Coincidences

I might have bored someone with the last two posts, all about Eluana and what other people think of her case and yappity yappity boo, but I just stumbled about the news related to the excommunication of a mother because she allowed/wanted/forced? her daughter to have an abortion; some details you find here and no doubt in a lot of other places. Well, what's the big issue? That the daughter was nine and possibly pregnant because of abuse by her stepfather, who is also suspected of having abused her older sister.

Now, if the Vatican had felt forced to judge the mother for picking such an unsuitable mate, I might even agree with them, but the point is that they rule abortion in such cases (rape, for example) as immoral. Shooting themselves in the foot, since Brazil is not very liberal about abortion: quoting from the article I linked, "Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.", which is way more restrictive that what happens in most of the western world (do you have to give a reason for wanting an abortion in Italy? I'm not 100% sure but I think not). Pushing the Brazilians might have the opposite effect, i.e. the very catholic population might answer the call for morality with an impolite "mind your own business"...

The coincidence I mentioned: while waiting for the computer to crunch some data, I was reading Ethics: a very short introduction, by Simon Blackburn (it's the simplest thing I could find on the topic - anyone knows if there is an Ethics for Dummies?), and at page 46 I stumbled upon the following sentence:

"If the girl is not allowed the abortion, or the family not allowed to assist the suicide, they have to pick up the pieces and soldier on themselves. Those who told them how they had to behave can just bow out."

This was in the paragraph titled: False consciousness. The point the author is trying to hammer home is that this seems a menace to the foundations of ethics themselves: if ethics tells you you have to pick this or that way no matter what, it is sometimes natural to turn around and bite back, asking pointy questions such as: who the hell you think you are to tell me this? Where is the cross YOU are carrying, that allows you to tell me smugly that everybody has to carry their own?

Well the answer of the author is that Ethics as institution IS a failure; in practice, too easily corruptible by personal and corporate interests. Funny enough how this analysis fits nicely with the recent behaviour of the Vatican...

So, it seems simple enough that determining what's right and what's wrong is something one cannot afford to delegate. Now, how to combine this relativism with the need to live in societies? The world is not big enough for every one of us to have their little universe, so the next big question is how to liaise with your fellow humans without having to kill them first. Maybe there is an answer in the remainder of the book...