Here is a short and (for us) timely piece written in the 1950s by the philosopher Mary Midgley. It’s lovely from beginning to end – in many ways.
The topic of abortion is introduced in the last paragraph, which I quote here (but do read the earlier paragraphs first, if you are up to it):
Great men, simply by their ignorance of a topic, can lay a remarkably strong taboo on the mention of it even where it happens to be entirely relevant. I saw a singular instance of this lately in a correspondence about the law of abortion. A writer pointed out that many women who had wished to be rid of their child two months after conception were eager to bear it three months later, and finished apologetically, “Expect no logic from a pregnant woman.” But of course there was nothing wrong with the logic. The premises were changed. A child at two months feels like an ailment; at five months it feels like a child. The woman had passed from the belief, “I am not well” to the belief, “I am now two people.” And the only thing wrong with that belief is that it is one which is unfamiliar to logicians. That, I suspect, is an unphilosophic objection.
One
might disagree that the mother’s feelings during pregnancy shed light upon the moral status of the unborn child (or upon the mother’s moral position
vis-à-vis her child). But the burden of proof lies with the person who’d discount those feelings.
What’s cavalier is this sort of attitude:
P.S. Midgley’s piece was rejected when it was drafted. It appears now in
The Raven,
a magazine of original philosophy written for intellectually curious readers with or without academic training in the discipline. It aims to revive an essayistic style of philosophy that was more common in academic venues as recently as thirty years ago but has gradually disappeared – that is, to publish contributions to the “literature” that deserve to be called literature.
P.P.S. I want to make one rejoinder to Midgley’s piece. It’s true that Descartes never married; but he did have a daughter,
Francine, who died young. He’s thought to have been profoundly affected by the experience.
P.P.P.S. Just how solitary
is Descartes’s theory of knowledge, anyway? Yes, the meditator’s own consciousness is the “Archimedean point” from which he comes to know the world. But when he examines his consciousness, he detects
another person: a person more perfect than himself: a person whose commitment not to deceive, whose commitment
vis-à-vis the meditator, is what enables the meditator to know the world. This may still be “adolescent.” A youth hopes that contact with
one other person will open a window onto the world. But that’s not so self-centered as when a philosopher accepts the Cartesian starting-point and then tries to gather knowledge without looking to another person – outside, or inside, himself.
