What is going on in China is horrible. It's so easy for us to close our eyes or say there's nothing we can do about it. Or even that it's their right to choose what is morally right and wrong for them and if they want to follow that practice, that makes it moral.
What I found interesting was the observation that these deaths over time insensitize us all to the preciousness of life. This was the basic premise of an excellent New Republic article, back in the days when it was a bastion of liberal thought, on why liberals should oppose abortion. The premise was that once you start down the path of saying that certain stages of human life are okay to destroy you lose the basic principle of respect for human life. Then it becomes a question of not should government allow killing, but which forms of killing are okay and which aren't -- the death penalty, voluntary euthanasia, forced euthanasia of those found a burden on society, forced abortion per China, holocaust, ethnic cleansing -- once you open the door to saying some human lives are of value and some aren't you lose the moral clarity of certaintude and it all becomes a matter of opinion as to where you draw the line. It was a thought-provoking article. I wish now that I had clipped it. It's unusual, IMO, to hear secular liberals being so clear. The human rights movement generally gets tied up in religious trappings so that the pro life position gets tarred with the "religious right" brush, while in fact there are innumerable people of quite liberal persuasion who see the wrong in abortion but tend to be cowed by liberal political correctness to remain silent. |
