We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident
Some principles are so obvious they should not have to be defended. Instead, they can be universally known through intuition and should merely be accepted. That’s why, when the United States’ The Declaration of Independence declares, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” it precedes the statement with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
In preparation for my debate against Peter Singer, I discovered that he, like the Declaration of Independence, believes that some truths are self-evident. In his 1972 essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality he wrote,
“I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this...I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.”
Notice what Peter does here: He makes a claim and then expressly refuses to defend it. Why? Because it is self-evident; although there are a minority who might disagree, he does not engage them and instead labels such thinking as being an “eccentric” position.
As the saying goes, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” I therefore chose to follow in Peter’s footsteps in my opening remarks and I, too, decided to make claims that I would not defend but instead take as assumed (knowing that if a minority disagreed, such a view could fairly be labelled as “eccentric”). My positions were as follows:
1) All humans are equal and it is wrong to intentionally end the life of an innocent human.
2) Parents have a responsibility to care for their children, not kill them.
These are not controversial claims. They are nearly universally accepted. My task was not to defend these, but to defend their applicability to the pre-born and make the case that one can conclude abortion is wrong based on evidence I provide that abortion violates these two well-established principles.
Of course, Peter had a thing or two to say about my position (disagreeing with the assumptions); hence, I’ve created this multi-part series reflecting on my debate with the man who cites journalists as calling him the “world’s most influential living philosopher.”