Whether you like it or not, seeing your self committing atrocities is abhorrent to your mind, and no amount of rationalizing self-destructive behavior will turn vices into virtues.
I have written a ton of polemical essays in my life, but I’ve never written an argument about abortion. Given the method for evaluating values in Chapter 7 of Man Alive, it’s not very difficult to work out.
That’s funny, isn’t it? The most contentious political issue in modern-day America, and I can address it in a way that seems to me to be incontestable in just a few lines. That’s the power of working from the right map of the universe.
Politically, as a matter of human liberty, other people’s families — or pets or property — are none of my damn business. But having an abortion, performing one, encouraging one or paying for it are all morally-reprehensible acts. They cannot advance or enhance your own self-adoration, and, necessarily, they must retard and diminish your self-love, in the immediate moment and enduringly thereafter. It is not even necessary to look for real-life evidence of this argument, but, of course, that evidence abounds.
Do you want to dispute this? If one abortion enhances your self-love a little, will six abortions cause you to love your self a whole lot more? How about strangling kittens? Whether you like it or not, seeing your self committing atrocities is abhorrent to your mind, and no amount of rationalizing self-destructive behavior will turn vices into virtues.
You could argue that abortion or exposure can be exigently necessary — as, for instance, in extreme emergencies or when your family is already starving to death. But even then, the action cannot make you love your self more and must make you love your self less. Again, existentially, in real life, there are no counter-examples. Too much the contrary.
Obviously, I am arguing from my own ethical system, but since that system is based in actual human nature, the theory and the evidence correspond to each other. The map corresponds to the territory, where it quite clearly does not for every pro-abortion argument: Obviously the babies don’t love their lives more afterward, but neither do the adults involved.
Would I do anything to prevent abortions (or exposures) from taking place? No. I boycott doctors who provide abortions, but I doubt they notice the loss of my business.
Meanwhile, I have my own past sins to atone for. I’ve always been very careful to contain my own enthusiasm, as it were, but I paid for a family member’s abortion, and encouraged another one, with both of these episodes occurring decades ago. You will note that my regret for both of these atrocities endures. It could not be otherwise.
Looking at the issue of abortion from the point of view of one’s own on-going self-adoration, there really is nothing to be debated. The pro-abortion argument is at war with the real, unchangeable nature of the human mind, and, hence, abortion must always be judged as a moral evil.
