Ethos is the guiding principle, the underlying morality, the why and wherefore. I woke up this morning and checked my emails and FB feed, as usual. If you do not do these things, you are a wiser and probably healthier person than I.
One of the items that I encountered in my digital journey this morning was a commentary on The Freedom Caucus – ironically named since they are about everything except freedom. They want to control your reproductive decisions, what your children can read, whether you can help your child navigate the ambiguities of gender identity, when and how you can vote, and myriad things that you and I have taken for granted as part of freedom.
This kind of linguistic claim on the moral high ground always pisses me off. See my blog post on Las Cabronas. Today, that post sent me on a two-hour journey to refresh my memory of John Locke‘s writings. You will recall that Locke was a 17th Century English Philosopher.
My Master’s degree minor was in philosophy. It wasn’t the philosophy of laws, government, religion or anything like that. It was Propositional and Predicate Calculus, theory of natural language, Epistemology, and other topics that informed the Computer Science of my day as a graduate student. The more ubiquitous computing has become, the more important that Philosophy has become. For example, what are the moral obligations, if any, of autonomous AI making life and death decisions?
Later, as a physician, philosophy became still more important to me in helping me address how I (we) should relate to fellow humans (patients) as well as in addressing issues of autonomy. That’s when I first sat down to read Locke seriously.
As regards the law, Locke argued that Natural Law gave each person the right to Life, Liberty, and Property. You will recall that our Declaration of Independence (DoI) says that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The DoI echoes John Locke’s writings a hundred years earlier. Still, there is a subtle difference between Locke’s statement and that which appears in the DoI. Locke’s notion of property included the idea that every person owns his or her own body – the first property. Other property might become part of his or her ownership by the investment/expenditure of his/her labor to add value to property otherwise unclaimed – common property, as it were. I mention this only to emphasize that we are each the owner of our own body. No one else can claim our flesh without our expressed consent. Think about that, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Locke distinguished Natural Law from Divine Law – the latter being revealed to and binding upon individuals or groups rather than to humanity at large. The Ten Commandments, for instance, are addressed to the children of Israel – not to all humanity. No one else is bound by them.
And this brings me to Dobbs and abortion, of course. To deny reproductive autonomy to women is to deprive half of humanity of the right to lord over oneself as Locke once wrote. It denies women of the right to property – their own bodies and how to use them.
Locke argued that when a government violated Natural Law, that the governed had a just cause to rise up against that government. Remember the American Revolution phrase of “No Taxation without Representation?” It basically said that one should not be deprived of property without the consent of those whose property was being taken.
That’s where we stand with Dobbs today. American women have been deprived of their bodily autonomy, arguably the most sacred of properties, without their consent. If you think this is a religious issue about the unborn or some such nonsense, please be aware that half of us don’t believe in your God fantasy or your religious delusions. We have arrived at a Declaration of Independence moment, and those who stand against it will feel the resistance and fury of those whose rights have been stolen.
Beware, women will not acquiesce to reproductive slavery. And, among men, they have allies.