Spent the day on an out-of-town adventure with a Friend of Crescat. Despite attempting to stop at three bookstores-- one full of romance novels, one without any books, and one that was closed-- we acquired no new books, which is probably for the better given that I ought to be reading Don FehrenBacher's The Dred Scott Case.

We did, however:

1: Acquire (and devour) a lobster roll from Johnny Ad's (I suppose it should be no surprise that fresh lobster, butter, and bread are this delicious, but still, who knew?)

2: Try, and fail, to stop at a now-demolished marble store.

3: Go to the beach in Old Saybrook. In the rain.

4: Go to the Gillette Castle, also in the rain. Since it was closed, we had the grounds to ourselves, and could stand around and watch the ferry.

5: Buy apple cider, a basil plant, and a very yummy Humboldt Fog cheese.

6: Eat ice cream at Wentworth's.

7: Felicitously find Liuzzi's and buy some delicious Scamorza (for pizza) and a new item, the Sweet Grass Thomasville Tomme.

I thought the Humboldt Fog was transporting, but the Friend of Crescat preferred the Thomasville Tomme. We both agreed that the pizza was good.

Quaker continues to argue that a belief that 1, abortion is murder for which abortion providers should be punished but 2, women who seek abortions should not be punished for them must rest on some presumed denial of full agency to women. (Note that he is not arguing that abortion bans themselves deny moral agency to women-- he is complaining that bans that are too lax do.)

I still don't see it. The decision to punish the provider but let the mother go free is just one of many possible and reasonable moral compromises. It needn't stem from a belief that women are not autonomous moral agents-- one might just think that deterrence will be more effective when practiced on the supply side, that punishing mothers as well as doctors would lead to an undue blossoming of the underground abortion market, would make women more likely to attempt (dangerously) to force miscarriages on themselves, etc. Or it could stem from a belief not that women aren't autonomous moral agents but just that the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and the like are in fact likely to serve as deterrent enough.

Moral decisions are messy, and it is unfair to grade moral compromises with syllogistic impatience, or to assume that simply because one treats unique situations uniquely that one must have some sinister motive afoot.

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it: could someone explain to me how warrantless wiretapping of solely domestic calls on the president's say-so doesn't exceed his Article II authority and violate the Fourth Amendment into the bargain? Prof. Kerr?

While I appreciate Will's thoughtful response to my initial criticisms, I confess I'm still not convinced, for a couple of reasons.

I would readily agree that the legal and moral contours of murder can (and often are) different, that the law does not necessarily treat all murders the same, and that this is perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy. Yet I'm bothered by the next clause of the argument. It is not simply that the commission of an abortion is treated differently from some murders committed by those of sound mind, but that it is treated differently from all murders of that kind. I can't think of a single type of homicide, barrring self-defense (which I already discussed), that is not punished in some way by the criminal justice system. What justification is there for this particular form of homicide to stand apart?

Actually, in a certain sort of way, the previous paragraph is almost beside the point. Even if the moral and the legal contours of murder may differ, they overlap at least to an extent in the case of abortion. That is, those who believe that abortion is murder also believe that the commission of such murder should be punished by the legal system. They believe that carrying out an abortion is not only a sin but a crime. Yet procuring that abortion is not. Why? From a moral standpoint, suborning a sinful act is certainly itself sinful; from a legal standpoint, suborning a crime is itself criminal; suborning murder through money can itself be a capital crime. Why is this crime different from all other crimes?

In terms of the question of agency: I would point out that there is a difference between one-off exercises of clemency or nullification based on the particular facts and circumstances of the case, and a general a priori determination that those circumstances will apply in every case. But leave that aside for a second. Will's argument seems to be that the pro-life people he's talking about view desperation as the sort of mitigating circumstances that should preclude punishment in the abortion context. Why? Because desperate women are forced into a dreadful action, and should thus be treated with mercy. But what about infanticide? We know that women who give birth to a child and then abandon it to die are subject to punishment by the justice system; yet such people, whatever else one might think of them, are pretty darn desperate. And from the point of view of a pro-life person, there is no moral difference between infanticide and abortion. So why does one desperate woman who kills her baby get treated differently from another?

Yet even that argument is begging a question: why assume that these women are desperate? To say that abortion is something that certain people "turn to in desperation," implies that this is a choice they would not normally make, that they have been effectively forced into a dreadful option. I would argue that this sort of a priori assumption about the women who have abortions and the reasons behind their doing so itself denies full moral agency to women. It denies the possibility that they might have made a calm, fully-reasoned choice to have an abortion, and implies that they are not fully responsible for their actions because they were acting under some kind of duress. I don't see how that's consistent with a view of women as fully adult, fully autonomous moral actors.