The Right Choice
LAWLER, PETER AUGUSTINE
The Right Choice Hadley Arkes on natural rights from the Declaration to Roe v. Wade. BY PETER AUGUSTINE LAWLER Hadley Arkes is a frustrated man. All he wants to do is to get his fellow citizens...
...I tend to think it will be more difficult than Arkes believes to make effectively the argument that laws allowing abortion are unconstitutional...
...Those who believe that abortion is wrong are too often silent in public because they do not think they can really convince their fellow citizens that their belief is true...
...Unless we become clear as a nation that abortion is wrong, women will—I predict—eventually find themselves compelled to submit to therapeutic abortions of genetically defective babies and then to do whatever is required to enhance their children genetically...
...And he has been tireless in provoking such conversation through his writing, lobbying, testifying, and other political activism...
...Too many pro-life conservatives do not want to join in Arkes's conversation because they wrongly believe that reason is the enemy of moral decency...
...Not just a lack of confidence, but a moral weakness, lies at the heart of this refusal...
...In Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes seems most of all to aim to convince his fellow moral conservatives to help him instigate a national conversation on abortion—and to convince them that reason is actually their best weapon in their effort to limit and eventually eradicate abortion through law...
...Bush also followed precedent by refusing to explain to Americans why Roe v. Wade and subsequent pro-abortion Supreme Court decisions were wrongly decided...
...Both are forms of making, types of techne or poesis—and thus it is predictable that modern poe-sis, which ought to complement eros, instead seems so often limited to what calculative, human reason can comprehend and control...
...If modernity finds itself intrinsically at odds with the supernatural, attempting to find a way to defuse, or at least bring under human control, the powerful impetus toward the divine, then how likely is it that it will ever embrace the divine madness of Socrates...
...Moreover, Heidegger's longing to overcome technical reason and voluntarism leads him to celebrate the passivity of the human individual before the speech of Being...
...To make sense, rights must be limited— Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and author of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls...
...It remains permanently unclear why Heidegger's resolution of the problem of nihilism is not itself nihilism on the grand scale...
...Some of this, of course, is already happening informally through pressure imposed by physicians and HMOs...
...And the proposition of our intellectual political class seems to be that the unborn really have no rights, no claim for dignity at all, that we are bound as free and rational beings to respect...
...Indeed, the ideas themselves have a hypothetical status in Plato...
...Arkes's claim is that the Democrats are right: A national argument over, say, partial-birth abortion could easily unleash a train of thought that would lead to the discrediting of all abortion in America...
...Those who believe that abortion is wrong are too often silent in public the entire order of things...
...Too many pro-life conservatives do not want to join in Arkes's conversation because they wrongly believe that reason is the enemy of moral decency...
...Arkes sees the Democratic view of abortion as both smarter and more pernicious than the Republican view...
...Rosen might well be right about the strengths and weaknesses of the Enlightenment project and about the correctives available in Plato...
...To make sense, rights must be limited— Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and author of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls...
...Their demand is not only that no law restrict abortion but that it be deemed beyond the pale for anyone to say in public anything against it...
...All he wants to do is to get his fellow citizens to talk with him seriously on the fundamental moral and political issue of our time: abortion...
...Modernity deems especially repugnant the notion of subordination to a transcendent good, however hypothetical...
...Rosen counters that the attempt to think Being itself or difference will quickly prove fruitless, evaporate into nothingness, as it is only particular beings that provide content for thought...
...Thomas Aquinas...
...Heidegger's cure for what ails the West is no better than his diagnosis of the disease...
...Too many of our intellectuals— even too many conservative constitutionalists, such as Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia—are unreasonably skeptical about reason...
...Here theological issues surface in a decisive way—and Rosen remains relatively silent about the theological or anti-theological roots of modernity, the way in which modern philosophy is parasitic on medieval theology...
...by the rights of others, if nothing else...
...And he has been tireless in provoking such conversation through his writing, lobbying, testifying, and other political activism...
...Philosophy is not so much a matter of advocating a specific set of doctrines as it is a way of life...
...It's a shameful commentary on the present state of our liberal democracy that he has achieved so little success...
...In his new Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes defends with plenty of reasons his view that "the right to choose" (really, the right to unlimited sexual freedom) has undermined the foundation of both natural rights and our constitutional order...
...But Lincoln, as Arkes points out, declined to accept the Court's notorious pro-slavery error in Dred Scott v. Sandford, and he taught Americans that ours is an anti-slavery regime...
...That proposition, Arkes is convinced, cannot withstand the test of reason...
...If Rosen faults analytic philosophy for its excessive attachment to science, he detects the opposite in the Heideg-gerian strain of twentieth-century Continental philosophy: a tendency to turn philosophy into bad poetry, or, as Rosen memorably describes it, "orientalist kitsch and Gothic etymologizing...
...Their increasingly obstinate position resembles that of the leading southerners prior to the Civil War, who demanded not only that no anti-slavery legislation be passed but also that slavery be regarded as a positive good under the Constitution...
...President Bush is certainly pro-life, but he followed the precedent set by most of his Republican predecessors when he refused to say during his campaign why he thought abortion wrong...
...they serve to account for the intelligibility of sensible particulars and for our ability to distinguish between better and worse courses of action...
...Indeed, he seemed to suggest that it is somehow unconstitutional for an elected official to challenge the constitutional wisdom of the Court...
...Just as modern philosophy vacillates between excessive confidence in the power of reason and skepticism, so it seems to shift between a preoccupation with mathematical models of intelligibility and an obsession with a mystical poetics...
...All he wants to do is to get his fellow citizens to talk with him seriously on the fundamental moral and political issue of our time: abortion...
...In language that becomes increasingly poetic and obscure, he counsels a return to Being rather than beings, or, even more obscurely, an attempt to think the difference between Being and beings...
...Arkes points out that Republican legislators often prefer to have courts take abortion out of their hands—so they can then shake their heads and complain that there's nothing to be done about it...
...If Roe were reversed, our legislators would have to deliberate about what sort of pro-life legislation is warranted...
...by the rights of others, if nothing else...
...But this, according to Rosen, only ends up exacerbating our situation, since it deprives us of any standard for preferring one course of action to another—or, indeed, for preferring action to inaction...
...If we understand America in light of Lockean "natural rights" alone, as some conservatives do, there is a line of thought that leads to the promiscuous application of the principle of consent to all areas of human life...
...But one wonders whether there is not something inherent in, and essential to, the modern project, in its political and scientific forms, that will never allow it to be subordinated to the transcendent...
...Locke can be viewed as the grandfather of the soft libertarianism of our time...
...That proposition, Arkes is convinced, cannot withstand the test of reason...
...He has a Socratic confidence in the power of reason to lead us to the truth about our natural limits and purposes, and so he is equally convinced that the crisis of our time is rooted, in large measure, in our lack of confidence in reason...
...Indeed, there is an additional urgency to this argument now, as the threats of biotechnology begin to loom over us...
...For another, his presentation of the American Founding identifies modern "natural rights" with classical "natural right," as well as with the "natural law" teaching of St...
...To take Arkes's challenge seriously, we must begin a national debate over the true understanding of human nature and human dignity...
...In his new Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, Arkes defends with plenty of reasons his view that "the right to choose" (really, the right to unlimited sexual freedom) has undermined the foundation of both natural rights and our constitutional order...
...We will not be able to protect the genuine reproductive freedom of women—their right to have and love their own babies—unless there is a pro-life consensus embodied in our law...
...It's a shameful commentary on the present state of our liberal democracy that he has achieved so little success...
...He has a Socratic confidence in the power of reason to lead us to the truth about our natural limits and purposes, and so he is equally convinced that the crisis of our time is rooted, in large measure, in our lack of confidence in reason...
...by Peter Augustine Lawler Hadley Arkes is a frustrated man...
...Too many of our intellectuals— even too many conservative constitutionalists, such as Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia—are unreasonably skeptical about reason...
...And the proposition of our intellectual political class seems to be that the unborn really have no rights, no claim for dignity at all, that we are bound as free and rational beings to respect...
...That controversy would cause them great difficulty and no doubt ruin some careers...
...The pro-choice Democrats do everything they can to squelch argument on abortion...
...The refusal to bring sound and irrefutable arguments against Roe—to expose the fact that it unconstitutionally deprived American citizens of their right to make moral choices on abortion—is the largest error of Republican politicians in our time...
...Those who believe the effective regulation of biotechnological development can be morally neutral about abortion are simply wrong...
...In Natural Rights and the Right to Choose, he presents the great tradition of Western political thought as more seamless than it really is...
...Conservatives even more than liberals need to understand that the pro-life position has an essentially secular basis in our Founding principles and in truthful reflection on human nature...
...But the real coercion has not yet begun...
...For one thing, Arkes's confidence in the power of reason to inform practical life directly seems naive...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 11
