Thoughts on the full 18 June Stewart / Huckabee discussion

I just watched the full discussion from Thursday between Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee on the issue of abortion. It’s really a joy of mine to watch Stewart sit down to serious interviews like the ones he has with Huckabee, because even though he’s a comedian (rather, because he’s a comedian) he has the ability to make tough, principled arguments and ask insightful hardball questions without putting his guest into a siege mentality. The result is probably the most civil discourse you’ll find anywhere on cable television. Of course, Stewart has his good days and his bad days, but this interview gave me a lot to think about.

Huckabee’s assertion that pro-choicers ‘haven’t thought through the implications and the logical conclusions’ seems ironic and more than just a bit absurd, since he is asking three different questions (‘is it a life?’, ‘at what point is it a life?’ and ‘at what point is it our responsibility to give it the same protection [as an adult human being]?’), which don’t necessarily have the same answer, and are far from being self-evidential truths – as Huckabee does some serious question-begging when he says ‘I believe that life begins at conception’. When he starts using distinctly Kantian language like ‘intrinsic value of human life’ in connexion with these kinds of dogmatic assertions, my Socratic daimonion starts whispering in my ear in a voice that sounds a lot like Hegel: ‘yeah, it’s a great thing that you’re talking about intrinsic value, but – how did you come by all these assumptions? Were they on sale?’

A lot of us, even if we aren’t die-hard pro-lifers, have thought through the assumptions and the implications. Even Kant recognised that when we talk about human dignity and the intrinsic worth of human life on his terms, we aren’t trying to nail it onto a physical heartbeat or onto a complete, unique set of 46 chromosomes or onto a face the way Huckabee repeatedly tried to do in the interview. Even at Kant’s most infuriatingly idealistic and transcendental, his ‘intrinsic worth of persons’ was something attached to a real quality human beings had that not every other living creature (whether with a heartbeat, a complete set of chromosomes or a face) was thought to have – Kant believed that intrinsic worth lay in the capacity of a human being for rational decision-making and ability to take responsibility for her actions. Even that is unsatisfactory, though, since (long story short) Kant is at a loss to explain how rationality occurs in the first place.

Personally, I’ve come to take a route through Hegel, Honneth and Habermas. Human rationality – what is of ultimate and intrinsic worth in a human being – is developmental and it is linguistically structured: we grasp at the world through how we describe it, and (in a rather Biblical fashion) we begin to understand ourselves when we are able to name and communicate with the world around us (even something as simple as ‘Mama’ or ‘Dada’), and when we can begin narrating our beliefs and desires and marshalling them into a linguistic framework. That’s not something that (to the best of our knowledge) an embryo can do.

I agree with Huckabee, wholeheartedly, that terminating a human life for the sake of convenience or for the sake of someone else’s peace of mind is morally repugnant – it’s why I’m against the death penalty, for example. But on abortion, I think my own position is, much like Stewart’s, somewhere in the middle. I also struggle with this issue: I still feel that most elective abortion is morally problematic, but really more because of the social narrative in which so many unwanted pregnancies occur rather than because of any intrinsic value of the embryo.

My apologies to my readers that this has nothing to do with Peace Corps. Also, my apologies if this got a bit technical – I can go into ‘philosophy mode’ on issues like this sometimes. I still think it's an issue worthy of deep thought.

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