The Right to Life" & Classical Conservatism

The National Right to Life Committee endorsed John McCain for president this week (see this story in the Baptist News). Robert P. George, a Catholic “natural law” theorist and professor of political science at Princeton University, wrote in this editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer “that there is no comparison between McCain’s history of support for the right to life and Clinton’s and Obama’s implacable opposition to it.”

There is a reason for my italics. George is generally regarded as a “conservative” intellectual and the National Right to Life Committee a “conservative” organization. Indeed, the “pro-life” cause is invariably associated with “conservatism.” Yet insofar as they couch the issue of abortion in the language of “rights”— e.g., “the right to life” v. “the right to choose” -— the opponents of abortion employ an idiom that traditionally has been at home on the political left. Furthermore, it is this moral ideology of “human rights” or “natural rights” to which conservatives have, for the most part, been opposed for over two centuries.

The eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke is widely recognized as “the father” of modern conservatism. Burke argued passionately and tirelessly against the French Revolution. In so doing, he not infrequently spoke against the metaphysical doctrine of “the Rights of Man” to which it appealed.

Burke never denied that there are “natural rights.” What he denied is that they could ever provide us with any guidance. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, he wrote that it is “absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.” The “abstract perfection” of natural rights “is their practical defect,” for “by having a right to everything,” we “want everything.” That is, given “the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns,” and the fact that “the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” incessant appeals to natural rights make us mere mortals painfully aware of all that we lack. They entice our appetites with objects that promise to forever elude our grasp. The restlessness and irritability that this in turn causes threaten to upset the civil order.

Burke may have been among the first conservatives to combat the rationalistic morality of “rights,” but he certainly wasn’t the last. For the next two centuries up until the present, hosts of thinkers have taken up this theme.

When opponents of abortion argue from “the right to life” of the unborn to the wrongness of abortion, they presuppose this “mathematical” conception of morality that conservatives have always resisted. That no substantive conclusions about abortion follow from invocations of this right further shows that conservatives have been correct.

Think about it: even if everyone agreed that the unborn have a “right to life,” this does not mean that everyone would agree that abortion is always immoral or even wrong most of the time. Most people who believe that all human beings have a right to life also believe that it is permissible to kill in a variety of circumstances. Self-defense, capital punishment, and war are among the standard occasions that killing is deemed justifiable. One may respond that killing under these conditions is acceptable because the parties killed are guilty of some offense, while abortion is unacceptable because the unborn is innocent. Though plausible on its face, this response fails, for with the exception of pacifists, there isn’t one among us who wouldn’t endorse the killing of innocents if we were convinced that this would be the lesser of two evils. Take war, for instance. In every war, innocents are killed. Though we lament this, and though we may not intend it, within the larger context of the war, we believe that it is justified. There are other examples. On 9/11, say, if the only way for our government to prevent a hijacked plane from flying into another building and killing thousands was for it to be shot down, how many of us would object even in full knowledge that innocent American passengers would be killed? Even though we may all agree that the people killed have a “right to life,” we nevertheless would maintain that it is permissible to end their lives.

On the other hand, there are some kinds of killing to which we are unequivocally opposed but concerning which we don’t believe there is any “right to life” involved. Those who believe that animals have “rights” constitute a tiny minority. Most of us, including those of us who believe in “human rights,” do not recognize animals as “rights” bearers. Still, we don’t for this reason hold that it is okay to kill or even harm animals for any old reason. This explains why we have enacted laws forbidding animal cruelty, and why we find abhorrent those who practice it.

It is understandable that opponents of abortion should avail themselves of the language of rights that dominates contemporary political-moral discourse. They are speaking in terms that everyone comprehends. Furthermore, the loftiness of the rhetoric of “human rights” is mesmerizing, and it suggests a seductively simple image of morality in which the most contested moral issues can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction with just the slightest amount of clear thinking. For example, the wrongness of abortion can be established by and to any and all people by just a few simple deductions from the major premise, the principle that all human beings have a “right to life”: since the latter is true, the reasoning goes, and the unborn are human beings, then it follows that they have a “right to life” and abortion is immoral. Presto! Problem solved.

In the real world, however, morality is a much messier affair. This, as I have indicated, is what conservatives have always known and why they have rejected the universalistic, abstract morality of “rights.”