The Philosophical Optimist

In the last few decades, few aspects of the practice of medicine have been more debated than the topic of abortion. Often, the very terms used by one side of the debate differ from the terms used by the other side, to the point that clear communication is almost impossible. What is needed now is someone to clarify the terms of the debate—someone like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, whose brilliant, sometimes paradoxical observations were often based on careful attention to the very words people use in everyday speech. Presented here are a number of reflections, in the spirit of Chesterton, on some of the terms central to the abortion debate: 1. Abortion The very word “abortion” is a point not sufficiently heeded in the debate that centers on it. People speak of aborting a fetus, but a thing cannot be aborted, only a process. People abort missions, they abort computer operations, but they do not abort computers or cars. When one aborts a pregnancy, it is like aborting any operati...

              In Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew , is Petruchio's wooing of Katherine not an image of unrelenting love?   He refuses to see the bad in her words and deeds and imagines in them great good.   Even as she wishes his death, he speaks and acts as if she only loves and adores him.   He will not hide from her what others say of her, but he will not join with them; rather, he repudiates what they say, even as we see how true it all is.             Yet, he is as rough with her as she is with him.   He confronts her with force for force, but it is so deftly handled as only to serve to undermine further all her attempts to rebuff him.   When she slaps him, he does not act shocked, but merely threatens to respond in kind; yet he never does, for she is so shocked by his response that it provokes not more violence, but a further war of w...

            In a world so flooded with sexual images and energies that it has reached a Brave New Level of boredom, it seems only the eccentricities retain any possibility to excite.   Hence our current seeming fascination with such matters as “same-sex marriage.”   In the last few years, some have insisted that we should ban same-sex marriage by legislative fiat.   Most recently, this country’s highest court has taken the opposite approach by banning any and all such bans by its own judicial fiat             But, as usual, they are all wrong.   Or at least, that is not the whole story.             That cannot be the whole story because to presume that it is such is to hold to the fallacious belief that marriage is a mere human creation of positive law: the Supreme Court decision treated the issu...