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The rhetoric of morality in social policy

by Sheila Liaugminas

That heading requires a book instead of a post. But here goes…

The use of moral language is controlled by the thought police of elite media and politics, or at least they try to. So do some bullies in social networking media, who wield it or fight it (depending on the topic) with all their might in the verbal arena. I’d prefer to call it the arena of ideas, which it used to be when Socratic reasoning still mattered, but it’s more a pugilistic boxing arena now with punches thrown and swings taken with words, sometimes mean and angry ones, sometimes deftly honed, sharpened and maneuvered ones that cut a deep slice meant to wound.

Whose morality? is often thrown back at someone trying to reason in moral terms, and it becomes an automatic conversation stopper. So people in the current cultural climate have to learn to argue from reason alone, which still wins the day in the great Catholic intellectual tradition when engaged by anyone open to truth. You can’t argue or debate the definition of marriage in law from the basis of morality anymore. And ‘women’s issues’ has become a runaway train laden with the freight of ‘reproductive justice’ and ‘choice’ and ‘preventive health care services’ and ‘contraceptive coverage’ to stave off the ‘war on women’ and so on.

Where’s this going? Everywhere. I’ve written about semantic engineering since I first discovered the California Medical Association journal’s 1970 editorial.

“It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives… Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected”.

Over four decades later, and 40 years of Roe, acceptance and rejection of ethics have ebbed and flowed.

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