Abortion and negative rights

A negative right is the right to keep something you already have, the right to not have something taken from you. In contrast, a positive right is the right to have something provided to you. The classic statement is Locke's: you have the right to life, liberty, and property. These are negative rights: you have the right to keep whatever property you have: other people, including the government, do not have the right to take your property from you. A positive right to property would be the right to have property given to you.

Part of the reason abortion is such an insoluble problem is that they involve two conflicting negative rights. If the fetus is a human being, then it has the negative right to life. But the woman has the negative right to liberty, expressed here in terms of bodily autonomy. So the question is which of these two negative rights take priority, and the answer is neither. You don't get to take away someone's negative rights. Of course, it is not clear to a lot of people that the fetus is a human being with human value and thus human rights, including the right to life (see here), but just ignore that for the sake of the present issue.

So if we grant the claims of both sides, the fetus has the negative right to life and the woman has the negative right to liberty, and neither gets to overrule the other. And the resolution to this is . . . meh.

The Unconscious Violinist

The pro-choice position is that women have the right to do what they want with their bodies, but the pro-life position claims that the fetus is not the woman's body; it's the fetus's body. Since the right to swing your arms ends where another person's nose begins -- that is, your right to do what you want with you body ends where your use of your body harms someone else's body -- then if the fetus is an actual person, this would bear on whether a woman has the right to abort it. One problem with this is that the the woman and the fetus are organically connected, so the relationship between the mother and the fetus would be a unique one (really, the only example I can think of that's even remote comparable is conjoined twins), and that's a detail that could potentially change the equation.

Judith Jarvis Thomson is a moral philosopher and she came up with an argument that has greatly influenced the abortion debate. She grants these pro-life claims for argument's sake in order to construct a thought experiment. Say you wake up in a hospital bed and discover you're hooked up via tubes and whatnot to another person who is unconscious. Then you're told that this person is a famous violinist, a great artist, and has a kidney disease or something, and the only way to save him was to hook him up with someone else who closely matches his various biological conditions so that this other person's kidneys will filter his blood as well as your own -- and congratulations! your kidneys fit the bill. After nine months, everything can be disconnected and the violinist can be woken up, cured of his disease or condition. So do you have the right to refuse to take part in this procedure?

Thomson says yes. Granted, the unconscious violinist is a person; granted he will not survive without this procedure, this does not entail any responsibility on your part to allow your body be used as an object or tool to keep him alive for the next nine months. As a person, the violinist has the right to live, but he does not have the right to use someone else's body for his own purposes. So even if the fetus is a human being, a person, it does not have the right to the use of the woman's body.

Some people have raised objections to this. For one thing, at best, it would only apply to pregnancy by rape. Thomson argues that the fetus is using the woman's body in a nonconsensual way, but if the woman chose to have sex, the parallel between Thomson's thought experiment and abortion doesn't hold. We could add the detail that the woman attended a party with the understanding that there was a nontrivial chance of her being hooked up to an unconscious violinist for nine months afterwards. But this muddies the waters enough so that it isn't obvious that she has the right to unplug herself from the violinist. She knew that was a possible outcome of going to the party. Honestly, the first time I heard the Unconscious Violinist Argument, I thought it was an argument against abortion because of this point.

Another question we can ask is, how long is too long? What if she only has to be hooked up to the violinist for nine days? Or nine minutes? We can stand on principle here so that no amount of time is acceptable, but would you really think not having your autonomy overruled for nine minutes is more important than the violinist's life? What about nine days? Nine weeks? Or, to add another wrinkle, what if it's only nine hours but you know you only have fifteen hours to live and this will prevent you from accomplishing what you want during this time?

Again, this is all granting the pro-life position that the fetus is a person which is eminently contestable. I would conclude that the abortion issue does not have an obvious solution one way or the other, and if you're really confident of your position, maybe spend some more time thinking on it. I actually grew up with one side being the obvious, unquestioned one and then had some ideas presented to me which had never occurred to me, and after some contemplation, I switched teams.

The issue of abortion

Abortion has been in the news of late because New York state passed a bill allowing abortion at any time during a pregnancy, and Virginia tried to pass a similar one that some claimed even allowed it immediately after birth if the fetus was critical or terminal. Of course, at that point, it would no longer be called a fetus and it would no longer be called abortion.

It seems to me that both sides are not addressing the right issue here, as vain as that is to say. A lot of people say the question is whether the fetus (or zygote or blastocyst in the earlier stages) is alive. But this is a simple question with a simple answer: of course it's alive. It meets all the scientific conditions for life. For that matter, individual sperm cells are alive, although they are haploids rather than diploids. Nor is the question whether the fetus is human life. Every cell in a human being's body is human life, it's a living cell that forms a part of a human being.

What people are really asking is when does a human life begin? That is, when does a unique individual human being begin to exist? Most pro-choice folk say that it's sometime during the pregnancy (some say at birth or even later), pro-life folk say that it's at conception, when the haploid sperm cell unites with the haploid ovum and a living thing that is not identical to either the sperm or ovum -- nor for that matter is it genetically identical to the father or mother -- begins to exist. Of course, many people say we can't know for sure and embrace the pro-choice side (because it unreasonably restricts what the woman can do with her own body) or the pro-life side (because if it might be a human life, we have a moral obligation to protect it). For that matter, many people say we can't know and remain agnostic on the larger question.

The problem with asking when a human life begins is that is still a simple question with a simple answer: a human life begins at conception. That's not a matter of opinion or value judgment, it's a scientific, medical fact. And I think this is why pro-lifers want to end the discussion here, because they are on solid ground while the pro-choicers are not.

But, as you can probably tell, I don't think that is where the discussion should end, because I don't think that's what the real question is. The real question is a two-sided coin. The first side is when does human value begin, and the second side is when do human rights begin? Perhaps we could say the question is not when a human life begins, but when a human being begins. Of course, pro-lifers will say that human value and rights begin when the individual human life begins, and that's a defensible claim. For value to begin at some other point seems arbitrary: there should be a clear indication, a clear event, which can be identified as when a creature has intrinsic value and the right to life. However, there is an objection that can be made here that can't be made (or made as plausibly) when we're just asking when does a human life begin. The objection, or problem, is that it is strongly counter-intuitive to say that an undifferentiated group of cells is a human being in the full sense that it has human rights and human value. This is what (I think) pro-choicers are objecting to: we have a cluster of cells that are dividing and nothing else, and we're being told that it has just as much right to live as the woman in whose body it is dwelling.

One potential response to this is that the fetus is no longer an undifferentiated group of cells by the time the woman discovers she is pregnant. Organs have been formed, and some are even functioning. The fetus's heart begins to beat at about three weeks gestation. However, it's difficult to say that a beating heart is what bestows human value and rights.

By human value I do not mean utilitarian value, what something is capable of accomplishing. In fact, the concept of human value is one of the very few aspects of Christianity I appreciated when I first became a Christian: a severely mentally retarded person, who spends his life in a hospital bed, never contributes anything to society, is a burden on all those around him -- that person has just as much value, rights, is just as important and as absolutely irreplaceable as the most influential thinker, statesman, or artist who ever lived.

At any rate, as I say, while the fetus is definitely a human life, it is at least counter-intuitive to say that -- at least in the very early stages -- it is a human being equipped with human rights and human value. This doesn't constitute a reason to think it is not, it just means the pro-life side has to produce arguments to counter this counter-intuition. I'm sure they think they already have, and I'm not disputing that. I just want to clear the air on exactly what (I think) the issues really are.

Abortion

Here's an essay by a nurse and nursing instructor who formerly assisted in performing abortions. She argues the pro-life position. She is not arguing against abortion from a religious perspective but from a medical perspective.

Abortion and Strawmen

When I teach logic, in order to offend everyone equally, I sometimes say that both sides of the abortion debate, at least in their slogans, commit the strawman fallacy. One commits this fallacy when, instead of addressing the actual argument being presented, one erects a strawman: something that is superficially similar to the argument but is actually as dissimilar to it as a scarecrow is dissimilar to an actual human being. Moreover, by being made of straw, the strawman is much easier to knock down than an actual person.

So how does the pro-life side commit this fallacy? By saying abortion is murder. Murder involves the intentional killing of what someone recognizes as an innocent human being. Many women who have abortions have been told that the fetus is not even alive, much less a living human being, much less an innocent human being. The abortion doctors are in a different position: they know the fetus is alive -- but then again, so is an individual cell in your liver. But I doubt that they believe the fetus is a distinct human being, a person (for simplicity's sake I'll treat "human being" and "person" as interchangeable, although many distinguish them in this debate). However, this is an assumption on my part: I don't know of any polls as to whether abortionists tend to believe that the fetus is a person. But even if there were, I don't think I'd trust the results: if you thought fetuses were human beings, but thought abortion was a necessary evil, would you acknowledge this in a poll? I'm sure there must be some abortionists who do think the fetus is a person. Kermit Gosnell, in the manner of serial killers, kept trophies of all the babies he killed -- I say babies, not fetuses, since he delivered them and then killed them outside the womb. A doctor wouldn't keep trophies of the tumors he'd removed from patients, so obviously Gosnell recognized that he was taking the lives of innocent human beings.

I think the strongest objection one could make is that if the person should have known that she was killing a human being, then their act could still be considered murder. If a philosophy student who had read her Peter Singer and Michael Tooley killed a newborn baby and argued afterwards that she honestly didn't think it was a human being, she would probably still be convicted of murder. That's because nearly everyone recognizes that a newborn baby is a human being and has a right to life, and that same intuition, that same source of knowledge, would have been available to the person being accused, since they lived in the same culture and context. With abortion, however, there is no such consensus. We have to be careful here to not commit another fallacy, argumentum ad populum, appeal to the masses. But I think we can avoid this as my point is a more modest appeal to humility: given that there is widespread disagreement on abortion, we shouldn't assume that a particular person knew the fetus was a human being and killed them anyway.

Anyway, the closest parallel I can think of to this -- the intentional killing of something that one recognizes is alive but does not recognize to be an innocent human being -- would be a hunting accident. A hunter sees movement in the brush ahead, thinks it's a deer, and intentionally aims and shoots with the goal of killing it. But to her horror, she discovers it wasn't a deer but another hunter. She recognized the thing ahead of her was alive, and deliberately killed it. But she didn't recognize that it was a human being she was killing. Perhaps a court of law might determine that a hunter should have known that it was a person she was shooting at, but since she wasn't deliberately trying to kill another human being, it is unlikely the hunter would be convicted of murder. Similarly, even if we grant the pro-life position (as I do) that fetuses are distinct human beings, insofar as the abortionist and the woman do not recognize this fact, they are not guilty of murder, whatever else one might say of them. So to call abortion murder is to erect a strawman to the effect that the abortionist and the woman are intentionally killing what they recognize to be an innocent human being.

How does the pro-choice side commit the strawman fallacy? By saying the woman has a right to do what she wants with her own body. Well, yeah, of course she does, as long as she doesn't harm someone else. The old saying is, your right to swing your fists ends where another person's nose begins. That is, one person's right to do what she wants with her body only extends to the point that she harms someone else or restricts the other person's right to do what he wants with his body. And the claim of the pro-life side is that the fetus is another person. A woman does not have the right to do what she wants with someone else's body, and the fetus is someone else's body (namely, the fetus's), not her body. That's the claim. Perhaps that claim is false, perhaps it's even absurd, but that's the claim being made. Slogans like "Keep your laws of my body" or "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" may be clever, but their goal is to defend a right that no one is challenging. Thus such claims are complete strawmen.

Of course, the relationship between the pregnant woman and the fetus is a unique one. The only real world scenario I can think of that's even remotely analogous is conjoined twins. I'm unaware of a situation where one conjoined twin deliberately killed the other, but it seems to me that it would be considered murder (assuming all of the conditions discussed above). Judith Jarvis Thomson presented an interesting thought experiment: a woman wakes up in the hospital and finds herself connected to an unconscious violinist. The violinist was suffering from kidney failure, and the only way to save his life was to hook his circulatory system up to the woman's so her kidneys can do the work that his kidneys couldn't. It's only temporary, just nine months, and then she can be unplugged from the violinist and go on her merry way. Thomson argues that, even granting that the violinist is a human being, a person, the woman has the right to unplug herself from him, even knowing it would cause his death. The violinist's right to life does not include the right to use someone else's body.

When I first heard this argument, I thought it left out an important element: except in the case of rape, the pregnant woman engaged in an activity which has been known from time immemorial to lead to pregnancy. You'd have to add to Thomson's scenario that the woman went of her own volition to the hospital for some ostensibly pleasurable reason (maybe they were throwing a Christmas party and serving bacon wrapped shrimp) and signed a paper acknowledging that, by entering the hospital, she is accepting there is a nontrivial chance that she would be hooked up to a violinist for nine months. This changes the scenario dramatically. In fact, I first thought that Thomson was presenting this as an argument against abortion. So Thomson herself has commited the strawman fallacy: rather than include an element that would make her thought experiment more accurately track the abortion issue, she has excluded it in order to make the intuition she's appealing to more commanding.

Having said that, Thomson's point is still very astute and important: in the case of rape, which more closely parallels her thought experiment, does the fetus's right to life not include the right to use the woman's body as an incubator for nine months? Some people are opposed to abortion even in this case, because the evil of intentionally killing an innocent human being is greater than the evil of significantly, but temporarily, disrupting the woman's life. A lot of issues come into play here: what takes priority, a right to life or right to a lifestyle? What about the psychological effects on the woman? These could very easily ruin her life, they can't just be dismissed. What if we shortened the period of time the woman's life was disrupted? What if it was only three months? Or three weeks? How about three minutes? At some point, even though we might agree with the principle that one person's right to life doesn't include the right to use another person's body, most of us would think the inconvenience becomes trivial and the life of the fetus so much more important that we would no longer think the principle takes precedence. For that matter, couldn't we reframe the principle the other way around? Does the woman have the right to do what she wants with the fetus's body in order to continue her lifestyle? I mean, by killing the fetus, she's using its body for her own ends. On the other hand, how probable is it that the fetus is really a person, a human being? If you think it's just one chance in two, you might think the potential evil of killing the fetus is greater than the evil of disrupting the woman's life for nine months. But what if it's one chance in ten? Or a hundred? Or a million? At some point, even though we might agree that killing an innocent person is a greater evil than disrupting a woman's life for nine months, most of us would think that the probability that we really are killing an innocent human being becomes so low as to become trivial. I'm not even going to try to answer these questions, but I think they show that there's a reason why the abortion issue is controversial, and we should treat those who disagree with us respectfully and assume they are acting in good faith.

Linkfest

-- Long books worth your time.

-- Victor Reppert has been blogging about abortion of late -- see here, here, here, here, and here.

-- Starship Troopers is the new Art of War.

-- An infidel's quick guide to Islamic sects. Although, you know, you could just read a book on the subject.

-- The top picture here is amazing.

-- I'm a bibliophile, but this goes a bit too far.

-- Scientific American argues that the best site off Earth to colonize is Titan. The biggest problem is getting there. Speaking of which...

-- The impossible EM drive seems to work, despite its apparent violation of Newton's third law. OK, well, we'll still have a problem with finding enough water to survive off Earth. Speaking of which...

-- Dwarf planet Ceres is full of water. So, I guess, the only problem is ... I don't know ... we'll still eventually die?

-- Speaking of which...

Down syndrome children

This video was banned in France. The reasoning the court gave is that women who had aborted fetuses with Down Syndrome might be traumatized by it. That could certainly be the case: a woman who had agonized over having an abortion, and finally decided to have one because she thought the child would lead an empty, miserable life could be horrified to discover that she had actually stolen a beautiful, joyous life from her own child -- a life that would not only be blessed, but one that would bless the lives of many others, including hers. Nevertheless, in such circumstances, the proper attitude is to try to prevent future tragedies like this from happening. You don't avoid warning people about a crime wave because those who had been victimized by it already don't want to have to be reminded about it.

Infanticide

One of the big stories going through the blogosphere and other internet phenomena is the trial of Kermit Gosnell. The number of links I could give is excessive, so I won't even try. He is an abortion doctor who provided very late-term abortions, long past the point where it was legal, to low-income women in Philadelphia. But "abortion" is really a misnomer: Gosnell would induce labor, deliver the babies and then kill them. Even Roe vs. Wade says that once a baby is outside the mother's body, it is a distinct human being which has the right to life, and so all efforts must be made to preserve its life at that point. This makes Gosnell one of the most successful serial killers in human history. As further proof, he kept "trophies" of all the babies he killed; they found jars filled with baby feet.

What's sad is that our society provided him a forum where he could carry out his killings without danger of being caught. Abortion is one of the most controversial issues around; you can almost hear the minds snapping shut, on both sides of the aisle, whenever it's brought up. Part of our shared morality is that the most helpless members of our community deserve protection, and we generally view the killing of children as even more horrific than the killing of adults. Pro-life people (like myself) claim that this applies to the unborn, while pro-choice people do not. But by saying that it's OK to kill those who have not yet been born and who would not be able to survive outside the womb we are blurring the distinction of when someone becomes a human being, and this blurring blunts our empathy for infants: a few years ago I was speaking with a friend about this, and he said it was patently obvious that newborns aren't really people. (My friend is not on the political left incidentally.) The whole process of pregnancy is one of gradual development, so picking any particular point as qualifying when the baby "becomes human" is arbitrary. This is one of the motives for those of us who say that one's humanity begins at conception, since this is a particular event and not a process. Of course, there are counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments which I won't go into here.

Another issue is that the mainstream media, left and right, wasn't really covering the Gosnell story (although they're beginning to now). Some justified this by saying it was just a local story, but of course, all such stories begin as local stories. As one person put it, if an anti-abortion activist had killed Gosnell, you can bet that that would get wall-to-wall around-the-clock coverage in the media, even though it would equally be a local story. But the media, in this case, reflects our culture: newborns, especially unwanted newborns, don't really qualify as people, so it's not  a significant story. But if we see them, instead, as children, as the most helpless members of our society and the human race, then we see the acts of Kermit Gosnell as beyond horrific; as an indictment on our culture; as a desire to kill those who are inconvenient for us; as -- to put it bluntly -- evil.

Choosing My Religion

Here's a video of the President talking about why he's a Christian. I think he expresses it well, although the questioner also asked about the abortion issue, so he talks about that too, and I disagree with him about it. The President and I are both adult converts; I wrote about how I became a Christian here if anyone's interested.

Linkfest

-- Further steps towards curing cancer.

-- I remember claims in 2003 that Iraq may have sent WMDs and other material to Syria, but there is apparently a new chorus suggesting there is some evidence supporting it. Via Patterico.

-- More on private business in space.

-- This is just heartbreaking. A disturbingly large number of couples who go through incredible difficulties trying to get pregnant and are eventually successful with in-vitro fertilization, end up aborting the babies for "social reasons".

-- I hadn't heard this song in years, but after listening to it again I remembered something I thought about it when it was popular: the guitar solo is one of the clearest expressions of hell I've ever heard. I don't mean that it's a bad solo at all, I mean it expresses in audible form what I think a damned soul would feel.

-- Japan is testing a solar sail to see if a spacecraft can be propelled by the sun's rays. Photos at the link. Also, Japan's spaceship that landed on an asteroid several years ago, took samples, and then had difficulty returning to Earth ... has returned to Earth. Very cool.

-- The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Afghanistan has immense mineral resources, trillions of dollars worth. I think this is a very good thing: the Afghanistan economy is based on non-perishable crops like opium, because they lack the infrastructure to make farming perishable goods profitable. This discovery would give them the ability to be economically independent, which in turn would give them the ability to be militarily independent. Of course, it will be years before the benefits will be realized, and there will undoubtedly be the danger of corruption.

-- Bill Vallicella has some great posts on Nietzsche of late. Start here, then go here, and then here. The latter post is only incidentally about Nietzsche, as it deals with a silly misconception of the Imago Dei doctrine, and two of the posts deal with the book Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. And if you still need some more, read this.

Abortion and Age-reckoning

One of the arguments for abortion is that we don't count someone's age from the date of their conception, or of quickening, or some other point in utero. We count age from their birth. If we really believed human life began at an earlier stage, we would recognize it here and we simply don't. I've never found this argument convincing.

1) We count age from birth because this is the child's introduction to the public world.

2) Birth is a very dramatic phenomenon with immediate objective results and so supplies us with a very obvious point of reference (whereas conception and quickening do not).

3) This argument would mean that a fetus at nine months gestation is not really a human being, and can therefore be killed without repercussions. Very few people would accept this. This is significant since the whole point of this argument is based on an appeal to common perception and belief.

4) Plenty of cultures throughout history have reckoned age according to the approximate time of conception. This has been common in east Asian cultures for example, like China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.

Three points on abortion

-- The Anchoress quotes Sen. Tom Coburn as saying, "We now record fetal heartbeats at 14 days post-conception. We record fetal brainwaves at 39 days post-conception." Coburn, an OBGyn, makes an interesting argument about this, but my focus is in the claim about brainwaves. I had heard that there were measurable brainwaves at 40 days gestation before, but elsewhere, I've read that they're not actually observable until about 25 weeks gestation. I'm more inclined to believe an OBGyn, but does anyone out there have any info on this, and why there are such disparate answers? This raises two points: 1) if there's a functioning brain at 39 days, which is before nearly all abortions are performed, it becomes very difficult to maintain that the fetus is not a living human being, independent of the mother. By "independent" I don't mean that it could survive outside the mother so early. Rather, I mean that the fetus is not merely a part of the mother, but gives every appearance of being a little person in its own right. It has its own organs, including a functioning heart and brain. 2) If there are brainwaves there are very probably pain receptors by the time abortions are actually performed. So an abortion is not merely removing a clump of undifferentiated tissue. It is submitting what gives every appearance of being a helpless human being to a painful death.

-- Closely related, fetuses have been shown to have memories at 30 weeks gestation, and "34-week-old fetuses are able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later." Most abortions, however, are performed long before this point.

-- Also via the Anchoress, President Obama apparently lied to the Pope regarding his commitment to reduce the number of abortions. What is at issue is that, while telling the Pope this, his health care bill would include taxpayer-funded abortion, something that has been shown to increase the number of abortions by 20-35%. The study showing this increase was performed by Planned Parenthood, so it wasn't biased in favor of the pro-life platform.

Abortion and Gay Rights

{Caveat}
1. Last week, a poster at the Jury Talks Back asked a good question: "Suppose the technology existed to safely remove a fetus from a womb at any gestational stage for incubation elsewhere until birth. If such “no-death abortion” was available to any woman who wanted it, would most abortion rights supporters stand down?" Patterico followed it up with a post on his own blog, saying that a pro-choice person he posed the question to was adamantly against it. JTB had a follow-up to the original post as well. I found it an interesting question, partially because I had the same idea when I was a teenager (again!) and toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor in order to pursue it -- of course I would have had to be a medical technologist instead, but I didn't think about it hard enough to realize that. The objections to this scenario on the blogs linked to above strike me as contrived: the baby might come to the mother 40 years later looking for a kidney transplant; it would allow rapists to propagate themselves; etc. The primary argument in favor of abortion has been that women shouldn't have to go through pregnancies when they don't want to. The above scenario would allow women to end their pregnancies. If a pro-choice advocate is still against it, then their real goal is not to allow women to end unwanted pregnancies. Their real goal is to kill unwanted fetuses.

2. The Volokh Conspiracy reports (from the Religious Clause blog) on an interesting case: a black woman, an administrator at the University of Toledo, took umbrage at an op-ed in her local newspaper arguing that gay rights are a type of civil rights and that homosexuals are equivalent to black people. She wrote a very respectful but dissenting op-ed of her own, a large part of which expressed the traditional Christian belief that homosexual behavior is a type of rebellion against God. Here is her op-ed. She was promptly fired. The university defended their action by saying her views on homosexual behavior make it impossible for her to fulfill her role as an administrator. She has pointed out that it has never prevented her from hiring gay people before during her 25-year career. Instapundit calls it a political firing, but it seems to be a religious firing to me.

Horton heard a what?

On the plane ride across the Atlantic they showed three full-length movies, one of which was Horton Hears a Who. I was in Paris when it came out there, and wanted to see it, but for some reason my wife was more intent on seeing ... well ... Paris.

I had forgotten the Dr. Seuss book, so the story was essentially new to me. Having seen it, I have to say that I'm shocked such a film came out of Hollywood. It has religious and ethical connotations that are the polar opposite of the Hollywood mindset.

Horton (voiced by Jim Carrey) is an elephant, and because of his ears, he has greater hearing than others in his jungle community. He hears, and then befriends, the mayor of a town (voiced by Steve Carell) on a planet that is basically a dust speck. The movie entails Horton trying to bring the dust speck to safety.

The religious connotation is that Horton hears a voice, but other people doubt him because they don't hear it themselves. His main detractor (a kangaroo, voiced by Carol Burnett) says "If you can't see it, feel it, or hear it, it doesn't exist." This strikes me as very similar to the claims of atheists that if they can't experience God with their five senses, they refuse to believe in him. If someone claims to hear God's voice, he must be delusional or worse.

The ethical connotation is that Horton insists that the people in Whoville are just as important as anyone else, since "A person's a person, no matter how small." This strikes me as a very obvious statement about abortion. It doesn't matter that they (the Whos in Whoville or the fetus in the mother's uterus) are small, they're just as important and have just as much right to live as anyone else.

Again, I am staggered that Hollywood made this movie. These implications are not contrived or hidden; they are very obvious. I also find it interesting that the two main characters are voiced by Jim Carrey and Steve Carell. Both men have Christian backgrounds: Carrey was raised Catholic, and has attended Protestant church as an adult, and Carell is a lifelong Catholic. These two also made two other movies which take God seriously: Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty.

Of course, the movie has other themes as well. The kangaroo accuses Horton of corrupting the young, eerily similar to the same charges made against Socrates. Another is that Horton refuses to give up, even when everyone else is against him, and even when what he promised to do becomes insanely difficult. "I meant what I said and I said what I meant; an elephant's faithful, one hundred percent." This is quite laudable, and I'm very glad that this is put forward as something people should do; but there are other mainstream movies that advocate such themes, so it's not as noteworthy as the two mentioned above.

(cross-posted at OregonLive)