[MD] Morality, Abortion and the MoQ

[Steve Peterson]

Hi MP, Arlo,


> [Michael]
> Arlo, if we can continue on this line and tone, I would very much 
> appreciate it and am willing and eager to drop cold all the rest of 
> the opinionated back and forth with you or anyone else to do so.Yours 
> is exactly my reaction to Steve's statement as well. It sure is 
> problematic.But I don't see the MoQ thinking that justifies your/my 
> POV.
>
> [Arlo]
> Well, I think the key is that nothing exists in isolation. No 
> "pattern" exists in a decontextualized world. While it may be true in 
> the MOQ that a pre-social organism is "just" a biological pattern, the 
> fetus and the consideration of abortion exist within a large 
> interwoven web of patterns; including a host of social and 
> intellectual ones. This is why I would find it horribly problematic to 
> base abortion law on the pre-social/post-social definition of 
> "human-ness".

Steve:

I was being polemical in my MOQ analysis. I agree that it is not as 
simple as all that. But I do think that the question about the morality 
of destroying a zygote lies in its potential for humanity rather than 
it actually being a human person which it obviously is not. As long as 
one person claims that a human person is created at the moment of 
conception, there isn't much to talk about. It just a matter of two 
people not accepting one another's definitions. No MOQ analysis can 
proceed if you believe that a soul is bestowed on a zygote at 
conception.

I still hold that a zygote is a biological pattern in the MOQ. There 
are also social patterns involved in considering the abortion issue. 
Opposition to abortion is an example of society trying to control 
biological patterns. A society needs to instill a value for human life 
(there are other less defensible social aspects such as male control 
over female reproduction). But there is also the individual freedom of 
the woman to consider. To instill a value for human life, does a 
society need to go so far as to call a single cell a human life? Or is 
there some reasonable compromise to made here? Does society's need to 
instill value for human life trump a woman's right to her own body? The 
MOQ does have value in breaking this issue down so we can see what 
levels are in conflict, but the MOQ never has easy answers unless the 
levels in question are as separate as a germ and a doctor's patient. 
The moral conflict is complicated here.  It is biological (zygote) 
versus social (value for human life), social versus intellectual 
(woman's individual rights), and static versus dynamic (the potential 
for human life).

Remember Pirsig in his intro to LC:
"...I've concluded that the biggest improvement I could make in the 
Metaphysics of Quality would be to block the notion that the 
Metaphysics of Quality claims to be a quick fix for every moral problem 
in the universe. I have never seen it that way. The image in my mind as 
I wrote it was of a large football field that gave meaning to the game 
by telling you who was on the 20-yard line but did not decide which 
team would win. That was the point of the two opposing arguments over 
the death penalty described in LILA.That was the point of the 
equilibrium between static and Dynamic Quality. Both are moral 
arguments. Both can claim the Metaphysics of Quality for support. Just 
as two sides can go before the U.S. Supreme Court and both claim 
constitutionality, so two sides can use the Metaphysics of Quality, but 
that does not mean that either the Constitution or the Metaphysics of 
Quality is a meaningless set of ideas. Our whole judicial system rests 
on the presumption that more than one set of conclusions about 
individual cases can be drawn within a given set of moral rules. The 
Metaphysics of Quality makes the same presumption."

We don't have clear answers handed to us by the MOQ. We just have a 
better way of understanding the factors that must be weighed. 
Personally, I think our society is better off preferring the woman's 
right to choose and can instill a value for human life without having 
to go to such extremes as calling a zygote a person.

Best,
Steve