Topics Abortion

Question If a person claims to be both pro-life and pro-choice regarding the abortion controversy, is that person necessarily practicing relativistic moralism? The person in question claims to believe that abortion is morally wrong. However, he also claims that despite his personal beliefs he believes it is a choice each woman should be allowed to make.

Accepted:
November 3, 2005

Comments

There need be nothing inconsistent about this position. The first view, that abortion is morally impermissible, is a moral or ethical view. The second view, that each woman should be permitted to choose for herself whether to have an abortion, is a politicalview, one about what laws a state ought to have. The combination istherefore consistent so long as one denies that, if it is morallyimpermissible to do A, then it ought to be illegal to do A.

Whymight one deny that claim? One might well ask why one should endorseit, but there is a better answer. Suppose one believed the following:

Alaw must be justifiable on the basis of principles that cannotreasonably be rejected by any citizen, where a rejection is"unreasonable" if it is flatly irrational or, more interestingly, basedupon too many particulars of one's actual situation.
Inparticular, religious doctrine cannot figure in the justification ofany law, since one's finding the appeal to any religious doctrineconvincing depends too strongly upon one's actual situation, namely,one's particular religious affiliation.
In short: The brute fact of religious pluralism invalidates appeals to religion in the "sphere of public reason".

That's roughly the sort of view that is defended in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice,though I've adopted some terminology from Tim Scanlon in formulatingthe view (and so brought it closer, probably, to Rawls's later view, in Political Liberalism). The underlying idea, as applied to religion, is traceable to John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration and Two Treatises on Civil Government. The latter is essentially the basis for the United StatesConstitution. (Indeed, large parts of the Declaration of Independenceare based, fairly directly, upon the Second Treatise.) Indeed, one might regard (3) as a way of understanding both the basis and the content of the Establishment Clause.

If one held this sort of political view and alsobased one's moral objection to abortion on some religious ground—say,one's argument depends essentially upon the claim that life begins atconception, and one takes the ground for this claim to be "revealedtruth"—then the combination of views mentioned is not only consistentbut required.