A tragedy without villains:

...Certainly I do not react the way I would to the death of a child...

...How great a value is freedom...

...If I learn that the child of someone I know has died, I am shocked, appalled...

...If so, then it makes no sense to promote derivative values at the expense of more fundamental values upon which the former depend...

...In the eyes of prochoice people, freedom suffers a serious blow if prolifers win...

...and if we undermine the value of the person in the name of freedom, we shall find in the long run that we have undermined freedom itself...

...Isaiah Berlin, an anti-Hegelian if ever there was one, says something very similar when he argues that it is not possible to maximize all good things, since many goods are incompatible with other goods...

...In other words, don't expect a Hegelian solution to the abortion conflict in the near future...

...In the case at hand, find a solution that surpasses yet preserves the essential truth of both the pro-life and prochoice positions...

...That is, while I tend to think in a more or less prolife way, I don't tend to feel that way...

...There was perhaps never a time in human history when freedom was not valued-freedom for the king, for the nobles, for the slave owners, for our fellow citizens, etc.-but always freedom for some limited group...

...and I fear that some such belief is entailed by the prochoice position...

...Personhood, then, is the foundation of freedom...

...The trouble with these higher-synthesis solutions is that the synthesis in question never comes about today, when you need it...

...rather, it is the issue of a struggle between two goods...

...The political battle over abortion in the U.S...

...At best, this is a cavalier attitude to take with regard to the value of personhood...

...Quite the contrary, each side is fighting to defend a great and genuine value...

...I suppose my reaction to her is that she, like so many others who buy the prochoice argument, is involved in a fallacy rather than a crime or a catastrophe...

...But despite my inability to develop a proper prolife sensibility, I cannot bring myself to enter the prochoice camp...

...For I cannot persuade myself that freedom is the supreme value or that it is more fundamentally important than the value of the human person...

...my belief in the fundamental goodness of reality wobbles, nearly falls over...

...but since fallacies are so common, especially among students, there is no reason to get worked up about all this...

...is one of these Hegelian tragedies...

...Are some values, that is, more fundamental than others...

...If supreme, then the prochoice party deserves to prevail, since it makes no sense to limit the supreme value...

...while in the eyes of the latter, human lives continue to be snuffed out in vast numbers so long as Roe v. Wade, the prochoice Magna Charta, continues to be the law of the land...

...but it seems strangely at ease about the killing, in the name of freedom, of millions of entities which it believes may be persons or which it believes are on the way to becoming persons...

...one must choose among goods, and in choosing A one bids farewell to B, C, etc...

...I confess that while I am in general more sympathetic to the prolife than to the prochoice party, my prolife sensibilities are deficient...

...But when I learn that someone I know (a student, for instance) has had an abortion, I have little or no emotional reaction...

...Again, do all values travel on their own two feet, or do some ride on the shoulders of other values...

...I fear that something like this is taking place today with regard to abortion...

...Hegel, however, also explained that there is a way out of a tragic conflict...

...But the fact that freedom is a universal good-that it should belong to all humans, regardless of race, sex, social class, and so forth-this is an insight that could not be arrived at until we had arrived at the prior insight that the personhood which belongs to all human beings is something of infinite value...

...Neither side, despite accusations sometimes made by its opponent, is fighting with the intention of making some great evil prevail in the world...

...It only comes about in the long run, after the great battles have been fought and the battlefields have been strewn with corpses-which retrospective logic proves to have been unnecessary but which history insists on, as a kind of tuition price the human race must pay to gain its difficult logical insights...

...At worst, it is a reckless attitude for the lover of freedom to take with regard to the foundation of freedom.tion of freedom...

...I neither condemn the young woman in question, nor feel any strong compassion for her...

...Then, like the lion and the lamb, the prochoicers and prolifers can lie down together in peace, while the rest of the world goes on to involve itself in some other tragic conflict...

...if I were to get upset about every fallacy a student falls into I would never get a good night's sleep...

...Find some more comprehensive good in which both the conflicting goods are reconciled in a higher synthesis...

...No one, after all, can doubt that freedom of choice is a great good...

...And it is only because humanity, after a painful struggle of many centuries (the kind of struggle Hegel delighted in describing), has come to have a more or less adequate understanding of the dignity of the human person that we also understand that freedom is a universal value...

...But if it is only one value among many, then from time to time it will have to give place to other values, among them, perhaps, the life of a fetus...

...Personhood is the more fundamental of the two values...

...nor do I react the way I would to a homicide, even an unwitting one...

...nor can anyone doubt that human life is a great good...

...Is it the supreme value, or is it one value among many...

...It is not that the prochoice party advocates the killing of entities which it believes to be persons...

...I do not react to dead fetuses the way I react to dead children...

...Both sets of antagonists-the prochoice people and the prolife folks-are (at least within the limits imposed by original sin) decent people with honest motives...

...Yet neither side can prevail without causing great damage to what the other considers a supremely important good...

...A TRAGEDY WITHOUT VILLAINS THE POLITICAL BATTLE OVER ABORTION Hegel, whose philosophy constitutes a kind of ex-traordinarily long epic poem in celebration of HIH BBH conflict, says somewhere that tragedy is not the result of a struggle between good and evil...

...it makes no sense to destroy the foundation for the great glory of the superstructure...