The Religion and Philosophy Room
Being an avid student of the history of ideas, I was naturally draw to this article, http://The roots of abortion ideolog...ury philosophy.
Nevermind that Locke's treatises were arguments against Hobbes's view justifications of the state....The bond of mother and child has been mocked before. Thomas Hobbes, a materialist philosopher (if that is not a contradiction in terms), had this to say about mothers and infants in his fanciful state of nature:
For in the condition of meer Nature, . . . the right of Dominion over the Child dependeth on her will, and is consequently hers. Again, seeing the Infant is first in the power of the Mother, so as she may either nourish, or expose it, if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other, and by consequence the Dominion over it is hers.
One cannot fail to see the parallel to modern pro-abortion arguments. Yet Hobbes maintains this position only for his hypothetical state of nature or state of war. In civil society, exposure of infants would never be allowed by the sovereign power.
Hobbes’s more subtle follower, John Locke, argues in the Second Treatise that parents have no power or right over the life and death of their children. For Locke, procreation is the “chief end” of marriage, and parents are accountable for their children. Even “Mr. Property,” who defends an almost absolute right over one’s property and one’s body, can see that marriage is ordered to children!
It was the rest of the article, however, that really nailed it, the more general nature of materialism and the negative effects of viewing man en masse to the loss of diginity. to wit, the articles cites:
This materialism that reduces the individual to his matter is akin to the collectivism that reduces the body politic to masses ready for manipulation. In his brilliant Gifford Lectures, Gabriel Marcel observes:
What is immediately obvious is that whenever circumstances prevailing here and now lead to men being not only regarded as masses but actually treated as such—treated, that is, as aggregates, whose elements are transferable according to the demands of temporal vicissitudes—it becomes more and more difficult to keep in mind the inalienable characteristics of uniqueness and dignity which have hitherto been considered as attributes of the human soul created in the image of God. To say that these characteristics are becoming more and more lost to view is not enough; they are being, if one may so put it, actively denied, they are being trodden upon. Man may end by imagining that he can prove by his very behavior that he is not such a being as the theologians have defined.
If we look at the question carefully we shall see, also, that we have here a real vicious circle. The less men are thought of as beings [with innate worth], . . . the stronger will be the temptation to use them as machines which are capable of a given output; this output being the only justification for their existence, they will end by having no other reality. There lies a road which runs straight to the forced labour camp and the cremation oven.
In the same lectures, Marcel talks about the effort to create (or at least envision) a soulless world and modern man’s tendency towards “de-creation”. People have bought into the illusion that man is all exteriority and no interiority. In a similar way, Charles De Koninck spoke of the “lifeless world of biology.” The suppositions and framework of the modern science of biology, which are thoroughly materialistic, paved the way for human reductionism.
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Originally Posted by Chris
