Ponnuru responds to Rauch, et al.

Here is a response, by Ramesh Ponnuru, to some of the critiques of his book, "The Party of Death."  (See these posts.)  With respect to the charge that Ponnuru fails to see or embrace the implications of his pro-life views for the criminalization and punishment of abortion, Ponnuru writes:

It is true that I don’t lay out a detailed version of an ideal legal code concerning abortion. I had three important reasons for this “omission.” The first is that legislatures and voting publics are not yet in a position to be enacting ideal legal codes, and the case for allowing them to do so — which can include a case for the general reasonableness of the anti-abortion position — has to be made before it makes much sense to proceed to the next steps.

The second, related one is that my view of politics is not utopian. A slow process of persuasion, of asymptotic approaches to justice, is not a compromise; it is the very best that we can hope for. I have no illusions, and indulge none in the book, about the likelihood that a democratic resolution of the abortion debate would involve the triumph of my views on, say, the permissibility of aborting fetuses because of their disabilities. If we reach a point where unborn children are generally protected, I may write a book attempting more persuasion. But it would be a very different book.

My third reason is that there is considerable room for prudential judgment in the drawing up of laws. In one state, penalties might have to be tougher to deter a crime. I don’t have an ideal legal code in mind for prohibiting homicide in general, and I think that homicide laws may rightly vary according to the circumstances of time and jurisdiction. That doesn’t nullify my view that all places ought to prohibit homicide.

Yet I say enough to refute the charge that Rauch makes. I don’t sidestep the issues he addresses. See page 262, where I offer a reason for considering abortion “less culpable than, say, the murder of a business rival out of greed,” and for thinking it “just to impose less severe punishments.” I also explicitly say that if a legal regime of delicensure and fines for abortionists “deterred abortion and communicated the state’s and the public’s hostility to abortion. . . there would, in my view, be no need to go further” (p. 246).

In other words, I outlined the principles that ought to govern these laws in as much detail as the matter allows. I explained the sense in which abortion is analogous to other kinds of homicide (its deliberate ending of a peaceable human being’s life) and the sense in which it is not (the subjective moral intent likely to be behind the act). To put it a different way: While I cannot assent to the common pro-choice argument that we should allow the killing of unborn human beings since our society includes people who take many different good-faith moral views about the issue, I can see this pluralism as a legitimate reason for lenity in enforcing the prohibition.

Thoughts?