Tooley deserves salutation for in his 1972 article “Abortion and
Infanticide” (In: The Ethics of Abortion. Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (eds.) Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989. 45-60) and his later
Abortion and Infanticide. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), most consciously annunciating, and reasoning according to, this distinction and evaluative
movement. See the first and last chapters of that monograph, and page 48 of that article.
9
Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert Deltete. A Brief, Liberal Catholic Defense of Abortion. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000; H. Tristram
Engelhardt Jr. ‘The Ontology of Abortion’. In: Samuel Gorovitz et all (eds.), Moral Problems in Medicine. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall,
Inc.,1976, 318-334. This author has here no intention, indeed no taste at all, for entering into theological disputes. He uses the term ‘liberal’ only because of its
quick referential power, not because he thinks it anything but dangerously superficial. Furthermore, he here makes clear in asserting this ‘sense’ that he presumes
no right at all to judge another’s interior life of faith or lack-thereof. Regarding its application to Engelhardt, he here cites page 250 of Camosy’s Peter Singer and
Christian Ethics. Concerning Fletcher (whom this essay shall not actually discuss), who famously became an atheist in late life, it is difficult for this author, to the
small degree he’s familiar with the man’s work, to think it ‘Christian’ in any meaningful sense. This isn’t an insult. It’s only to say that it strikes him as secular
utilitarianism, through and through, of which someone like Peter Singer could be proud. And indeed, in Chapter Four (‘What’s Wrong with Killing?) of the 2nd
ed.
of his Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Singer relies heavily on Fletcher’s ‘indicators of humanhood’: self-awareness and control, a
sense of future and past, relational capacities and concern for others, communication and curiosity – though his own categories stress rationality and self-
consciousness more exclusively. As Fletcher is quoted (from page 39 of the former’s Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966)) by Grisez (page 292 of
Abortion): “They [those who share Fletcher's view] would in all likelihood favor abortion for the sake of the patient's physical and mental health, not only if it
were needed to save her life. It is even likely they would favor abortion for the sake of the victim's self respect or reputation or happiness or simply on the ground
that no unwanted and unintended baby should ever be born.”

7. 7
through various other teleological and rationalist anthropological and socio-political visions, onto utilitarian
variants, all the way to near-absolute autonomy prioritizing, feminist, bodily autonomy advocacies.10
There exist also several alternative paths to these ends. This author’s elected to enrich this question
focus by historico-phenomenologically contextualizing this tradition. Concretely, his declining to attempt
this matters’ direct philosophical resolution isn’t merely pragmatic. It’s grounded in his authentic
uncertainty, indeed anguish, concerning these very real-life existential queries. For years he’s regards this
controversy, especially as its been battled out in his native U.S., as embodying them particularly
poignantly.11
And he hopes to here achieve catharsis by carving this emblematic-ness into philosophical
relief, and perhaps not just for himself, but maybe also for likeminded readers. Specifically, he’ll elucidate
how the afore-mentioned spectrum’s subdivisions each relate to different fundamental anthropologies,
especially different gauging of human ethical and civilizational capacities, and of ultimate spiritual destiny
(or lack thereof). These reflections interweave with what are hopefully quite empathetically dignified social-
phenomenological descriptions, based in Taylor’s filtrations of twentieth-century linguistic epistemology, of
a most unfortunate feature of contemporary Western imaginaries, integral, he thinks, to their ‘post-modern’
character, which necessarily colors for worse our thought regard this matter, and more broadly exercises
upon our societies tremendously corrosive effects: a certain ubiquitous, and inescapable - though often
repressed in polite society, politics and business as despairingly abject – profound anti-humanist
misanthropy, which the above epigraph from Leonard Cohen captures powerfully. This misanthropy’s
historico-political snowballing over recent Western centuries shall, naturally traced with exceeding
abridgment and spotlighting of infiltrations of originally purely academic conceptions - philosophical,
10
As Noonan observes on pages 37-8 of “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” and this author believes this a quite telling fact, the first well-known written
praise of abortion in post-Christian Western history appears to come from the Marquis De Sade (La Philosophie Dans Le Boudoir c. 2.), a down the centuries
famous advocate of Nietzsche or Byron-like radical libertarian freedom, about whose decidedly violent intensely sexual temperament little needs to be said.
11
These battles are particularly well known, and it far exceeds this author’s research and length constraints to at all adequately document them. He shall, however,
do two things. First, he’ll intensely recommends Rosenblatt’s Life Itself. Therein Rosenblatt, whose academic and letter achievements (a Peabody, two George
Polks, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, Harvard’s youngest ever ‘House Master’ of writing) equal those of almost every philosopher here discussed, offers a
profound meditation on the abortion issue’s perennially deep moral, spiritual and legal contours, particularly as they intersect with American politics and
mentalities, both historical and contemporary. His analyses are paradoxically quite philosophically astute in their non-philosophical-ity, tending towards a blend of
the phenomenological and the bodily autonomy approaches (later discussed). Second, he presents the following polling data. First, Rosenblatt synthesis three
major and nuanced polls (by Wirthlin, Gallup and Louis Harris) conducted between June 1990 and February 1991 into the following statistics. 77 percent of
Americans then considered abortion a form of murder, while between 73-83% supported at least some abortion rights, such as the procedure’s legality for rape,
incest, the mother’s life / health and in the first trimester, (though considerably fewer support the general abortion-on demand situation that Roe vs. Wade and Doe
vs. Bolton ushered in, and the statistics tend to be within a certain range malleable, depending on how personally certain questions are posed, and whether they
focus upon the mother’s plight or the unborn child). This author, however, finds Rosenblatt’s first statistic suspect, believing him to have invalidly conflated
affirmative responses to the question of whether abortion is the taking of a human life, but not murder (28%), with affirmative responses its being murder (49%).
This conflation is invalid, insofar as anyone familiar with both the basic developmental embryology covered in Chapter One and the general terms of this
philosophical debate would grasp the great moral significance of the distinction. One thinks that Rosenblatt here inadvertently falls into the sort of species-ism
condemned in this paper’s course. Yet this movement is strange in that he himself points out the invalidity of this conflation as regards the use made of the Gallup
statistics by the American pro-life group Americans United for Life. In any case, the details of these polls can be found on pages 183-9. Second, (and this author’s
conflation thesis is here supported) a 2012 Gallup poll found that 51% of Americans consider abortion in some sense generally morally wrong, and 50% are
comfortable using the phrase ‘pro-life’ to describe themselves, while only (a record low) 41% are willing to employ the phrase ‘pro-choice.’ Yet, as many pro-
choice writers and organizations were quick to point out following this poll, a shift toward more conservative legal opinions has not accompanied this not absolute
dramatic, yet substantive, transformation in moral opinion. For as is consistent over at least the past decade (and the early 90’s polls discussed above), a majority,
twice as large as the number supporting either extreme, favor abortion’s legality under certain circumstances. (See Lydia Saad’s May 23rd
, 2012 “ ‘Pro-Choice’
Americans at Record-Low 41%” – http://www.gallup.com/poll/154838/pro-choice-americans-record-low.aspx. Of course, there is, as is true of any socio-political
matter, the considerable danger that the moral-legal opinions of a population be born in considerable ignorance of relevant facts. For example, the late, beloved
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, in a February 16, 1993 address to the University of Illinois health care community entitled “The Abortion Debate and the
Consistent Ethic of Life,” (pages 211-22 of The Seamless Garment: Writings on the Consistent Ethic of Life. Thomas A. Nairn (ed.) Maryknoll, New York: Orbis
Books, 2008) points out that the 1990 Wirthlin Poll revealed that almost half of Americans then believed there to occur less than a half a million abortions per year
(the real total being 1.6 million), and that 35% of this figure occurred in situations of rape, incest or life endangerment (the real total being 1% for rape or incest,
and a mere 7% even citing ‘health,’ as a reason, a criteria here employing the widest possible construal of therapeutic abortion).

8. 8
scientific and theological – into these imaginaries, heuristically illuminate the Anglo-American tradition
and its metaphysical and axiological undergirdings.
This essay’s ultimate intellectual rub is this. While this author sympathizes considerably with typical
‘conservative’12
anti-abortion positions, he isn’t here endeavoring their direct defense. For, besides his
feeling incapable of contributing anything fundamentally new, this would require his subscribing to various
definite metaphysical and axiological positions he’d like to believe, indeed regards with a certain Camus-
like sense of propriety,13
but must remain philosophically agnostic regarding. Moreover, this misanthropy
unfortunately often extends to his own psyche, making him, almost involuntarily, deeply skeptical of what
such would accomplish, in a West which, deeply fatigued with its own civilizational project, has forsaken
transcendental hunger for the empty calories of hedonism and corporate fascism14
and pop-science’s
(scientism’s) just minimal intellectual nutrients. Finally, there’s to him - but this may just be the
misanthropic sense that because life often seems as in the last stanza of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,’ and hence
ourselves as naught but ignorant, confused foot soldiers therein,15
aborting a nascent individual, prenatal or
neonatal (this author regards very early infanticide - particularly, but not exclusively, fetal euthanasia – as
extending abortion’s socio-legal acceptance’s underlying logic) not yet to briefly flare in futile, contingent
rational self-consciousness, like a slowly burning light illuminating an initially astonishingly beautiful room
that shall inexorably turn to inhospitable dullness with that effulgence’s weakening and death, cannot really
be near so wrong as murder; perhaps is even mercifully upright - a profound phenomenological sense of this
position’s untruth.16
Combined with the well-admitted phenomenological power – this author, both
personally and philosophically, takes this position quite seriously, but ultimately rejects it as
misanthropically originating - of one quite recognizable Western sentimental ‘encampment’: the conviction
that abortion is fundamentally an individual woman’s private sexual issue, on which others, especially men,
and especially legally, have absolute no business pronouncing, this sense blocks his full support thereof.
12
Alternatively, ‘restrictive’ or ‘pro-life.’
13
This author’s understanding of Camus’ thought comes largely from pages 582-6 of Taylor’s A Secular Age. As Taylor says, “[For Camus], [w]e feel called to
happiness, jouissance. This is not just a desire, but a sense that this is our normal condition; that this is what we are designed for. And beyond that, we feel an
imperious demand in us to make sense of the world, to find some unified meaning in it .. But then the claims to fulfillment and meaning are brutally denied by an
indifferent universe.” (583).
14
Quoting from Desmond: “The thesis is sometimes proposed that in modernity the nation-state was the most comprehensive social institution … but now, in
‘postmodernity,’ we are said to witness the decay of the authority of the nation-state, as it is superseded by the power of anonymous global corporations … that
exceed the regulation of even the most powerful state. What are the principles governing these corporations? … The major ones would include, first, that the
human being is a unit of power or resource; second, that desire is exploitative and even predatory, if the chance arrives; self-interest is the essential value; third,
that rationality is self-interested calculation; fourth, that efficiency is perhaps the highest value; fifth, that the purpose of being together in society is product
(GNP), and perhaps consuming; sixth, that consuming may be for the demos, but there are the ‘captains of industry,’ as they used to be called … The ‘elite’
constitutes a problem, even in a positive age … but these seem to be like the Platonic guardians, but without Platonic wisdom.” From pages 423-4 of Ethics and
the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001).
15
Cf. the last Stanza (l. 29-37): “Ah love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams / So various, so
beautiful, so new, / Hath neither really joy, nor love, nor light / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; /And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with
confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” (As collected in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter ed. New York: Norton,
1970, 396).
16
This author here echoes considerably a central thrust of O’Brien’s The Church and Abortion: that much of American anti-abortion political activity, including
the central role therein of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations (mainly Evangelicals), is at present futile, not adequately mindful of certain legal
and political practicalities – such as its being inappropriate to denounce something as murder and then to only propose very small criminal penalties for an
abortionist and none for the woman seeking (25-8), not likely to accomplish substantial over-turnings of Court precedents (cf. note 5), or a constitutional
amendment prohibiting it, etc. and motivated by sheer anger, largely at the perceived demoralization of society and the erosion of the influence of Christian
Churches in America (see pages 20-36 of Rosenblatt’s Life Itself for a disturbing portrait of certain ‘pro-life’ personalities). O’Brien himself points to such anger
within the American Catholic Hierarchy, linking it to a perceived media overblowing of sex abuse scandals, empty pews and declining vocations. He alleges that
this hierarchy, along with the conservative Catholic laity, has found a scapegoat in more liberal minded Catholics, who, if not pro-choice, are at least
uncomfortable with pro-life militancy (115-17).

9. 9
Instead, his support shall be indirect. This author is strongly philosophically-culturally convinced
that postmodern misanthropy, for soon elaborated reasons, gravely threatens Western civilization’s socio-
political humanist legacy, to which Hellenistic and Enlightenment rationality, Judeo-Christian religion,17
and
even (paradoxically) ‘anti-humanisms’ such as Romanticism and existentialism have deeply contributed, and
which has culminated (thus far), in many minds, in the human historical moral high-mark of societies
fundamentally sculpted by scientific and technological achievement, suspicious of non-democratically
transparent authority claims, and committed to egalitarianism, non-discrimination and individual
authenticity. Admittedly a methodological contrivance, this author treats this humanism as abstract-ably
transcending these particular, often bitterly opposing sources, and thus capable of cultivating across them
intellectual solidarity. In so doing, this project’s inspired by a somewhat recent, and truly moving, May 2011
Oxford collaboration between retinues of a) accomplished Christian ethicist, and b) secular utilitarians.
Spearheaded by Peter Singer, probably the world’s greatest living ethicist, but also its most ‘polarizing,’ and
young, but rising, American Christian Ethicist Charles Camosy, these have been aimed at, via fair-minded,
scholarly dialoguing through deep disagreements (abortion, euthanasia, etc.) gathering intellectual resources
deployable against agreed upon evils (factory farming, environmental degradation, global capitalism’s
ravaging the world’s poorest,18
etc.)19
In exceeding amateurity, this paper seeks this project’s augmentation
(especially in certain lengthy footnotes).
17
As is powerfully suggested, implicitly or explicitly, in the works of thinkers as diverse as Locke, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and Habermas, we must
add classical Christianity to this list, though of course with pronounced reservations. Indeed, as religions are wont to be, it was here in any fair-minded account
paradoxically both the deepest inspirer of great ideals (to paraphrase Whitehead), i.e., universal agape, poverty alleviation, mercy under the law, ethical allegiances
beyond Judaic blood-tribalism, etc., and perhaps the major authoritarian-institutional obstacle to the realization of the universal rights in the West. Concerning
such egalitarianism, and its overwhelming, though often incognito, role in Western modernity’s ascendency, consult a 2012 interview by David Cayley with
acclaimed British sociologist David Martin for a miniseries entitled “The Myth of the Secular” within CBC Radio One program Ideas: with Paul Kennedy.
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2012/10/23/the-myth-of-the-secular-part-2/. Martin’s essential thesis, if this author understands him correctly, is that modernity
synthesizes Christian ideals like peace and equality with the ‘realism’ involved in, for example, Darwinism, or the political theories of Machiavelli and Hobbes.
18
The following quotation comes from “The Idea of a Local Economy” by Wendell Berry (In: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell
Berry. Berkley, California: Counterpoint, 2002 – unfortunately, this author does not have access to this essay’s precise pagination). Widely respected across
American political constituencies, Berry is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, poet, deep ecologist environmental advocate, practicing Baptist and rural farmer in the
U.S. state of Kentucky. For an introduction to his literary work and advocacy, one well capturing of his marvelously wise and agapeic character, see the following
link to a late 2013 interview of him by American journalist and public commentator Bill Moyers. http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-
prophet. “The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as ‘a person.’ But the limitless
destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation is, essentially, a pile of money to which a number of
persons have sold their moral allegiances. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the
shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetimes of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can
experience no particular hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of
becoming a bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people ‘who let their money work for them,’ people who expect high pay in return for
making others work for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the idea of the corporation as person by giving the global corporate economy the status
of a super-government with the power of overrule nations.”
19
As Camosy says in his short article “Singer’s New Song: The Evolution of a Philosopher” (In: Commonweal Magazine. October 24, 2011.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/singer’s-new-song),“when Singer’s name is mentioned by prolifers, it’s usually as a kind of warning of where the logic of
abortion leads. Some talk about him as if he were a kind of academic monster: the pure intellectual who has lost touch with his humanity.” ‘[P]olarizing’ is a word
he uses therein. In the introduction to Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2012), which is to this author’s
knowledge this collaboration’s greatest academic fruit so far, he states: “I know colleagues, for instance, who will refuse to assign him in classes, dismiss him as a
‘popularizer,’ and who will take just about any tactic possible to marginalize his point of view. To the extent they even engage his arguments at all, many do so
without reading him carefully or broadly, and instead respond to caricatures of his views (2) … But perhaps some Christians can be forgiven for reacting to Peter
Singer in a less than charitable way. After all, as we saw from the quote above, Singer’s basic project claims to be one designed to undermine the foundations
supporting our view of the world. It’s not just that Singer can’t imagine a God who allows all the suffering that exists on this earth, but he holds that our culture
has a hangover in our ethics from a period, long past its prime, where we mistakenly took Christian religious belief seriously – and we need to purge this last
remaining vestige of its religiosity from the way we think about how we should live our lives.” (3) Within both sources, Camosy discusses extensively a May 19-
20, 2011 academic conference at Oxford University’s McDonald Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, entitled Christian Ethics Engages Peter Singer.
(Archived in audio at: http://mcdonaldcentre.org.uk/resources/peter-singer-conference/). Giving papers / presentations, and engaging in dialogues, were the
utilitarians Singer, Julian Savulescu, Toby Ord, Tim Mulgan and Brad Hooker. Aside from Camosy, representing the Christian ethical contingent were Eric
Gregory, John Hare, John Haldane, Nigel Bigger, and Lisa Cahill.

10. 10
Many see abortion as exemplifying Christian morality’s supersession by modern humanism. But
this writer believes this too quick. It mightn’t be coincidental that the procedure’s legalization isn’t fully
accomplished until Post-World War II, and hence postmodernity.20
Sought comprehensiveness, the
tradition’s demanded contextualization, abortion’s legal status falling fairly neatly out among lines dividing
culturally Western from non-culturally Western nations,21
and this asserted misanthropy’s distinctive
Western-ness (at least perceived) together make appropriate this research’s Western topical circumscription.
Thus, it cannot, beyond some minor remarks, historically review cultural-religious legislation concerning
abortion and infanticide in cultures beyond the classical Hellenistic and Judeo-Christian. From Rosenblatt,22
Grisez,23
and personal knowledge this author gathers that while few cultures condemned abortion so
univocally as Christendom, and many have overtly permitted it, it’s by most been taken with great ethical
seriousness, much exceeding Western (post)-modernity, which this author thinks most analogous to the
hedonistic callousness of the Ancient pagan Mediterranean, where Christianity began.24
It well could be (this
author isn’t certain) that Jaspers’ higher ‘axial’ religions tend to condemn it more deeply, as violating not
just sacred procreative bloodlines, and thus divine bestowals of life, but more fundamentally an individual,
teleologically destined soul’s transcendental dignity. In turn, those believed-in bestowals’ intersections with
pregnancy’s general socio-phenomenological ‘unknown-ness’ may have rendered abortion more often
condemned than infanticide. For whatever religious or pragmatic meanings a new life portended would be
reasonably known shortly after birth.25
Hence, this author makes no evaluative pretensions regarding
20
Cf. footnote 5. A qualification: as Grisez details in Chapter Five of his Abortion (cf. footnote 4) the Soviet Union was the first modern Western nation to legalize
abortion, conscientiously understanding its doing so as a modern liberation of women from patriarchal sexual oppression and of a to-be socially engineered society
from otherworldly opiate Christian dogmas. This legalization gathered a tremendous amount of attention from certain pro birth-control and abortion groups of
Anglo-American and Continental European doctors, lawyers, politicians, sociologists, etc., who admiringly attempted to sway their nations’ laws and social norms
in a similar direction. Of course, as Grisez details, the Soviets were not committed to modern feminist autonomy in the Western sense, but rather to social
engineering, and were happy to employ traditional sexual moral and familial laws and rhetoric when such was required. Various Scandinavian nations in the
1930’s began to decriminalize abortion and / or extend therapeutic exceptions. Grisez fairly persuasively suggests the influence of Lutheran ‘Situational’ Moral
Theology (Barth, Bonhoeffer, etc.) therein. An example of this particular Christian approach to the question, which shall be examined herein, comes from the
Methodist Paul Ramsey. See also pages 73-7 of Rosenblatt’s Life Itself.
21
As can be clearly seen from the linked-to interactive map - http://www.worldabortionlaws.com/map/ (published by the Center for Reproductive Rights) –
abortion is generally completely prohibited, or very much restricted (permitted only for the mother’s life, or in rape / incest cases, or because of probably fetal
defect) in Central and South America, Africa, the Islamic Middle East, and Indian / Pacific Oceania. It is generally legal on demand (but within certain gestational
limits) in North America, Europe (both East and West, but with the notable exceptions of Ireland and Poland), Eurasia, Australia, and the Orient. In a few nations
of the latter category, such as England, India, and Japan, the legalization rationale is broadly socio-economically therapeutic, rather than feminist-autonomic
permissive. The qualification fairly refers to the fact that, as Grisez points out in Chapter Five of Abortion (185-266), traditional Japanese Buddhism has no moral
objection to abortion or infanticide, which were traditionally used to limit population and family size. Furthermore, as he demonstrates on pages 118-21, while
older Hindu religious legal texts, such as the Arharva-Veda (before 1500 C.E.) and the Anugita (which offers a vivid speculative hylomorphic account of the soul’s
progressive prenatal infusion – “entering the limbs of the fetus, part by part … supports [them] with the mind. Then the fetus, becoming possessed of
consciousness, moves about its limbs. As liquefied iron being poured out assumes the form of the image, such you must know is the entrance of the soul into the
fetus …” (quoting from Rosenblatt, 55) ) consider abortion a far worse crime than later ones. This perhaps goes some distance toward explaining the procedure’s
legalization there today, the rest being traversed by 200 years of Western (British) influence.
22
See pages 49-98 of Life Itself.
23
See pages 118-35 of Abortion. However, this author has in his reading over the past few years become fairly knowledgeable regarding broader world history,
and is happy to answer any question there-concerning at his defense. He also recommends for those interested in expanding their own knowledge pages 117-35 of
this work, wherein is discussed at length everything that is known about ‘Primitive,’ Vedic Hindu, Zoroastrian, Egyptian and Hebrew attitudes toward the
procedure, as well as the insightful summary of Grisez’s material provided by Rosenblatt in pages 49-65 of his Life Itself.
24
In Rosenblatt’s words from Life Itself: “Search the records of ancient civilizations and you will not find a great deal said about abortion per se; the subject will
appear as an adjunct to discussions of the status of women, crimes of assault, ownership of property, the rules of medical practice, constructions of ideal societies
and population control. Abortion seems to exist in history as an omnipresent problem that becomes controversial from time to time, when the rules of society and
the needs of individuals are at odds …Yet unlike the history of other complicated and nettling ideas, that of abortion does not develop significantly – that is,
deepen – over the centuries. The questions that framed the issue four thousand years ago are the same questions framing it today. How these questions are
addressed from civilization to civilization depends on such variables as religion, social structure, forms of government, and prevalent philosophies. The questions
themselves, however, do not change, probably because in most ways the human condition does not change. Underlying every era and instance in which the issue
arises is the same fear and wonder that people are capable of creating and uncreating themselves …The entire history of the subject expresses itself in three
fundamental concerns: 1) When is a fetus a person? 2) What circumstances justify an abortion? 3) Who decides? (50)
25
Tooley, who favors infanticide, gives in Abortion and Infanticide a (not terribly extensive) overview of its historical acceptance: in Melanesia, Polynesia, among
Australian aborigines and those of New Zealand, among some tribes in North and South America, among the Swahili, the ancient Arabs, among the poor in China

11. 11
whether more permissive norms have substantive correlation to lower and / or decidedly negative ethical-
anthropological conceptions (and how would one judge what constitutes ‘lower’ or ‘negative’ on such a
large historical scale?). But he strongly suspects that for our Western societies, shaped by the
aforementioned general humanism, this is likely so. And, whatever very small contribution toward this
misanthropy’s combatting this thesis can make, this author hopes valiance.
Seeking all possible un-assumption, this essay’s structurally designed to, while introducing readers a
bit to the Anglo-American tradition under the above-described postmodern misanthropic aspect, enable them
to begin formation and / or reevaluation, in whatever small ways a Master’s thesis can accomplish, of their
own views concerning these questions. This small objective’s nonetheless quite concreteness - especially
regarding the situational empathy this author’s striving after – makes it intensely fitting to center the above
ambitions, as a skeleton centers flesh and sinew, upon what amounts to one long interlinked description,
scientific-medical in appropriate sections, phenomenologically psychological in others, and historical in
others still, of the matter’s overall worldly ‘facticity’ (employing the first of several Heideggerian terms) as
this has been constituted in our particular postmodern context, drawing out only what most people already
know, albeit in considerably greater detail.26
I.B. Structural Overview.
This essay possesses five chapters. The very short first offers, with some tradition engagement, two
requisite procedural definitions. The next three also feature some explication of the Anglo-American
literature, but primarily together constitute a progressive historical diagnosis of the different anthropological
conceptions the postmodern Western mind naturally brings to bear upon ethical and socio-political thought
concerning abortion. Given that rationality is a fundamental characteristic of humanity, and - this author
argues throughout these three – that this issue’s crux is the different metaphysical and axiological meanings
we interpret it as manifesting, the second chapter is devoted to a) employing twentieth century epistemology
to explicate human rationality per say, particularly how historically accumulated ‘background’ assumptions
deeply determine what positions we late-moderns will find plausible concerning, say, a bitterly controversial
(rejected in Buddhism and Taoism), in India among Hindu castes and in the Vedic age, and in Greece and Rome. He explains that such cultures practiced it, by
custom and / or law, to control population numbers and quality, that it had nothing to do with weaker parental ties, and everything to do with infants not yet being
thought of as persons, as members of a tribe or social group. (313-18) His overall point is that abhorrence of it is a Judeo-Christian taboo, not a universal moral
intuition. In Singer’s words from pages 151-3 of the 2nd
edition of Practical Ethics (as indirectly quoted from page 11 of Camosy’s Peter Singer and Christian
Ethics): “A week-old baby is not a rational and self-aware being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-awareness, capacity to feel and so
on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If... the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not
either. If these conclusions are too shocking to take seriously, it may be worth remembering that our present absolute protection of the lives of infants is a
distinctively Christian attitude rather than a universal ethical value.” Such may well be true. But distinguished contemporary virtue ethicist Rosalind Hursthouse,
in “Virtue Theory and Abortion” (Philosophy and Public Affairs. Volume 20. Number 3 (Summer 1991), 223-246), offers from a universalist virtue perspective,
wherein pregnancy, children, family, motherhood, fatherhood, etc. are all objective human goods, and something like infanticide a severe object negation thereof, a
cogent explanation: that their realization may well have been inhibited by the sheer physical hardness of such historical existences, and that technological,
economic and egalitarian progress would, one would hope, enable their realization.
26
Two quotes (or one, conjoined from interruption) from Hursthouse’s ‘Virtue Theory and Abortion’ are here appropriate: “By "the familiar biological facts": I
mean the facts that most human societies are and have been familiar with. That standardly (but not in-variably) pregnancy occurs as the result of sexual
intercourse, that it lasts about nine months, during which time the fetus grows and develops, that standardly it terminates the birth of a living baby, and that this is
how we all come to be … [that] the human race is roughly 50 percent female and 50 percent male … that our only (natural) form of reproduction involves
heterosexual intercourse, viviparous birth, and the female's (and only the female's) being pregnant for nine months, or that females are capable of child-bearing
from late childhood to late middle age, or that child bearing is painful, dangerous, and emotionally charged.”

12. 12
ethical issue like abortion, and b) elucidating the Enlightenment deism from which our contemporarily
dominant socio-political discourses of rights and autonomy derive, and in which they have real metaphysical
and axiological grounding, so as to expose, insofar as it is relevant to the abortion debate, a certain deep, and
possibly misanthropy generating, instability within these discourses, in that belief in these groundings has
given way to utilitarian justifications. The third chapter discusses how Darwinism dealt the deathblow to
deism and ushered in a new, very darkly misanthropic worldview. A contrast is there begun, which runs into
the fourth chapter, concerning i) the authoritarian and racist meta-narrative aspirations of Pre-World War II
eugenics movements, out of which the modern libertarian, democratically utilitarian and egalitarian Western
birth control and abortion rights initiatives emerged as ii) their post-war counterparts. A great historical echo
is here noted between both the former and latter and ancient Hellenistic attitudes toward abortion and
infanticide. Simultaneously, the traditional Jewish and Christian views are delineated as flowing from
substantially different anthropologies, on the whole far more philanthropic, but still not fully dissolving of
deep misanthropic equivocities. The forth chapter is a balanced evaluative unpacking of the utilitarianism
underlying those contemporary movements: the wise transition from i) to ii), the theory’s credible
evolutionary psychological basis, the related and just questions of non-human animal ideality and welfare
claims, and an offering of what are nonetheless substantial criticisms of the theory as enabling postmodern
misanthropy. The fifth chapter at last hones in upon the abortion issue in itself, summarizing the best
available empirical data concerning fetal and neo-natal morphological and neurobiological development.

13. 13
II. First Chapter: Procedural Definitions
II.A. Definition of ‘Abortion.’
We first announce a perspicacious philosophical definition of abortion, uniformly subsequently
implied: a homo sapien pregnancy’s artificial termination prior to natural cessation,27
where almost always
occurring fetal death is either intended or foreseen and accepted. This reworks respected bioethicist Eike-
Henner W. Kluge’s admirable offering in The Practice of Death: “an artificially engendered termination of a
pregnancy prior to its natural termination ... with the expressed purpose of bringing about the death of the
entity ... aborted, and where this intention is actually realized.”28
The following corrections are intended.
First, that fetal death’s direct intention isn’t quite absolute. In “therapeutic abortion” – to, depending on
different evaluative-ly charged definitions, preserve the woman’s life, and /or physical health, and / or
‘health’ considered socially, economically or familial, when an ongoing pregnancy threatens it - fetal death
isn’t definitionally intended, though it may de-facto be. Furthermore, even under conventional motivations
(socio-economics,29
avoiding parenting, etc.) the prenate’s destruction isn’t necessarily required. In the
future, its removal to, say, an artificial womb might be to both patient and doctor perfectly acceptable.
Second, this intention isn’t absolutely always realized. There exist cases of post-viability fetal survival.30
II.B. Definition of ‘After-Birth Abortion.’
A modification thereof complements, prompted by an intensely controversial 2012 article by
Australian bioethicists Alberto Guibilini and Franscesca Minerva entitled ‘After-Birth Abortion: Why
Should the Baby Live?’31
After-birth abortion is the successful intended termination of a post-natal homo
sapien yet to substantially realize rational self-consciousness. Unlike fetal euthanasia,32
the former’s
27
Whether this is in miscarriage or live birth.
28
Kluge, Eike-Henner W. The Practice of Death, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 5.
29
Assuming, that is, that socio-political definitions of ‘therapeutic’ are ‘restrictive’ (defined in Chapter Two) enough to exclude such factors.
30
See page 28 of New York surgeon Richard Selzer’s ‘Abortion’ (In: The Ethics of Abortion. Edited by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum. Buffalo, New
York: Prometheus Books, 1989. 23-28.) See also the following links to a Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianna_Jessen#1990s.) and a December
2005 article by Elizabeth Day in The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1504652/Gianna-Jessen-was-aborted-at-7-months.-She-survived.-
Astonishingly-she-has-forgiven-her-mother-for-trying-to-kill-her..html) concerning Gianna Jensen, a now 37 year old American woman who survived an April
1977 saline abortion (generally the safest method within a general ‘instillation abortion’ type, used in the middle second trimester, wherein the amniotic sac is
injected with a chemical solution, inducing fetus-expelling contractions; this type was once widely in use but has dramatically declined world-wide to almost
complete obsolescence in recent decades, due to relative un-safety compared to both D + C and D + E; for saline is potentially fatally poisonous if it enters the
bloodstream, while Prostaglandin hazards violent side effects like nausea and diarrhea - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instillation_abortion.), but which left her with
life-long cerebral palsy. Jensen is now a full-time anti-abortion and disability rights activist.
31
Guibilini, Alberto and Franscesca Minerva, “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”, (Journal of Medical Ethics.
http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/04/12/medethics-2011-100411). A fair amount of controversy surrounded this article’s publication, as evidenced by the
journal’s (edited by Julian Savulescu) having to afterwards compose a justification of its choice to publish it. Indeed, its authors report having received death
threats (this author completely condemns this occurrence). This article is a bit differentiated from the rest discussed in this paper in that it is, strictly speaking, a
piece of medical ethics, as opposed to biomedical philosophy (far more medical information, mostly surrounding indications for fetal euthanasia, is included, etc.)
However, its authors show themselves to be philosophical astute, and are likely well versed in the ‘personhood’ approach to abortion ethics.
32
In this author’s knowledge, infant euthanasia is legal in two Western nations: the Netherlands (under the ‘Groningen Protocol’ (2004-2005), for “infants with a
hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering’’ - see Ibid.), and now Belgium, as a consequence of a mid-
February 2014 ratification by its parliament of a winter-long legislative process, whereby doctors are now allowed to grant the parentally consented-to repeated
euthanasia requests of children of any age who are suffering intensely and decidedly terminal. It has thus become the first nation ever to do away with any age-
limits. The law has drawn considerable opposition from the Catholic Church in Belgium, which has a more numerous faithful than exist in most European nations,
as well as from physicians who think it unnecessary and worry about dangerous precedents. Yet opinion polls show it to enjoy broad support from the Belgian
population. For a poignant (though not necessarily agreed with) real-life example of such a prognosis, introduced as almost a self-evident recommendation for
legal infant euthanasia, see Singer’s discussion of ‘Baby Andrew’ in chapter 4 (What’s Wrong with Killing?) of the 2nd
ed. of his Practical Ethics.

14. 14
performed for reasons like those typically ‘justifying’ normal abortions.33
Though nowhere yet legal,34
this
definition’s exigence consists in such legalization’s being a logical terminus of the Anglo-American
tradition’s ‘personhood approach’ arguments (discussed further on), now apparently politically victorious
within Western postmodernity.35
This moral-logical connection is - while often resisted36
by permissive
abortion’s socio-political advocates, both for pragmatic public-image reasons37
and because what they often
really value is women’s bodily autonomy (Judith Jarvis Thomson is value’s clearest philosophical
articulator38
); the issues are indeed distinguished by prenates requiring their mothers’ bodies39
- widely
posited within the Anglo-American tradition,40
whether by conservatives who think infanticide’s wrongness
self-evident and this connection as underwriting abortion’s condemnation,41
or liberal Christians like
Dombrowski and Deltete who, here apparently following great process philosopher Charles Hartshorne,42
don’t support it, yet see it as lesser ethically weighty than ‘murder,’ as entailed by the metaphysical and
axiological principles (more Aristotelian teleological than truly Christian, as discussed later on) they employ
to argue the moderate case that (only) prior to fetal neurological integration43
the procedure44
possesses little
ethical weight. This approach’s proponents – notables include (besides Guibilini and Minerva), Tooley,
33
Guibilini and Minerva, ‘After-Birth Abortion.’ Examples might be: the mother’s psychological health, a lack of family and state economic resources, etc. This
author accepts this phrase, here employing it rather than ‘infanticide,’ both because of the influence of this article and because it nicely captures the connection
between prenatal and immediately post-natal killing. These authors developed it so as to further the distance in people’s minds between the killing of immediate
post-nates and that of small, but self-conscious, children.
34
This author, who believes that Western civilizations have since World War II’s end been governed by a singular, consistent, progressively unfolding materialist,
autonomy prioritizing utilitarianism, and have according to this standard greatly revised traditional Christian laws and moral norms, thinks that such legalization
cannot be far away. It may, however, be inhibited by the procedure’s only very rare necessity (a ‘necessity’ presuming of its moral casualness), combined with the
repugnance deeply inculcated by previous Christian centuries.
35
If not philosophically. In this author’s outlook law and politics generally aren’t, as regards moral reasoning, the most subtle dimensions of human existence.
While trading in pragmatic compromises, these are generally hashed out between powerful extremes, not moderate articulations. Hence, as we’ll see, the flip-over
in less than a century from the above described spectrum’s Christian extreme to its utilitarian autonomy extreme. Another terminus is organ harvesting from
aborted fetuses, as well the artificial creation and growth (through cloning or other means) of embryos for organ harvesting, supported by Savulescu, for example.
36
Perhaps less today than thirty years previous.
37
Tooley, on pages 422-3 of Abortion and Infanticide, very politely and empathetically points out to such advocates that their not wanting to be associated with
infanticide’s advocacy is not philosophically sound.
38
Judith Jarvis Thomson. “A Defense of Abortion.” In: Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (eds.) The Ethics of Abortion. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus
Books, 1989. 29-44.
39
Such would explain the popularity of ‘viability reasoning.’ Precise medical information regarding viability is offered much later on in this chapter. Regarding
viability’s functioning within the Roe vs. Wade ruling, and Singer’s criticisms thereof, echoed by Camosy, see note 5.
40
One important author who appears not to accept it is Roger Wertheimer, who in his ‘Understanding the Abortion Argument’ (In: The Rights and Wrongs of
Abortion, edited by Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Scanlon, 23-51.) thinks it self-evident that infants are persons, and also thinks that even if they
are not, their destruction is self-evidently wrong. In his words: “except for monstrosities, every member of our species is indubitably a person, a human being, at
the very latest at birth.” (25) His analysis is phenomenological, but in a somewhat culturally-relative Wittgenstein-like sense, wherein the factual ‘humanity’ of the
infant is itself an evaluative commitment. He intuitively trusts modern Western moral intuitive affirmations of that humanity, for which he is criticized by Tooley
at the very beginning of the latter’s section on infanticide in Abortion and Infanticide.
41
A good example would be Camosy, though he goes to great lengths to argue for the wrongness of killing individual homo sapien potential persons (see pages
23-39 of Peter Singer and Christian Ethics). Camosy presents not only the contemporary Catholic Church as always having understood this connection, but that of
the Ancient early Church as well, pointing to The Didache 2:2 (partially originally Apocalyptic Jewish, dating from A.D. 100 or earlier) and writings of Pliny the
Elder. He synthesis arguments by Rodney Stark and Will Durant to effectively assert that the early Christian refusals of the common pagan practice of disposing
with female infants, indeed their rescuing and adopting these infants, shifted demographics in favor of Christianity’s become the late Roman Empire’s dominant
religion (19-20).
42
See page 112 of Hartshorne’s “Concerning Abortion: An Attempt at a Rational View.” In: Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (eds.) The Ethics of
Abortion. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989. 109-114. Hartshorne does not consider infanticide murder, but thinks it condemnable through slippery
slope reasoning to the effect that social norms governing care for slightly older children, as well as their socio-legal standing, would suffer under its acceptance.
Yet he does not, fallaciously this author believes, extend this logic to the unborn.
43
Scientifically explicated below.
44
In this author’s judgment, with the possible exception of so-called ‘plan B’ or ‘morning after’ pills (very high contraceptive doses that by drastically altering the
hormones regulating a woman’s reproductive system either prevent conception or, more likely, kill the new conceptus by preventing its implantation.) – that homo
sapiens at these developmental stages might not possess full moral status even under the restrictive rubric, due to questions of the assurance of individuality, is
considered later in this chapter – there is in this view no significant moral differences, at least in terms of the act itself (contra factors of agency or circumstance),
between abortions performed at different gestational ages or via different methods (‘medical’ – i.e. pharmaceutical regimes of mifepristone or prostaglandin
analogs, effective sometimes into the second trimester and the most common abortion method in most nations besides the US; suction or vacuum aspiration – the
most common surgical methods until 15 weeks gestation; D and C; D and E – essentially the uterus’ surgical evacuation, employed between 15 and 26 weeks;
saline solutions, hysterotomy or even intact D and X (so-called partial birth abortion – federally banned in America) ), but before the threshold of possible fetal
sentience (again explored later in this chapter).

15. 15
Singer, the accomplished Canadian ethicist and legal philosopher L.W. Sumner and the American feminist
philosophers Mary Ann Warren and Joan Callahan,45
have (almost?) all frankly thematized it, though they’re
divided about acceding to it. The first three openly advocate it. Don Marquis, perhaps the tradition’s one
genuinely secular conservative, criticizes (here echoed) as arbitrary and intentionally contrived Warren’s
differentiation attempts: that, while not murder, infanticide is wrong because emotionally abhorred,46
unnecessary under the afore-stated bodily dependence distinction and negating of adoption potentialities and
a general adult valuing of newborns. For, additional to Warren’s own rejection of moral-intuitive taboos,47
wouldn’t such reasoning permit it if potentialities and values weren’t so common?48
Sumner and Callahan’s
distinctions shall be treated a bit later. In any case, this author somewhat, though not absolutely, confidently
asserts that Guibilini and Minerva’s article is in a minor way landmark, in being the most forthright
advocacy thus far of legal medical termination of immediate post-nates. For it stresses decidedly less than
earlier literature, presumably for lack of felt need, the eugenically therapeutic (preventing the familial and
social burdens of physically or mentally disabled children)49
or euthanasia-centered considerations that early
writers like Singer50
and Tooley placed front and center.
45
L.W. Sumner. Abortion and Moral Theory. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1981; Mary Ann Warren. “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” In:
Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (eds.) The Ethics of Abortion. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989. 75-82; Joan C. Callahan. “The Fetus and
Fundamental Rights.” In: Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (eds.), The Ethics of Abortion. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989. 115-129.
46
Cf. footnote 24.
47
See page 225 of “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.” Warren particularly targets felt protective instincts toward older, morphologically ‘human’
fetuses.
48
Don Marquis. “Abortion Revisited.” In: Bonnie Steinbock (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007, 395-415. See
especially pages 397 and 400-8. See page 228 of “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion.”
49
On page 46 of “Abortion and Infanticide” Tooley exemplifies this concern by arguing with nonchalance that societal happiness could be increased by showing
there to be no moral objections to infanticide, since most persons would prefer to not raise physically or mentally disabled children.
50
Cf. footnote 32.

16. 16
III. Second Chapter: Socio-Linguistic Rationality, Moral Exigency and Enlightenment
Deism
III.A. 20th
Century Epistemology
The debate’s heart consisting in relations between a) prenatal bodily dependence, and prenatal /
neonatal neurobiology and morphology and b) certain institutionalized rights and prohibitions – a ‘right to
life,’ or ‘bodily autonomy,’ a social obligation to increase or decrease populations,51
etc. - accurate
knowledge of a)’s progressive development is requisite for adjudicating these. But prior still, it’s relevant to
reflect upon the tight philosophical relationship between (after-birth) abortion and another pressing
contemporary question relating to how we conceive our humanity and its ultimate spiritual-moral
significance (or complete lack): our rationality’s relation to our embodied, animal, social-psychological
existence, as such evolved over the past few million years, and, at that, from a much larger Darwinian tree.52
And it’s thus necessary to consider human rationality per say.
Quantum entanglement, relativity and the ‘information’ concept indispensible to contemporary
genetics / evolutionary biology each persuasively exemplify reductive Newtonian atomism’s significant
twentieth century qualification by a far more relationally holistic vision of ultimate materiality.53
In rough,
but hardly coincidental, synchronicity (accomplished earlier and with less contestation in post-Hegelian and
post-Nietzschean Continental philosophy; Taylor’s Analytic ‘Oxford Ordinary Language’ tradition-crossing
illuminations figure here with special prominence) came the now widely celebrated epistemological
realization that language isn’t, contra the moderns,54
a perfectly ‘transparent’ tool wherewith individuals
atomistically ‘picture’ reality for autonomous purposes. Rather, it’s an intrinsically social, intentionality-
driven concept deployment deeply determining all mentally manifested objects and experiences – our chief
primordial ‘coping’ (Heidegger) with a world charged with significances for us. These pragmata (Heidegger
again) are themselves socially generated in the afore-stated determining / quasi-creating sense. Moreover,
this generation isn’t primarily rationally inter-subjective.55
Instead, it proceeds via historical accumulation of
51
Warren, for example, concludes her “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” as follows: “in the absence of any overwhelming social need for every
possible child, the laws which restrict the right to obtain an abortion, or limit the period of pregnancy during which an abortion may be performed, are a wholly
unjustified violation of a woman’s most basic moral and constitutional rights (225).
52
The following excerpt from Ian Barbour’s When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (New York: HarperOne, 2000) is here helpful:
“Anthropologists in Africa have found a variety of fossil forms intermediate between gorillas and humans. Australopithecus afarensis, an apelike creature, was
walking on two legs some four million years ago. In Ethiopia, bones were found from a short female, dubbed Lucy, who walked on two legs, had long arms and a
brain size like that of the great apes, and was (as her teeth show) a meat eater. Homo erectus, one million years ago, had a much larger brain, lived in long term
group sites, made more complicated tools, and probably used fire … Archaic forms of homo sapiens appeared five hundred thousand years ago, and the
Neanderthals were in Europe two hundred thousand years ago (though they were probably not in the line of descent to modern humans). The Cro-Magnons made
paintings on cave walls and performed burial rituals thirty thousand years ago. The earliest known writing, Sumerian, is six thousand years old.” (119-20).
53
Regarding the relationality and holism of quantum mechanics and relativity, see pages 42-7 of John Polkinghorne’s Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (New
Haven, Ct: Yale UP, 2000). Regarding the concept of ‘information,’ see pages 105-8 of Barbour’s When Science Meets Religion. Polkinghorne and Barbour (now
deceased) are / were two of the most important theistic thinkers working at the intersection of science and religion (though Barbour’s thought was equally marked
by strands of process pan(en)theism and religious naturalism). The dazzlingly eloquent and erudite young American theologian, philosopher and cultural
commentator David Bentley Hart, astonishingly brave in his assured defending of classical Christian theism, presents throughout his acclaimed new The
Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013) what this author judges suggestive, though not absolutely convincing, reasonings to
the effect that these and their like scientific discoveries are far more consonant with traditional teleological metaphysical doctrines than with mechanistic thinking.
54
This author’s reading of Charles Taylor’s “Overcoming Epistemology” (In: Philosophical Arguments. Harvard UP, 1995, and 1-19) leads him to think that this
generality is not absolute. Herder and Humboldt, for instance, espoused more ultimately social theories of language.
55
As might, for example, be the working presumption of democratic political bodies or utilitarian or Kantian moral theorists.

17. 17
interrelated, mutually strengthening narratives and ideals. Although often originally conscious intellectual
formulations, these nevertheless exercise greatest force by gradually entering the partially unconscious,
never fully articulable, ‘background’ (Heidegger and Polanyi) or ‘world-picture’ (Wittgenstein), the “shape
… [of which] is not perceived, but which conditions, largely unnoticed, the way … [societies and
individuals] … think, infer, experience, process claims and arguments.”56
This author believes this epistemology the most powerful available philosophical technique for
understanding everything human that is possibilized by an underlying neurobiological capacity for
incredibly precise symbolic representation of, and / or creative engagement in, an indefinite number of
objects, properties, mathematical and logical operations, scientific experiments, technologies, aesthetic
endeavors, games and competitions, practiced metaphysical / religious doctrines, sentiments visceral and
refined, self-consciousness modalities, social relations, and value / principle determined decisions. In short,
it both helps us understand, and itself is, human rationality.57
Yet this belief isn’t without challengers.58
And,
given length constraints, he cannot here defend, but must simply assume, its truth. However, two
qualifications hopefully legitimate this assumption. First, this essay centers on interrelations between a)
Western postmodernity’s historico-socially conditioned lebenswelt sensibilities,59
and b) the metaphysical
and axiological range - even granted, neigh incorporating, postmodernity’s wearily misanthropic general
eschewal of metaphysical axiology60
– these make denizens therein think plausible, specifically concerning
desirable laws and civilizational norms. This assumption makes philosophically intelligible the common
sense observation, which shall be here quite important, that empirical facts don’t come with prepackaged
ethical meanings, but are instead ‘moralized’ only within certain background understandings, inevitably
socio-phenomenologically extending into metaphysical axiology. Utilitarians like Singer, Tooley, Sumner
and Warren61
often utilize this observation’s first half62
in criticizing so-called ‘moral intuition’ reasoning63
:
56
This modified quote comes from page 565 of Charles Taylor’s magnum opus A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2007).
57
The information contained within the previous two paragraphs (from the sentence following footnote 1 onward) is a mixture of my own knowledge and that
obtained from three outside sources. From the previously cited Taylor essay (see footnote 2) this author has taken what appears therein regarding the intentionality
and sociality of language. That pertaining to the modern picture of language, its determining / quasi-creating nature vis-à-vis. the objects and experiences
manifested to consciousness, and the social institutions it possibilizes, he derives from an interview with John Searle, one of the best living American philosophers
of mind, language and social reality by Brian Magee, conducted sometime between 1978 and 1987, for the latter’s famous television program Men of Ideas.
‘Transparent’ is a word used often in that interview, by both parties, borrowed from a quote by Bertrand Russell describing the views on language that he held
until the 1920s. ‘Picture’ refers, of course, to the philosophy of language laid out by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus. See the Internet link provided below.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOlJZabio3g) And that content about ‘background’ understandings and the social generation of Heideggerian significances, as
well as the ‘deconstruction of epistemology’ more generally, comes from Taylor’s A Secular Age– see pages 13-14, 95, 172-4, 323, 325, 549, 557-60, 565 and
575).
58
Such as Quine-inspired eliminative materialists and semantic behaviorists (Dennett, Rosenberg, the Churchlands, etc.) who recognize the indeterminacy and
flexibility of language and its inescapable social conditioning of how reality is grasped, but who nevertheless believe that such can, like traditional
phenomenological notions, be employed against themselves, deconstructed, pealed back like onion layers, as it were, to reveal an epistemically empiricist
ontological materialism.
59
Ironically, far better explicated through (here Taylor’s reading of) Heideggerian than Husserlian categories.
60
The current author regards this a superior phrasing of what is often termed the ‘end’ or ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics. For thinkers like Deleuze and Badiou,
among others, do articulate metaphysics. But these tend to be of the chaotic difference sort, describing visions of being that humans must struggle against, rather
than seek communion with.
61
Cf. footnote 47. Warren, this author thinks, is actually more of a Kantian than a utilitarian. For example, the following quotation: “It is clear that what he
[Noonan] needs to show, for his version of the traditional argument to be valid, is that fetuses are human in the moral sense, the sense in which it is analytically
true that all human beings have full moral rights.” (“On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” 223)
62
This is commonly known as the ‘is-ought’ distinction, first laid down by Hume in Book 3, Part I, Section i of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) (Edited by
L.A. Selby-Bigge. 2nd
ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1978). G.E. Moore, of course, articulated similar reasoning, but with a quasi-Platonic intention of
demonstrating that ‘the good’ is not definable in terms of any natural property (see page 82 of Keith Ward’s Morality, Autonomy and God). Moore’s and Hume’s
insights are unfortunately often conflated.

18. 18
for example, pointing to fetal morphological similarities (to us), and our arisen protective instincts, or
citing Rosenblatt’s world historical generalization that “most societies have seen …[abortion] as a violation
of nature.”64
They reject these as historico-culturally inculcated, which they certainly are. But this author
hasn’t seen them consciously apply the above epistemology, which, as before said, he judges the most
powerful means for understanding such inculcations. For reason of this perceived failure to engage
twentieth-century epistemology,65
i.e. the observation’s second half, he assesses their own ethical
methodologies as, while hardly sub-par (consequentialism’s a towering Western moral legacy), possessing
some decided theoretical blinders. The previous few sentences have commenced, soon resumed and running
throughout, what shall be, relative to this paper’s length and expertise limitations, a somewhat protracted
critique of the personhood approach’s (unpacked in due course) utilitarian foundations. Second, in true
Heideggerian spirit this paper aims ultimately at perspicuous phenomenological description, only
provisionally at evaluative prescription,66
and so can afford to, with minimal personal weaponry, settle with
neutral journalist status into partisan encampment in a philosophical warzone.
A profound contemporary application of the previously- described epistemology, and one crucial to
this paper, is Taylor’s conjoined notions of ‘cosmic’ and ‘social’ ‘imaginaries’: (in turn) the natural
universe’s (our best science and philosophy thereof, popular religious cosmologies,67
accounts of humanity’s
origins, etc.) “into our [socially shared] moral and aesthetic imagination;”68
and, influencing and influenced
by such, the pre-theoretical and widely shared (within one or more given societies) normative – so
descriptive and ideal – imaginings of social and political relations, both shaping and carried by a repertoire
of practices, with deep epistemic roots in the general ‘background’ plausible position range on questions
having to do with those dimensions of human existence listed in the previous paragraph’s beginnings.69
63
Singer, on pages 187-204 of The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress. 2nd
ed. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1981 (first printing).
contends that moral intuitions are evolved responses to situations encountered in evolutionary history, and thus not rationally based. From my experience of the
vehemence of moral intuitions of both very pro-life and very pro-choice Americans, I am inclined to disagree with this being an exhaustive account of moral
intuitions, thinking this a bit socio-biologically materialistically dogmatic in its excluding the role of culture in generating intuitions, since these parties gut-feel
judgments that I don’t see our ancestors as having anything close to. In Taylor’s (not a utilitarian) words from page 554 of A Secular Age: “a Humean stream,
which does indeed have a place for feeling in ethics, the reaction of sympathy, but accords this no power to discern its good or bad uses. This a calculating reason
must determine. And in certain extreme variants, even the most basic ‘gut’ feelings, like our horror at infanticide, are ruled irrelevant.” Tooley, in Abortion and
Infanticide, while regarding such intuitions as lacking “ultimate or basic evidential significance” (27), believe they do make it “at least somewhat more likely,
other things being equal, that a given moral principle is correct[.]” (27) Tooley’s account of this (26-27) is that, in the case of both epistemic and non-epistemic
justification of ethical principles, it is likely that over time moral feelings will more and more coincide with objectively justified moral principles. (26-27) This
account strikes this author as presuming the truth of a Humean ‘extension of moral sympathy over time’ account, such as Singer’s book attempts to synthesize with
contemporary socio-biology or evolutionary psychology.
64
Life Itself, 52.
65
The word ‘failure’ is here applied only to the utilitarian project per say, not to the quality of thought of individuals. Furthermore, it is meant in the narrowest
sense possible: a criticism of only one particular methodological facet.
66
That Heidegger’s project is fundamentally descriptive, rather than ethically prescriptive, is a significant piece of knowledge gleamed by this author from an
episode of Magee’s 1978-1987 Men of Ideas, this time an interview with lionized scholar of modern existentialism William Barrett concerning Heidegger and
Sartre, entitled ‘Heidegger and Modern Existentialism.’ See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp2KWiXFQ6E&index=7&list=PL27237BEACE46EC46.
67
Or irreligious, for that matter. Claims of the universe’s hostility or absurdity, as pronounced, for example, by Steven Weinberg (an American Nobel Laureate in
physics famous for asserting that “the more he understood the universe the more it seemed to him to be pointless” - quoting from Polkinghorne, Science and
Religion in Quest of Truth, 102), are as respected British Christian philosopher Keith Ward observes in a chapter on Nietzsche in Morality, Autonomy and God
(London: Oneworld, 2013) hardly objective yieldings of the natural sciences. In Ward’s words, “Scientifically established facts must be accepted. But broad
theories about human existence may, as Nietzsche himself suggests, not be timeless and purely theoretical surveys … They may already incorporate values and
commitments that are generated within and strongly influenced by a particular historical situation. Can the natural sciences establish that humans are accidental by-
products of blind physical forces? Or is that view influenced by a prior sense that there is no point or purpose in human life, no transcendent dimension to human
experience?” (160-1). Polkinghorne asserts that integral to science’s astonishing fruitfulness is a self-defined limitation of investigation to impersonal processes,
marked by potentially limitless repeatability. Thus, it simply cannot pronounce on questions of ‘meaning, value or purpose’ (3-4).
68
Taylor, A Secular Age, 323.
69
These definitions interpretatively summarize Taylor’s explications, as offered on pages 171-5 (social imaginary) and 323 (cosmic imaginary) of A Secular Age.

19. 19
Philosophically astute readers should already, in quickly placing their general cultural-historical
knowledge under these powerful philosophical lenses, be beginning to discern how the politico-cultural and
intellectual history of recent Western centuries might have progressively brought about the misanthropy this
thesis’ introduction alleges is characteristic of postmodernity, significantly coloring the abortion debate
spectrum’s permissive or libertarian side.
III.B. Moral Unconditionality and Intelligence’s Quest for Meaning
The above-distilled rationality conceptions shall accompany us to this paper’s end, often playing a
guiding role. Yet now we must momentarily switch tracks and consider rationality in a different, but
necessarily related vein. As long humans have been humans70
(this conditional is, when one thinks about it,
fairly enigmatic, in a way suiting this essay) there hasn’t been one of reasonably normal mental capacities
who hasn’t stood absolutely dumbstruck by our species’ amazing, unprecedented intelligence,71
by (as we
educated moderns alone understand) the evolutionary processes’ having thrown up animals capable of
theorizing The Critique of Pure Reason, writing The Brothers Karamazov, composing the “Moonlight
Sonata,” painting Guernica or tracing the universe’s origins back to 10 to the negative 47 seconds after
absolute singularity. This awe combines in self-conscious with our – there’s here obviously overlap, for all
the above examples couldn’t have come to be absent, and indeed several directly thematize, this
combination – basic awareness of the exceedingly strange fact of our very existing, and within a much larger
plane of existence, of this particularity’s originally seemingly limitless possibilities; narrowing over a
lifetime’s course to ‘the possibility to end all possibilities’ (Heidegger again), of its intrinsic sociality, i.e.,
our sharing a world with countless other Dasein, etc. And, this author believes, of what C.S. Lewis in Mere
Christianity’s opening chapters72
famously describes as ‘The Moral Law’ or ‘The Law of Human Nature,’
and Kant intelligiblized in a very different moral metaphysics: that humans, qua rational animals, stand felt-
phenomenologically, in a way raising many ontological questions, under an absolute unconditional: to at
every moment rationally sift through all the biological or social inclinations that might be pressing upon
them at any given moment, so as to consistently disciplined-ly attend to and will what is honorific,
beneficent, piteous, truthful, beautiful, just, the greater good of a nation or tribe or even all humanity or all
sentience, etc.
Naturally, a Nietzschean (or maybe even a more neutrally scientific cultural anthropologist) might
contest this, and this author’s reasons for finding such contestations deeply unconvincing are partially
70
Cf. footnote 50.
71
As Singer says in The Expanding Circle: “Gradually, as we evolved from our pre-human ancestors, our brains grew and we began to reason to a degree no other
animal had achieved. We became better able to communicate with our fellows. Our language developed to the point at which it enabled us to refer to indefinitely
many events, past, present, or future. We became more aware of ourselves as beings existing over time, with a past and a future, and more conscious of the
patterns of our social life. We could reflect, and we could choose on the basis of our reflections. All this gave us, of course, tremendous advantage in the
evolutionary competition for survival; but it also brought with it something which has not, so far as we can tell, occurred in any non-human society: the
transformation of our evolved, genetically-based social practices into a system of rules and precepts guiding our conduct toward one another, supported by widely
shared judgments of approval for those who do as the rules and precepts require, and disapproval for those who do not. Thus we arrived at a system of ethics or
morality” (92).
72
See pages 13-27 of Mere Christianity (In: The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York: HarperOne, 2002. Originally Published in 1952).

20. 20
beyond this essay’s scope. He judges it here sufficient to adjust Anscombe’s famous quip to the effect that
“if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether …[this unconditionality holds
universally] … I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.”73
This quip, together with this
phenomenology, might not exactly constitute an argument, but certainly corresponds to a basic
presupposition of all ethical philosophy, i.e., all philosophizing seeking to recommend particular ethical
conclusions as ‘good’ or ‘right,’ instead of mockingly deconstructing these terms.74
The current writer also
believes in a strong, universal connection between this exigence and religious impulses, here generically
defined as ‘the need to understand who we are in a larger framework of meaning and significance.’75
Alternatively stated, the above epistemological mechanisms naturally aim at, and function in terms of,
syntheses of social moral-political exigencies and cosmic metaphysical doctrines. Valid or not, it strikes this
author as an eminently natural movement of the afore epistemologically described social mind,76
one easily
and passionately empathized with - and, if supposed untrue, deserving of profound mourning (as Arnold’s
poem obliges) - to posit as corresponding to those capacities and this exigency, which obviously intersect in
philosophical ethics, an objective, teleological purpose and horizon. If true / real, such would ontologically
validate the above moral phenomenology and ground the ascription of very great, indeed potentially infinite
(though, of course, conditional) value to human existence, as a fundamentally rational, socially purposeful
endeavor. Fundamental misanthropy would be metaphysically excluded. But only, for here significant
reasons later unpacked, as a ‘last word,’ i.e. not as a utopian total negation or absence within our
conceptualizations of human existence. And this philanthropy wouldn’t necessarily, and this shall also be
important, extend to the individual human, at least not absolutely, such as would be necessary (but not
sufficient) to theoretically justify a truly conservative (defined further on) abortion policy. Many
metaphysical specifications would be required.
Neither universality, however, need here be demonstrated. This essay’s ambitions are culturally
relative, and these observations unquestionably hold of the later teleological Hellenistic philosophy (Plato,
Aristotle, the Stoics, etc.) and Judeo-Christian religion wellspringing the Western ethical and political
tradition, wherein the contemporary abortion issue is located. Modernity, of course, witnesses amazingly
drastic changes within the basic philosophical conceptions of both existence itself (natural science’s
exposure of the universe’s unfathomable age and size, and its contestable mechanistic elimination of form
73
Anscombe, GEM. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html. Originally published in Philosophy 33, No. 124
(January 1958). Unfortunately, the linked-to copy of this paper is not paginated.
74
As this author sees things, very few expositors of such views have actually followed them all the way through, in life or thought. Sartre, Marx (here this author
relies upon Ward’s chapters in Morality, Autonomy and God on Marx “The Option for the Poor” (164-72) and Sartre “Sartre and Authentic Life” (173-82)) and
Foucault (here he relies upon the preface of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd
ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2006) all made very deep moral exhortations - for social justice for the poor, for the emancipation of human sexuality, gender identity and creativity from self-
serving regimes of power, etc. – despite their arguments that human beings stood free from all objective moral constraints. This failure – a sincere moral success,
from another perspective - should induce skepticism concerning how possible or desirable such phenomenological liberty is. Nietzsche, however, certainly stands
as one who has, at least in thought. Another, more minor, achiever of true moral anarchism might be De Sade, whose significance for the abortion debate a
previous note has already explored.
75
Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, 50.
76
The ‘naturalness’ of this movement is one of the chief research results of the ‘Cognitive Science of Religion,’ a new and exciting sub-field within psychology
and cognitive science, whose pioneering leaders are people like Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, David Sloan Wilson and Justin Barrett.