Violence, morality, and the destruction of property (op-ed)

Last year New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a new abortion law.  Pro-life critics claimed the new law allowed abortions up until birth.  That wasn’t true, but the false claim started another round of arguments about abortion.  Pundits on the right and left seized the opportunity to grandstand and denounce their opposition on social media.  One brief Twitter exchange between a NYT-contributor and a pro-life radio host became a story of its own.

The NYT-contributor tweeted: A fetus is not a baby.  A baby is not an unborn or a preborn baby or child.  If your goal is to legislate medical care you have to use medical terminology. 

The pro-life radio host copied and pasted the Oxford dictionary’s definition of the word fetus.  The reply looked like this: Fe·tus (noun): An unborn offspring of a mammal, in particular an unborn human baby more than eight weeks after conception.

The NYT-contributor didn’t respond.

That made the pro-life radio host the victor of the exchange in the eyes of many pro-lifers.  But the NYT-contributor could have responded with the second definition of the word fetus from the “Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing” that states: Fetus – In humans, the product of conception from the end of the eighth week to the moment of birth.  Now, it would have been easy to conclude both the NYT-contributor and the pro-life radio host were right according to their own definition.  The pro-life radio host used the definition that emphasized the humanity of the fetus to justify his moral stance against abortion, but the NYT-contributor used the definition that dehumanized the fetus, which creates moral ambiguity, in order to justify her pro-choice position.

Now, Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine reporter and creator of The1619 Project, attempted to create the same moral ambiguity around the destruction of property. 

After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis riots erupted across the United States.  Naturally, concerned citizens denounced the violence, but Hannah-Jones, told CBS News, “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body.  Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.  To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.”

In the abortion example the moral ambiguity is derived from the difference between the medical and non-medical definition of the term fetus.  Hanna-Jones’s distinction about violence isn’t based on different terms within different definitions, it’s based on her refusal to accept the definition of violence.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines violence as: The use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.  Injury and abuse apply to people and damage or destroy applies to property.  Two things can be true simultaneously.  

It seems Hanna-Jones redefined violence in order to justify her support for those that took to the streets after the police killing.  Her redefinition of violence may get rid of her moral dilemma, but it doesn’t change the fact that destroying property is a violent act.

Meanwhile, protesters are marching through the streets with signs that say: Silence is Violence and White Silence Kills.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 6/10/2020