Okay, apply Rawls’s “general description” of “fairness” and Aristotle’s “general description” of “virtue” to a set of conflicting goods such that they take into account the manner in “I” reacts to particular behaviors based in large part on how individual lives predispose us to liberal, moderate or conservative prejudices.
What is “fair” in the abortion wars? What does it mean to act “virtuously” with respect to gun control laws?
In the end, moral philosophers help describe the Social Contract, whether that’s what they’re trying for or not. Social contracts occur not when everyone agrees, but because not everyone agrees. If you have no concept of the operative (at a certain time and place) social contract, you will be lost indeed. The social contract is the motherfucking context.
Instead, from my frame of mind, it is back up into the didactic clouds.
So you were prochoice and now you’re… am I to believe that you have done no thinking, throughout all these influential experiences? What is your case against legal abortion?
My point is that your thinking can revolve around one set of circumstances and then those circumstances radically change and that thinking doesn’t work anymore.
And the argument against legal abortion depends on the assumptions that you start out with.
You might be a Catholic, convinced that abortion is a sin. And surely sins against God should never be made legal.
You might be an atheist who believes human life begins at conception and, therefore, that abortion is murder.
Or you might be a conservative making arguments that flow from assumptions like these: frc.org/brochure/the-best-p … -audiences
My point then is that the folks on the other side have their own sets of assumptions that they deem to be perfectly reasonable.
Neither side is then really ever able to make the other side’s points go away. Not completely.