Let’s say, just for imagination’s sake, that you’re the president of the student club for a political party whose fortunes are looking increasingly desire. Eight years of your ideological rule has led the country through an era of foreign irresponsibility, economic collapse, and psychosocial manias. Poll after poll shows that voters don’t trust your type to govern the country with any more enlightenment than a printing-press technician at an inspirational poster factory. Worse, your party’s name has become increasingly synonymous with corruption, intellectual banality, and sinister politicking. Now, if you were in this unfortunate situation, wouldn’t you write an article about baby killing, too?

The logical structure of Weatherl’s magnum dopus reminded me a lot of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. In that book, Lewis makes the statement in the first few pages that we all agree there’s some sort of extrapersonal Moral Law known to all human beings. He then proceeds, in effect, to say “Okeydoke, since we all obviously agree on that, let’s get to the heart of things.” Meanwhile, the reader with a bit of sense realizes that Lewis just made an extraordinarily fragile assumption and labeled it common fact. When he continues to say “since we’ve agreed on that, we must thus be Christians,” you can stammer all you want that no, in fact, we haven’t agreed on that, but it won’t make any difference—Lewis has already gone beyond that.

In much the same way, Weatherl presents conjectures as facts and builds his argument on this phantom framework. Early on in the article, he says:

The answer, of course is simple: to legalize abortion is to put a seal of moral acceptability on the procedure.

Ah, simple, see! Personally, I’m a fan of that construct; it’s useful in such phrases as the answer, of course, is simple: the viscosity of the conservative cortex is exactly equal to that of apple butter or the answer, of course, is simple: the syphilis is cured!

All the same, it doesn’t work so well here. Why? Because to legalize abortion is not to put a seal of moral acceptability on the procedure.

The fact that we’ve lurched so far into a theo-political nexus that somebody can pass off that argument in a campus newspaper is quite worrisom. Since when are we limited to a low-resolution moral faculty, one in which our own values can make no distinction between private and public morality? There are plenty of things in this country which are legal—commercial television, pornography, Ayn Rand novels, the Ku Klux Klan, to name a few—which I have serious degrees of moral opposition to. But to suggest that any of those things should be illegal would be to presume that my own moral figuring is more inherently just than anyone else’s. Narcissist though I may be, I’m not willing to make that claim.

The thing is, each person has their own unique catalog of personal morality. As a consequence, public morality will always have to deviate from private morality on a huge number of issues, or else become ideological slaughtering-ground as different parties compete to invoke their moral idiosyncrasies onto everyone else.