Debating morality in a liberal age

If liberalism is to be reduced to any single position it is the belief that autonomy is the overriding good in life.

I was reminded of this when reading a Twitter debate about abortion. The anti-abortionists were arguing that a woman should not take the life of the fetus in her womb. The pro-abortionist rejected this on the basis that the woman's autonomy trumped everything else.

He took this position to its logical conclusion in tweets like the following:

Something becomes moral, in this point of view, not because of its intrinsic nature, but if it is consensual. If a fetus fails to gain consent from its mother to live in her womb, its position becomes morally untenable. That is where the logic of making autonomy the ultimate test of morality - the ultimate good - takes us.

Update: A participant in the debate added what I think is a good insight into the possible mindset of liberals like "idahogie". It's worth considering:

Liberal modernity leads to Amanda Marcotte

I visited Dalrock's site and was interested to find the following quote on abortion by feminist Amanda Marcotte:

…[what a woman] wants trumps the non-existent desires of a mindless pre-person that is so small it can be removed in about two minutes during an outpatient procedure. Your cavities fight harder to stay in place.

That is the terrible logic of a liberal morality. For liberals there is no objective right and wrong. What is good is the act of individual choosing, desiring, will-making. For Amanda Marcotte, since the foetus cannot choose, desire or express will it is outside of the moral equation and has no rights. Therefore, all that matters morally are the wants of the mother.

Note too the dangers of the modernist view as expressed by Marcotte. She comes very close to expressing the idea that the person with the strongest will, the strongest will to power, has thereby demonstrated a superior moral status.

I decided to visit the link to Marcotte's original piece to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting her. The piece is interesting because Marcotte is very honest in the way she describes her attitudes. It's a look into the liberal, modernist mindset. Here is Marcotte explaining why, no matter what social policies are in place, she will never want a baby:

You can give me gold-plated day care and an awesome public school right on the street corner and start paying me 15% more at work, and I still do not want a baby. I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding. No matter how much free day care you throw at women, babies are still time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. No matter how flexible you make my work schedule, my entire life would be overturned by a baby. I like  my life how it is, with my ability to do what I want when I want without having to arrange for a babysitter. I like being able to watch True Detective right now and not wait until baby is in bed. I like sex in any room of the house I please. I don’t want a baby. I’ve heard your pro-baby arguments. Glad those work for you, but they are unconvincing to me. Nothing will make me want a baby.

She wants her autonomy - her freedom to do whatever she likes, whenever she likes - more than she wants the fulfilment of motherhood. And she is too much of a hedonist to give up a pleasure seeking lifestyle. Which is why she is so strongly in favour of abortion:

This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion. Given the choice between living my life how I please and having my body within my control and the fate of a lentil-sized, brainless embryo that has half a chance of dying on its own anyway, I choose me.

What I would say to fellow traditionalists at this point is that it's not enough to merely condemn Marcotte's moral position. Her moral position points to much deeper failings within modern society which we cannot ignore or pretend don't exist. Society is trending to exactly the mindset that Marcotte is honest enough to describe - the individualistic, hedonistic one. It is an end point of liberal modernity.

Marcotte herself concludes her piece with the admission that she is selfish and hedonistic, but she believes that this is how women should be and that it is only "gender norms" that make women anything else:

So, reading those three paragraphs above? I bet at some point you recoiled a bit, even if you don’t want to have recoiled a bit. Don’t I sound selfish? Hedonistic? Isn’t there something very unfeminine about my bluntness here? Hell, I’m performing against gender norms so hard that even I recoil a little. This is actually what I think, and I feel zero guilt about it, but I know that saying so out loud will cause people to want to hit me with the Bad Woman ruler, and that causes a little dread.

Amanda Marcotte wants a society built on hedonism and selfishness. With no babies. It's not much of a plan.