Obama and Abortion: A Pro-Life Atheist’s Take

Nat Hentoff, a self-described “Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer,” had a column in the Washington Times on Monday describing his disillusionment with Candidate Obama over the abortion issue:

My initial inclination to support Sen. Barack Obama’s road to the White House came from his work as a Chicago community organizer and his record in the Illinois legislature. He actually worked to rescue school dropouts from a lifetime dead end as well as provide job training for the unemployed. Later, in the Illinois state Senate, he was able to get a law passed requiring police to electronically record interrogations and confessions in homicide cases. But my view of him changed as I learned his record on abortion.

The Death Penalty: A Compromise

Capital punishment is a very controversial issue. Some would say that, regardless of what evils a person has done, it is not right to kill him, for human life is sacred, and further that there is something especially noxious about the death penalty because it is irrevocable, and if a person is ever wrongly executed there is nothing that can correct this. Others claim that we must take from the criminal something equivalent to what he has taken from his victim and from society, either as a matter or justice or in order to deter future crimes. And there are further concerns that without the death penalty murders will eventually be paroled to kill again.

These considerations may seem irreconcilable, but it strikes me that there is a “third way” one could take on the issue that would do at least a passable job of addressing the concerns of both the pro and anti-death penalty camps. The proposed compromise I have in mind is as follows: Instead of killing convicted murders, we use modern medical science to place them in an induced coma for the rest of their lives. This would respect the inviolability of human life, since we would not kill anyone. Further, if it ever came to light that a person was innocent, then and only then could we awaken them from their coma. On the other hand, from the perspective of the convict his life would be over, since he would spend the rest of it unconscious. This ought to have the same deterrent effect as execution, and since it serves to take away just as much liberty as death, it ought to serve the same retributive purposes. And the risk that a convicted murder would ever be released would be minimal, since the only way the person could ever even be woken up is if their conviction is overturned.

Question for discussion: is this a satisfactory compromise or not? If not, why not? If most people do not find the compromise satisfactory, does that suggest that the considerations given in the first paragraph aren’t at the root of disagreements about the death penalty?

If You Want Peace, Work For Marriage?

Via First Things, Maggie Gallagher points to some strikingly counter-intuitive statements by the Pope on the relationship between marriage and peace. Here, for example, is a snippet from the Holy Father’s remarks at this year’s World Day of Peace:

Consequently, whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace. This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.

And here is a similar statement, made in 2007 to the Executive Committee of the Centrist Democratic Internationale:

There are those who maintain that human reason is incapable of grasping the truth, and therefore of pursuing the good that corresponds to personal dignity. There are some who believe that it is legitimate to destroy human life in its earliest or final stages. Equally troubling is the growing crisis of the family, which is the fundamental nucleus of society based on the indissoluble bond of marriage between a man and a woman. Experience has shown that when the truth about man is subverted or the foundation of the family undermined, peace itself is threatened and the rule of law is compromised, leading inevitably to forms of injustice and violence.

I’ve been puzzling over these comments for a couple of days now, trying to understand what the Pope was getting at. After all, the relationship between, say, Same Sex Marriage and the Iraq War is hardly obvious. Yet the Pope is nobody’s fool, and if he’s repeatedly made the point, it’s worth considering whether he’s on to something.

Thoughts?

The Dogma of Evolution

As a follow-up to my Expelled review, I’ve long noticed that critics of evolution often talk about evolution being a “religion”, supported by “faith” rather than reason, supported by a scientific “orthodoxy” that considers any questioning of evolutionary “dogma” to be “heresy”, and so forth. I find this rhetorical tactic a bit odd. Based on such statements, you would get the idea that the average critic of evolution thinks of religion as an insult, of faith as something bad, of heresy as good, of orthodoxy as stultifying, and dogma as unreasoned and unreasonable. In short, he attempts to degrade and insult evolution by comparing it to religion, which is odd, given that the average critic of evolution is not only religious, but objects to evolution precisely on religious grounds.

The truth is that religion, faith, orthodoxy, and dogma are all good things. Faith is not the enemy of Reason, it is her sister. Dogma is not an unnecessary evil, but a necessary good. Orthodoxy is liberating; it is heresy that is stifling. I can understand the rhetorical effect of using these terms in this way, and certainly opponents of evolution are not the only ones who do this, but it seems to me that any battle we win in this way will be a Pyrrhic victory.

More on Torture

Yesterday’s post on the subject hardly exhausted all the practical reasons against using torture on terror suspects (to cite but one omission, torturing a suspect will likely mean that he can never be brought to trial and forced to answer for what he has done). However, the post was, I think, sufficient to show that torture “does not work” and should not be used or condoned or winked at by the United States. Nevertheless, there is one other consideration which I would like to highlight, a consideration that, to use a mixed metaphor, tips the scales against the use of torture beyond all reasonable doubt. That consideration is this. The War on Terror is not only a battle fo bombs and bullets, it is a battle of ideas. By engaging in torture, by defending it, legitimizing it, codifying it in our law, we cede a portion of the moral high ground in that battle, which is worth more to us in practical terms than several Army divisions. Our use of torture makes people who are inclined to love this country love us less and those who are inclined to hate us hate us more. When we condemn human rights abuses in other countries our condemnation will have less credibility. When Europeans and Leftists attack American policy, those attacks will have more credibility. And when American solders fall into enemy hands, they will be more likely to be mistreated.

Does Torture Work?

Does torture work? As Bill Clinton might have said, it depends on what you mean by “work.” If your goal is to extract a confession for use at one of Stalin’s show trials, then torture works well enough. If, on the other hand, your goal is to get reliable intelligence out of a person, to get him for example, to tell you the details of a potential terror plot or name his confederates, then just as clearly torture does not work. A person being tortured is liable to say just about anything to get the pain to stop and isn’t apt to be much of a stickler for whether or not his statements are true. Since there is no way to separate the true from the false screams, answers given by a suspect under torture are worse than worthless and should never form a part of our interrogation policy.

It is true that torture could sometimes produce accurate information. So can a magic eight ball, but no one would think to build our counter-terrorism strategy around the answers it gives. If I ask the magic eight ball whether it will rain tomorrow the answer it gives might be accurate, but it won’t be reliable. Magic eight balls are sometimes right, but are very often wrong, and since there is no way to tell if an answer it gives is accurate or not its answers are never reliable and only a fool would rely on them. So also with torture. If one scours the Internet, one might find a few cases in which the use of torture produced accurate intelligence (though not nearly as many as you might think). But so what? Police sometimes employ psychics to help them solve crimes, and I’m sure there have been a few cases where information provided by the psychics have led police to a breakthrough in the case. This doesn’t mean that we ought to be employing psychics in the war on terror. You might as well argue that the lottery is a good financial investment because people do occasionally win it. We can only get the benefit of the information torture produces if we are willing to rely on it without knowing whether or not it is true. Since this is self-evidently a bad policy, the only logical choice is to forgo the use of torture altogether in favor of more reliable interrogation techniques.

Cleaned by Capitalism

Over at Vox-Nova, my co-blogger Policraticus has pointed to some of the many statements made by the Popes in recent years on the importance of protecting the environment. It’s only fair, however, to note just how much technological progress and the free economy have led to a cleaner, healthier, and all around more pleasant environment. As Don Boudreaux has put it:

[S]mallpox, dysentery, and malaria – once common threats to humankind – are today totally conquered in the industrial world. (Smallpox is no longer a threat even in the poorest parts of the world.) Antibiotics regularly protect us from many infections that routinely killed our ancestors.

Before refrigeration, people ran enormous risks of ingesting deadly bacteria whenever they ate meat or dairy products. Refrigeration has dramatically reduced the bacteria pollution that constantly haunted our pre-twentieth-century forebears.

We wear clean clothes; our ancestors wore foul clothes. Pre-industrial humans had no washers, dryers, or sanitary laundry detergent. Clothes were worn day after day without being washed. And when they were washed, the detergent was often made of urine.

Life Imitates Art: Al Qaida Upset by 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Looks like yesterday’s parody is today’s news:

Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy on Tuesday denied a theory that Israel carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and blamed Iran and Shiite Hezbollah for spreading the idea to discredit the Sunni al-Qaida’s strike against the U.S.

Words Fail Me

From Green Saviors to Bio-Fools

It looks like I may have been on the cutting edge on this one:

Hailed until only months ago as a silver bullet in the fight against global warming, biofuels are now accused of snatching food out of the mouths of the poor.

Billions have been poured into developing sugar- and grain-based ethanol and biodiesel to help wean rich economies from their addiction to carbon-belching fossil fuels, the overwhelming source of man-made global warming.

But as soaring prices for staples bring more of the planet’s most vulnerable people face-to-face with starvation, the image of biofuels has suddenly changed from climate saviour to a horribly misguided experiment.

On Friday, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said biofuels “posed a real moral problem” and called for a moratorium on using food crops to power cars, trucks and buses.

The vital problem of global warming “has to be balanced with the fact that there are people who are going to starve to death,” said Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

“Producing biofuels is a crime against humanity,” the UN’s special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland, said earlier.

More.