Mirror of Justice

MOJ-friend John O'Callaghan sends this reply to Michael Perry:

Michael, in the absence of your expressing and explaining a view on what I wrote, other than the rather ambiguous “clarifying analysis,” your additional questions that you put to me strike me as confusing and filled with all sorts of assumptions as to what people will clearly agree about, with the result that I am unclear about how to respond to them. Case in point, your first scenario suggests that you don’t know what KIND of act is involved.  And yet your second scenario begins by implying that you do know enough about its kind to say that it isn’t of the KIND intentional killing.  On the basis of what I have said, I would likely say of the first scenario that it is the premature expulsion of the fetus from the uterus.  It is chosen rather than spontaneous.  It is then a direct abortion.  Given the condition of the fetus and what is possible for it, the choice to abort it so is a choice to kill it, despite the fact that the killing is drawn out.  To use common language we are all familiar with, rather than being a partial birth abortion it is a full birth abortion by Cesarean section.  For the question of what KIND of act it is, it does not matter that one cares gently for the person one has chosen to kill when the death is prolonged.  Nor does the fact that the means one chose to perform the killing involved an otherwise licit medical procedure, Cesarean section, anymore than the fact that the serial killer may use an otherwise licit kind of medical procedure to kill someone by removing his heart.  I would say that in that respect it violates the more general principle that stands behind #2275 of CCC: "One must hold as licit procedures carried out on the human embryo which respect the life and integrity of the embryo and do not involve disproportionate risks for it, but are directed toward its healing the improvement of its condition of health, or its individual survival.”  But your second scenario suggests that you would disagree with all of this, which is why I am not surprised to be confused by the questions your raise within it about “innocence”.

The heart of what I wrote was a claim about how very different views on action, implicit or explicit, cause probably irreconcilable disagreement about how to think about particular cases.  To come to agreement on the cases requires coming to agreement on the theory of action.  Are we to assume that those differences of view on action are now settled in favor of my analysis?  If so, why not put forward how you think those scenarios ought to be thought about?

In addition, if you will forgive the metaphor, your questions seem to me as if I in particular am in the dock being interrogated because I chose to engage Cathy argumentatively.  I couldn’t have agreed more with what Cathy wrote rather eloquently in the first part of her discussion of the case in Phoenix about the sacredness of the context in which we are engaging this tragedy.  Clearly I disagreed with what she then wrote in the second half about Anscombe and about intention.  Still, I thought her remarks serious and important enough to engage argumentatively.  I’m a philosopher—I argue.  I don't hold myself out as having an oracular capacity to respond to hypotheticals coming out of nowhere (in the sense of not being seated within a larger argument) and in the absence of agreement on how to think about human action.  So, it is not clear to me what I might add, for the reasons given above, to a general discussion of types of scenarios widely discussed in the literature, as opposed to something like Cathy's post, where she was arguing for a particular conclusion from premises that I could identify and engage.