File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 584


Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 14:51:31 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Abortion for sex selectivity (Morality and  


G'day Thaxists,

Bill doesn't need anyone else's help here, but might I remind Carrol that
Bill wrote, only a few hours ago, the following:

>Well I think it's worth looking at the differences between regarding "good"
>human behavior as the result of bending to some "higher principle" (usually
>enforced by agencies of power), or regarding "good" behavior as the natural
>expression of a human beings' unalienated nature.

I know Justin is going to take to me with a fine tooth comb here, but let
me chance my arm.  I think my argument the more Kantian (ie only in some
formal respects, alas).

Bill's argument strikes me as ultimately non-Kantian.  Sure, Kant
explicitly opposed 'autocratic despotism' and did discern in enlightenment
thinking the 'is-ought' problem that has exercised us ever since.  So Kant
started from the observation that morality is ever abroad in the human
world.  From there we get a move Marx makes too, which is to posit freedom
as the fundamental postulate of morality.

Alright, so far I do infer Bill is okay with all this.  I'm really
mentioning it in some detail because I go along with it to the extent that
it is the philosophical basis of my argument: only the free may be held
responsible for their actions.

BUT, I also take Bill to take his leave from Kant at the point where the
latter takes a big step into what Justin calls (if I understand him
correctly) deontology: the desires and aspirations - the interests if you
like - of a person may not enter into the act if that act is to qualify as
moral, indeed it precisely has to be *free* of the distortion of
instrumental reasoning.

And to imagine an act outside the phenomenal world, one must necessarily
accept the notion of a universal (transcendental) law (there being no
phenomenal/contingent/phenomenal context).  A couple of laws that Kant
reckons can thus be sustained are 'act only on that maxim through which you
can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' and 'man,
and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not
merely as a means ... he must in all things ... be viewed ... as an end'.

So it is not Bill who is displaying worrying Kantian tendencies; it's Rob.

This is not to say I like Kant's wording.  His categorical imperative
amounts to the 'do unto others' edict.  Well, clearly Yoshie could shout at
me 'You're doing just what the duplicitous liberal bourgeoisie does!
You're disguising our different material interests by defining 'fair' as
'universally applicable'!'

After all, as a non-womb-owner, a universal law against abortion has
different implications for me than it does for a womb-owner like Yoshie
(Auguste France's quip about laws preventing both the rich and the poor
from sleeping under bridges makes this point deliciously).

Just for the record, I've ended up with something I pinched from an
economist (a more earthly variety of philosopher - who may, or may not, be
called Roberts):  something along the lines of 'take that action which will
do least damage in the event you are wrong'.

That's a worry because you may decide the chance of your being wrong in a
given case is very slight, but we have to relate that to just how ghastly
the ramifications are in that slightly possible event.

If a 13-week-old foetus turns out to be a person (where its nature may one
day be scientifically established to be such that we can not sustain a
meaningful distinction between it and the 'person' to whom we are bound to
accord the status of end-in-itself), then its killing is the ultimate
deprivation of freedom.

If woman is free (which you know I do not think she is), she has the status
of an autonomous moral being.  She is bound to the physical reality of her
womb, the social fact of her unalloyed ownership of that womb, and my
presumptuous quasi/pseudo/sub/neo-Kantian 'law' that anyone who might
reasonably be suspected of being a person must be treated as an end in
themselves.

If we're wrong about the nature of the foetus, the damage is monumental.
In our world that lies at the door of patriarchal capitalism.  In my
envisaged free world, it no longer does.

Bill most definitely does not agree with this type of reasoning, Carrol.
Kant might recognise (albeit with rolling eyes and shaking head) as
attempted plagiarism some of this amateur philosopying.  Anyway, for the
moment, it works for me.

Cheers,
Rob.




************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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