Ethics & the Death Penalty & Abortion

Bernardin first writes about the death penalty and does so in terms of what he calls a consistent ethic of life, derived in large part from Catholic social teaching. He says that such teaching is based on two truths bout the human person--human life is sacred, and human life is social:

Because we esteem human life as sacred, we have a duty to protect and foster it at all stages of development, from conception to death, and in all circumstances. Because we acknowledge that human life is also social, society must protect and foster it (Bernardin 60).

The taking of a human life is a momentous event precisely because that life is sacred, and traditional Catholic precepts allow the taking of human life in particular situat

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eft to them without the interference of the law. The "pro-life" side, by contrast, has held that the decisive harm abortion does to the fetus and its right to life removes it from the private realm and makes it a matter of legitimate government regulation (Callahan, "Abortion" 57). Callahan examines the abortion debate as a case study of the problems and paradoxes of the pluralistic preposition: Is it possible, simultaneously and with equal seriousness, to hold that abortion should 1) be left to the individual and private choice of women, and 2) that each such decision should be understood as a genuine moral choice, one that can be good and bad, right and wrong? (Callahan, "Abortion" 57). Callahan finds that the pro-choice movement has been able to make a case for the importance of choice but has only been able to do so by ignoring the larger question of the morality of the choices made. This need not be the case: If, for some people, to have choices is itself the beginning and end of morality, for most people it is just the beginning. It does not end until a supportable, justifiable choice has been made, one that can be judged right or wrong by the individual herself based on some reasonably serious, not patently self-inte
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Approximate Word count = 2074
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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