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Entry: Life Beyond the Party Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/life_beyond_the_party#21258 Post contents: I am sympathetic to your criticism of rights-arguments against abortion with respect to their effectiveness in <i>actually influencing people's behavior</i>. I am not sympathetic to your criticisms of the validity of the arguments, though. My wife works for a crisis pregnancy center that counsels women who are considering abortions in a non-coercive way. This is certainly a more effective way to change people's minds than writing abstract treatises. But what you say here, in addition to other things in your article, amounts to a rejection of reasoning in moral matters: <i>Conservatives have always known that most people are governed not by abstract reason but by emotions and experience.</i> That's certainly true as a description of facts. But it certainly doesn't support a wholesale rejection of moral <i>theory</i>. We need the consistency and predictive force of moral principles both as individuals and as a society. Emotions are fluctuating, subject to manipulation, and contradictory. I might "emote" that the death penalty is wrong one day, and "emote" that it is right when I read about a really sadistic murderer the next day. Americans "emoted" that the war in Iraq was right at the beginning, and now they "emote" that it's wrong. But you yourself appeal to the "abstract" notion of a "just war". So there must be some criterion for distinguishing just from unjust wars that is not based on expressions of emotion towards a particular situation. I agree with your general point here, but I think that like Thomas Fleming in <i>The Morality of Everyday Life</i> there is an inconsistency between condemning the "abstractness" of "theory" and "rights-talk" in favor of sentiment, and yet appealing to moral theories like the natural law and just war. This talk of "abstractness" is basis of the whole paleoconservative rejection of the French Revolution. I absolutely agree with it. But there must be some way to distinguish abstract ideology from real logic and moral reasoning, which are indispensible for human thought. I think Thomas Fleming is right to point to the tradition of moral casuistry as an example of moral reasoning. Casuistry doesn't reject principles. But it deals in a prudent, pragmatic way with how to apply principles to concrete circumstances by considering examples drawn from common life. Perhaps the pro-life movement needs a book of moral theory written in this tradition, rather than in a French Revolution-style manner of abstract rights-talk? Sent at: 2008 07 24