The Meaning of Life

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

Prompted by recent developments in reproductive technology and research and by the threat of President Bush to overturn Roe versus Wade, KEVIN CAREY argues, in a specially extended essay, that we need both a proportionate moral and legal framework for issues concerning the nature of human life, that the two should not be confused and that President Bush's moral confusion presages a disastrous outcome.

This essay does not permit of a myriad of subordinate clauses which would be allowable and indeed necessary in a monograph or book, but I hope it is detailed enough to overcome some of the generalisations which ruin properly constructed moral and legal arguments. For some people the cases under discussion have such simple answers that they require no debate at all. That is fine so long as their fundamental requirements for themselves are not assumed to be the proper basis for legislation. Equally, others may think that these matters are so personal that they are beyond the bounds of human agreement and must be left totally in the private domain. Surprisingly, perhaps, many people think both of these things in fuzzy alternation. This short essay is an attempt to untangle some of the factors. The word 'right' is placed in single quotes simply because I am not sure that the positions I describe amount to a philosophy that can be summarised in a simple term.

If you want to discuss the moral and legal framework for making decisions about the nature and meaning of human life, I concede that there is no easier place to start than to expose the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the fundamentalist 'right' but, as we have a President from this substantial enclave, as he, like his father, wishes to overturn the decision in Roe versus Wade (the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that permitted abortion and defined the conditions under which it can take place), and as he will likely be in a strong position to pack the already 'right' leaning Supreme Court to achieve this end, this is not a case of taking a cheap shot. There is no more legitimate place to start.

As I understand it, crystallised in Nozick's idea of the "Watchman State", the position of the Republican 'right' is that the functions of government in respect of the individual and collective, social and economic behaviour of citizens should only go so far as to protect those very individual liberties which excessive governance, civil unrest, crime or invasion threaten. Nozick's phrase aptly boils this down to organising a policing and defence function and facilitating an independent judiciary.

The problem with this position, as I have remarked before, is that the promised liberty is largely confined to making money and does not extend to the realm of private morality, to, for example, the relationship a woman has with the foetus she is carrying.

Here, a claim is made (which I will discuss later) that the state has the right to dictate the terms of that relationship to such an extent that a woman should be forced to carry a foetus to full term whether she likes it or not.

Now that is an extremely coherent position if all human life, in all its forms, from an egg at the point of fertilisation until 'natural' death, are all to be equally regarded; but in the 'right' Republican tradition they are assuredly not.

President Bush's response to the contradiction between his positions on abortion and capital punishment is that all "innocent" life is of equal value.

Again, this would be an entirely consistent, if ultimately untenable, position if it were not for the Republican propensity for military conscription. It is a strange form of minimalist state that will force citizens to put their lives in danger in the swamps and jungles of South East Asia in defence of state interests so undefined as to be useless in an argument. Conscription is the clearest but not the most frequent symptom of a ranking of the importance of various human lives where, needless to say, black people are usually at the bottom.

I think I have shown, therefore, that the ethical position of Bush and his supporters in respect of the value to be placed on human life is, to be generous, very weak but its legal under-pinning is no stronger.

Nobody, but Republicans in particular, should have any serious quarrel with the complementary principles of "Freedom of speech" in the First Amendment and the right to "Privacy" in the 14th. That these two formulations should exclude sexual matters has not seriously been held since Griswold versus Connecticut upheld the right of citizens to contraception.

On any scale of human intimacy it must be true that if the conditions under which people undertake sexual intercourse are deemed to be private then so are the conditions under which a woman carries a foetus. This, at least, is what I understand to be the logical position arising particularly out of the Republican repugnance of state interference express in the 14th Amendment.

In legal terms it is inconsistent to legislate against the temporary invasiveness of rape but only to forbid remedy in the more permanent invasiveness of a foetus not least because, continuing the analysis from the 'right' standpoint, a foetus, not being a "Constitutional person", cannot override the rights of the woman carrying it who clearly is.

Finally, on the legal front, the 'right's case is hardly helped by its position that the Constitution and its amendments, which together make up what is known as the 'Bill of Rights', is only to be interpreted in a narrow fashion. This position holds that the provisions as a whole cannot be taken to infer certain interpretations but that only the individual clauses can be considered and that they can only be considered in the light of what we know of the wishes and opinions of the framers.

This position, if held consistently, would certainly not have allowed the Supreme Court to uphold the abolition of slavery as most of the framers owned slaves and did not consider them to be Constitutional people. This narrow view is further complicated by a partner proposition that the Constitution should be read literally but not morally. This, at a stroke, undercuts any position on the nature of life which springs from a moral position.

So, to sum up, whatever the case of the 'right' for wishing to overturn Roe it is not one which derives from a coherent legal position. It arises rather from the classical stance of all tyrants; their freedom to plunder the populace must be matched by their power to interfere in its morals. I long thought this a paradox but that was in the days when I gave such people credit for being high-minded if misguided. I now see it as a cynical, illiberal, unprincipled, unscrupulous, untidy, unfocussed and indefensible attempt to clad untrammelled self-interest in the garb of political principle. These people, like the Emperor in Hans Christian Anderson, have no clothes.

This can best be illustrated by a dilemma presented via Mr. David Oakley whose case has recently been heard in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. Having fathered nine children by four different women and being in arrears of maintenance to the tune of more than $25,000, he has been restrained from any act of procreation which results in the fathering of a child which, in turn, means that if he disobeys the Court to the extent of causing a pregnancy the only way that the Court's ruling can be upheld is for his partner to be forced to have an abortion.

This, in a nutshell, is the dilemma of the greedy and the meddlesome because the wish to limit welfare spending comes right up against the moral position on the meaning of life.

The 'right's' position on this dilemma wavers dangerously between its highly articulated wish to enforce a moral code and its much less articulated wish to rid the polity of 'inferiors' of every kind.

At the moment the prison system is being used to cow and degrade black Americans -- but in an economic depression when cost cutting is required to sustain tax cutting enforced abortion may seem more attractive than a costly prison system.

One vital topic hardly explored on writing on these subjects is the very clear difference between the Roman Catholic position which wants pregnancies to come to term at any cost and the 'Protestant' position which has long flirted with genetic engineering for the elimination of a bewildering variety of supposed classes of people.

Having got this far, it is time to look at possible legal and ethical frameworks on which we can take decisions about the meaning of life, a problem given added impetus not so much by the Oakley case but by two more profound developments during the last month, the news that the sex of a child can be chosen prior to fertilisation of the egg by sperm 'sorting' and the development of technologies to extract stem cells for medical research from foetuses created in a laboratory.

To be fair to readers, I have to say at this point that I accept but do not wholly agree with the frameworks I am proposing. I believe, as I will amplify later, that why people do things is in many cases more important than what they do -- but a legalistic framework cannot rigidly follow that ethical precept.

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"Meaning of Life" CONTINUES (Stay with us!)

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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