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I Don’t Get It
When a pregnant woman arrives at the abortion clinic in the morning, she’s carrying a living being within her body. The fetus is swimming around in there, making faces, waving her arms, grabbing her piggy-toes, sucking her thumb, as innocent as a human being can be. When the woman leaves the clinic, that kid is dead. Abortion clinics are places where small human beings are killed, one after another, all day long. I don’t approve of blowing up abortion clinics, but I get the logic of it. Blow it up, and fewer babies die.
And I get the logic, too, of murdering an abortion doctor. Again, I don’t approve of it, but I understand it. Dr. George Tiller was an abortion doctor. When Dr. Tiller walked into a procedure room, the human fetus was alive. When he walked out, the fetus was dead. He—the doctor— directly and deliberately killed thousands of human beings; he specialized in terminating the post-viable fetus and made upwards of a million dollars a year doing it. And no, these were not by and large babies destined to die shortly after birth or live agonizing lives as catastrophically malformed creatures. Their mothers did not want them, and were willing to pay, in cash, for Dr. Tiller to kill them. So he did.
While teaching my first logic class (as a grad student, Baylor University, Fall of 2008), I made a rookie mistake. A student asked me if the false dilemma fallacy was the same thing as the false dichotomy fallacy. I said yes.
The Philosopher Aristotle divided persuasion into three parts: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Traditionally, we have thought of them as three separate modes of persuasion, I propose we think of them as three connected parts of shaping one’s geography of reason.
