The ethics of abortion

Abortion is in the news again, with the possibility that the landmark judgement in the USA which ensured the legality of abortion may soon be struck down.  Now, I preached Psalm 139 on Sunday as we celebrated new life, and with the affirmation that each baby is knit together in the womb by Almighty God very much ringing in my ears, it seems right to celebrate anything which might reduce the likelihood of this creative work of God being interrupted and thwarted by the destructive work of humanity.  It grieves me, frankly, that here in the UK abortion is hardly controversial; just a medical procedure, which we all tacitly agree to by funding it through our taxes and carrying it out through 'our NHS'.  It is not an ethical question in our society at large.  But it should be.

It is generally accepted that the newborn baby is a human being, fully deserving of all the protections which we typically accord to human beings and which we often bracket under the heading 'the sanctity of life' - a phrase which continues to be used even by people who don't really believe in sanctity as a concept at all.  Okay.  Let us take this as accepted.

So the question is this: what ethically significant change has there been in the baby?  He or she was in the womb, and now they are not; has that bestowed humanity on him or her?

Typically I don't think we would say so.  We talk about 'the baby' while she is still in the womb.  Sometimes we talk to the baby while she is still in the womb!  The baby is human, whether they have passed through the birth canal or not.  The onus is on the so-called 'pro-choice' advocate to show what the ethical difference is.

If not the birth canal, is it some other change earlier in pregnancy?  Is that why we typically limit the stage at which abortions can be carried out?  But what change is it that occurs, and why is it ethically significant?  Is it the ability to survive outside the womb?  If so, why is that ethically significant?

The logic of the 'pro-choice' position is that it is down to an expectant mother to decide whether the developing human being within her has value or not.  That is the logic.  You can try to wriggle out of it all you like, but there is no escaping the fact that what makes the difference between a foetus with no rights and a baby with rights rests in the will of another human being.

One human being gets to decide whether another human being has value or not.

There are lots of complicating factors, and I don't want to minimise them.  But I cannot see that any of those factors change the basic equation.  Is this an ethical position we're happy with?

Ah, but since abortions will happen anyway, shouldn't they be safe and regulated?  But there is no safe abortion for the baby involved.  And it matters what we as a society are prepared to sanction.  If we are talking about the taking of a powerless human life, then it matters that this be illegal even if it still happens.

I don't know how to make this a live issue again in British society.  Maybe, absent Christian presuppositions, it can't be done.  Maybe, as I've mused sadly before, we are past the point where ethical arguments can make headway against the 'sanctity of choice'.  But maybe it's just that this is another one of those areas where we believe things are important, but don't want to make things socially awkward by acting on our beliefs?

Thoughts about life

For reasons which will be obvious to anyone who follows the news, I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be 'pro-life' - and also what it doesn't mean.  What is a distinctly Christian approach to the ethical issues surrounding the beginning and end of human life?  Here are some thoughts, not all well developed at this stage.

1.  The theological foundations of a Christian pro-life stance are creation and Christology.  The doctrine of creation teaches us that each human being is made by God, in his image, and belongs to him.  Life - including my own life! - does not ultimately 'belong' to any of us, but to God.  That is why a human being cannot arbitrarily take another human being's life - consider Genesis 9:6.  Christology comes in because it is, if you like, the highest compliment that could be paid to human nature that God the Son took it on himself and became incarnate.  If we doubt the value of human life, the doctrine of the incarnation should be a sufficient rebuttal of those doubts.  We could also add that, de jure, each human life belongs once again to God, this time not only by right of creation but by right of redemption.

2.  The ethical implications of these foundations are sometimes very clear, and sometimes not so much.  I think that anyone who celebrates the Annunciation - I don't mean necessarily by keeping the feast, but by being gladdened by the angelic news of the incarnation - ought to recognise that Christ in his incarnation sanctifies human life from conception.  We ought to be pro-life in the narrower sense of 'against the deliberate ending of life in the womb'.  But we need to recognise that issues around end-of-life care just are more difficult.  There can be a moral difference, for example, between deliberately ending a life and withdrawing treatment - although both will end in death, and are undertaken in that knowledge.  We ought not to act or talk as if this stuff were simple and straightforward.

3.  To be pro-life is not the same as being anti-death.  One aspect of recognising the sanctity of life is recognising that the mystery of its end does not lie entirely within our power.  Thanks to medical advances, we can often delay death - but whether we ought to do so in every case is surely very doubtful.  Especially for the Christian, who believes in and looks for the resurrection of the dead, being pro-life ought not to mean 'prolonging life wherever possible regardless of other considerations'.

4.  It seems to me that many people - especially, I have to say, Americans - muddy the waters by confusing more than one issue.  For example, in some of the tragic issues involving children which have come up in the UK, American commentators have been quick to equate being pro-life with believing in absolute parental autonomy.  Some talk as if parents own their children's lives, something which I can't accept on theological principle (see 1, above), and some import the distinctly American (but not Christian) idea that the community and the state ought to have no input into tough decisions involving children.  This is an unhelpful blurring of issues, and particularly when it is being shouted across the Atlantic sounds a lot like real-life tragedies here are being used as ammunition for ongoing culture wars there.  (And as an aside, if the sanctity of life means anything, it means that issues of life must not be used in this way).

5.  A distinctive of Christian engagement with this issue ought to be a certain amount of calm.  Don't get me wrong: there should be anger when the sanctity of life is not respected, and there should be grief over individual tragedies and systemic horrors.  But there needs to be somewhere behind that the faith in God who raises the dead and gives each one his or her due, so that we can engage without bitterness and frenzy.

6.  Life is a gift.  It is all too easy to present life as a burden - and then say that you have to carry it anyway, because hey, we're pro-life.  Life is a gift.  There should be joy in being pro-life, joy in honouring the greatest thing the Creator has made, joy in the fact that Christ came that we might have life, and life to the full.  The Christian pro-life position is full of gratitude, seeing goodness where nobody else can see it, the joy of glimpsing the imago dei even in the briefest flickers of human existence and the hardest moments of human being.  Tone matters, because it betrays what is really going on in our hearts.

Letter to my MP

Do you recogise your local MP on this list?
MPs are lobbying Government to push Westminster into imposing legal abortions in Northern Ireland using the upcoming Domestic Violence Bill.
Write to your MP: respect the right of the people of NI to decide for themselves. #abortion pic.twitter.com/md0pjeildj

— Life (@LifeCharity) March 13, 2018

Here's what I wrote to my MP.  Maybe you could consider writing something similar?

I am writing in relation to the letter from Stella Creasy MP to the Home Secretary, dated 8th March 2018, to which your name has been appended as a signatory.  In the letter, the Home Secretary is asked to consider using the forthcoming Domestic Violence Bill to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, thus bringing it into line with the rest of the United Kingdom.  The letter cites the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) as stating that the criminalisation of abortion itself constitutes violence against women.  I am writing to express my own opposition to the viewpoint contained within the letter, and to ask you to reconsider your support for this position.

I am myself convinced that every abortion involves the deliberate ending of a human life.  When my own children were in their mother's womb, I had no doubt that they were already 'people' in every morally significant sense.  I understand that many people would not share this conviction.  I hope, however, that you would agree with me that if it were the case that abortion ended a human life, then it would be appropriate to consider abortion a criminal act.  Otherwise, we would be creating a class of human life which was not legally protected, something which I hope we all want to avoid.  Assuming you agree, the disagreement about abortion is not primarily about ethics, but about a question of fact: is the foetus in the womb a human being?  Please can I ask you to consider with what level of certainty any of us could answer in the negative.

May I separately ask you to consider in particular dropping your support for any plans to use the Domestic Violence Bill to drive this agenda.  Domestic violence is a serious and terrible issue, and deserves to be addressed without drawing in the constitutional and ethical controversy that would inevitably follow from making it about abortion provision in NI.  The claim of CEDAW that criminalisation of abortion itself represents gender-based violence is unfortunate, and I fail to see how it can be justified.  The separation of these issues will allow for good legislation on domestic violence.  In the meantime, it is to be hoped that devolved rule in NI will be re-established and the issue of abortion in NI can be considered by the representatives of the people of Northern Ireland.

These issues are complex and difficult, and I am grateful for your willingness to serve as an MP and therefore engage with them at the highest level.  I am also grateful for your willingness to listen to your constituents, and I hope you will be able to consider this point of view even if you do not agree.

Vote and pray

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.

Thus the apostle.

In directing the believers to pray for those in authority, Paul makes clear that the sphere of political leadership is not one of divine disinterest.  The fact that Jesus' kingdom is not of this world does not mean that the kingdoms of this world are beneath his notice.  Admittedly, Paul's expectations and goals when it comes to praying for kings and all in high positions seem to be very limited, but there is engagement.

Our situation is rather different from Paul's.  Unlike him, we are periodically asked to help decide who exactly will be "in high positions", through the mechanism of electing our representatives.  We approach that as believers who know the King, but nevertheless are called to take an interest in who will exercise temporal authority over us.  Unlike Paul, we are called not only to pray but to act, to take a degree of responsibility (albeit a small and limited one) for the powers that be.  The emperor did not ask for Paul's input in how he ran his empire, but we are asked for input, and it is important that our input be decisively shaped by the recognition that Jesus has died and risen, and is now ascended and enthroned.  We vote, just as we live, as witnesses to that decisive fact.  Our priorities ought to be different as a result.  Can I suggest a few particular areas to think through?

In 2015, 191,014 human beings were legally killed in England and Wales.  They were, of course, killed in the womb, but killed they nonetheless were.  If you're a taxpayer, you helped to pay for it.  We are called to bear witness to the fact that in Christ no human life is superfluous, hopeless, or without value.  If one of the candidates for your parliamentary seat is consistently pro-life, and shows some willingness to act on their convictions, can I suggest that this might trump a whole load of other considerations?  I know that lots of Christians in the UK have been dismayed at the 'single-issue' voting across the pond, and I'm not saying that you should ignore everything else.  But if you did have to pick a single issue, saving the lives of unborn children wouldn't be a bad one.

In a similar, but less extreme, vein, there are numerous people in the UK who, through ill health or disability, are unable to support themselves.  On this issue, we look for representatives who first of all have compassion - who actually show some signs of caring - and then secondly who have a plan.  I don't think we need to be or ought to be particularly attached to any one plan, but we want representatives who will prioritise taking action in this area.  We live as those who believe in the God of compassion when we vote with compassion - and note that the God of compassion did not sit in heaven feeling sorry for us in our brokenness, but acted to help!

A third area would be around freedom of expression, and especially freedom of religion.  This has two aspects to it: domestic and international.  Internationally, we want representatives who will support the spread of religious liberty around the world.  Domestically, we want representatives who will protect the right of people of all faiths and none to act according to conscience and to speak according to their conviction.  We should stand for religious liberty for all, not just ourselves or those like us.  This is, I will confess, partly out of a self-interested application of what might be termed the Niemöller principle - if we don't speak out when they come for the Muslims, who will speak out when they come for us?  But there is also something more principled about it.  We believe in the Christ who rules by his sovereign word, and wherever that word is given liberty he will extend his reign - we are not, or ought not to be, afraid of other ideas or beliefs.

And then there is a whole load of other stuff.  It's legitimate to think about economics, although we ought to resist the appeals to our own economic self-interest as much as we are able.  We can take a step back and ask what sort of system seems likely to work best, whether that's in economics or governance.  It's reasonable to think about security and international relations.  On most of these things. Christians will be able to reasonably and faithfully disagree, because they're inevitably based on uncertain assessments of the world and our place in it.  But that doesn't mean they don't matter, or that our choices ought not to be shaped by the reality of the gospel.

When we're done thinking all this through, I think we'll wind up back with Paul.  How huge these issues are!  How complex is the world in which we live!  What confusion there is around even the apparently simplest things!  How entrenched are some of the atrocities of our society!  How desperate is the situation of the voiceless!  And how pathetically small is our influence, our ability to shape things.

And so, pray for kings and all who are in high positions.  One way we can witness is to keep calm and know that Christ is on the throne.  It is, despite appearances, in his hands - all of it.  So vote and pray.  And pray and pray and pray.

Serpents and Doves

Just poking my head up from the midst of essay writing to offer some thoughts on two recent news stories. The two stories vary wildly in importance and tone, and this will feel like a strange post for that reason. But life is strange, sometimes.

The first story is that some of the money from the so-called 'tampon tax' has gone to a pro-life organisation.  You can see the liberal outrage here, and in various other articles scattered across the upright and progressive press.

I didn't hear nearly as much comment on this story from Christians as I would have liked.  Some, but not enough, and not sufficiently robust given that lives are at stake.

The second story is that apparently Cadbury and the National Trust have left out the word 'Easter' from some of their seasonal events and products.  (Although as this non-story unfolded over the course of the day, it became clear that they really hadn't).

I heard about this story from the Archbishop of York, and it made the national news as 'Church complains about...'

What in the world is wrong with us?  It's so awful at two levels.  The one level is the principle.  We seem to care more about the loss of our brand, about an affront to our symbols, than we do about the lives of the unborn.  We want to protect our privileged status more than we want to protect innocent life.  Is that really who we are?  But the second level is strategy.  Maybe there were plenty of Christians talking about Life, but they didn't make the news.  But the egg thing made the news.  The PM had to comment.  Because of course the media will seek out religious opinion on what they deem to be religious issues, and of course they will spin anything we say as 'Christians outraged by fact that society no longer accords them special privileges'.  That really shouldn't be a surprise.

Come on people.  Wise as serpents, innocent as doves.  Not the other way around.

Theotokos

On the feast of the annunciation, I've been reflecting on the incarnation of the Son of God.  In their defence of the genuine divinity and humanity of Christ, the orthodox church fathers used the term Theotokos to describe the virgin Mary - best translated 'God-bearer' (rather than 'Mother of God', which just has uncomfortable resonances with the Father).  Mary is God-bearer because the child in her womb, whilst genuinely and fully human, was also genuinely and fully God.  The eternal Son of God was personally united to the human nature of Jesus Christ, even in the womb; Mary wasn't the bearer of the human being who would be God incarnate, but actually bore in her womb God-in-the-flesh.

Two reflections:

1.  The grace of God is displayed, in that God the Son is willing to take to himself human nature in its most powerless, vulnerable, and dependent state.  To put it bluntly, the eternal Son was a human foetus.  Here is already a prefiguration of his condescension at the cross, when he was given into the hands of sinners, defenceless, and finally entombed.

2.  This is basically where a Christian pro-life commitment flows from.  The incarnate Son did not unite to himself a part of the virgin's body; he united to himself a fully human nature.  The person in the womb was God in the flesh.  That means both that we know when human life 'begins' and has significance, and it means that God cares about this stage of human life, sanctifying it by his presence.  Obviously, this isn't an argument for being pro-life (the argument I would deploy with people who don't accept my theological positions would be simply 'are you sure?  are you sure this isn't a human being?  don't you think you ought to be 100% sure before this becomes okay?') - but it is the underlying rationale for valuing human life in the womb.

Reader Response: Ethics (6)

The sixth manuscript of Bonhoeffer's Ethics is entitled Natural Life.  Bonhoeffer sees this as a neglected subject in Protestant theology (although it features prominently in Roman Catholic theology, where the relationship between nature and grace is understood in a way which is problematic for Protestant thought).  Natural life is not the same as created life - rather, "through the fall, 'creation' became 'nature'.  The unmediated relation to God of the true creation becomes the relative freedom of natural life" (173).  In terms of the relationship between ultimate and penultimate things, natural life is penultimate, and indeed the concept of natural life helps us to distinguish between those things in life which are genuinely penultimate and those which are unnatural and therefore destructive of the penultimate.  Bonhoeffer is here establishing a differentiation within the sphere of the world and the penultimate: against those who deride the concept of natural life because they have lumped everything that is not grace together as 'sin', he sees some things as genuinely natural and others as genuinely unnatural.  But against the Roman concept which tends to make the natural an 'ultimate' in itself, Bonhoeffer is clear that the natural-ness or unnatural-ness of anything will only be revealed in the light of Christ - when things are seen to be either penultimate preparations of the way of the Lord, or obstructions to his path.

"How is the natural recognized?  The natural is that form of life preserved by God for the fallen world that is directed toward justification, salvation, and renewal through Christ" (174).  It can therefore only be known "by looking at Jesus Christ" (174).  Nevertheless, it is reason which is the human instrument for discerning the natural.  The natural, as universally human, is not something which can be defined by any human authority, which will only show itself as arbitrary in so far as it attempts this.  Bonhoeffer, of course, has the Nazi state in view.

"The natural guards life against the unnatural" (176).  Because the natural is the form of life preserved by God, it fights off the unnatural, which is in itself "the enemy of life" (176).  The unnatural may triumph over the natural in limited ways, but the natural will always reassert itself at length.  This is because "the unnatural is something that requires organization, while the natural cannot be organized but is simply there" (177).  It takes fighting and campaigning and legislation to suppress the natural - I am reminded of various campaigns and organisations in the early twenty-first century.  If Bonhoeffer is right, and I think he is, those campaigns are right to think that they need to keep on even after they have apparently achieved their objectives; the natural will in time fight back!

The natural life is a formed life, and its form takes shape in rights and duties, corresponding to the fact that for Christian ethics life is both an end in itself and a means to an end.  Rights come first: "that means speaking first of what is given to life, and only then of what is demanded from it" (180).  This is the only way in which God is honoured, and it is also logical: "duties spring from the rights themselves, as tasks from gifts" (180).  Therefore for the remainder of the manuscript Bonhoeffer expounds particular rights of natural life, including 'to each his own', the inviolability of bodily life, and the rights of reproduction and developing life.

In this connection, and with relevance to contemporary debate, here is another snippet on abortion: "To kill the fruit in the mother's womb is to injure the right to life which God has bestowed on the developing life.  Discussion of the question whether a human being is already present confuses the simple fact that, in any case, God wills to create a human being and that the life of this developing human being has been deliberately taken.  And this is nothing but murder" (206, emphasis added).  Of course there are circumstances (and "without doubt, all this decisively affects one's personal, pastoral attitude toward the person concerned" 181), but they can't change the facts.

I see this manuscript as pursuing one of the most essential insights of Bonhoeffer's work, which is that there are ethical distinctions in the non-Christian world.  This might seem obvious, but the temptation of theologians to write off the whole structure as sinful is powerful.  Of course, the structure is implicated in sin - we are talking about natural life, not the pristine life of the first creation.  But there is nevertheless relative good and relative evil, and the church needs to engage with that if it is to prepare the way for Christ and his gospel in the world.

On being real

A couple of days ago, I argued that one thing we can take away from the doctrine of the Trinity is its concern for the God who is.  That is to say, the doctrine treats God as having real existence, and therefore particular existence - he is in this way, and to fail to acknowledge that is simply not to know him.  This is a property of real things: they occupy space, physically or conceptually, and we bump up against them, literally or metaphorically.  Whilst they can be (must be) interpreted - which is to say, there must be some interaction between my understanding and the real existing thing - they cannot be simply reimagined without denying their reality.

I'm not sure I could trace this historically, but I'm confident that logically the lack of belief in a real existing God leads to a loss of belief in real existing humanity.  Real existing humanity - both in the general sense and in the more acute sense in which I am myself an instance thereof - has a genuine shape, occupies genuine space.  It cannot be reimagined without denying its reality.  But we must reimagine humanity; we must claim for ourselves total sovereignty over our own humanity.  Do we notice than in claiming this sovereignty at this level we destroy (in so far as it lies with us) the very thing we want to rule over?  We become kings and queens of dreams, and more often than not of nightmares.

Of course we see this is in the arena of sexuality and gender, but the most extraordinary and terrible example I can think of relates to abortion.  Behold the power of imagination!  The joyfully expectant mother carries a baby; the unfortunate woman with an unwanted pregnancy has nothing but a collection of cells.  The longed for baby is not a foetus but a person, already loved; the undesired ball of matter is nothing but an excrescence, to be removed.  We have become sovereign over our own reality, and can decide what should live and what should die.

A big caveat: I have to put this starkly and horrifically, because that is the shape of the reality.  But I know that this is not how it feels for people going through this sort of thing.  I suspect that the decision to abort more often than not feels like helplessness and not sovereignty.  I know that it is pain and anguish and not at all the simple choice painted here.  I know that.  But if we step back: what allowed these choices to become choices at all, however anguished?

But the bitter truth is that human beings are real.  We are real.  I am real.  I cannot reimagine myself without denying myself.  In reality, I cannot be absolutely sovereign over myself or anyone or anything else.  I, and all other real things, are to some extent given; I am not a dream or a nightmare, but a created person.  At some point, we will bump up against the reality of humanity - our own and that of others.  And at some point, even if it is not until the Judgement, we will bump up against the reality of the God who is there and who gave us all of our reality.  Then what will we say?

For the sake of life

"The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them.  It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenceless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ."

Thus Bonhoeffer.

And thus the Royal College of Midwives, in response to a BPAS campaign to decriminalise the killing of unborn babies:

"This campaign has the RCM’s full support. The fact that women are still bound by this legislation in the UK will surprise many people. The law should not be potentially criminalising women for their decision. The system should be offering support, treatment and care, not obstacles.

“This is a fundamental issue about equality for women. It is about them having control over their own body and not having their bodies subject to the diktats of others, however well meaning."

The weakest and most defenceless.

Time to raise our voices.  Time to find ways of rushing to help.

Choice, death, and begging the question

In the University of Oxford, there should have been a debate this week, hosted by a University pro-life society, about the cultural impact of abortion.  It didn't happen, largely due to protests by other societies. You can read about it here and here. There are lots of issues around this, including of course the right to freedom of speech that one ought to expect the University to uphold.  There is also the issue of poor argumentation.

Consider some of the comments from groups opposed to the debate.  Here is the Women's Campaign: 

It is absurd to think we should be listening to two cisgender men debate about what people with uteruses should be doing with their bodies... The event description seems to suggest that increased access to abortion contributes to a ‘culture’ of ‘[treating] human life carelessly’. Framing the debate in these pro-life terms denies people autonomy over the choices they make regarding their own bodies,

Now, apart from the ridiculous nu-speak (cisgender?), and the bizarre idea that only people who have direct experience of an issue are able to have an opinion on it, the problem with this statement is that it assumes exactly what ought to be debated.  Is the question of abortion simply one of one's own body?  Is this about a man with a uterus-free body telling a woman with a uterus-equipped body what she ought to be doing with her body?  Of course, the reason any of us are pro-life in this context is because we are convinced that there is a third party present - a baby, a life, a real human being.  Speaking up on behalf of a third party who is powerless and voiceless is, I would suggest, always legitimate, no matter how much it impinges on someone else's autonomy.

Six years ago, I wrote something about clarifying the terms of the abortion debate.  At that time, I had the feeling that many people did not understand that this was primarily a debate about facts, not values.  I argued then that nobody thinks killing is okay; it is just that we disagree over whether abortion is killing, and that is a matter of fact to be debated.  I still think clarifying this would be really helpful.

However, I no longer feel so optimistic that sorting this out would move the debate forward very much.  It seems clear to me now that there is a value debate going on.  It is not a debate about life, primarily, but about choice.  The comments from feminist groups about this proposed debate make it very clear that autonomy is the ultimate value for them.  We must be able to choose; each individual must be able to choose.  Let me be honest: I am no longer sure that if these people were convinced that the human foetus were a real, living person waiting to be born, they would want to ban abortion.  In other words, I very much fear that choice has become so important that people would consciously kill and sanction killing in order to maintain their own autonomy.

There is, I think, a profound link between choice and death, in a way that there is not between choice and life.  None of us chose to live.  In Christian thinking, life is a gift.  Life is grace.  It is given to us.  To go on living is also not a choice (contra existentialism).  I cannot choose to keep living.  Of course, I can and do make myriad small choices which contribute to the upkeep of my life.  But none of them is a choice to live, and neither is the sum of them.  In the same way, I make choices that contribute to the continued living of others, most obviously my children.  But I don't choose for them to go on living (neither did I really choose for them to live in the first place; life simply isn't within my power or gift).

But I can choose to die, and I can choose to kill.  Whereas going on living shows my dependence, and contributing to the ongoing life of others shows our interrelatedness, choosing to die or to kill is all about autonomy.  A choice with complete finality, for me or for someone else; a real choice, a choice which shows that I am me and I can enforce my will.

And that is the culture of death that springs from radical individualism, and is masked by positive sounding words like 'choice'.  God have mercy on us.

Fact and Value

I suspect that there's very little in ethical debate that is more important than sorting out where we are making decisions about matters of fact and where we are making decisions about matters of value. Not making this distinction, and not carefully analysing whether our disagreements fall into one category or the other, leads to us talking past one another, thinking ill of one another and also just being muddle-headed.

A question of fact is a question about what is (or is not). An example of a question of fact would be 'there is such a thing as ice-cream'. This particular fact is trivial, and easy to prove, but not all questions of fact have those characteristics. The statement 'there is such a person as God' is certainly not trivial, and is not readily proved to most people's satisfaction, but it is still a question about what is - a question of fact.

A question of value is a question about what something is worth. An example might be 'ice-cream is tasty'. Again, this value statement is trivial. But the statement 'God deserves to be worshipped' is not, and neither is the statement 'murdering human beings is wrong'. These are significant statements, but they are not statements about what is. They are to do with value.

It would be easy to suppose that this distinction is identical to the distinction between what is objective and what is subjective: facts are things that are absolutely true (or false), whilst values are essentially opinion. This may well be true on a naturalistic worldview; it is not true on a Christian worldview, where God gives values which are, from a human standpoint at least, objective and universal. In a naturalistic worldview, you can be wrong about facts, but not really about values; the same does not ring true for the Christian (although obviously some value judgements really are just subjective, like my ice-cream example). This is interesting, because it means that interpreting value statements will ultimately boil down to a fact question: does God exist? But all this by the by...

Getting the fact and value distinction wrong has tainted the abortion debate in the US, I think, and I want us to get it clear on this side of the pond. In this debate, you have two sides: the 'pro-life' people, who think abortion is wrong, and the 'pro-choice' people, who think people should be able to choose. Just so you know, I'm firmly with the pro-lifers. Pro-life people often think that pro-choice people are making a value judgement: perhaps 'a woman's right to choose is more important than an infant's life', or more starkly 'it is not wrong to murder a baby'. Of course nothing could be further from the truth, and we need to drop that sort of rhetoric. The disagreement is one of fact, not value. Nobody thinks it's okay to kill a baby. Some people think that the foetus is not a baby - and that is a question of fact, not value. So the argument needs to proceed on factual questions: is this a baby, or not? Is this human or not?

This is important because often we agree on the value judgement: a human being must not be killed simply because that being's existence is inconvenient or even tragic for another human being. Let us take that as settled. (Though I cannot see why a naturalist should think so, I am grateful for the common grace that gives most people this intuition). Now we can have a sensible discussion about what a human being is, apart from emotive value-language. This won't make the discussion easy - after all, many religious pro-lifers will take their position from revelation to some extent. But I think it is a discussion that can be had.

I also appeal to pro-choice people to understand what is going on here. We disagree with you about facts. That means that we can't adopt a "live and let live" approach (to coin a phrase in a horribly ironic manner) to this issue. We really think that people are being killed, legally, at the point of their greatest defencelessness. If you thought that was the case, wouldn't you do anything in your power to stop it?