Victor Reppert’s reconstruction of the Roe v. Wade argument is illuminating: There is a constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy, of which we can be certain. In the case of abortion, the right of privacy must prevail unless there is a countervailing right of which we can be certain, such as the fetus’s right to life. This protects a woman’s right to consult with her doctor and decide whether or not to get an abortion. Just as it is a violation of privacy rights to make birth control illegal, it violates privacy right to prohibit abortion, unless a countervailing right can be established. But the fetus’s right to life cannot be…
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Your Rights: Acquired or Essential?
Do you acquire the rights associated with personhood or are they essential to you? Consider rights in general, the right to vote, for example. You didn’t always have this right. You acquired it. So, perhaps personhood is like the right to vote. You acquired it at some point in your development. The right to life goes along with being a person. If you are a person, anyone who kills you has committed a moral and legal wrong. Most pro-choice arguments talk about this right as if it is acquired at some point in the womb. Prior to counting as a person, however, it is morally justified to kill the entity…
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Notes on J.P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei
J.P. Moreland argues that certain features that we take to be part of what it means to be human are incompatible with naturalism but are every bit accounted for by Biblical Theism. Naturalistic views usually have three components – a commitment to an empirical epistemology, a historical account (“Grand Story”) reliant upon causal theory and emergenitism, and a constitutive account restricted to an ideal physics explainable with reference to causal theory. Moreland argues that consciousness, free will, rationality, an enduring soul, objective morality and human intrinsic value are all incompatible with naturalism. Moreland concludes by suggesting that the best the naturalist can offer is a dismissive strategy that takes human…
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Why a Person is a Person
Roger Scruton once wrote: “The most important task for philosophy in the modern world is to resurrect the human person, to rescue it from trivializing science, and to replace the sarcasm which knows that we are merely animals, with the irony which sees that we are not.”1 If, as most western educated children are baptized into believing, the human species arose through natural evolutionary processes, the concept of human, as anything more that demarcation of species type, is very difficult to maintain. Scruton points to an important modern dilemma. Either our intuition is correct—we are different than the beasts—or our observation is correct – we are the result of a…