Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: Sanger Once Again Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/sanger_once_again#24792 Post contents: Let me make clear that I do not buy Lockean arguments about the nature and origin of rights, but if I did,I would have to believe in the woman's right to dislodge an unwanted occupant from her womb, particularly if the unwanted guest had no consciousness of right that he/she/it could claim. Lockean libertarians Walter Block and Roderick Long are on perfectly sound natural rights grounds when they take this position. The problem with Murray's presentation of the pro-abortion, libertarian position was his tendency to conflate Lockean natural rights with Thomistic and Aristotelian ontology; therefore he had a way of introducing social responsibilities into his atomistic paradigm that never made much sense to me. The reason I brought him up is that Murray's thinking was relatively uncorrupted by sentimental egalitarianism, although he was making what for me is a counterfactual and counterhistorical case for individual human rights. On this point I am closer to Burke, Maistre, and Tom Fleming than I am to Locke and his Straussian epigones. The pro-life movement seems to combine two bad habits, trying to beat the Left as antiracist and egalitarian while bootlegging into its frenzied moral appeal heavy gobs of undigested Locke. Sent at: 2008 07 24