Carrot Juice Is Murder

Ryan Anderson at First Things gives a detailed account of a recent Princeton debate over the value of human life.  Put this down as a must read. 

Anderson begins with a quote from Princeton philosophy professor Elizabeth Harman comparing an unborn human with plant life, an attempt to make the point that the unborn humans have no rights.  Meanwhile in Switzerland they are actually debating whether plants have rights. 

As Anderson points out, one thing the three pro-choice philosophers have in common is the belief that there is nothing inherently valuable in human life.  Anderson writes:

It was instructive to witness the ease with which various speakers could embrace infanticide or dehumanize unborn life—recall Harman’s argument that unborn children “really are a lot like plants.” But even more instructive was how unalarmed many in the Princeton audience seemed to be by any of this. I had forgotten that, for more than a few in the academic elite, this is just par for the course.

This is indeed instructive.  One should not discount how thoroughly natural rights thinking has been discarded by the academics and how comfortable many of our elite ethicists are with infanticide and euthanasia.  Consider the fact that this is the elite which sets the intellectual tone and teaches our best and brightest.  In a trickle-down theory of ideas it isn't long before the crackpot notions of the elite become the common opinion of the average educated person.  I have noted many times that we already have had a presidential candidate, John Kerry, who buys into the notion that humans do not have rights; it is "persons."  Thus Kerry justifies the killing of humans he does not consider persons, namely the unborn.  Recall that Kerry claims to subscribe to the Catholic teaching that human life begins at conception.  It's just that Kerry thinks it is "personhood," not humanity, that has worth.  This is an example of elite philosophy trickling down into our common politics.  Is it any wonder that we are horrified by the euthanizing of a horse yet allow the aborting of the unborn simply because they are inconvenient? 

An audience member appears to have had more wisdom than some of the panelists:

When it comes to bioethics, much is at stake for the foundations of our political life. At the end of the panel, one questioner expressed this well. If we redefine our founding principle so as to exclude those without consciousness or rationality from an inalienable right to life, he asked, what is to keep others from redefining it again to exclude those who aren’t morally upright (as he thought the “radical right” might do) or who aren’t religiously upright (as he thought radical Islam would dictate)? At this time in our national and world history, he wondered, shouldn’t we be uniting around the principle of the Declaration of Independence?

Hear, hear. 

And in honor of the vegetable rights story mentioned above, I offer the brilliant Arrogant Worms and their classic Carrot Juice Is Murder.  Little did they know that their parody might someday become reality.