This time, I'll translate.
When an artisan gives himself over ceaselessly and entirely to the construction of one object, he achieves a remarkable dexterity in that work. But at the same time he loses the more general skill of applying his mind to the management of his work. He becomes, each day, more useful and less industrious. The man is degraded as the work is perfected.What must we think of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making pin heads? What application of that marvelous human intelligence, which has often moved the world, can he look forward to, except to seek for a better way to make pin heads?
When a laborer has spent a considerable part of his existence in this way, his thought is forever restricted to the object of his daily labors; his body has acquired certain fixed habits which cannot be gotten rid of. In a word, he is no longer master of himself, but only of the the work that he has chosen. In vain have laws and customs taken care to break all the barriers that surround such a man and to open for him on all sides a thousand different roads to fortune; an industrial theory more powerful than customs and laws has bound him to a trade and often to a locale that he cannot leave. It has assigned him a certain place in society from which he cannot escape. In the midst of universal movement he is afflicted with immobility.
Insofar as the principle of the division of labor receives a more complete application, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The progress of the craft is the regress of the craftsman. On the other hand, insofar as it becomes more clear that the products of industry are so much more perfect and so much less expensive, and insofar as the business is bigger and capital more expansive, the wealthy and savy are drawn to exploit those industries that, previously, had been the provenance of rude and uneducated artisans. They are drawn by the grandeur of the efforts needed and the immensity of the results to be obtained.
Thus, while industrial science continually demeans the class of workers, it raises the class of masters. While the worker's intellect is constrained more and more to the study of a single detail, the master every day surveys a vast organization, and his mind expands as much as the worker's contracts. Soon, the latter will need only physical force without intelligence; the former has need of science, even of genius, to succeed. The one comes to resemble, more and more, the administrator of a great empire, the other a mere animal.
The master and the worker then have nothing in common, and they differ more and more each day. They touch each other only as the two ends of a long chain. Each occupies a place that is made for him and that he cannot leave. One is in a continual, narrow, and necessitous dependence on the other, and seems born to obey, while the other seems born to command.
What is this if not aristocracy?
Conditions become more and more equal in the nation at large, the demand for manufactured objects grows and becomes more general, and the cheap prices that put these objects within the reach of middling fortunes become a great element of success. So it comes about that the more wealthy and savy dedicate their wealth and knowledge to industry and to seeking, by opening great factories and strictly dividing labor, to satisfy the new desires that are manifesting themselves everywhere.
Thus, insofar as the mass of the nation turns to democracy, the particular class that is is occupied with industry becomes more aristocratic. Men come to be more and more alike in the one and more and more different in the other, and inequality grows in the industrial microcosm as much as it is diminished in society at large. In this way aristocracy seems to arise naturally out of the very heart of democracy.
But this aristocracy is not like those that came before.
First, since this applies only to industry, and only to a few of the industrial professions, it represents an exception, a monster, in the larger society. The little aristocratic societies that certain industries compose in the midst of the immense democracy of our day, contain, like the great aristocratic societies of ancient times, some very rich men and an poor multitude. The poor have hardly any opportunity to improve their condition and become rich, but the rich are always becoming poor, or else leaving the world of business after having realized their profits. Thus the membership of the lower class is mostly fixed, while the membership of the wealthy class is not. Indeed, although there may be wealthy individuals, there really is no wealthy class; for those individuals have no esprit de corp, no common objects, and no common traditions or hopes. So there are members, but no body.
It is not only that the rich have no solid unity among themselves; there is also no true connection between the poor and the rich. They are not settled, in perpetuity, near each other; their interests at each moment connect and separate them. The laborer is dependent on the masters in general, but not on any particular master. The two meet for business and have no further knowledge of each other, and while they touch each other at that one point, they remain at great distance at every other point. The business owner asks nothing of the laborer except his labor, and the laborer cares only for his wages. The one does not in any way engage to protect or defend the other, and they are not linked together with any permanence, either by habit or by duty.
The industrial aristocrats almost never live anywhere near the population of employees that they manage; their aim is not to govern them but only to make use of them.
Such an aristocracy cannot have the admiration of those they employ. Even if they should get it momentarily, it will soon be lost. They do not know how to will and to act.
The landed aristocrats of ages past were obliged by law, or felt themselves obliged by custom, to come to the aid of their servants and to alleviate their sufferings. But the industrial aristocrats of our day, after having impoverished and dehumanized those they make use of, deliver them in their time of crisis over to public charity for their sustenance. This is the natural result of what was observed previously. The worker and the master have frequent contact, but they have no true community.
--Alexis de Toqueville, de la Democratie en Amerique, vol. 2, deuxieme partie, chapitre 20.
The following is an excerpt from POLICY, POLITICS, WAR, and MILITARY STRATEGY by Christopher Bassford. I'm quoting it here in order to substantiate a point I made in the comments section of Jonathan's Gridbook.
While it has correctly been said that "War made the state, and the state made war,"*19 even that formula acknowledges that warfare was a pre-existing condition. The anthropological evidence for large-scale human-on-human violence in non-state societies is overwhelming.The wars waged among primitive peoples tend to look "unmilitary" to modern Western eyes because they seldom involve open battle. They rely on guerrilla techniques, ambush, and frequent but small-scale massacres. However, non-state societies lack the political mechanisms to stop the local feuds, vendettas, and vicious cycles of revenge-killing that plague them. Therefore, such warfare is endemic. It has sometimes proved capable of wiping out whole societies. In a recent survey comparing the rates of warmaking and lethal violence in modern states on the one hand, and historical and still-existing primitive societies on the other, a prominent anthropologist found that:
Historic data on the period from 1800 to 1945 suggest that the average modern nation-state goes to war approximately once in a generation. Taking into account the duration of these wars, the average modern nation-state was at war only about one year in every five during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the most bellicose, such as Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, were never at war every year or continuously (although nineteenth-century Britain comes close). Compare these with the figures from the ethnographic samples of nonstate societies discussed earlier: 65 percent at war continuously; 77 percent at war once every five years and 55 percent at war every year; 87 percent fighting more than once a year; 75 percent at war once every two years. The primitive world was certainly not more peaceful than the modern one. The only reasonable conclusion is that wars are actually more frequent in nonstate societies than they are in state societies—especially modern nations.*20A comparative statistical analysis of annual war death rates showed that, at its worst (Nazi Germany during World War II, for example), the state is occasionally capable of exceeding the highest homicide rates of non-state peoples. On a long-term basis, however, the function of the state, with its determination to keep a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, has been to hold in remarkable check the regrettable but nearly universal human tendency to violence. Averaged over the first 90 years of the 20th century, even Germany's annual rate of war-deaths is lower than that of many typical primitive societies.*21
Therefore, it would be equally accurate to say that "War made the state, and the state made peace."*22 The modern European state system originated in an effort (the Peace of Westphalia) to put an end to one of the bloodiest fratricidal conflicts in Western history, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Although warfare between states continued, successful states were able to control the ultimately more costly endemic local warfare typical of non-state societies. To suggest, as one writer hostile to the state recently has, that "the state's most remarkable products to date have been Hiroshima and Auschwitz.... Whatever the future may bring, it cannot be much worse,"*23 is to miss this vital point about the actual role and function of the state.
The state is a stabilizing force in other important respects as well. For example, no territorial state has an interest in seeing nuclear war actually occur. Its own territory and population are hostages. Non-territorial—and thus non-state—political entities, which typically possess no assets targetable by nuclear weapons, are much more likely to actually use any nuclear device that falls into their hands.
The state has not, however, been able invariably to maintain its desired monopoly on the legitimate—that is, the socially sanctioned—use of violence. Entities other than the state make war—most often on each other, but sometimes on the state itself. In either case the state will become involved, either in self-defense or to assert its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The monopoly on violence cannot be preserved by an entity unwilling to use violence effectively. Should it fail to involve itself in the struggle, the state will lose a major justification for its existence and will likely find that existence challenged. If the state fails to meet this challenge, it will likely be destroyed, or taken over by some new entity willing and able to take on this fundamental function.
Attentive readers of this blog may have noted the Geopolitical Analysis bar, and perhaps wondered why it's there.
There's an awful lot of talk about politics out there. Some of it even shows up on blogs! Very little is rooted in careful analysis of the actual geopolitical issues that drive the leaders of nations. News reporters only say what happend, not why it happend or how it is related to what happend last month (or last year, or last century). And the news they report is market driven, in the sense that they report those events that they think their readers are most likely to be interested in knowing about (so Brittney Spear's love life usually gets more press than a massacre in Sri Lanka). Editorialists, or pundits, have loads of opinion, and occasionally an argument but almost never more than the most embarassingly oversimplistic analysis of the policy issue they talk about. In contrast to this, Stratfor is a breath of fresh air. It's not just facts, and its not just some guys' opinion. It's positive, rational analysis of why things are happening as they are, and what motivates the players, whether it's Al Qaeda, or the Tamil Tigers, Washington or Moscow.
Knowing what motivates your enemies and your allies (and your potential enemies/allies) is essential for policy making. Stratfor should be required reading for whoever thinks his opinions on national foreign policy are worth airing or printing or posting. The full service costs some money (I expect it's worth the price, though I can't say for sure because I can't afford it even if it is a good deal, and therefore don't read it), but you can sign up for a free newsletter to whet your appetite. Their comments on the London bombings are here With more thorough info at al qaeda cell in london
As promised:
I. The argument
1) If individual human life begins at conception then a living foetus is a living human individual.
There's nothing here to disagree with. The consequent contains nothing more than the antecedent.
2) If the foetus is a human individual, then it is an innocent human individual.
A foetus is obviously unable to commit any crimes, and the fact that its existence makes life difficult for its mother is no fault of its own.
3) Abortion is the killing of a foetus.
Again, there's nothing here to disagree with.
4) Therefore if individual human life begins at conception then abortion is killing an innocent human individual.
This follows by simple logic.
5) To kill an innocent human individual who poses no threat to the life of anyone else is murder.
This principle seems so immediate to the human conscience that it's hard for me to understand why anyone would object to it. Moral principles in general are subject to exceptions in very weird cases. This one is as straightforward and evident as any other moral principle I can think of. [Kevin points out, in his Dec 21 comment, that this principle ought to say something about the intention of the person doing the killing. This lacuna becomes what I regard as a serious but not fatal difficulty for my argument]
6) Therefore, if individual human life begins at conception, abortion is murder except perhaps in those rare cases in which the mother's life is endangered.
Again, this is a very simple logical conclusion. In the majority of cases, the foetus poses no threat to anyone's life. All that remains is to determine whether life does in fact begin at conception.
II. Is it more plausible to regard life as beginning at birth or much earlier, such as at conception?
Birth is not plausibly regarded as the coming-to-be of a new entity; it is rather a change of state. We speak of the foetus being born, implying that the same entity that was in the womb is now outside. And "same" here means the same individual. A newborn baby is a living human individual, and is the same living individual as it was before being born. (These observations are not particularly esoteric.) Conception on the other hand is plausibly regarded as the coming-to-be of a new entity. A foetus is not the same individual as either the sperm or the egg from which it was formed. The latter have the DNA of the parents. But the foetus has, from conception, its own unique DNA that will distinguish it from every other living individual to the day of its death. Identical twins are an exception to this, and if there is any murkiness to the question of when life begins it is here: does life begin at the very instant of conception, or shortly thereafter, when twinning occurs? This question should not distract us from the clarity of the fact that a baby at the time of its birth has already been in existence for more than eight months.
Furthermore, parents throughout the world and throughout history have loved their children before they were born. Their attitude is fundamentally different from that of those who are hoping to have a child, but have not yet conceived. The latter have a desire, a wish, or a hope for some possible future. But they do not yet have love for a living child, since there is no child there for them to love. They eagerly look forward for the time when there will be a child for them to love—at conception. Now, no parent can love a child while at the same time believing that child to be nothing but a part of the mother's body, like her heart or her spleen. You cannot love a spleen the way you love a child. Only a person—an individual human being—can be loved in that way. And children can be loved in that way long before they are born. Therefore, life begins at conception or shortly thereafter.
To reject these arguments is to run counter to the plainest common sense and to make the outrageous claim that all parents who love their unborn children are hopelessly deluded, thinking they can love what is in fact more like a spleen than a human being. If everything I've said so far be granted, abortion is murder in almost every case. This is about as strong a conclusion and as solid an argument as one can find in moral reasoning.
III. Objections
Some attempts have been made to avoid this conclusion by pointing out some of the differences between the unborn and the rest of us. For instance, the unborn must rely on the biological functions of their mothers to sustain their life. This distinguishes them from infants who must rely on their parents for food and shelter, but not for respiration and digestion. But it's hard to see how such differences are relevant to the question at hand. Are they supposed to show that a foetus is not a human individual? Or that, even if it is a human individual, it's still OK to kill it? Why would they show this?
In fact, these objections are brought against the personhood of the foetus. I have framed the argument in terms of individual human life rather than personhood not because I think personhood is unclear or ambiguous, but because my opponents seem to be confused about it, and so the question "what do you mean by 'person'?" becomes a distraction. But there can be little doubt about what we mean by "living human individual", and it doesn't seem to me that the moral principle (5) loses any of its force for that, instead of using the term 'person', it uses terms even clearer and more precise. But whichever terms are used, consider how strong an argument would have to be in order to refute the judgment that life or personhood begins at conception (or shortly thereafter). If this judgement is false, it would follow that parents who love their unborn children are hopelessly deluded in thinking they can love what is in fact not a person at all, but something more like a spleen. Even if you think these objections are stronger than I have made them out to be, they are nowhere near strong enough to establish this kind of conclusion.
Others have claimed that it is up to us, as individuals or as a society, to determine who is and who is not a person; so that a foetus only counts as a person, or as a human individual, if its parents think of it as such. In defense of this strange theory, proponents speak of how odd it seems that what is, in their minds, merely a biological event (conception) should have such profound moral implications, quite apart from how human beings choose to think of it.
Consider a homeless beggar who has no family and no friends—a man who, through no fault of his own, is unloved and outcast. Is he not a person? Is it not murder to kill him? Of course it is. Even proponents of this strange theory recognize the wickedness of those societies that have attempted to deny personhood to one or another group of human beings: the Third Reich's treatment of Jews: the ancient Roman custom of exposing unwanted infants (the closest parellel to the case at hand). Proponents of this theory must admit that biological facts place some kind of limits on what is morally acceptable. Indeed, virtually the only time when, according to them, we may choose to regard a living human individual as a non-person is prior to its birth. This means that the biological event of birth has enormous moral significance. It imposes as a moral duty what was before only an optional choice. There are no grounds for giving this kind of moral significance to birth while withholding it from conception. On the contrary, there is every reason to think conception is more significant than birth, from a moral perspective, as argued above. Human beings—before and after birth—are not caused to be persons when someone deigns to love them; on the contrary, they are capable of being loved because they are already persons.
These specious objections to the personhood of a foetus should not distract us from the established fact that a foetus is a human individual. If there is any cogent defense of abortion, it must directly attack the fundamental moral principle that to kill an innocent human individual who poses no threat to the life of any one else is murder.
Moral principles do not admit of a mathematically precise formulation. Hence any particular formulation of a moral principle is open to exceptions in weird and unnatural cases. A cogent objection to a moral principle ought to do more than illustrate the imprecise nature of moral discourse. A cogent objection ought to be relevant to the question at hand: Is abortion, in almost all cases, murder? In this instance, we are looking for a case that is analogous to abortion in a morally relevant way, and in which it is clear that killing an innocent human individual who poses no threat to the life of anyone else is not murder.
J. J. Thomson has formulated what is widely regarded as the best such objection. She asks us to consider a violinist who is in a coma and will certainly die unless he is connected, for nine months, to someone who has a particularly rare blood type. Friends of the violinist kidnap the only woman in the world who has that blood type and connect her to the violinist. Instead of remaining confined to a hospital bed for nine months, the woman disconnects herself from the violinist, leaving him to die.
Tomson asserts repeatedly that what the woman did was morally permissible, but gives nowhere the least shred of a defense for this assertion. Certainly her assertion is contrary to the teaching of Jesus that we are morally obligated to go out of our way to help our neighbors (Tomson explicitly rejects this teaching, when she discusses the parable of the Good Samaritan). But one need not accept the authority of Jesus in order to see that this is hardly a clear counterexample. It is not flat obvious to any human with a conscience that what she did was morally permissible. Now, when we are not clear about an individual case, we ought to look to those general moral principles that are clear. In this instance, we ought to draw from the general principle—to kill an innocent human being who poses no threat to the life of anyone else is murder—the conclusion that the woman in question did indeed commit murder, unless we argue that she did not actually kill him. And this argument seems plausible: it was the disease that killed him, all she did was withhold from him an artificial means of preserving his life. But then the case is not analogous to abortions, in which the foetus is killed—actively cut off from its natural life, sometimes by cutting it to pieces, or by poisoning it with salt as if it were a slug, or by crushing its skull.
There are a number of other disanalogies between this imaginary story and most abortions, disanalogies that are plausibly regarded as morally relevant. Most women who have abortions have voluntarily done something that by its very nature tends to result in pregnancy. The biological purpose of sex is reproduction, and it is at least plausible to think that this might be morally relevant. (Rape covers only a minority of cases, and we are interested in the majority of cases.) Moreover, the violinist is not the child of the woman, and parents are usually thought to have special moral responsibility for their children.
The story can be modified so that it is more analogous to most abortions, but the closer the analogy, the less plausible the claim of moral permissibility becomes. Alternatively, the story can be modified so that the claim of moral permissibility becomes less implausible, but the resulting disanalogies make the story irrelevant to the question at hand. There is no reason to believe that abortion is morally permissible in most cases.
Can we say that, though it is immoral, it is not murder? No, for we have established that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being. And the immoral killing of an innocent human being is murder.
In summary, I have argued that
7) Life begins at conception (or shortly thereafter).
From 6 and 7 it follows that
8) Abortion is, in almost every case, murder.
Pro-choice arguments usually appeal to the rights of the mother, but it is clear to everyone that my right to swing my arm stops where your face begins. If abortion is murder then all talk of rights is out of place.
IV. Corrolaries
9) Millions of abortions occur in America as part of a billion-dollar industry.
An undisputed fact.
10) Therfore, our society is guilty of institutionalized mass murder.
This follows directly from 8 and 9. We are if not morally equivalent then at least morally comparable to Hitler's Germany. Nazis were motivated by a paranoid ideology. We have different motives. The selfish desire to avoid responsibility may not be our only motive, but it is one of them. I don't see that this difference in motivation renders us the less guilty. On the contrary, one might argue that since the infamous "final solution" was imposed by the Nazi leadership without consulting the nation as a whole, the German people were, if anything, less guilty than are we, with our capitalistic democracy of death.
11) It is the duty of the civil authority to protect the innocent by outlawing murder.
I trust there are no anarchists in the audience.
12) Therefore, abortion ought to be illegal.
I am quite baffled by people who know that abortion is wrong, and yet think that other issues are more important when it comes time to vote. Some of them even ridicule those of us for whom the issue of institutionalized mass murder is more important than anything else, calling us "one-issue voters," as if that were obviously narrow minded and foolish. But if abortion is murder (and given that it is the immoral killing of an innocent human being, what else could it be but murder?) then nothing can come close to the importance of this issue unless it be a matter of life and death on a massive scale.
Can matters of war and peace outweigh the issue at hand? Certainly not. The leaders of nations have a rightful authority to wage war. They may make poor judgements. They may even go to war unjustly. But they are not murderers. In war, the soldiers on each side pose a threat to the lives of those on the other, and the killing they do, as ugly as it may be, is not murder. If the Kaiser was guilty of warmongering, his crime against the nations of Europe was not as great as Hitler's crimes against humanity. It is to the latter that our society must be compared.
If you agree that abortion is wrong, is our society not guilty of mass murder? If our society is guilty of mass murder, should not this fact loom larger in our minds than anything else when we cast our votes? In this past election, John Kerry, was not only in favor of keeping abortion legal, he wanted to use public funds to pay for abortions (he was quite clear about this in the second debate). In other words, he was in favor of state-sponsored murder. Those who voted for him would give him the power that they knew he would use to commit murder if he could.
Would I sound like a fundamentalist if I said that it was a sin to vote for Kerry? Well, I don't want to sound like a fundamentalist, but I can see no way to escape the conclusion with intellectual and moral integrity. It is a sin to give someone power that you know he intends to use to commit murder.
Though it may be less evident in print and e-text, which tend to evoke a more polemical tone than conversation, I try hard to see things from the perspective of those who disagree with me. I often find myself refuting the arguments of those I agree with, because I don't think they do justice to the opposition (see, for instance, the post "dig deeper" on this blog). I am convinced that on most of the questions about which people disagree it is possible to take either side without abandoning rationality altogether. But on the question of abortion, I am at a loss. The issue seems so clear, the moral intuition so immediate to conscience, the arguments on one side so decisive, and on the other so weak, with a weakness that is so easy to see, that as much as I try, I can't figure out how a minimally rational person could come to any other conclusion than the obvious one. I hesitate to say that whoever disagrees with me on this either hasn't thought carefully about it or else is blinded by morally degenerate passions. My reticence comes from a habit of trying to bend over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt. But in this case I can find nothing in the way of reasonable grounds for this reticence.
I am particularly baffled by those who agree that abortion is wrong, but who don't seem to take the issue very seriously when they go to the ballot box. I am preparing an article in which I work through some of these frustrations. I will attempt to present the case against abortion in a way that does justice both to the fundamental moral clarity of the issue, and to the arguments of the opposition. I should have it ready for posting here sometime soon.
[Response to a post on Ranting to /dev/null.]
It is a good and noble thing for citizens to object, to disobey, to oppose, and to work to eradicate the sort of grave injustices one finds in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, and if revolution is the only way to do this, then revolution is justified. "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes," because revolutions run the risk of engendering either the terror of anarchy or else a regime even more tyrranous than that which they supplant. It may be that liberals would take that risk more readily than conservatives, but the distinction between the two political ideologies runs deeper than this.
Where conservatives see a foolish and incompetant ruler, liberals see a tyrant. In vain are all the protestations that conservatives make regarding the danger of challenging the status quo. Liberals know it well. The people of France know the terror of anarchy far better than we. If they are on average more liberal than Americans it is because they disagree with us on the fundamental question of what tyrrany is.
Tyrrany is the persistent and widespread violation of fundamental human rights. Liberals quite simply believe that there are more fundamental human rights than conservatives are willing to admit; and among these are the right to some kind of representational government, and the right to some kind of economic equality.
Economic equality does not necessarily mean that no one is wealthier than anyone else. It is not strict equality that is in view, but something less--any attempt to define this would be fraught with mudiness and complexity. It means at least that the income of someone who works long, hard hours at a difficult job should not be less than that of someone who lives a life of leisure, or whose "work" produces nothing of real value, but only serves to put more wealth into the pockets of those who can afford to pay someone to spend his days moving money around. To the conservative, this is no injustice but merely an infelicity. It is unfortunate that people spend their money in this manner, but it is after all their money, and who am I to tell them how to spend it? The liberal is accused of being arrogant, in attempting to impose his own values on everyone else, by the conservative, who regards himself as being humble in allowing people to make their own decisions about what they value. But the liberal is not, by his own lights, attempting to correct an infelicity, he is fighting injustice. Liberals use methods no more severe in fighting economic inequality than conservatives would use in fighting something they regard as a genuine injustice such as laws against diagreeing with the government in one's private opinions.
The more I interact with liberals, the more convinced I become of conservative principles, but I don't accuse liberals of arrogance, and I expect them to refrain from accusing me of greed, because I think both of these accusations derive from a failure to see the root of our differences.
The New York Times reports J. L. R. Zapatero (Spain's new PM) as saying "We can't win against terrorism or rout it through wars, which are never an efficient way of eliminating or combating groups of fanatics, radicals and criminals."
So it's official:
Europe has already forgotten National Socialism.