What a splendid mind Elizabeth Scalia has, and beautiful too, through and through. It's frightening. She really lets the little girl have it, POW, right in the kisser. Beautifully.
She seems exactly right to me, though it will be hard to find the right way to say what she wants to say.
It can go very fast if you say that the word soul is about relations to others, as it is used. The man has no soul, and so forth. Cavell has a nice paragraph on it here (back up a paragraph for more context)..
A fetus has a soul if its parents are setting up the nursery, buying baseball mitt and glove, and so forth. It has relations to others, that the others are the ones holding up.
If not, not.
Society takes an interest whether the parents do or not when the baby is born. Then the baby is cute and everybody is able to care for it and is wired to do so.
That's how we came to be interested in what the word person means, and how it's applied.
But where's the dividing line? A single cell person does not match the word, a born fetus does not match the word.
The bright line is birth.
But what is the difference between the just born baby and the almost born fetus? None, except one is born and visible.
But consider that the baby is a person because we treat it as a person. If we keep treating it as a person, it learns what it is to be a person and how to be a person. Do we have to decide when actual personhood is? No, the word person is happy at birth. It's no stretch at all.
You can't treat a fetus as a person, except dogmatically. A baby is treated by everybody as a person.
Laws ought not to do damage to the actual, ordinary meanings of words, or it will damage the laws. Put the line where a lot of people can agree.
A parallel case: your toddler wants to pay for the meal. You give the toddler the money and the toddler gives it to the cashier. Did the toddler pay for the meal? Well, not fully. But if you act as if the toddler paid for the meal, the toddler will learn what it is to pay for a meal and eventually may actually pay for one. It is the same with the word person.
To say that a single cell is a person is a consequence of dogmatism, a fear of a slippery slope.
The slippery slope isn't there. Somewhere reasonable there will always be a majority opinion. It doesn't matter where, within a wide range, just that it's an agreement.
The right to choose argument to meet is Marge Piercy's Right to Life which somebody has posted here.
Anyway that's why I say the lady is in the right track. It's a complicated idea that the words that you think with already mean something to you other than you think.
There are sure a lot of Irish-Italian marriages, though in my experience it's usually Irish boys marrying Italian girls.
Currently in Italy I hear it's a problem that Italian women don't want to marry Italian men because the brides end up under the thumb of the mother-in-law and the men tend to be mama's boys.
rhhardin, part of what concerns me about abortion is that it is very close to eugenics. If a baby learns to be a person by being treated as a person, so do people learn to devalue all life by treating some as made disposable by the arbitrary judgement of others.
And I think it's different, too, just how much "choice" is involved. If a tribe of nomads living and the sharp edge of subsistence leaves an elder behind or abandons a cripple or exposes an infant, they've done so because they *don't* have a choice. It's actually a case of "the mother can't feed her other children" that the Anchoress points out as a stupid argument because we aren't, any of us, in a place anything like that. It's far more likely to be "the mother can send 2 kids to private school and residential summer camp but not 3".
And what does it do to us when we've convinced ourselves that our loss of *comfort* allows us to do those things to our infants, cripples and elders, that have been done from the beginning of time for reasons of dire necessity?
The lady in the video was saying that the word soul means relations to others, and a fetus doesn't have relations to others unless the parents hold up their end of the relation. Then it has a soul.
We have lots of way to say it but they all say it's not a human.
That's not insensitivity on the part of the creators of language.
Those are the words everybody thinks with.
If you make the laws different, it breaks a lot of words.
RH, that's what you say, but it still doesn't make it right. That fetus is a human being, not fully matured and even an adult or any other living organism is a clump of cells, large, but still a clump. Does that negate my status as human? No. Neither does it to it for the human being growing in the womb. The process by which growth and cellular division occurs and the chemistry involved might be more germane to the biological dissection of the process for how a human being gets there, but in the end, it still ends up as a human being.
I fail to see how a human in embryo, remaining human, fails to benefit from protection under law.
Gosnell killed the human in embryo which was big enough to walk him to the bus stop. Was this act justified by the embryonic status (not the word I want but the correct word escapes me now) of the fetus? When Harris sees only a bump does this mean that the human in embryo is outside lawful protection?
The lady in the video was saying that the word soul means relations to others, and a fetus doesn't have relations to others unless the parents hold up their end of the relation. Then it has a soul.
But she was using other words. Feelings.
Leftism dogma leaves apparently smart people languishing for the proper politically correct terminology to use lest they be perceived as heretics against that leftist dogma. The pretzel word twisting that leftists use to say what they want to say while trying not to say it so they appear to be towing the leftist screed is astounding to watch. And makes them look stupid in the end.
rhhardin: I have respect for words as a kind of DNA for ideas, but they are not immutable realities like the law of gravity. People create words and even bring forth new domains using words.
"Human rights" didn't exist until the Magna Carta. Kings and nobles had rights, but ordinary people did not. The Magan Carta "broke" words at that time and I would argue we are the better for it.
Do we extend human rights to the fetus? We could. Do we deny human rights to the fetus? We could do that too.
We could even have infanticide as many cultures did -- even the Japanese as late as a century ago.
I also find it odd that you make such a hard distinction between fetus and baby, as though everyone does. But I've never been around a visibly pregnant woman who referred to her "bump" as a fetus. No, that was her baby.
"The lady in the video was saying that the word soul means relations to others, and a fetus doesn't have relations to others unless the parents hold up their end of the relation. Then it has a soul.
But she was using other words. Feelings."
Except that this isn't true. It's true she said it and made that argument, but quite apart from the problems with the argument that relationship to others creates and defines a person or a non-person, it's not true to say that communities do not have a relationship to the unborn.
And I am talking about *communities*... the sort that actually know the other people in them. A pregnancy is celebrated by the *community* as an addition as soon as people know about it. People are excited about the new arrival. They have baby showers and parties. The new little prince was important to a very large number of people before he was born and had Kate miscarried people would have mourned. People other than parents mourn a miscarriage or still birth even if a baby wasn't born before it died.
More than just the parents have a relationship with the unborn.
None of this happens if a mother decides she doesn't want the child and no one ever finds out. OTOH, men mourn the aborted, as do grandparents, if they find out about it. A friend of mine is haunted by knowing that he had a child that was never born even if he agrees with the abortion. That fetus was an individual, not just a potential. Girl or boy, hair color, how tall it would grow, facial features... all that already existed.
The difference in relationships pre and post birth isn't in the *relationship* but in what anyone other than parents can do about it.
A community that doesn't care about that baby before it's born, isn't going to care about it afterward either. (It is also probably not anything anyone would call a "community".)
...quite apart from the problems with the argument that relationship to others creates and defines a person or a non-person, it's not true to say that communities do not have a relationship to the unborn.
Synova: Well-spotted.
A community that doesn't care about that baby before it's born, isn't going to care about it afterward either. (It is also probably not anything anyone would call a "community".)
I don't know whether that's strictly true, but it is in the vicinity of where I think this battle is being fought.
Who are we as humans? Who are we as community?
I wasn't crazy about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" but there is an exchange between the boy and his father that stuck with me.
The boy asks: "We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?" "No. Of course not. ..." "No matter what." "No. No matter what." "Because we're the good guys." "Yes." "And we're carrying the fire." "And we're carrying the fire. Yes."
A community that doesn't care about that baby before it's born, isn't going to care about it afterward either. (It is also probably not anything anyone would call a "community".)
I'm saying you decide the issue by saying baby before it is born, and not fetus.
The words you think with.
Try it and see.
Think of the abortion debate as about when should we stop calling it a fetus and start calling it a baby.
Imagine voting on this.
You could get an agreement of sorts by a majority at some time.
There would be a spread of opinion.
Some of the spread would be dogmatic, some of it would be parents wanting a child, some of it would be birth control failures.
I'm saying that it doesn't matter where it is so long as it's an agreement.
There's no point with a dramatic change in the fetus or even the baby. The big change is in the words.
rhhardin: You're trying to have it both ways -- that the abortion debate is socially decided and that it hinges on our hard-wiring.
We're human beings. We're hard-wired to do lots of things, but we're soft-wired, so to speak, to override the hard-wiring when we are sufficiently motivated.
As I pointed out, perfectly successful cultures (Rome and Japan to name two) practiced infanticide -- despite the hard-wiring you speak of.
The hallucination is that socially decided things aren't good enough.
Regarding abortion, the "socially decided thing" in the US, until Roe v. Wade, was that abortion was illegal most places.
I'm saying the only abrupt change is that at the birth of the baby we treat it much differently.
The baby itself isn't what changed.
The change is hard wired because it has survival value for the species, if you want to go evolutionary why it's there.
There's survival value in caring for a fetus but there was no way to do it, so that hard wiring didn't develop. Constant pregnancy was substituted.
The right to life side presumably agrees that there's no change in the baby, and that's part of need for dogma back to a single cell.
The right to choose side says that a single cell is not a person and goes forward to birth with it.
There's always slow change in the baby.
I'm suggesting that the personhood is personhood society confers. We treat a born baby as a person and that's how a baby learns to become a person. Call that : have more of the features of a person.
Part of treating it as a person is treating it as a person by caring for it. Any dilemma is gone.
But for hard wiring that would be arbitrary, but we have the hard wiring and so get a huge majority agreement there.
I say watch the word soul, way back up top.
It means relations to others (see Cavell link).
At birth society has a relation to the baby, wants to care for it, so the baby has a soul, and that's taken as the change justifying calling it a person.
Before birth the parents, if they are planning for it, have a relation to it, and so for them the baby has a soul and it seems that way.
The lady is talking about feelings instead, which makes it seem more arbitrary that it is.
Really, this just seems so weird to me. I think I understand what you're saying but if I were to write this in a story it would be science fiction or fantasy as much as a story where people are really characters created by an author in a book and find out that they aren't really real. I don't see how anyone gets a soul given to them by someone else deciding they've got one. I would think that a child born hated by all, ignored and abandoned from birth, raised by wolves or aliens or a soulless robot, would still have a soul (or not have one) in equal measure to the child born surrounded by love.
I think that it's dangerous to define humanity or personhood through how much a person is valued by others because humans have and do and will deprive people of their right to personhood for all sorts of reasons... they're handicapped or damaged or not-quite-right... they're a "primitive" race... any number of excuses as to why *this* person isn't really a person or his life is without value.
It gets there as a philsophical problem mostly among males trying to clarify things that seem to them to badly need clarifying, by withdrawing from others to think about what a soul is, which is what Cavell was parodying but analyzing in himself in the link. Nothing winds up making sense.
It doesn't make sense because soul doesn't make sense without what's been withdrawn from it. The guy takes the picture he has of soul as the thing, rather than its life in ordinary usage, and gets nowhere.
Without others you wind up like the young male philosopher that Cavell rehearses.
Take soul as a marker in language. Grammatically it acts like the name of something, which makes it convenient. But it is the name of a constellation of usages and conventions, not a thing.
32 comments:
Thanks for sharing that. She does have a beautiful heart for most of the things that matter to my heart.
The people -each and every one- who work at MSDNC are all pathetic and disgusting.
Wow, that was great. She's always been one of the best in the world of blogs.
Yes- that was a nice take-down. Perfect in fact.
All the real journalists exist outside of the mainstream press.
The Anchoress is an amazing blogger and a great example of a thinking, feeling Catholic.
My lawyer friend was sufficiently impressed that he assumed for the longest time she was the daughter of Justice Scalia. Not so.
Talk about a battle of wits with someone completely unarmed.
creeley23 said...
The Anchoress is an amazing blogger and a great example of a thinking, feeling Catholic.
My lawyer friend was sufficiently impressed that he assumed for the longest time she was the daughter of Justice Scalia. Not so.
Scalia is her married name.
She's an Irish girl.
I posted this, my usual argument :
She seems exactly right to me, though it will be hard to find the right way to say what she wants to say.
It can go very fast if you say that the word soul is about relations to others, as it is used. The man has no soul, and so forth. Cavell has a nice paragraph on it here (back up a paragraph for more context)..
A fetus has a soul if its parents are setting up the nursery, buying baseball mitt and glove, and so forth. It has relations to others, that the others are the ones holding up.
If not, not.
Society takes an interest whether the parents do or not when the baby is born. Then the baby is cute and everybody is able to care for it and is wired to do so.
That's how we came to be interested in what the word person means, and how it's applied.
But where's the dividing line? A single cell person does not match the word, a born fetus does not match the word.
The bright line is birth.
But what is the difference between the just born baby and the almost born fetus? None, except one is born and visible.
But consider that the baby is a person because we treat it as a person. If we keep treating it as a person, it learns what it is to be a person and how to be a person. Do we have to decide when actual personhood is? No, the word person is happy at birth. It's no stretch at all.
You can't treat a fetus as a person, except dogmatically. A baby is treated by everybody as a person.
Laws ought not to do damage to the actual, ordinary meanings of words, or it will damage the laws. Put the line where a lot of people can agree.
A parallel case: your toddler wants to pay for the meal. You give the toddler the money and the toddler gives it to the cashier. Did the toddler pay for the meal? Well, not fully. But if you act as if the toddler paid for the meal, the toddler will learn what it is to pay for a meal and eventually may actually pay for one. It is the same with the word person.
To say that a single cell is a person is a consequence of dogmatism, a fear of a slippery slope.
The slippery slope isn't there. Somewhere reasonable there will always be a majority opinion. It doesn't matter where, within a wide range, just that it's an agreement.
The right to choose argument to meet is Marge Piercy's Right to Life which somebody has posted here.
Anyway that's why I say the lady is in the right track. It's a complicated idea that the words that you think with already mean something to you other than you think.
There are sure a lot of Irish-Italian marriages, though in my experience it's usually Irish boys marrying Italian girls.
Currently in Italy I hear it's a problem that Italian women don't want to marry Italian men because the brides end up under the thumb of the mother-in-law and the men tend to be mama's boys.
rhhardin, part of what concerns me about abortion is that it is very close to eugenics. If a baby learns to be a person by being treated as a person, so do people learn to devalue all life by treating some as made disposable by the arbitrary judgement of others.
And I think it's different, too, just how much "choice" is involved. If a tribe of nomads living and the sharp edge of subsistence leaves an elder behind or abandons a cripple or exposes an infant, they've done so because they *don't* have a choice. It's actually a case of "the mother can't feed her other children" that the Anchoress points out as a stupid argument because we aren't, any of us, in a place anything like that. It's far more likely to be "the mother can send 2 kids to private school and residential summer camp but not 3".
And what does it do to us when we've convinced ourselves that our loss of *comfort* allows us to do those things to our infants, cripples and elders, that have been done from the beginning of time for reasons of dire necessity?
Has anyone read her book? I read it last month. Fantastic and thought provoking, because sometimes its too easy to be too intertwined with politics.
@Birches: I loved her book too. It was short and a quick read but I think I read it too quickly. Need to reread and dig deeper.
Synova, your post reminded me of this quote:
“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
― Mother Teresa
rhhardin: The "bright line is birth" is another dogmatism.
I don't think either side gets to win this argument by force of reason.
Likewise gay marriage.
Synova, because a fetus is a lump of cells.
It's human (i.e. not wolf) but not a human.
You can say it's a human in embryo.
We have lots of way to say it but they all say it's not a human.
That's not insensitivity on the part of the creators of language.
Those are the words everybody thinks with.
If you make the laws different, it breaks a lot of words.
creely23, the bright line is birth for the word person working.
The idea is to get the language right, so that we can think with words we understand.
Person doesn't go to unborn unless you force it there. You can do that but you should understand what's happened to the word person if you do.
I don't say that the law has to use birth as the line, I say that we should understand what we're doing with the words.
It may be that x weeks is an agreement point.
I'm saying it doesn't matter so long as it's an agreement.
There's nothing about the baby/fetus that gives a bright line except the language.
Sonograms make babies cute before they're born. Hearts melt. The line moves back in time.
But not to single cell.
Find an agreement point without the dogmatism.
The lady in the video was saying that the word soul means relations to others, and a fetus doesn't have relations to others unless the parents hold up their end of the relation. Then it has a soul.
But she was using other words. Feelings.
rhhardin said...
Synova, because a fetus is a lump of cells.
It's human (i.e. not wolf) but not a human.
You can say it's a human in embryo.
We have lots of way to say it but they all say it's not a human.
That's not insensitivity on the part of the creators of language.
Those are the words everybody thinks with.
If you make the laws different, it breaks a lot of words.
RH, that's what you say, but it still doesn't make it right. That fetus is a human being, not fully matured and even an adult or any other living organism is a clump of cells, large, but still a clump. Does that negate my status as human? No. Neither does it to it for the human being growing in the womb. The process by which growth and cellular division occurs and the chemistry involved might be more germane to the biological dissection of the process for how a human being gets there, but in the end, it still ends up as a human being.
"You can say it's a human in embryo."
I fail to see how a human in embryo, remaining human, fails to benefit from protection under law.
Gosnell killed the human in embryo which was big enough to walk him to the bus stop. Was this act justified by the embryonic status (not the word I want but the correct word escapes me now) of the fetus? When Harris sees only a bump does this mean that the human in embryo is outside lawful protection?
rhhardin said...
The lady in the video was saying that the word soul means relations to others, and a fetus doesn't have relations to others unless the parents hold up their end of the relation. Then it has a soul.
But she was using other words. Feelings.
Leftism dogma leaves apparently smart people languishing for the proper politically correct terminology to use lest they be perceived as heretics against that leftist dogma. The pretzel word twisting that leftists use to say what they want to say while trying not to say it so they appear to be towing the leftist screed is astounding to watch. And makes them look stupid in the end.
rhhardin: I have respect for words as a kind of DNA for ideas, but they are not immutable realities like the law of gravity. People create words and even bring forth new domains using words.
"Human rights" didn't exist until the Magna Carta. Kings and nobles had rights, but ordinary people did not. The Magan Carta "broke" words at that time and I would argue we are the better for it.
Do we extend human rights to the fetus? We could. Do we deny human rights to the fetus? We could do that too.
We could even have infanticide as many cultures did -- even the Japanese as late as a century ago.
I also find it odd that you make such a hard distinction between fetus and baby, as though everyone does. But I've never been around a visibly pregnant woman who referred to her "bump" as a fetus. No, that was her baby.
It's complex and thorny.
"The lady in the video was saying that the word soul means relations to others, and a fetus doesn't have relations to others unless the parents hold up their end of the relation. Then it has a soul.
But she was using other words. Feelings."
Except that this isn't true. It's true she said it and made that argument, but quite apart from the problems with the argument that relationship to others creates and defines a person or a non-person, it's not true to say that communities do not have a relationship to the unborn.
And I am talking about *communities*... the sort that actually know the other people in them. A pregnancy is celebrated by the *community* as an addition as soon as people know about it. People are excited about the new arrival. They have baby showers and parties. The new little prince was important to a very large number of people before he was born and had Kate miscarried people would have mourned. People other than parents mourn a miscarriage or still birth even if a baby wasn't born before it died.
More than just the parents have a relationship with the unborn.
None of this happens if a mother decides she doesn't want the child and no one ever finds out. OTOH, men mourn the aborted, as do grandparents, if they find out about it. A friend of mine is haunted by knowing that he had a child that was never born even if he agrees with the abortion. That fetus was an individual, not just a potential. Girl or boy, hair color, how tall it would grow, facial features... all that already existed.
The difference in relationships pre and post birth isn't in the *relationship* but in what anyone other than parents can do about it.
A community that doesn't care about that baby before it's born, isn't going to care about it afterward either. (It is also probably not anything anyone would call a "community".)
It is an inconvenient truth that Harris Perry does not want to face.
...quite apart from the problems with the argument that relationship to others creates and defines a person or a non-person, it's not true to say that communities do not have a relationship to the unborn.
Synova: Well-spotted.
A community that doesn't care about that baby before it's born, isn't going to care about it afterward either. (It is also probably not anything anyone would call a "community".)
I don't know whether that's strictly true, but it is in the vicinity of where I think this battle is being fought.
Who are we as humans? Who are we as community?
I wasn't crazy about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" but there is an exchange between the boy and his father that stuck with me.
The boy asks: "We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?"
"No. Of course not. ..."
"No matter what."
"No. No matter what."
"Because we're the good guys."
"Yes."
"And we're carrying the fire."
"And we're carrying the fire. Yes."
A community that doesn't care about that baby before it's born, isn't going to care about it afterward either. (It is also probably not anything anyone would call a "community".)
I'm saying you decide the issue by saying baby before it is born, and not fetus.
The words you think with.
Try it and see.
Think of the abortion debate as about when should we stop calling it a fetus and start calling it a baby.
Imagine voting on this.
You could get an agreement of sorts by a majority at some time.
There would be a spread of opinion.
Some of the spread would be dogmatic, some of it would be parents wanting a child, some of it would be birth control failures.
I'm saying that it doesn't matter where it is so long as it's an agreement.
There's no point with a dramatic change in the fetus or even the baby. The big change is in the words.
That's from relations to others.
What's definite about being a person after you're born is that we have definitely decided that.
The word imposes itself. We're wired to take care of the right-there cute baby and called on to do so.
It's not something that changed in the object of the name.
The hallucination is that socially decided things aren't good enough.
They're pretty solid.
Everything depends on them.
rhhardin: You're trying to have it both ways -- that the abortion debate is socially decided and that it hinges on our hard-wiring.
We're human beings. We're hard-wired to do lots of things, but we're soft-wired, so to speak, to override the hard-wiring when we are sufficiently motivated.
As I pointed out, perfectly successful cultures (Rome and Japan to name two) practiced infanticide -- despite the hard-wiring you speak of.
The hallucination is that socially decided things aren't good enough.
Regarding abortion, the "socially decided thing" in the US, until Roe v. Wade, was that abortion was illegal most places.
Your argument style reminds me of Althouse's.
I'm saying the only abrupt change is that at the birth of the baby we treat it much differently.
The baby itself isn't what changed.
The change is hard wired because it has survival value for the species, if you want to go evolutionary why it's there.
There's survival value in caring for a fetus but there was no way to do it, so that hard wiring didn't develop. Constant pregnancy was substituted.
The right to life side presumably agrees that there's no change in the baby, and that's part of need for dogma back to a single cell.
The right to choose side says that a single cell is not a person and goes forward to birth with it.
There's always slow change in the baby.
I'm suggesting that the personhood is personhood society confers. We treat a born baby as a person and that's how a baby learns to become a person. Call that : have more of the features of a person.
Part of treating it as a person is treating it as a person by caring for it. Any dilemma is gone.
But for hard wiring that would be arbitrary, but we have the hard wiring and so get a huge majority agreement there.
I say watch the word soul, way back up top.
It means relations to others (see Cavell link).
At birth society has a relation to the baby, wants to care for it, so the baby has a soul, and that's taken as the change justifying calling it a person.
Before birth the parents, if they are planning for it, have a relation to it, and so for them the baby has a soul and it seems that way.
The lady is talking about feelings instead, which makes it seem more arbitrary that it is.
If everyone you love dies... is your soul gone?
Really, this just seems so weird to me. I think I understand what you're saying but if I were to write this in a story it would be science fiction or fantasy as much as a story where people are really characters created by an author in a book and find out that they aren't really real. I don't see how anyone gets a soul given to them by someone else deciding they've got one. I would think that a child born hated by all, ignored and abandoned from birth, raised by wolves or aliens or a soulless robot, would still have a soul (or not have one) in equal measure to the child born surrounded by love.
I think that it's dangerous to define humanity or personhood through how much a person is valued by others because humans have and do and will deprive people of their right to personhood for all sorts of reasons... they're handicapped or damaged or not-quite-right... they're a "primitive" race... any number of excuses as to why *this* person isn't really a person or his life is without value.
The word soul wouldn't come up without others.
It gets there as a philsophical problem mostly among males trying to clarify things that seem to them to badly need clarifying, by withdrawing from others to think about what a soul is, which is what Cavell was parodying but analyzing in himself in the link. Nothing winds up making sense.
It doesn't make sense because soul doesn't make sense without what's been withdrawn from it. The guy takes the picture he has of soul as the thing, rather than its life in ordinary usage, and gets nowhere.
Without others you wind up like the young male philosopher that Cavell rehearses.
Take soul as a marker in language. Grammatically it acts like the name of something, which makes it convenient. But it is the name of a constellation of usages and conventions, not a thing.
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