The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else.
Oh God, you’re probably thinking. Not abortion. We’ve already read a cover article about that. Can’t you write about something else, with some laughs in it? British agents pretending not to realise when they hand people over to tyrants for torture, for example? And I won’t lie, I thought about that, and I had a particularly nice gag lined up about a man from MI6 claiming not to realise that bears shat in the woods (‘We were given assurances, by the bears, that they had invested in a chemical toilet’) but, as MPs debate the Health and Social Care Bill, and the shrieking begins in earnest, it’s abortion which has grasped my goat.
Thing is, everybody is winging it. I interviewed the scientist Brian Cox once, and he made the quite wise and undeniably scientific observation that if you ever come across a debate, and there appears to be an ideological or religious homogeneity to one side of it, then whatever anybody tells you, it’s a reasonable assumption that this is not a debate about science. He was talking about climate change at the time (don’t write in) but the point is as valid (more valid) about abortion. Because abortion isn’t a scientific debate. It’s an ethical one. It’s about whether it is right, for the sake of convenience, to snuff out what would otherwise become a life.
It’s quite a small, mean word for what I’m talking about, ‘convenience’, but I’m afraid I can’t think of a better one. For the sake of it, I’m of the view that abortion is a thing worth fighting for. And I’m aware that, written down, that looks terrifyingly callous, but the reason why it look that way goes right to the heart of my whole point.
I got in terrible trouble, once, when I wrote a column which suggested that people with faith (among whom I do not number) had a clearer moral code than those without. People wrote to me, saying ‘You’ve just called my wife and I immoral scum and we’re actually lovely! I hope you die!’ quite a lot. My name was dirt on one of those slavish Richard Dawkins websites, and A.C. Grayling even wrote an article about how stupid I was.
This was all frankly quite flattering, but they’d missed the point. Very possibly I hadn’t made the point terribly well, but they’d missed it, all the same. I wasn’t saying atheists couldn’t be good. Of course they can be good; indeed, they’re probably under even more pressure to be good, just to keep the Pope on the back foot. What I was saying was that it’s just quite a lot harder for non-believers to explain what ‘good’ means. They (we) have to talk about respect and humanity, but both go back to ethics, and without God, ethics goes back to… what?
Convenience. Ultimately, you just have to make a call. You have to say, ‘This is what feels right, and this is the point at which I’m going to decide that, for the sake of convenience, I’m prepared to sanction something that feels a bit wrong, because blindly following my initial emotional responses every time seems to be throwing up complications.’ It’s convenient for people not to kill each other. It’s convenient for them not to rape or burgle. It’s convenient to have a notion of humanity that embraces and formalises all this. Inconvenience, in this respect, would be deeply ugly. It’s just a bit scary to acknowledge the possibility that it all might be built on sand.
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Speaking of which, somebody nicked my bikes. I think it was during the riots the other week, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t notice for ages, not until I found myself in my shed, gazing stupidly at the space where the pair of them weren’t. You know how it is. You look, you look away, you look again. Big old bike-shaped hole.
The police came around the next day and took a statement at the kitchen table. ‘I’m not expecting to get them back,’ I told them at one point, mainly to fill the embarrassing silence which developed when one of them was having such a hard time spelling the word ‘hybrid’. But, while his colleague frowned into her notebook, first writing the word ‘high’ and then staring at it for ages, her colleague told me that, actually, the chances were pretty good. They were raiding a lot of houses, he said, because of the obvious, and most likely the person who had broken into my shed had also been looting Tottenham Hale retail park, and was known to the police.
Ken Clarke says that 75 per cent of those charged with looting who were over the age of 18 already had criminal records. In a sense, I suppose this is rather heartening. I mean, at least it’s the same people, doing it again and again. From the way David Cameron goes on, you’d think that half of Britain was prepared to steal my bikes. That wouldn’t be convenient at all.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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