Nobody wants to think about abortion, so let’s think about something else instead:
Now that wasn’t cruel! But Cameron Crowe’s 13-second morality play illuminates perfectly why this crisis of conscience over intrauterine infanticide matters so much:
You create enduring obligations – by your choices, or by your actions, or sometimes simply by default – and the self-adoration or self-loathing you embody with your life over time will be a reflection, in part, of the choices you make in observance of those obligations.
What’s the worst choice? Hit ’n’ run. Your moral fault can never end because you refused to seek an honest outcome.
This week at The Church of Splendor we take up the enduring obligations of everyday life and how best to honor them. Moral philosophy is what church should do, yes? Why would you go anywhere else?
Just in passing, as a part of the larger argument, I am drawing out other points of difference between me and the Ayn Rand Institute. I’ll continue to point out their hypocrisy, but it is obvious by now that they are a think-tank devoid of thinkers. There is no rational argument for infanticide, so they cannot but stammer helplessly and plead for your pity. But Ayn Rand’s arguments for love, sex, marriage and family are hideously anti-human – essentially identical to paleo-Marxist appeals – which is why big-O Objectivists are epidemically unmarried/divorced/all-but-childless, much like the Bourgeoise Bohemians they so much resemble. Objectivism is de facto anti-fatherhood, and, as we have seen, to be anti-father is to be anti-family is to be anti-civilization. Whatever Rand’s virtues as anti-Marxist/pro-capitalist polemicist, her advice to young people was horrifyingly wrong in every respect.
There’s more: In the analogy of the squatter, we are talking about the creation of obligations on the actor absent the freely-chosen consent of the actor. That notion will seem abhorrent to willful teenagers, but reality does not retreat just because you want it to. And in the analogy of the lifeboat, we take up a circumstance where the most self-adoring action you can take will be to end your life to spare the life of another person, which a puerile mind could seek to portray as self-sacrifice. But doing the right thing – in your own undoubted opinion – is always the self-adoring choice, even if that option cuts of your every further choice.
Man is not bound by nature to make his choices consonant with his nature as an entity – but his best benefit comes to him by voluntarily choosing to live in consonance with that nature even so. Every alternative choice will prove sub-optimal over time, with the worst outcomes of all emerging from a willful defiance of human nature – and of the boundaries imposed on human choices by nature as such. To deny the identity of the child is morally repugnant, but to deny the value of human life is to undermine all of humanistic civilization in due course.
