The desire to murder

The desire to murder
Olavo de Carvalho
Jornal da Tarde, January 22nd, 1998
(This translation has not been reviewed by the author)

My readers and friends inquire about my opinion on abortion. However, being prone to sparing the efforts, my brain refuses to create an opinion about anything whatsoever it be, except when it finds a good reason to do so. Standing before any non specific problem, my instinctive reaction is to hold forth to my natural right to not think about the matter.

But while trying to defend this right, my mind asks why this cursed problem exists in the first place. Thus, what started as a decision to not think ends up being an investigation of principles, that is, the greatest philosophical enterprise that could exist.

The future authors of my depreciative biographies will say, and rightly so, that I became a philosopher because I was too lazy to think. But, since laziness grades the matters according to the minimum priority of attention, I have started to develop an acute sense of the distinction between the problems posed by the nature of things and the problems that exist just because some people want it to exist.

Well, the problem of abortion belongs, according to all evidences, to this second type. The dispute about abortion exists because the practice of abortion exists and not the opposite. Someone decides in favor of abortion - that is the premise of the existence of the abortion debate. But the premise of a debate cannot be its own logical conclusion. The option for abortion, preceding all discussion, is unaccessible to a debate. The abortionist is an abortionist by his own decision, which does not offer any reason. This freedom is stated directly by the very act of realization, and, when multiplied by millions, it becomes a freedom recognized in general and consolidated into a "right".

It is for this reason that the public discourse in favor of abortion avoids the moral problem and holds tight to the legal and political grounds: the abortionists don't want to propose a value, they want merely to rule and establish a right (and this right, in theory, can even coexist with the moral condemnation of the act).

As for the content of the debate, the opponents of abortion state that the fetus is a human being, that to kill it is a crime of homicide. The abortionists allege that the fetus is just a piece of tissue, a part of the mother's body, who has to have a right to cut it off at will. In the current score of this dispute, none of the sides managed to convince the other. And it is not even reasonable to expect it, since there is not even a minimal consensus in the current civilization about what belongs and what does not belong to the human nature, there are no common premises that could serve as basis to uneven the score.

But the tie itself ends up transforming the discussion: we have left an ethical-metaphysic dispute that is unsolvable in the current conditions of the Western culture and we have arrived at a simple mathematical equation whose solution must be, in principle, identical and provable to any person capable of understanding it.

This equation is formulated as follows: if there are 50% of probability that the fetus is human and 50% of probability that it is not, to bet in the latter hypothesis is, literally, to choose an act that has 50% of chances of being a homicide.

With this perspective, the whole issue becomes clear to even the most obstinate of all minds. Since there is no absolute certainty of the non-humanity of the fetus, to extirpate it is to make a moral (or immoral) decision in the dark. We can preserve the life of this being and discover later that we have wasted our highest ethical feelings in a vain defense of what was, in the bottom line, a mere thing. But we also can decide to destroy it under the risk of discovering too late that it was a human being.

Is it right to choose between a precaution and an irresponsible bet? Who, armed with a gun, would believe to have the right to pull the trigger knowing that there are 50% of chances of killing an innocent being? In other words: to bet in the non-humanity of the fetus is to leave the survival or death of a human being to the flip of a coin.

Once arriving at this point of the reasoning, all points for abortion become anti-abortion. We have left the ground of the undetermined and found a worldwide consensus firmly established: no defensible or indefensible advantage, no real or hypothetic benefit can justify that the life of a human being be put at risk in a bet.

However, as we have already seen, the pro-abortion option precedes all discussion and this is the reason for which the abortionist hates and denounces as "repressive violence" all of the evidences presented against it. The pro-abortion decision, being the premise of the debate, could not seek anything other than the ex post facto legitimization of something that has already been decided irreversibly, with or without debate.

The abortionist would not concede not even before a full proof of the humanity of the fetus, and even less so before a mere evaluation of the moral risk. He simply wants to incur in the risk, even with zero chances of succeeding. He wants because he wants. To him, the death of the undesired fetuses is a question of "honor": to display, through acts and not reasoning, a self-founded freedom that dispenses with reasons, a Nietzschean pride for which the least of the objections is still an intolerable constraint.

I believe I have found the reason why my mind refused stubbornly to think about the matter. It is of no use all the reasoning before the brutal and irrational affirmation of the pure desire to murder. Of course, in several abortionists, this desire stays in the subconscious level, hidden under a veil of humanitarian rationalizations, which are strengthened by the endorsement from the media and corroborated by the screams of the militants. But it is also very clear that it is futile to argue with people so capable of lying to themselves so tenaciously.