Читать книгу The Philosopher's Toolkit - Julian Baggini, Julian Baggini - Страница 46

At its most flagrant, inconsistency is obvious. If I say, ‘All murder is wrong’ and ‘That particular murder was right’, I am clearly being inconsistent, because the second assertion is clearly contrary to the first. (One might be false, both might be false, but both can’t be true.) On a more general level, it would be a bald contradiction to assert both that ‘all murder is wrong’ and ‘not all murder is wrong’. (One must be true and the other false.)

But sometimes inconsistency is difficult to determine. Apparent inconsistency may actually mask a deeper consistency – and vice versa.

Many people, for example, agree that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings. And many of those same people also agree that abortion is morally acceptable. One argument against abortion is based on the claim that these two beliefs are inconsistent. That is, critics claim that it is inconsistent to hold both that ‘It is wrong to kill innocent human beings’ and that ‘It is permissible to destroy living human embryos and fetuses’.

Defenders of the permissibility of abortion, on the other hand, may retort that properly understood the two claims are not inconsistent. A defender of abortion could, for example, claim that embryos are not human beings in the sense normally understood in the prohibition (e.g. conscious or independently living or already‐born human beings). The defender, in other words, might return a rejoinder to the critic that her objection is based on an equivocation (3.3). Alternatively, a defender of abortion might modify the prohibition itself to make the point more clearly (e.g. by claiming that it’s wrong only to kill innocent human beings that have reached a certain level of development, consciousness, or feeling).