My Body, My Choice—Her Body, Her Choice. Same Principle

Principles are universal and provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

Examples from an earlier post, with appropriate qualifications, included water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, and never lying in human relationships. The former is a causal explanation with implicit guidance to adjust cooking temperatures at higher altitudes and the latter is moral guidance with a fundamental explanation of benevolent cooperation. Both principles are universal and apply to all instances of water boiling and cooperation.

Two disputed issues in today’s world are coerced vaccinations and coerced birthing of unwanted children. Both violate individual rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The premise underlying both types of coercion, which itself is presented as a universal principle, is the altruistic doctrine of self-sacrifice. As a universal, it justifies extending initiated coercion to other areas of our lives, such as coerced sterilization and coerced prevention of the use of birth control. The premise treats each of us as lambs to be sacrificed to the state. However, there is no right or duty to sacrifice ourselves to others, including the state, and certainly no right to sacrifice others to ourselves or the state.

Rights are freedoms of action, freedoms from any kind of initiated coercion, whether by another citizen or by the government, to choose the values we want to pursue and to take the actions necessary to acquire those values. Rights are moral guidance in a political context and causal explanation of peaceful social cooperation in a capitalist society.

Our only general obligation to others is to avoid initiating coercion against them.

Freedom of action in today’s world includes the freedom to refuse to get vaccinated or to have an unwanted baby. If anyone is afraid to get near the unvaccinated, it is that person’s prerogative to avoid them, not the responsibility of the government to punish or quarantine the unvaccinated. Private businesses can ask you to get vaccinated or stay home. The government cannot.

And the government is nearly everywhere in our lives in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, which means “follow and find the government intervention” before drawing conclusions about what should and should not be done in specific cases. Solution: get the government out of our lives, personal and professional.

Freedom of action also presupposes an actual, not potential, independent living human being who does the acting. Cells in a woman’s body is not an independent life and the woman has the right to decide what to do with her body and those cells. If a fetus develops, though not yet into an independent entity, and the woman’s life becomes threatened, terminating the pregnancy is her decision, no one else’s.*

Freedom of action is the legal issue. You can talk about ethical issues of recklessly refusing to take care of one’s health or of recklessly getting pregnant. But the government in a free society has no right to interfere in such a person’s life.

If I sneeze on you and you can prove my awareness of illness and my negligence or intent to harm, you might have a legal case against me. But if a woman gets pregnant to increase her welfare payments—the only thing morally or legally guilty here is the government welfare system, which should be cancelled.

In April 2020, I cited John Goodman of the Goodman Institute who projected what a truly free market in medicine might be like in a pandemic—meaning absent licensing monopolies and health or medical czars telling us what we can and cannot do. Such as, inexpensive testing kits rapidly produced and made available. Doctors or nurses (an abundance of both because there would be no artificial restriction of supply caused by the licensing) would be available immediately to talk to you via telephone or, more likely, the internet, or actually to make a house call. And if you had serious symptoms, you would be welcomed to the hospital emergency rooms (many more than today because of their built-in excess capacity) and treated promptly.

Quarantining (including “lockdowns”) of asymptomatic people is preventive law and, as Ayn Rand has said, preventive law “is the legal hallmark of dictatorship . . . the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent.”**

Emergency powers and martial law of any kind are violations of individual rights and should be banned in free societies.

Also in today’s mixed economy of freedom and dictatorship, both left and right, that is, the pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates have much to clean up before they can talk about the issue of abortion. The welfare state and poverty programs that have given us welfare recipients, including pregnant teenagers, who refuse to get a job or a husband to father their children need to be opposed and repealed. And the adoption system, hopelessly mired in bureaucratic rules that prolong and extend the process, should not have any government involvement at all.

Needless to say, the government and its money should also not be involved in birth control or the actual medical procedure of abortion. Let the market decide and operate. It will do a far better job than any federal, state, or local government.

My body, my choice—her body, her choice. Both follow from the US Bill of Rights.


* The right to life, in other words, begins at birth and the abortion issue is nearly entirely about the first trimester, though the woman’s life, health, or future must never be sacrificed, whether to a rapist or to a healthy fetus, or to a severely disabled one.

** Typhoid Mary? Mary Mallon was the only one of over 400 carriers of salmonella typhi forcibly confined by the health czars of New York City. For a total of twenty-six years! The common cold is asymptomatic for one to four days. If we develop a test and find someone positive after two days, do we put that person in jail (quarantine)? Protect the vulnerable is the advice of rational scientists today. See Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 monograph Pandemics (Kindle, location 380), where she suggests that our “current patterns of international travel” have exposed us to all kinds of pathogens and likely given us a “global wall of immunity.” Lockdowns and other forms of confinement prevent our acquisition of such an immunity. And, as Gupta also points out, older people during the 1918 Spanish Flu seem not to have been affected because they likely had developed immunity during previous influenza outbreaks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pandemics, Kindle, location 20).

“Whataboutism” and the Nature of Principles

“Whataboutism” (1, 2) is an accusation of inconsistency.

In recent years it has become a form of the tu quoque (“you too”) fallacy: “what about your (America’s) human rights violations?” But it has another form that has been around probably since the beginning of intellectual argumentation.

“You don’t believe women should be drafted into the military, but what about men?”

“You don’t believe small business should be regulated, but surely you believe big business needs regulation?” What about the steel industry? What about automobiles? What about high tech?”

When it occurs in this form, it might be a logically valid point, or it might be a dropping of context by failing to connect to reality. To understand the difference, we need to understand principles and their application.*

Slightly adapting a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, principles are fundamental truths on which others depend that provide causal explanations and guidance to human action.

For example, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level, lower at higher elevations or higher if the water contains impurities. This is a causal explanation and implicit guidance—adjust cooking recipes in high altitude.

Never lie in human relationships, unless threatened with initiated coercion, uninvited invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth may unnecessarily hurt the other person. This is a guide to human action, a moral one at that, and an implied causal explanation of what is required for benevolent cooperation and friendship.

Principles are combinations of concepts and each concept in the principle must be true, that is, correctly identify the facts the concept subsumes under it.** In this way principles state truths and enable subsequent truths to rest on them to build our personal knowledge (unique to each one of us) and our physical, biological, and human sciences.

Truth is not in reality to be corresponded to or “grasped” as the traditional theory of truth holds, which is to say truth is not in the thing intrinsically as Aristotle and other naïve realists believe.

Truth and falsity are in our heads based on how well—correctly or incorrectly—we have processed reality, performing certain mental actions to make our identifications. If I call the glass of water on my desk a leprechaun, I have mentally processed the object in a way that the content of my consciousness contradicts the facts. This violates one of Aristotle’s many major contributions to rational thought, the law of non-contradiction.

If I call the object a glass of water, I have mentally processed the object in a way that the content of my consciousness correctly identifies it, that is, subsumes it under the concept “glass of water.”

Correctly identified truths are universal, as are correctly formed concepts, but the fundamental principle that guides all our identifications is Aristotle’s law that includes a crucial phrase at the end of his statement: “at the same time and in the same respect.”

Concepts and principles are formed and applied within a context. Water does not boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit without appropriate qualifications. Herein lies the problem with the “whataboutists” who fail not just to understand the correct nature of principles but also the context in which they apply, hence the many repeated questions “what about this?” “and this” “and this?”

The principle of individual rights identifies freedoms of action that are universal in a social, political context, meaning they apply to all individuals in society, whether male, female, black, white, American, or Chinese. The principle of rights also applies to anyone who runs a business, any business.

And these rights are violated by initiated coercion, especially when imposed by the government.

This means the military draft is involuntary servitude for both males and females, no matter what rationalizations the Supreme Court has given to justify it. Being against the draft for women means also being against it for men, and vice versa.

If initiated coercion is used to regulate business people, the consistent conclusion of universal individual rights applied to business must be laissez-faire capitalism.

Applying principles means recognizing specific cases that are subsumed under the principle. Men, women, blacks, whites, etc.—and business people—are all included in the principle of universal individual rights, which means all of the individuals’ rights must be protected by the government, not violated through the initiation of physical force.

If, however, we say that some human beings should be drafted into the military, a disconnect from reality has occurred and a concession to the alternative principle of servitude has been made. This sets up a problem of logical consistency: either men and women both should be drafted and turned into slaves, or no one—morally and legally—should be. There is no way consistently to apply the principle of involuntary servitude to one and not the other.***

The same applies to business people. If it is okay to regulate one, consistency of the regulation principle makes it okay to regulate all. This is how government interventions in our personal and professional lives necessitate a full march toward socialism, which is where we are heading today and have been for the past one hundred years.

Consistency means no contradictions, but that can mean what follows deductively from a principle detached from reality or whether the principle is anchored inductively to facts. “Draft and regulate everyone” follows from the principle of servitude, but individual rights as freedoms of action that are violated by initiated coercion are rooted in and derive from the nature of human beings that possess the capacity to reason. Consistency, fundamentally, means being connected to and anchored in reality.

In today’s postmodern culture where facts don’t matter, consistency doesn’t either. Throw in the mixed economy that by its nature violates principles to combine freedom with dictatorship and you have many inconsistencies to call out with “what about this?” “and this?” “and this?”

Nonetheless, there are occasions in which a “what about this?” question, as I alluded to earlier, may bring up a valid point you may not have thought about. Such a questioner, however, must be sincere.

As a teenager I was introduced to whataboutism from one or two adults who condescendingly said, “What about this? I’m just trying to help you. I don’t really believe any of this” (crap was the full implication of the adult’s statement). One even said, “It’s just good debate,” meaning there is no such thing as truth.

These whataboutists are people who do not take ideas seriously and I have no use for them.


* This post is based on Ayn Rand’s epistemology, especially her theory of concepts. See also this earlier post.

** From the OED’s etymology discussion of the verb to identify: “to subsume (several things) under one idea or concept (1610).” Identification means to recognize similarity or sameness in order to classify whatever is similar or the same under a particular concept or principle. Rand’s notion of measurement omission gives us the causal explanation of how we abstract to form valid universals, and the guidance to form them.

*** See my earlier post and Ayn Rand’s comments on the anatomy of compromise of principles (1, 2).

Rules vs. Principles

In chapter 4 of Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I wrote: “Rules are commands to act or not act a certain way. Obedience may be rewarded; disobedience is certainly punished.” The context was the regulation of child and student behavior and my point was that “rules have no place in a theory of nurture.” Rules call for obedience to authority. Principles, on the other hand, teach abstract thought and lay the foundation for independence.

This is not to say that rules to protect young children from harm or to help them respect the rights of others are not ever a good idea. Young children, including those up to the age of adolescence, have not yet acquired the skill of abstract reasoning. Guidance from adults cannot always be made in the form of rational argument, nor is the young child likely to understand such reasoning. A screamed “Stop!” when a three-year-old is about to run into the street is appropriate, as is the command “Don’t step off the curb until I get there to take your hand.” The latter is a rule, but when the added explanation “Cars can do bad things to little children” is provided, the groundwork for reasoned thought is being laid. Repeated explanations on similar occasions lead to understanding and eventual grasp of the principle of observation and self-protection. Absence of the added explanation, or worse, punishment for something the young child cannot possibly know or understand sends only one message: “Obey.”

Elementary-aged children, roughly from six to twelve, pose an interesting challenge for adults. Logical thinking is noticeable in children of this age but it is concrete thinking, the “period of concrete operations,” as Piaget calls it. Broad abstractions, formed and retained over time, are difficult and rare. Yet elementary-aged children exhibit a highly active and rambunctious behavior that is often not to the liking of adults. The easiest solution is a barrage of rules, such as “Don’t run,” “No talking in class,” “No eating after 7PM,” etc. Such rules, to be effective, must be enforced with stern consequences, ranging from confinement to withdrawal of possessions or privileges to spanking; if the rules are not enforced, or meekly enforced, they will be ignored and children will run amok and have what some would say is a lowered respect for the adult. Lowered fear of the adult would be a more correct description.

Teaching principles means giving children a full explanation, for example, of why running is not advisable on the patio: they might stumble and hurt themselves or others, who have just as much right to be there as they do, and the running might interrupt or destroy the other children’s enjoyment. Such explanations require more words than a simple rule and there is no guarantee that the children will grasp and remember what was just said and implement a change of behavior to become the perfect angels that adults want them to become. Repetition of the explanation is required; so also is repetition required to enforce rules, unless the coercive consequences of breaking rules are so stern that the children get the message immediately. But then, what price has been paid in the psychological development of such coerced children?

Rules presuppose coercion. Principles presuppose teaching. A lot of it. But teaching principles requires patience, understanding, and, especially, fast thinking (of the right thing to say) that many adults—parents and teachers—do not have when trying to regulate and influence the behavior of elementary-aged children. Distractions and demands too often preclude the use of these three traits.

The middle ground between rules imposed from above and principles taught repeatedly (and exasperatingly) might be the democratic meeting in which children make and enforce their own rules. This is the solution adopted by the Summerhill School in England and Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. (See Go Fish!)

A variation of this advocated by Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline and Positive Discipline in the Classroom, is the family and class meeting. The purpose of such meetings is to brainstorm for solutions to problems and agree on the solutions either by vote or consensus. To be effective, the adults must reduce themselves to equal participants, rather than act as lecturers or moralizers.

Having children take responsibility for their own behavior through discussion, brainstorming, and democratic voting or consensus frees adults from having to play cop and peacemaker and enables them to spend more time being the long-term thinkers and leaders that the children need. Until the perfect handbook is written and published on how to teach children to become perfect angels, this technique will probably have to do.