Let me first of all say ‘thank you’ to James for a fascinating paper and book. The opportunity
to engage your work in preparing this response has been a constructive experience for me and has produced quite a bit of thought. Some of that thought, as will become clear, is somewhat critical, but I hope that it will also be clear that all of it puts me heavily in your debt.
To counter the tendency for debates about abortion to divide along lines of religious versus secular, James calls our attention to a stream of philosophical thought that can challenge the presumption that all secular philosophy supports the legal status quo. Phenomenology, he argues, is a rival philosophical tradition that calls into question many of the seemingly settled judgments of secular moral thinking about abortion. This seems to me an important move, and one for which we should be grateful.
There are, however, complications. …
The full paper is attached to this post as a PDF.
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