A comment to M. Simon’s earlier post highlights the hopelessness of the abortion debate:
If we keep killing our children, we don’t have a civilization anyway.
It’s actually the one issue I’m willing to die over, just as I would have given my life to end slavery had I lived 150 years ago.
We?
If person A kills a child, how did I do it?
Over the course of civilization, countless children have been killed, yet civilization has continued on. How many children have been killed in wars? I’m not anti-war, but I am not in favor of killing children. Yet our government has dropped many bombs which have killed many, many children, with my tax dollars. Does that make me guilty of killing children? I don’t see how. I am only responsible for committing the acts I commit. If my government does something, I did not do it. With abortion, the claim of collective guilt is even more tenuous, for abortions are not done in the name of the state; the killers are individual mothers. People who happen to live in the same country as those mothers are not complicit, because they did not commit the acts, and this applies whether the abortions are legal or illegal.
People who do not own slaves are not slaveowners and people who did not own slaves were not slaveowners. I think it was wrong for human beings to be treated as property, and I probably would have thought the same thing had I been alive before the 13th Amendment, but so what? If I didn’t own slaves, I didn’t own slaves. Whether I think something is wrong is my opinion, of course, and has nothing to do with my culpability for other people’s actions. So even if I thought slavery was OK, that would not make me a slaveowner. And if I don’t want to imprison women who have abortions, that does not make me guilty of killing children, any more than not wanting to imprison meth lab cookers makes me guilty of running a meth lab.
Collective guilt is illogical. There are a lot of people out there doing a lot of things. I cannot control them, and I am not responsible for them. The problem is, a lot of people believe passionately in collective guilt. If I am responsible for the actions of a woman who has an abortion, then I am responsible for the actions of virtually anyone anywhere, children are responsible for the actions of parents, citizens inherit responsibility for what people in previous generations did. Which means I am guilty of massacring the Indians probably owning slaves.
Sorry, but I’m not buying into it.
Comments
5 responses to “Collective guilt”
I actually don’t think ending slavery was worth dying over. But, I’m British; we ended slavery in our slave states (Jamaica et al.) without killing off a bunch of folk.
Well, since the people most strongly behind the anti-abortion movement are also anti-birth control apparently a sperm and egg that have never met are a child too.
Every time you masturbate you are killing children!
If person A kills a child, how did I do it?
Well, you know … “first they came for the [fill in] and I did nothing because I am not a [fill in]”.
I’m sure you can fill in all the blanks.
II actually don’t think ending slavery was worth dying over. But, I’m British; we ended slavery in our slave states (Jamaica et al.) without killing off a bunch of folk.
Right.
Right after you peddled it around the planet just about everywhere you left a footprint in the dirt.
Let’s all hear it for the oh-so-righteous Brits, shall we?
Poor comparison, Paul. I’m not talking about doing nothing about evil; I am saying that the only people who are responsible for acts are those who commit them. If I see a man being mugged, I would try to intervene and help, but whether I do anything or not, I am in no way responsible for the mugger’s the actions.