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The Values of Life

Kevin Baldeosingh • 04 September 2003 • 866 words

"But true morality also requires one more value: courage. Most people are simply not brave enough to reject what their ethnic or religious group tells them to believe."

I found it quite ironic to see Catholic propagandist Leela Ramdeen writing about the values we should teach schoolchildren (Trinidad Guardian, 25/08/03). Her list of "core values" was respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, obedience, integrity, honesty, love, kindness, generosity, courtesy, duty, discipline, tolerance, fairness, caring, compassion, consideration for others, courage, fortitude, perseverance, honour, sincerity, conscientiousness.

It is clear from this list that Ramdeen has never given any serious thought to the matter of values. If she had, there would have been no need for redundancy: "conscientiousness" includes responsibility and trustworthiness; "integrity" comes from honesty and fairness; "compassion" encompasses caring and consideration for others. She would also have realised that values such as "obedience" and "duty" and "honour" have been more often responsible for evil than for good, as the history of Ramdeen's own Church amply demonstrates. And she would not have characterised her values as "enduring, universal moral truths", as though context is irrelevant to moral decisions.

My sense of irony, though, came mainly from the fact that, if it were possible to inculcate in children the core values and attitudes listed by Ramdeen - honesty, fairness, compassion, respect, tolerance and courage &endash; religious bodies would lose all their political power within one generation. Mind you, I am sure that I have somewhat different definitions of these values than Ramdeen.

Take honesty. It is impossible to be truly honest without regard for fact and logic. When, however, Ramdeen speaks out against the reform of our abortion laws, she is betraying the very values she claims to espouse. For example, pro-choice people point out that the abortion law does not prevent abortions. The anti-abortionists respond by saying that just because people commit murder, rape and robbery is not a reason to legalise them. If they were honest, though, they would admit that the laws against murder and robbery and rape, unlike the law against abortion, result in arrests and punishment and so have a preventative effect.

Some anti-abortionists then go further, arguing that the law should be enforced against women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them. This goes against the value of compassion. Just laws prevent harm to others. The abortion law does the opposite: it results in harm to women, and mostly to poor women who can't afford doctors. So the value of compassion for these women would inform the debate and lead to legislative reform. Instead, the anti-abortion lobby saves their compassion for the foetus.

This contradicts the value of fairness, because putting the rights of the foetus above the rights of the women is unfair. We know the woman is entitled to full human rights. We do not know that the foetus is. The argument that the foetus is fully human from the "moment of conception" simply has no logical or empirical basis. Ramdeen in another article (Sunday Express, 14/07/02) claimed that "scientific evidence, when considered honestly and dispassionately, establishes the fact that each of us was, from conception, a human being: that at conception what comes into being is a distinct, unified, self-integrating human being." But this claim is just a damn lie.

What science does tell us is that the zygote is not an individual. A zygote can split to become twins, or develop into less than one individual and naturally abort. Also, it takes 24 weeks for critical organs such as the lungs and kidneys to develop. Thus, the organism cannot exist on its own: ergo, the foetus is part of the woman's body over which she is sovereign. Ethical logic says that human rights can be conferred only on an individual.

Of course, this argument does not apply if the foetus is fully human (whatever that means). But it takes 28 weeks of gestation before the foetus develops sufficient neocortical complexity to exhibit some of the cognitive capacities typically found in a newborn baby. And it takes 30 weeks for foetus EEG recordings with the characteristics of an adult EEG to appear. In other words, the capacity for human thought cannot exist until 28 to 30 weeks of gestation. Of all the characteristics used to define what it means to be 'human', the capacity to think is provisionally agreed upon by most scientists to be the most important.

To admit these facts, and to adopt the ethical position that comes from them, would require the values of honesty, fairness, respect, and tolerance which Ramdeen, as a Catholic apologist, must necessarily eschew. Honesty and fairness demand that the individual promote even those truths - empirical or ethical - which make him or her personally uncomfortable. Respect and tolerance require that, on issues such as abortion and homosexuality, the choice should be left up to the individual. This, after all, is what tolerance means in practice: giving persons with beliefs and values different from your own equal rights before the law, once those beliefs and values do not harm other persons.

But true morality also requires one more value: courage. Most people are simply not brave enough to reject what their ethnic or religious group tells them to believe. This is why, except for fornication, the Biblical rule that people most often flout is: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil."