Keller: on Sandel - 'pro-choice' is not morally neutral

Sandel...says that the most familiar liberal argument for abortion rights "claims to resolve the abortion question on the basis of neutrality and freedom of choice, without entering into the moral and religious controversy."  Abortion rights supporters charge that their pro-life opponents are trying to impose a particular set of moral and religious views on society but that pro-choice people are not.  They are simply arguing for freedom of choice.  Sandel retorts:

"But this argument does not succeed.  For if it's true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide.  And few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to kill their children.  So the "pro-choice" position on the abortion debate is not really neutral on the underlying moral and theological question; it implicitly rests on the assumption that the Catholic Church's teaching on the moral status of the fetus...is false."

...the case for permitting abortion is no more neutral than the case for banning it.  Both positions presupposesome answer to the underlying moral and religious controversy.

Generous Justice, p157-158

Keller: irony of objective rights in an accidental world

To use a simple example, it is often argues that corporal punishment violates the rights and human dignity of a child, and therefore should be illegal.  Smith [The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse] that there is no secular, scientific basis for the idea of human dignity, or that human beings are valuable and inviolable. Historian Carl L. Becker famously said that, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, human beings must be viewed as "little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn."  Scientist Stephen Hawking agrees that " the human race is just chemical scum on a moderate size planet" and most recently Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker wrote an essay entitled "The Stupidity of Dignity". The prominent philosopher John Gray, who teaches at the London School of Economics, writes in his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals of the self-deception of those who embrace science and still hold to the tenets of liberal humanism, such as belief in human dignity and rights.

So, concluded Smith, to say that corporal punishment violates a child's dignity and rights seems more objective than to say "I think corporal punishment of children is morally offensive", but the latter statement is a more frank expression of how you reached your conclusion.

Generous Justice, p155-156 (emphasis mine)

The unfairness of infinite justice...or...

Mark Galli (CT):

There is a lot of talk about how unjust or unfair this is—that finite decisions can have eternal consequences. To me, some of that talk sounds like a teenager rebelling against having to do homework or chores. Philosophical rebellion is respectable in our culture, but when we rebel against the very conditions of our existence, I'm not sure what to say: That God should have created a different world with different conditions? 

Our objection to the inevitability of eternity, of course, is one sided. We like the idea that good finite decisions might have happy eternal consequences. But of course, this is just as unfair as its opposite. Why should a finite decision be rewarded with infinite rewards? Maybe the universalist gets this when he postulates that what eternity is about is learning to make an infinite number of right decisions that will be awarded a life of infinitude.

I for one find this a dreary and hopeless scenario. What I know about myself is this: I am unable to make right decisions and to perform right actions, certainly not to the degree that they merit an infinity of reward. What I know about myself is this:

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Rom. 7:18-20, ESV)