Quick Thanks -- and Tentative Rejoinder -- to Rick

Hello again, All,

Many thanks to Rick for taking up my question with characteristic thoughtfulness.  I'm on the fly at the moment, so just three quick observations in response:

The first is that I am a little hesitant about the title of Rick's post.  For the phrase 'abortion subsidies' that occurs therein is ambiguous as between intended financing of abortion on the one hand, and collateral effects on the disposable income of people who might seek abortion on the other -- precisely the distinction that step one of a double effect inquiry aims to keep clear.  (That is in view of the decisiveness, for purposes of moral evaluation, of intentions in individuating morally evaluable actions -- including those actions which are votes on legislation.)  I want, then, to make sure that all readers know that my question is aimed at what significance 'intervening choice' ought to have in the the 'proportionality' thinking of a legislator who has reached step two of a double effect inquiry -- that is, a legislator who already, by hypothesis, does not intend to push funds toward abortion but is now thinking about collateral effects. 

The second is that I do want to emphasize once more that it seems to me that the likely collateral abortion effects of health insurance reform legislation remain at this stage uncertain, particularly because subject to counterveiling tendencies.  In one corner we have what I believe to be well documented correlations between abortion-seeking on the one hand, and poverty on the other.  (Of course that's not to say wealthy folk don't seek abortions.  It's just to advert to a statistical predominance of nonwealthy folk among those who seek them.)  In the other corner we have the obvious fact that any federal expenditure that enhances disposable incomes also enhances the affordability of purchasable 'services,' including abortion 'services.'  I want, then, to ensure that nobody takes the present colloquy for implying that health insurance reform legislation now before Congress is apt to increase the incidence of abortion; it could very well do the contrary.  And so my question concerns how a legislator ought to factor intervening choices into the inherently probablistic 'cost benefit analysis' that is a double effect stage 2 inquiry.

Finally, the third is that I am of course sympathetic to the distinction that Rick highlights -- namely, between intervening-choice-mediated collateral effects that would be good ones on the one hand, and intervening-choice-mediated collateral that would be bad ones on the other hand.  It is probably here that the form of 'schizophrenia' which any member of a classically liberal polity is apt to experience will be most poignant.  For, in our roles as citizens, we are on some understandings of liberalism required to abstain from considering legally-cognizably bad that which our courts have determined to be permissible and many of our fellow citizens have determined not to be unambiguously bad.  And of course counterpart observations hold of the 'good' of the 'parochial' element of parochial education.  On the other hand, in our roles as fully situated, faith- and culture-identified human beings, we cannot ignore the 'bad' and the 'good' in what, per our own and our traditions' conceptions of the good, are arguabley bads and goods.  But if Messr. Hobbes and Locke, and Messrs. Rawls and Sandel, never reached agreement on how to thread this particular post-religious-wars needle, I suppose I shall be excused for not knowing precisely how to do so at present.  Am working on it, though!  (And the answer, one naturally suspects, will have to be found in some plausible understanding of 'the natural law.')

All best and thanks again,

Bob