This is an interesting essay—really an applied ethics paper—by @RameshPonnuru and @McCormickProf: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/10/19/voting-for-life/

It makes three claims to which I'd like to offer some friendly philosophical pushback. Thread

1. "Since the wrongness of abortion can be grasped through natural reason, abortion is not the sort of wrong the state has valid reasons for tolerating." That's a very strong claim. After all, the official position of the Catholic Church is that /theism/ is rationally accessible.

That is, the church holds that the existence of God "can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." So if the state shouldn't tolerate sins that reason alone condemns, why should it tolerate ATHEISM, which per the Church is one such sin?

The catechism also states that human reason is fallible, which is one reason revelation matters. But the same could be said of abortion. Even if its (im)morality is accessible through reason alone, human beings don't reason perfectly.

If that imperfection justifies atheist toleration, why doesn't it ALSO justify a permissive abortion regime? Contrarily, if that imperfection does NOT justify a permissive abortion regime, how can it justify tolerating atheists? Reason hard enough, and you'll see both are wrong!

The obvious reply is that murder is WORSE than atheism. So if abortion is murder, the state has stronger reasons ban it than to ban atheism, even if both teachings—"God exists" and "abortion is evil"—don't depend on revelation. But what matters here is not rational accessibility.

Rather, what matters is the putative wrongness of the act. Whether abortion is the "the sort of grave injustice and violation of fundamental human rights that it is a central duty of law and the state to prohibit" does not turn on reason vs. revelation.

It turns on the act's moral status.

Now, because liberalism wants to insist that natural rights, and who has them, are self-evident—and that the state can only enforce self-evident moral truths—pro-life liberals have to insist that abortion, like slavery, is /obviously/ wrong.

But it's not. Smart people disagree about whether abortion is wrong—just like they disagreed about whether slavery was wrong for most of human history. That they no longer disagree about the latter is a sign of moral progress, NOT that slavery's immorality is "self-evident."

In sum, it is perfectly reasonable to vote against pro-choice candidates in order to avoid being complicit in abortion. But what matters here is MORALITY, not moral epistemology. Plus, liberalism denies the church's epistemic infallibility, including on issues of epistemology...

...So the fact that the Church says its own teachings are "available to natural reason" has no bearing on whether liberalism is internally obligated to regard those teachings as self-evident. Of course you could argue that's why liberalism needs Christianity...but let's move on.

2. "Abortion, unlike climate change, involves the permission to kill large numbers of people because they belong to a disfavored class." This distinction rests on an empirical premise: that climate change /won't/ kill large numbers of people who belong to a disfavored class.

But of course, this is a premise that progressives deny. In their view, climate change WILL kill large numbers of people who belong to a disfavored class: namely, future persons confronting the effects of our current consumption. Membership in this class is totally arbitrary.

It depends entirely on your date of birth, or, as it were, your date of conception. And the same goes for the unborn! Time is the only thing that determines whether fetuses OR future persons can be sacrificed for our present comfort.

And it's possible that MORE future persons are on the line than unborn fetuses. In which case the pro-life voter might decide, on consequentialist grounds, to vote for the candidate with the best climate policies, in the hope of minimizing the number of arbitrary deaths.

You could deny that empirical premise, of course, just as you could deny the empirical premise that voting against pro-abortion candidates reliably reduces abortion. You might also think there's a difference between supporting murder and being indifferent to foreseeable death.

A difference that arguably maps onto abortion vs. climate change. One is the intentional killing of a human life (Ponnuru and George believe), and other is an impersonal process that COULD kill millions if left unchecked. For deontologists, that is a morally salient difference.

But deontologists also care about consequences—and Ponnuru and George themselves say that the "gravity" and "scope" of the evil matter, not just whether it is "direct and intentional." If the right is lexically prior to the good, their argument follows. Otherwise, it does not.

3. Which brings me to the final, implicit claim I take issue with: "We should vote for candidates based on what they /will/." On the contrary, it seems to me that we should vote for candidates based on what they are likely to /do/. And you needn't be a consequentialist to say so.

In voting for X, you are not endorsing everything X WILLS. You are making an all-things-considered judgment that X would be /preferable as president/ to Y. @RameshPonnuru and @McCormickProf basically admit this earlier in the essay, then seem to contradict themselves at the end.

The question isn't what the candidate wills; it's what YOU will. After all, by Ponnuru and George's own lights, pro-lifers needn't support Trump's every policy preference, and certainly not his every whim, to vote for him; they just need to believe he's better /on balance/.

And that's not a judgment about character. It's a judgment about consequences—who is more likely to promote the good, all things considered, in the oval office? Pro-lifers certainly have reasons to worry about Biden on this front. But they also have reasons to worry about Trump.

And which worry should carry the day ultimately depends on what each candidate is likely to do, not what each candidate wills or believes. (If it were immoral to vote for someone who willed evil, almost all votes cast would be morally illegitimate.)

So I don't see why pro-life Catholics can't say, in effect: "we believe Biden supports a killing innocent people, but also that fewer innocent people are likely to die under Biden than Trump, regardless of the latter's intentions. Therefore, we want Biden in the oval office."