The abortion debate is something I've been thinking a lot about because I'm anxious that I will need to declare 'my colors' at some moment in an awkward social context and I want to prepare something to say that will not offend. This is tricky because in certain social groups I think a weak or an uncertain stance could still be considered offensive. I am leaning towards something that seems potentially sympathetic but that is actually too vague to infer a stance such as, 'There is so much wrong in the world today, I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to begin with fixing it'.
In actuality, I don't feel very strongly about the abortion issue and I spend time wondering if I lack a morality that other humans have -- if I'm actually less "moral" than whatever human morality would be.
My sense of morality (determining whether something is right or wrong) is that a person thinks about a situation and if they feel dismay, then they decide that situation is morally wrong. They then try to decide what is the source of their dismay -- what is so awful about it and, if possible, who is to blame? In some types of morally gray areas, we feel dismay but we're not sure who is to blame. 'It's just a bad situation.'
I think this is how a lot of pro-choice people feel about abortion?
However, when I interrogate my feeling about abortion, I don't feel any dismay for the sake of the baby. I happen to be someone who easily feels dismay in other contexts. For example, if I think about a young soldier dying in combat, I feel dismay at lots of different levels. But when I think of an aborted baby or a miscarriage alike, my moral apparatus just shrugs. (Is this immoral?)
I do feel dismay from other sources. I feel dismay if other people are saddened (a mother, the father, a grandparent, even a pro-life advocate) and I also worry about what effects a disregard for the life of a fetus for its own sake (e.g., like the one I have) could have on family and society. (For example, it would be awful if employers thought pregnancies were so disposable they could choose one more convenient for their schedules, and less romantic if timid but otherwise capable and loving couples never felt any pressure to work together to face the challenge of raising a baby they hadn't expected.)
So my question is, is the main thing going on in the abortion debate this sense of dismay that I lack? (I realize that many to most pro-choicers may also feel dismay, but weigh this differently against the freedom of the mother.)
I personally consider it virtuous to (politely and respectfully) speak my mind without worrying about offending people, so I can't sympathize with the particular challenge you're facing. But I want to say that I find your solution clever and I like it:
My sense of morality [...] is that a person thinks about a situation and if they feel dismay, then they decide that situation is morally wrong. They then try to decide what is the source of their dismay [...]
I believe moral psychology agrees with you. Joshua David Greene says:
...Under ordinary circumstance
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.