Re: Restored (and a final story for Luke and Daniel)

Responses below:

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> I meant to suggest that I, at least, am not prepared to say that any of them
> are right, or wrong, or even better. All can be arrived at by something
> that I think ought to qualify as "common sense" though the final judgement
> may differ, because -- again, as it seems to me -- whatever discrete facts
> are a part of "common sense," I expect each alone is primarily mundane and
> essentially comprise a method, or rules for manipulating other things.

Ok, this is better, but I don't think you're using the phrase "common sense" the
way it is usually used. Now, you make reference to my use of words and phrases
like "usually" below -- when I use it, I don't really mean to make reference to
any kind of statistical analysis, but only to my own experience. Arguing from
experience, of course, we're both on the same grounds. Who's to say my
experience is better or more accurate than yours? I may think so, just as you
may think your understanding of your experience is more accurate than mine.
This gets us nowhere.

But since we don't have an agreed upon catalog of common sense statements or
ideas and aren't prepared to make one (as I said before), we're going to have to
simply keep comparing notes until we can make some sense out of common sense. I
think to do this we'll have to be as specific as possible.

I very commonly hear people say, "it's only common sense." I also hear people
say, "he/she is lacking in common sense." In the first case, the phrase makes
reference to a fact or process everyone or at least most people should be
familiar with, or to consequences everyone should be able to predict. This has
to do with specific facts about life that are easily observable on the surface
-- things we should know.

The second sentence, "he's lacking in common sense," makes reference to an
innate ability. I think this is related to the first sentence in the sense of
being able to predict consequences. The young man parties every weekend then
wonders why he fails class. The young girl has unprotected sex with every boy
she dates then wonders why she winds up pregnant. We'd say both are lacking
common sense because they can't draw out easily predictable consequences based
upon knowledge they should have had.

In these cases I don't think, then, that common sense is a "method" of any
sort. The phrase "common sense" seems to apply to the mundane facts you make
reference to, not the way we manipulate these facts. If everyone has the same
facts, they should draw the same conclusions, and these conclusions actually
constitute "common sense," not the method of drawing the conclusions themselves.
People are usually pretty unconscious of the methods themselves.

> Different groups can come down arbitrarily with certain matters (such as the
> relationship between the indivudal and the community), and then use common
> sense. The results will vary somewhat (though I expect not arbitrarily or
> even infinitely) depending upon the first principles. As the first
> principles evolve with time, change suddenly as a result of some event, or
> differ from group to group, so varies the results.
>
> I'm not sure of any of this, haven't been thinking about it long, and don't
> mean to be confrontational. I'm just tossing it out as something that
> seemes reasonable enough to me at the moment.

No, you don't sound confrontational at all but I understand why you feel the
need to say that.

> He goes on:
> << You find that common sense isn't always or even usually all that common,
> and that your decisions are really being motivated by specific value
> judgments that are best examined out in the open, rather than hidden under
> the guise of "common sense." >>
>
> Again, the accuracy of your statistical analysis is not self-evident. One
> can just as well say, as I myself currently expect is the case, that common
> sense IS usually 100% common, as it is usually just the sort of mundane and
> fundamental understanding I referred to earlier -- the sort of reasoning
> that though one might deny it for sake of argument, he cannot honestly bring
> himself to believe the denial.
>
> For instance -- whether the sanctity of human life begins at conception,
> birth, never, or at some other time cannot itself be answered by common
> sense. Given certain principles, one might use common sense to come up with
> one of these, though it varies with those principles. Likewise, if one
> takes it to begin at birth, common sense easily leads one to be pro-choice;
> if one takes it to begin at conception, common sense easily leads one to be
> pro-life and aghast at the practice of abortion.
>
> -robbie

What would be helpful is if you could spell out how "common sense" leads one
from "belief that life begins at birth" to "abortion is not morally acceptable."

What you'll find is that the chain of reasoning really has nothing to do with
any kind of logic internal to the facts presented, but rather with the actual
rhetoric of the abortion debate and propoganda used by both sides to win the
public over to their opinion.

Pro-life people began by arguing that life begins at conception. If the unborn
fetus is a human being before the mother even knows she's pregnant, then to
abort the fetus is to kill a human being, so abortion would be wrong. I would
say the pro-life camp argued this way, though, not because it was a convenient
way to win their argument, but because the pro-life movement was influenced by
Catholicism, which has a strong teleological component (inherited from
Aristotle) in their ideas about procreation

The purpose of sex -- of marriage, for that matter -- in Catholicism (as I
understand it) is twofold -- unitive (to spiritually and emotionally and
physically unite husband and wife) and procreative (to bring forth new life).
The birth of the actual child is just the last step in a long process that began
with a man asking a woman for a date, and is part of reason that the process
exists.

So to interrupt the process at any point after marriage is to do a wrong. The
use of birth control is just as wrong, for these reasons, as the abortion of a
child. It defeats the purpose of the union.

Needless to say, all this background got lost as Evangelical and Fundamentalist
Christians largely took over the abortion debate. They still held to the idea
that life begins at conception, but didn't know why -- usually trying to justify
the belief from some passages in the Psalms.

So what you have is a polarization of ideas: life begins at conception =
abortion is wrong, and life begins at birth = abortion is morally acceptable.
The process by which this polarization came about is long forgotten, and all we
have is a pointless public debate in which two irreconciliable groups are
accusing the other of lacking common sense, an idea which ultimately gets in the
way of understanding what's really going on in the argument.

The real grounds of the debate is about control vs. responsibility these days,
the pro-choice movement emphasizing control (she can abort it any time she
wants) and the pro-life movement emphasizing responsibility (once it's there she
has to live with it). This is, of course, a caricature of the debate -- but a
caricature that applies to large numbers on either side.

Does the notion of common sense help us at all here? No, because it simply
doesn't exist.

Jim

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Received on Fri Jul 18 23:35:56 2003