On moral consistency:
I know a lot of people get upset and railed up about life, death, and choice issues like abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. I don’t have firm opinions on any of these issues, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, but I tend to be liberal:
1. Pro choice
2. Anti-capital punishment
3. Pro-Euthanasia
The Conservative stance tends to be:
1. Pro-life (anti-abortion)
2. Pro-capital punishment
3. Anti-Euthanasia
Now, if you think about it, neither position is very consistent. Liberals (such as I) have no problem killing babies and old people, but we want to protect criminals.
Conservatives want to save babies and old people, but kill criminals.
I don’t know if there is a way to resolve this. I do understand that the issues are a bit more complex than this. For instance, Doctor assisted suicide is voluntary on the part of the patient, while capital punishment is involuntary. But there are some issues where one is inevitable dragged through the requirement of logical consistency, into uncomfortable moral positions.
Here is a really weird one: can you be (consistently) pro-choice, but anti-incest (in favour of laws banning it, not a fan of the practice itself)? Ok, think about it…. We all agree that consenting adults can do what they want in the bedroom. If you’re pro-choice, you also agree that the rights of the body outweigh the rights of the foetus, and probably even have the view that the foetus has no rights at all. So if you are pro-choice you cannot employ the most common objection to incest, namely, that it hurts the offspring. If you were to assert the rights of the child in this case, you would have a hard time defending your pro-choice stance. You simply can’t have it both ways, in my opinion.
