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The bloom of the rose

September 16th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Politics - US - (0 Comments)

If even George W. Bush recognised the failings of the Sarah Palin pick…

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.

I suppose it’s not a huge surprise – the man may not have been an exemplary human but he was a career politician. He would have known what he was seeing. And the last sentence is also unfair – Bush and McCain were not friends, for all that the White House said from the podium.

It’s been a while since I posted…

August 19th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (0 Comments)

And I’ve been thinking largely about historic truth.

If you ask most people to give as detailed a history of humanity as they can, most would go: monkey, caveman, cradle o’ civilization, ancient Egypt, China over there, blurblelug, GreeceRomeMiddleAgesBritishEmpireAmerica. And that’s fair enough, because it’s our history; the history of the “civilised west”. The Eurocentric version of history won, or at least has ascendancy at the moment, because Eurocentric version of society won, because Eurocentricism won its wars and now gets to teach  the students who go on to write the history books. The victor’s justice of history: an obvious point but one that occasionally deserves to be revisited.

But when we talk about historic victor’s justice, we tend to think about in in limited terms. We think about Neuremberg, and whether we’d like the Nazis more if they’d won; we think about Charles Taylor and the ICC; we think about America and whether it truly understands the cultures of the countries it invades, and whether history will accord Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay the weight they deserve. But history’s bias towards victory is much more far-reaching than that; it affects our entire world view. Michael Hastings at True/Slant gives a demonstration of this in his review of District 9, in which he expounds on the nature of English language political and social discourse on Iraq and Afghanistan:

Our government’s language is teeming with condescension when discussing Iraqis and Afghans, as if they’re not quite complete humans, child-like, and certainly not really civilized. Their lives are not valued as much as Western life–in economic terms (the families of Iraqis or Afghan who get accidentally killed during get a payout of around $3000; the family of a Westerner, military or civilian, who gets killed will get around $500,000) and in how we process the daily death totals. (Politicians always mention the 4,500 Americans who’ve died in Iraq, but rarely give more than perfunctory acknowledgment to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.)

The very metaphor for our strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is so casually offensive that it’s somewhat astounding that it passes through our lips without comment. Usually it’s summed up by American officials like so: “The Iraqis are on a bicycle and we’re holding the bicycle seat until they’re ready, so we can let go.” Or: “It’s like we have training wheels on their bicycles, and we can leave once we take the training wheels off.”

This echoes the way that we often refer to people from “hot places” – and by minimising them in this manner we pave the way for an oversight of the historical worth of their culture. It is somewhat true that all history is, to some extent, ‘-centric’;  it has to be, as a history can never really be comprehensive, the scale of the task is too big. So we narrow it down, by region and era, and take it from there. You can ask, “What would a Native American-centric explanation look like? What would an Afro-centric explanation look like?” but the answer would be too obvious: they would tell the story of the development of the civilisations of Africa or Latin America, and only deal with Europe when it impacts those stories; after all, we don’t have to simply focus on history’s winners. And it’s legitimate to ask whether, given that all history is at least slightly -centric, and that the story of European history has to be told, why Eurocentricism has to be classified as a criticism. After all, a large part of the justification for the idea of the nation-state is that it preserves the culture, identity, language and history of the nation it serves. Insofar as an obligation to record Latin American and African history exists, it lies with Latin America and Africa; the duty of European scholars to record that history extends only so far as it takes to explain its impact on our own history. So long as we can do that respectfully and without jingoism then we have done all that is required of us.

But there is an untruth to that, and in that untruth lurks an imperative. In our military and political worlds, we have a concept called the “Responsibility to Protect”. This (admittedly contested) doctorine states that a nation has the right to intervene on behalf of a people whose government either will not protect them from grevious need, or which is directly oppressing them. Why is there no comparable ideal in history? During the Early Middle Ages, learning in Europe was a complete bust. The intellectual and social rout was complete, and all of Europe’s history was profoundly lost. The only reason why we know anything of Europe pre-1200 or so is because there was an external superpower who was minding our business better than we were. The scholars of the Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate painstakingly transcribed and preserved the words of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates; they kept and treasured the history of Europe, even though it had had almost no direct influence on the development of the Caliphate itself. Our entire knowledge of the world exited Europe via Byzantium and spent centuries making its way around the Mediterranean, through Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Carthage and finally back into Europe through Cordoba.

By enshrining European knowledge, the Caliphate did the entire world a courtesy, one which Europe and, later, America have been tepid in returning.

Take Africa. A cat may look at a king; but the poorest, bloodiest, most corrupt and least densely populated continent by a long margin cannot fairly be compared to Europe. They seem to be worlds apart. Why is that? In the short term, we talk about colonialism, but that’s a code, because we still think of the European invaders rounding up chieftains in grass huts full of yams. There is a reason for this: it is because sub-Saharan African history is virtually unknown to us except as an extension of European history. The history of an entire continent is basically lost to us – not just because modern historians have been more interested in Louis XIV (aka the most awesome king in history) but because history throughout the ages has been homocentric, and Africa has never had a chance to record Africa’s history. The earliest we can go with confidence is the Kingdom of Mutapa, which was founded in 1450 in the area that is now Zimbabwe and which was attacked by the Portuguese – pre-guns – who were trying to establish a trade route to India. The history that has been preserved for us is the Eurocentric ideal: it has no context beyond what our historians have given it.

Which gets to my second point: Eurocentricity is one thing, but our obsession with our victor’s history has caused us to reflexively overlook another cause. The Caliphate was not restricted to the Mediterranean coast. The main reason why Portugal and Mupata clashed, rather than coming to a peaceful trading agreement, is because the Mupatanese government was Muslim. We have no idea what the southern extent of the Caliphate was, and even if we did, we would have no idea how its influence had spread within Africa, because those historical records don’t exist. When we talk about the Caliphate, we fixate on the geography of the empire itself, and this grossly overlooks the human and cultural dimensions of what it achieved.

Thirdly, these two misunderstandings – Eurocentricism and geography-fixation – have led to you a conclusion that is false. Because we do have a little bit of pre-European knowledge of Africa, mostly thanks to Caliphate historians and architectural digs. In the aftermath of the Bantu expansion, the Monomatapa kings (the precursors to the Mutapa Kingdom) built a city called Great Zimbabwe. It stood for 300 years, covered seven square kilometres and has a population of around 20,000 at its peak, making it significantly larger than London was at the time. It was the centre of a trade network that stretched from China to Arabia and possibly even to South America. With Great Zimbabwe, we can prove that as of 1400 AD, sub-Saharan Africa was as technologically advanced as Europe – not ‘noble savages’, not victims of geography, but genuine contenders for the mantle of future leaders of the free world. Portugal could not beat Mupata. Portugal’s generals are recorded as having described it as “invulnerable”. Mupata collapsed through infighting and domestic politiking, and so thrust sub-Saharan Africa into its present dark age.

Europe is not alone in having suffered dark ages; Latin America is only decades removed from its own, and Africa is still deep in its clutches. The reason why Eurocentricism is a criticism is because European history doesn’t need protecting. It is as complete as it possibly can be, but for lucky finds and interpretation; but more African, Middle Eastern and Latin American history is being lost by the day. History is written by the victor, but only because the losers have a few other things on their hands, so under the circumstances, it surely doesn’t hurt us to be a bit more magnanimous with our resources.

PS

April 27th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General - (0 Comments)

I have turned off the thing where you have to log in to comment, as I think that I have resolved the spam problem.

Food and trade

March 10th, 2009 | Posted by Aosher in General | History | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (0 Comments)

In the mid fifteenth century, the Venetians were the undisputed masters of the Mediterranean. Following the sacking of Genoa, they had no meaningful rivals when it came to the sea’s lucrative trade routes, and the Ottoman overthrow of Byzantium and the destruction of Armenia meant that overland trade with Asia Minor was all but impossible. Operating mainly through Beirut and Alexandria, Venetian ships more or less single-handedly represented Europe’s market to the old world.

In these two ports, everything was traded – the goods brought overland from India and China along the Silk Road – Persian gums, precious stones – copper and incense from the south of the Arabian peninsula, ivory, pearls, fruit and cloth from north Africa. But one commodity stood above the rest, commanding prices put all of the others to shame, and that was spice – more specifically, pepper.

What the spice trade meant to Europe can be read upon the pages of any medieval account or cookery book. In spite of the perverse vagaries of the Mameluke Sultans – whose greed could send prices soaring on a whim, and whose uncertain tempers and squalls of fury could inflict upon a patrician Venetian a flogging, as if he were a slave – to the Republic, the rewards were well worth the costs. German, French and English consumers would pay whatever prices were demanded for as much spice as Venice could supply.

But, in 1487, Batholomew Diaz became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and before the end of the century Vasco de Gama proved the viability of a sea route to Calicut. This was apocalyptic for the Venetians; a pilgrim’s journal of the time notes that “all the city of Venice was greatly impressed and alarmed, and the wisest men held that this was the worst news that could ever come to the city.” Sure enough, by 1502, the Venetians found that there was no spice to be found in Alexandria. The Portuguese had stolen the trade, although the English would later steal it from them in turn, and Venice’s star was on the wane.

I find this interesting for several reasons. Firstly, I think that cooking – the desire to source new, exciting ingredients and have them delivered fresh – is underrated as a motivator when it comes to understanding geopolitics. It only recently that, for the first time in human history, the most commonly internationally traded resource had not been a foodstuff; coffee, the erstwhile leader, still accounts for phenomenal quantities of shipping every year. To those who say that the current banking crisis somehow proves the inviability of capitalism as model, that this is the end of the supremacy of the market, I can only say: human behaviour is economic behaviour. As long as people need to eat, international trade will be at the forefront of or politics, our society, and our world. A few fewer banks and a few fewer bankers won’t change that; there still will be banks and traders and investors, because at the end of the day, people will always need pepper, and that’s the bedrock upon which international trade is built, not mortgages. The mortgage trade may seem like a lot when your fate is directly linked to interest rates, but it’s peanuts compared to how the peanut sellers roll.

Secondly, it illustrates what a harsh mistress that very market is. Both Venice and Portugal had their dreams of glory dashed on the spice trade; then, as now, the Middle East proved to be an unreliable trading ground. In the context of this history, it makes sense for America to pursue their ethanol dream. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why the rest of the world is allowing them to do so. If the Brazilians have developed, in sugar cane ethanol, a fuel that is four times more efficient than America’s corn ethanol at the same cost, a fuel which many believe has the potential to be as efficient as gasoline, and a fuel which impacts global food supplies in no way at all, then why isn’t China, or Russia, or the EU, investing in it?

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The food crisis

November 11th, 2008 | Posted by Aosher in General | Politics | Thorough Wonkiness - (3 Comments)

It is reasonably clear that the world is in the grip of a prolonged and aggressive food crisis. Since 2005, there have already been food riots in more than 30 different countries. Paul Collier, a Professor of Economics at Oxford, claims that the price of food has jumped by 83% in that time – a price rise that the rich world has largely absorbed, but which has had horrific ramifications on the inhabitants of less developed nations.

 

While this is a severe problem, it is in fact less complex than many problems of similar scale; however, it is beset by misunderstanding. Effective solutions to world hunger exist, but they are impeded by a mixture of ignorance, romanticism, populism and cynicism. Tackling the issue requires a candid look at the effects of food prices, and an understanding of the mechanisms that can be used to control them.

 

Firstly, it is necessary to look beyond root causes. There is a general ignorance surrounding the question of how food prices have risen so high, so quickly, but the answer is actually relatively straightforward. This drive in food prices was caused by the rapid pace of economic develolment in Asia, which houses over half of the worlds population. Although still poor (the average resident of Asia devotes over half of their budget to food), this population is rapidly getting richer, and thus their demand for food is increasing. Not only that, but it is becoming more intensive; grain-based carbohydrate diets are being upgraded to protein-rich habits, and as it takes six kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, this is having a significant effect on demand. The solution to the problem of food prices can thus be effectively uncoupled from its cause; short of making Asia poor and malnutriated again, food prices cannot be controlled by reversing the stimulus that caused them to rise. 

Secondly, we need to look at who actually suffers the most from high food prices. Causes such as Fair Trade and Red have become popular in the rich world over the last decade, mostly as a result of the famines that struck Africa in the later part of the twentieth century and thus off of the back of movements such as LiveAid. However, they operate on an underlying assumption that is broadly incorrect: the Africans in agrarian communities are the real losers of the world food lottery. Admittedly, African farmers tend to do rather less well out of high food prices than their Western counterparts, mostly because the markets that they serve are unresponsive to global food prices. However, farmers do have two rather large advantages when it comes to surviving food crises. Firstly, they are growing their own crops. Regardless of what happens to the food market, they can always ensure that they themselves have something to eat. And secondly, they have the World Food Program, a buyer of last resort in famine years who can prevent a failed crop from being a catastrophe. Now, the World Food Program is not a prefect institution. Its budget is set in dollars, not bushels, so it is less capable of responding when food prices are high (as they are now) – ironically making it much less effective during times of global food shortage. Farmers are still vulnerable to famine, drought, and crop failure. But they are still comparatively well off; provided that they manage to eke out a crop, the current food market actually works in their favour.

 

Comparatively well off, that is, to the urban poor, who are the real losers when it comes to high global food prices. In the cities of the developing world (typically ports), the slum-dwellers and underpriviliged must spend on food a proportion of their income five times greater than that of their wealthier neighbours. Because they have no recorse to their own subsistence farming, they are accutely vulnerable to price shocks. Ironically, it is these urban workers who have the greatest economic impact; keeping them fed will have a far greater impact on the relative wealth of nations than proping even agrarian sectors. This is the problem that I’ve always had with Fair Trade; it seems to me to be a vehicle for exporting western agrarian romanticism, when what the developing world needs is a more pragmatic look at what is required, and accordingly targetted stimulus to make the most difference. 

 

Sadly, the victim’s victim in this case is the children, who are by far the most likely to go hungry. If a child remains malnourished for more than two years, the concequence is almost always stunted growth – an uncurable lifetime of physical and mental disability, and potentially a genetic factor for the next generation. The food market has been tight for three years already; a short-term solution is clearly needed.

 

Solutions are possible – no, it would be better to say that solutions are already potentially present. The world already produces more food than it requires. Supply needs to be boosted, as the population will keep growing, but the economic mechanisms that control the matching of supply and demand for food need to be reformed. The impediments are threefold: public romanticism, political populism and economic cynicism.

 

I’ve already touched on western agrarian romanticism, but to make my point more explicit here: the West needs to end its love affair with farmers, both its own and those in the third world. The “buy locally” movement in Europe and America is commendable, but Britain, America, France and countries like it all produce radically more food than it could ever consume, largely thanks to government subsidies and farmers union pressure on quotas, each of which have broad appeal amongst the population at large. This, however, is special treatment, and it is distortative. If these policies were being put in place for houses instead of grain, then the outcome would be ruinous. Subsidising grain is more acceptable than subsidising houses, for two reasons; firstly, because of the rural idyll; and secondly, because subsidised surplus grain can always be dumped – unsubsidised surplus grain, of course, would have to be sold, overseas if need be, thus easing the pressure on global prices. Farming in the west is not a competitive business; it is not exposed to normal market forces. It needs to be; small farmers are inefficient, while larger organisations, with better investment and more robust defenses against the vagiaries of the market, will help to lower prices at home and thus around the world. There will always be demand for local produce, free-range chickens and organic vegetables; and thus, there will almost certainly always be supply. However, small-scale farming in the rich world is an increasingly harmful anachronism. 

 

Public fetishisation of farmers leads to political populism – always a baleful influence but especially malign in the farming sector. From corn subsidies for ethanol in the US to the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe, governments throughout the rich world are responsible for some deeply flawed policy-making in the name of fuelling agrarian romanticism. Worse than that is the pandering that is offered to those afraid of agricultural science. Some 300m acres of the world’s crop area, a full 10%, house genetically modified crops. There is still no evidence of any kind to suggest that it may have any negative effects at all, a decade after the science was globally introduced. But still, almost none of that land is in Europe or Africa. Needless to say, this has had a profound effect on supply, in the continent that would benefit from increased supply the most. 

 

Economic cynicism is fuelled by those bodies that benefit the most from the status quo – governments that put export caps on domestic grain, for example, forcing crops to be dumped in order to keep international prices high, or lobbying groups that keep markets restricted and subsidies in place. It is this behaviour that has led to Brazilian sugar ethanol – far more efficient than corn ethanol and significantly cheaper, and greener, to produce – being restricted for import into the US. This, however, is not an area that is likely to change. Economic cynicism will always exist and is essentially uncombatable. It can, however, be worked around.

 

Paul Collier suggests three immediate policy changes that would reverse the trend in food prices quickly: expand large commercial farms, end the ban on GM crops and do away with US subsidies on ethanol. The end of ethanol subsidy would hopefully sharply reduce the rate at which crop prices rise, due to the influx of American corn that would be swiftly re-inserted into the global market. The expansion of farms and the wider imposition of GM crops would increase production over the course of the next decade to ensure that prices stay controllable. I would add three more: ending the CAP in Europe and liberalising trade agreements between Europe and Africa, allowing more food to come into Africa from outside but not so artificially priced that it destroys the local markets, and reforming the World Food Program, allowing it to buy and sell food with greater and more targetted efficiency.

 

Politically, all of these propositions are difficult, especially in these times of economic crisis; old industries, such as farming and manufacture, gain significant lustre when banks and house-prices start to take a tumble. However, the arguments for all of them are rational and sound, while the arguments against them tend to be emotional and easily countered. I await a politican with the principle to do the necessary – John McCain looked useful on ethanol subsidies, but I severely doubt that Barack Obama will step to the plate. If the mark of a good politician is the ability to guide citizens away from populism, then I hope that a good politican emerges soon, because there are a few romantic illusions that urgently need shattering.

Fetishising life

October 20th, 2008 | Posted by Aosher in Feminism | General - (0 Comments)

It is not uncommon for those who favour the legal protection of abortion rights to dispute the label that their opponents have chosen for themselves. “Pro-life”, they say, is disingenuous; everyone is pro-life at some base level, but by making the pro-life label their own, the anti-abortionists are implying that pro-abortionists are anti-life by opposition. A cheap trick, I hear. Empty grandstanding, a propagandist rhetorical trick aimed at framing the debate. I think that this belies a fundamental lack of understanding.

The pro-rights view differs, of course, from one group to the next. Broadly speaking, however, most pro-rights groups are “pro-life”, at least to an extent; but any situation in which abortion is a possibility is bound to be much more complex, nuanced and delicate than such a broad-blanket term can possibly hope to encompass. Many proponents of this view think that the term “pro-life” seeks to remove that distinction. In fact, it simply refers to a difference in priority. Anti-abortionists are not unaware of this argument, they just don’t agree with it. They feel that the essential sanctity of life is greater than any confounding nuance or mitigating factor. The term “pro-life” has stuck because it does effectively describe the philosophical basis from which anti-abortionists are working. By arguing strongly against the label “pro-life”, the pro-rightsists are indulging in a little moral hypocrisy; this is possibly not the saddest thing, nor the most surprising, in this most vexed of culture wars, but still disappointingly intellectually dishonest.

The idea of the sanctity of life can be attacked rationally, if one tries. It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but the fetishisation of life is not new; human culture has accepted it as a predicate almost from the get-go. The western view of life is older than Hobbes, but was best described in his Leviathan, where he said that ‘natural law’ forbids one from doing anything “that [...] is destructive of his life, or takes away his means of preserving the same.” 

Religion is a natural disseminator of life-fetishism. Judaism and the faiths that it fathered are untiring in their promotion of the “divine spark” argument. Genesis 9:5 (“And surely the blood of your lives will I require”) is taken as the basis of much Talmudic law on subjects regarding the taking of life; if our lives belong to God, then it is of course immoral for us to do with them as we will. Christianity has the interesting distinction of being the only religion to overtly depict the act of suicide in its holy book; in fact, their were no less than seven suicides in the bible, and a early, heretic, sect of Christianity even believed that martyrdom, and thus Heaven, was only attainable through suicide. It wasn’t until the sixth century AD that St Augustine justified the act of suicide as a sin, based on the sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”.) This is now an accepted orthodoxy, and has informed debates over the sanctity of life ever since, even though the Catholic Church is currently more progressive – the catechism currently states that “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide”; and goes on to say “We should not despair for the eternal salvation of those who have taken their own lives… God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance.” 

Islam is the only religion to explicitly forbid suicide, both in the Qu’ran (“And do not kill yourself, surely Allah is most merciful unto you”, 4:29) and in hadith (“He who commits suicide to himself by throttling will continue throttling in hellfire”). Islam was, of course, strongly influenced by eastern religion as well as the Abrahamic tradition. The Buddhist faith, of course, is possibly the most pacifistic of the major religions, and largely for life-fetishising reasons: one of the first things that the Buddhist is taught is to refrain from the destruction of life. Hinduism is massively diverse, but generally speaking, dharma is thought to protect the sanctity of life. Shinto is perhaps the most equivocal religion on the subject of life, but still it still states that the purpose of life is to live, and calls death “pollution”.

GK Chesterton may seem to have vocalised the Christian orthodoxy on the subject when he called suicide “the absolute and ultimate evil” can equated the act of suicide to “destroying the world”, but a different reading could see this as more of a paean to experience; he describes it as a “refusal to take an interest in existence”, exposing his disgust as more earthly than ecumenical. This is not an uncommon line of secular argument. Camus and Sartre both argued that life should be embraced in all of its absurd glory; Kant, and his deontologist successors, took the religion out of Calvinist and Descartean arguments on Divine Right, arguing that good acts are good without qualification; but they kept many of the assumptions that underpinned religious teachings on life. Kant described suicide as “[an] action [inconsistent] with the idea of humanity as an end in itself.” 

But Kant’s arguments are interesting, as they serve to expose the thought processes that lead to these arguments being woven into the fabric of religion. The idea of “humanity as an end in itself” is no different from humanity in God’s service or humanity in the pursuit of karma. The polytheistic mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia were rather more mute on moral sermonising than their monotheistic successors; the issue of the sanctity of life first achieved prominence in the west with Judaism, possibly adopted from Hinduism but equally possibly adopted independently. But the idea of humanity as a tool of humanity is much older. A legend from ancient Sumer says “We Gods live as Gods; you men live as men;” legends such as the Epic of Gilgamesh place a heavy emphasis on immortality as a virtuous aim. 

So if the sanctity of life can be reduced to Kant’s ideal of humanity as an objective end, then it becomes vulnerable to all sorts of attack. What if humanity is not an end, but ameans to an end? Epicurean living defines life as a vehicle, with which one can seek modest pleasures, attain freedom of fear through knowledge and companionship, and be temperate. The Epicurean goal was to pursue quasi-ascetic, moderate consumption in order to gain freedom from appetites and desires, until one gracefully reaches death – “because death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation.” The Cynics treated death as part of living according to nature; even suicide was regarded as a natural facet of the human condition; Marcus Aureleus considered suicide not just acceptable, but a perfectly ethical and necessary action in some respects. Hugh Arthur Clough wrote “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive”; David Hume wrote that suicide was no more sacrilegious than saving the life of someone whose death would be otherwise inevitable, as either way, the only agency that potentially interferes with God’s will is yourself. 

All of which is attacking the point in rather a circular fashion. What I have not done is to present an argument by which it is morally acceptable to kill, either by abortion, euthanasia, or murder; those arguments are being, and will continue to be, thrashed out elsewhere. All that I have sought to do is to look at one specific argument which crops up with alarming regularity, and argument that I find specious: the idea that life has some intrinsic moral worth that must trump all other considerations. Different situations have different criteria for judgement, but a life, if it has any value at all, has a value that is defined only by its possessor.

People who fetishise life will sacrifice all sorts of freedoms, experiences and opportunities in the defence of their intangible essence, but this is a trap; because if life is the pursuit of humanity then that means accepting humanity in its fullest extent.

 

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