de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 23 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. Welcome to Episode 23 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communications specialist at the Center. We recently had a chance to sit down with Francis Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies and the Associate Director of the graduate program in Philosophy at Baylor University. Frank has been a longtime friend of the de Nicola Center and joined us in Houston as we presented a mini version of our Vita Institute pro life workshop for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. In our conversation in front of the microphone, we talked about some of the philosophical arguments surrounding the abortion debate. Join us for this excellent conversation. Well, Francis Beckwith, thank you very much for joining us today. Francis Beckwith 1:20 Thank you for having me. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:21 So tell us a bit about yourself about your professional journey. Francis Beckwith 1:25 Well, I'm a, right now professor of philosophy and church state studies at Baylor University. I began my career, oh, I don't want to say how many years ago but several decades ago, doing doctoral work at Fordham University. I did my PhD in philosophy there and then several years later, went to law school at Washington University in St. Louis, and have had interests in several areas of philosophy and law, including philosophy of religion, medical ethics, issues in religion and the Constitution, and I've published in all those areas. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:04 You're, you're all over the place. Francis Beckwith 2:06 Yeah, I think I like too many things. I sometimes have envy for colleagues that really can sort of focus on one thing and stick to it. But that's, I guess, I don't know if it's a gift or a burden that God has given me, but it's, it's been a wonderful journey. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:24 Awesome. Tell me a bit about your teaching load. What, what do you teach on a regular basis? Francis Beckwith 2:29 Yeah, I usually teach a couple of courses a semester at Baylor in different areas. I mostly teach in law and philosophy. So recently, I taught Law and Religion in the U.S. which is a course on Constitutional law and religion, and that's cross listed in philosophy and political science. I sometimes teach philosophy of law. I've taught introduction to medical ethics. Some courses on faith and reason that are electives at Baylor so and also a graduate seminar recently on religion law and politics. So I'm mostly around law and religion and but a little bit further out in other areas of philosophy as well. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 3:17 Now how did you first get involved with the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture? Francis Beckwith 3:21 I met David Solomon in 1994, he was the founding director of the Center, at a conference at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I had taught there for seven years between 1989 and 1996. There was a conference of the Baptist Association of Philosophy Teachers, and David was a member. He had been a member since his time as a graduate student at Baylor. He was a Baptist then but he still retained his membership in the Baptist Association of Philosophy Teachers and I was asked to speak in a session to comment on a paper in an area that I knew nothing about. I was asked by the director of the conference, Ira Peak, who was at time professor at UNLV to comment on this paper on Immanuel Kant and art. And I thought I actually originally was he said morality and art. And I thought it was going to be something on like censorship and morality and things like that and no, it had to do with a Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and, and I knew very little about that. So I picked up this little book on Kant's aesthetics authored by Roger Scruton, read it over the weekend, wrote my comments and then showed up at the conference and read my, my critique of the presenter, and afterwards David came up to me. At that time, I think I was, it was 33 years old. He came up to me said, I can get you into Notre Dame's doctoral program. That was a brilliant analysis of Kant's aesthetics. And I, I said, well, I already have a PhD I was flattered that he thought I was that young. And he said, You know, we're going to have a get-together at the next American Philosophical Association meeting, folks from Notre Dame, why don't you show up? And so I did. And that was the beginning of a friendship with with David as well as other people at Notre Dame. And then 10 years ago in 2008-2009, I served as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture, and spent time working on a couple of books, each of which have since been published by different publishers, but that's my connection here. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 5:38 Yeah. Wonderful. Well, you have spoken several times over the years at our Notre Dame Vita Institute, focusing especially on the philosophical issues and arguments around procured abortion. Can you maybe walk us through some of the more popular and non-academic discussion points that will, you know, people can encounter? Francis Beckwith 5:56 Yeah, oftentimes when people debate abortion you know, emotions are involved. People have deep feelings about what position is correct. And they often don't reason well, and and I actually think it's true of, to a certain extent both sides of the debate. Although as somebody who's pro-life I've spent most of my time critiquing those that defend the right to abortion, but one, for example, you'll often hear arguments that will attack or be critical of the pro-life advocate. So one that I've heard is if you don't like abortion, don't have one. Now, if you think about it, when somebody opposes abortion, when they think it is the unjust taking of human life there, they're saying that it is something objectively wrong. They're not saying they "like it" or "dislike it." So I think when somebody raises that question, they sort of missed the point of the pro-life position. Now, obviously, that's not the entirety of the pro-life position. We have to defend it. We have to present evidence for why the unborn is a human person and why laws should be changed. But, but in terms of sort of the popular rhetoric, that's a that's a bad argument, you, it doesn't matter whether I like or dislike abortion, it really comes down to whether it's right or wrong. We don't do that with other issues. Like we don't say, you know, you know, don't like, I don't what would be a good example? de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 7:29 Don't like slavery. Francis Beckwith 7:30 Yeah, don't like slavery then don't own one, right. You say, Well, wait a second. It's not a question... I hesitated because there are a lot of examples that they could push the envelope so I want to use one that's respectful but yeah. So something like that, I mean, if you said that, then somebody said, "Wait a second. I, it's, it's wrong. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not." Right. So I think, you know, when it comes to the way in which people argue about abortion, they they oftentimes move away from the central issue. So one more that you'll hear is that, you know, abortion will reduce poverty, right, or will relieve people of certain burdens. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 8:12 It's the Freakonomics argument. Francis Beckwith 8:13 That's right. And, and it may very well be true, I don't know. But I think it's irrelevant, because the argument is assuming that the fetus is not a human person, right? So if it is a human person, let's say for the sake of argument, let's assume it's a human person. Well, imagine somebody making this argument, well, if every family killed, you know, one child, the economy would improve, or one way to get rid of poverty is to kill all poor people. Right? I mean, yeah, that would get rid of poverty, to be sure, but it would also violate, in a horrific fashion, the rights of people that are intrinsically valuable. Now, of course, the other side may say, Well, I don't believe the fetus is a person. Okay. Then that's the argument. Right, that that means that that's what's doing the work, not whether it can relieve poverty or not. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:06 Wow. Well, one of the main philosophical kind of academic points that comes up in the abortion discussion centers around bodily autonomy, primarily in an article published in 1971 by Judith Jarvis Thompson called, "A Defense of Abortion." Can you walk us through her argument and maybe give one or two kind of salient objections? Francis Beckwith 9:28 Yeah, her argument. It's different from what most of us are accustomed to hearing. She says, to the pro-life advocate, I'm going to grant to you that the fetus is a person and still show you that abortion is permissible. And so what she does she comes up with several illustrations, one of which has become quite famous. It has to do with what she calls the case of the famous unconscious violinist. What does a violinist have to do with it? Well, the story goes like this, you show up a society of music lovers party, and you get knocked out and you wake up in the morning hooked up to a world-class violinist who needs to use your kidneys for nine months. And you obviously didn't consent to it. You went to the party thinking it was just going to be, you know, just a get-together of people celebrating this particular artist and it turns out, you're hooked up and the doctor says to you, look, the violinist is a person and every person has a right to life so you have no right to unplug yourself from the violinist. After all, it's only nine months. And you can get, you get the analogy. What she's saying is that to be removed from the, even though removing yourself from the violinist will result in the violinist's death, it's not unjustified because the violinist doesn't have a right to use your body against your will. As many people have pointed out, there are several problems with this argument. One problem, is that it undermines or seems inconsistent with sort of a fundamental intuition that we have about the responsibility that that we have when we act in terms of those that we could put in harm's way. So think of something like what is called the attractive nuisance tort. What's that? Well will in tort law if, let's say, on your property, you create something or have something that attracts, let's say, vulnerable people like infants or small children, let's say you have a pool in the backyard and you don't put a fence around it, you draw them in, or they're attracted to it. You're, you can be held responsible or liable, if in fact, the child is harmed. Even though you know, you didn't push the child into the pool or anything like that. You knew that the by creating that environment, you in fact, attracted that child. And so in the same way, when people engage in sexual relations, they are in fact putting themselves in a position of bringing into being vulnerable children. Now another counter example is what I call the deadbeat dad example. That is, imagine a couple, man and woman, they engage in sexual relations, supposing they use contraception, indicating that neither one intended to have a child, supposing she gets pregnant anyways. The father goes, supposing she says, well, you know, I have second thoughts, and I really do want to have a child. And he says, Well, I don't want to be responsible for that child, supposing they're unmarried. And according to the Thompson argument, he should not be required to pay child support. That, there's no, that he has no obligation to care for that child, even if, let's say... the government in conscripting his salary requires that he engage in certain bodily activities, which would be the case if he were, let's say, a day laborer or mechanic, right. And so he would be using, let's say, 20% of his bodily energy five days a week, eight hours a day, to support that child, supposing it was 20% of that. It seems to me that if Thompson is correct, then we would have to, the government would have an obligation to sort of say to deadbeat dads, well, you're not obligated to care for the child that you sired, even though you are directly responsible. And the reason why I think a lot of people reject Thompson based on this argument, in fact, most of my, virtually all my students, when I give them that, they reject it. It's because they understand there's a deep, intrinsic connection between our sexual powers and the creation of children, and that we are in fact responsible, even if we don't ask for it, right? That there are certain responsibilities that go beyond mere consent or agreement. This is why we think that somebody that we that we have an obligation to our aged parents, even if we well, clearly, we didn't ask to be born. Why is that? Well, it's because of our relationship to them. And and that's something I think the Thompson argument doesn't adequately capture. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:08 Now, obviously, there are other objections. And you've written about several of these. I know you presented a few when you came and spoke here at the Vita Institute here in Houston. Are there, is there a spot where somebody can go and read some of your other objections and thoughts through this? Francis Beckwith 14:24 Yeah, I have a website, FrancisBeckwith.com, that's francisbeckwith.com. And on it, there's several of my articles you can you can get. There are links to those and then I've published a book called "Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice," which came out in 2007 with Cambridge University Press. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:52 Wonderful. Well, I'd love to just end with maybe this question, do you have grounds for hope that the question of abortion in America will ever come to a conclusion, whether that's through reasoned debate or even by legal or judicial fiat? Francis Beckwith 15:08 You know, it's, it's, it's a difficult question, I think. I think legally, I'm I'm hopeful. I think that the way in which the courts have been moving, I think there's an openness now to scaling back Roe v. Wade. But scaling back Roe v. Wade or overturning it is is ultimately not going to change the culture, it's going to have an influence to be sure. But I do think that at the end of the day, what is essential is convincing and persuading people of the correctness of the pro-life position. So I'm hopeful. I've seen a major shift, at least among young people over the past 20 or 30 years. So I do have hope. And you know, never know, who knew the day before the Berlin Wall fell that it was going to fall? So, you know, we think we know sometimes where things are going, but we're sometimes surprised. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:56 Well, Francis Beckwith, thank you kindly for being with us today. Francis Beckwith 15:58 Thank you for having me. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:59 Thank you to Professor Frank Beckwith. You'll find links to his website and some of his excellent books and essays in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please give us a review wherever you get your podcasts, and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu Our theme music is "I Dunno" by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions Transcribed by https://otter.ai