Going, Going, Gone: the diminution of the self.

In the course of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the newest justice of the United States Supreme Court, said that the right to abortion is essential to a woman's autonomy.

The word is striking. Its etymology gives its meaning: self-rule, from the Greek word "nomos"--rendered into English as "rule" or "law." If you are autonomous, you are self-governing. You give the law to yourself, as opposed to having it imposed on you by someone else.

In connecting abortion and autonomy, Justice Ginsburg hit a certain nail right on the head. Prochoice people come in many varieties. At one end of the spectrum is the mere pragmatist, who opines: "I don't know if abortion is right or wrong, but I'm sure glad my girlfriend got one." At the other end is the true-believing ideologue, who dogmatizes: "The right to abortion is among a small number of fundamental human rights, and therefore it must not be infringed upon in any way." In saying abortion is essential to a woman's autonomy, Ginsburg spoke in the precise accents of those at the ideological end of the continuum. I don't say she is herself an ideologue; only time will tell. But she found just the right word to express the ideological point of view. No wonder the abortion radicals have overcome their initial reservations about her.

It does not take much listening to prochoice true believers in order to grasp that autonomy is their cardinal issue. What's at stake for them in abortion is not, except incidentally, sexual conduct or population control or health or money or getting through college or avoiding so-called "unwanted children" or any of the myriad of reasons commonly given to justify abortion rights. At bottom, the issue is moral autonomy. When the ideologue demonstrates a sense of outrage at the prospect of even the slightest legal restrictions on abortion, she (usually she, though on occasions he) is totally sincere. Anti-abortion legislation is seen as tantamount to telling women that they are not capable of self-rule; that they are not free agents; that they are not fully adult (a privilege reserved for men); that they are to remain in a state of quasi-servitude.

The concept of moral autonomy was introduced into modem philosophy by Immanuel Kant late in the eighteenth century. Kant was convinced that the freedom and dignity of the human person required that the individual obey only those laws given by himself or herself. To have laws imposed on one from the outside, even when the outside lawgiver is God, is to be in the unhappy condition of heteronomy. This was a radical thought indeed, and at first glance it would seem to lead to anarchy. For if we have a million different individuals giving law to themselves, won't this result in a million different laws? You, for instance, may think stealing is always wrong; I may think it is permissible in extreme situations; and this third fellow (the one who never returns your pen when you let him borrow it) thinks one is free to steal whenever one likes.

But not to worry. Kant, though a theoretical radical, was a practical traditionalist. True, I must obey only myself, you must obey only yourself, Jones must obey only himself, etc. But what if it turns out that my lawgiving self, your lawgiving self, and Jones's lawgiving self are the same self? This is pretty much what Kant concluded: though we are different selves for many purposes, we have in common an identical lawgiving self, called Practical Reason. If so, then a million people don't enact a million laws; there is one law for all; anarchy is prevented; autonomy and universality are reconciled, living happily together ever after.

Whether we agree with this theory or not, it reminds us that the concept of moral autonomy makes no sense apart from the concept of self. If I am to obey only my self, then everything depends on how I conceive this self. If (Kant-like) I think of my self as Practical Reason, then obedience to self is obedience to universal law. If (Plato-like) I conceive my self as a soul having a destiny beyond the grave, then I must act in obedience to the immortal interests of this soul. If (Aristotle-like) I conceive my self as a rational substance whose full reality is achieved in the course of a lifetime, then I should act in obedience to the lifetime interests of this substance.

Now what theory of self is held by abortion ideologues? Unfortunately the prochoice movement has published no official metaphysics, so we have no authoritative account of its theory. But it seems safe to say that among prochoice ideologues neither a Kantian nor a Platonic nor (despite some superficial resemblances) an Aristotelian conception of self prevails. The self that is obeyed when an abortion decision is made is the temporary self, the self of today, the self that exists at the moment of decision. The idea is that as long as the woman obeys this ephemeral self, she is autonomous. It doesn't matter that in obeying the temporary self she may have violated the deepest requirements of her substantial self or immortal self or universal self.

"But wait a minute!" someone will object. "These fanciful notions of universal or immortal or rational-substance selves are highly dubious. In a pluralist society we cannot operate on the basis of such premises. If you wish to hold grandiose notions of the self in private, that's your business. But for public policy purposes, we have no choice but to stick to a concept of the empirical self that no one can doubt, which is the self of the moment: the minimal self."

Exactly: the minimal self. The concept of morality and the concept of the self, though two distinct concepts, cannot be separated from each other. Unrestricted abortion has become morally acceptable in America only in association with an attack on the very idea of morality. Increasingly we have come to think of morality as a subjective preference, not an objective requirement; and the further we carry this line of thought, the more acceptable abortion appears, being only one more subjective preference. But this chipping away of the idea of morality is inseparable from an erosion of the idea of self. A minimal morality will beget a minimal self, and vice versa. In contrast to the noise that has accompanied the abortion battle, the erosion of self has been a quiet process--but a process already far advanced, as the foregoing observations remind us.

How ironic, that a movement which exalts the autonomy of self should be in process of destroying the very idea of self. It reminds one of that notorious remark from the Viet Nam War: "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

And how logically consistent, that an ideology which deprives its clients of all but a minimal self should not hesitate to deprive an unborn child of its physical self. For if self is reduced to the decision-making self of the moment, then the unborn not being capable of making a decision, cannot be a self. From which it follows that one may abort without the least bit of a bad conscience. Regarded from this point of view, the act of abortion may be defined as the elimination of a nonself by a minimal self.

In the meantime, best wishes to Justice Ginsburg as she begins her new career. Which is to say, let's hope her judicial conscience gets the better of her ideological propensities.