An Open Letter to Political Pundits: Convicts != Fetuses != Animals

[rowyn]

What is with this whole soundbite rhetorical argument that, somehow, one's position on the death penalty needs to be aligned with one's position on abortion and/or hunting? Is it so hard to imagine that one could believe that convicted criminals, fetuses, and wild animals are not, in fact, identical creatures and should not, therefore, be treated as though they were? I am so sick of hearing "how can she be pro-life and yet favor the death penalty?" or "how can he allow the murder of unborn children and yet oppose the execution of hardened killers?" Neither one of these positions is ethically inconsistent. They just require a marginally nuanced version of the world that does not do things like, oh, group frogs and plants in the same family because they're both green. No one over the age of ten is going to change their position on any of these things based on this line of argument. Please, stop. Thank you.

Comments

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I think consistency is considered valuable because it implies more rationality going into your decision-making process than just "I do it just because it's what I feel like doing" - or, as I remember from my grade school days, the much shorter version of that would come out as "because." (Why'd you do that? Because. No clue whatsoever as to future behavior to expect out of this individual! Unapologetic admission of arbitrary behavior, surely!)

Sometimes, people reach certain moral/logical frameworks without doing all the math - and, if faced with an argument over the matter, it may be inferred that such people are morally or logically inferior because they didn't "do the math" to "come to their own conclusions."

However, there are cases wherein I repeatedly come to certain conclusions (relatively lightly held) without "doing the math." For instance, a friend of mine goes to see a movie, and informs me that it well and truly stinks and that I should not go to see it. Based on my good relationship with this friend, and the observation that we share in common many movies that we both enjoy, and that we happen to despise a great many movies in common as well, I may infer that I am likely to reach the same conclusion. I put a certain amount of trust into this individual. I may, of course, end up seeing the movie anyway, and find out that it wasn't all that bad. (Maybe my friend just had a bad day, or there were some particular points in the movie that were a hot button for him, but not for me, or various other reasons.)

I suppose it'd be silly of me to insist on liking the movie anyway - or claiming that I like it - even though my personal experience suggests otherwise. But I can't blame people for hearing arguments made by people they trust, and coming to certain conclusions without doing all the homework (seeing the movie, reading the passage in "the original Greek," etc.). Life's short. In such cases, it might be beneficial to point out genuine internal inconsistencies ... but it's a pretty rare thing in my experience to find truly blatant internal inconsistencies that can be easily shot down by "pointing out the obvious."