The Three Whisky Happy Hour: No Leaking Here

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J. Budziszewski’s book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide offers an excellent and accessible discussion of the philosophical issue at the root of John Yoo’s exit question.

The Republican response to Dobbs has been very disappointing to me, someone who’s not pro-abortion as much as I do not want it to be illegal. (My preferred cutoff date is 8 weeks, but I would compromise at 15 weeks, per Roe.) Progressive, well-to-do, elite-schools-educated white women don’t care a whit about principles and certainly know nothing about the democratic norms which they claim only Trump has broken. They ridiculously feel under attack by right-wing Christians of all stripes and so see Dobbs as taking their rights away (which is why they continue to refuse to see the Biden administration’s unmitigated failures). Their delusion is only bolstered by the Texas judge’s ruling on the abortion pill, South Carolina’s proposal to charge women who get an abortion with murder, and by DeSantis signing the bill to limit abortion to six weeks. I had hoped that state legislatures would not act without receiving vigorous public input and comment—that there would be democratic debates in every state. But no. The leaders of both parties seem unwilling to hold onto the center. If Republicans don’t wise up, pro-life voters could see passage of a national right to abortion up to 22 weeks. . . . If I felt compelled to do something about abortion, I would drop politics entirely and focus only on the establishment of maternity clinics and do everything I could to get that information out into the public. That effort has a far greater potential of “saving babies” than showing people pictures of dead fetuses (though morally justified) and of truly changing hearts and minds.

Leslie Watkins (View Comment):

If I felt compelled to do something about abortion, I would drop politics entirely and focus only on the establishment of maternity clinics and do everything I could to get that information out into the public. That effort has a far greater potential of “saving babies” than showing people pictures of dead fetuses (though morally justified) and of truly changing hearts and minds.

*** DING DING DING ***

1000%

***Drop the legal threats.*** The legal threats are going nowhere, politically. In fact, they are definitively going south. They are ***NEVER *** not going south.

Hand out Plan B pills, instead.

The "amount" of people backing or not backing a particular thing, or how the question is asked is an easy logical way to look at it; but I think there is a deeper explanation to John's question. ALSO, I'm not sure if that answers the question he actually asked. How I understood it was: If natural right is so natural, why don't people naturally look at the world through that lens?

“If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Is it reasonable to tweak the quote to say something like "if what is true and good were to govern all man's rationality, neither external or internal controls on man's understanding of what is right would be necessary"

Mankind has the ability to choose between good and evil, the ability to be tricked, manipulated and lead down false paths. If that wasn't true, then all the marketing departments at the most successful companies wouldn't exist. Sophistry wouldn't be effective.

That doesn't mean natural rights are not true, especially when they are at odds with the most power hungry and the most insidious of us, often found in activist groups and governments of all kinds.

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One other perspective, is maybe the reason the masses don't naturally come to these conclusions is because of human's ability to manipulate and change our environments so easily and successfully. It's hot out? We turn on the AC. There is a gash in the earth where we want a road? We build a bridge. There is some illness? We have medicine that saves someone who would have otherwise died.

Because people see the ability to manipulate nature (in a broad sense), do you fault the masses in thinking that abortion isn't just another one of those ways to solve an inconvenient obstacle? After all, it works for so many other obstacles...

If we stop and think, I believe people naturally agree with natural rights. The life of the average person is so fast, changing and manipulated as it is, that people don't have the chance to come to these conclusions. Instead we have to seek these points out from @Lucretia on the Powerline Podcase...

Anecdotally, when I have the opportunity to quickly walk people through a natural rights perspective on something, I never get a reply that says "YOUR WRONG" or "that's not the right way to look at it". They either take the point at face value with no pushback (which would be John's answer to coming to that conclusion naturally), or they say nothing while in deep though and the conversation moves on to something else; as being forceful and humiliating isn't always the best course of action (although pleasurable, like how Steve and John get pushed around time to time by you know who).