We’re not all equally gifted

Not everyone is beautiful

This came across my feed, and I think it says it well. But I want to expand on it, because its not just beauty that we have troubles with.

We have a strange relationship with differences in our society:

Attractiveness we all see and recognize (though we may disagree on the details), but there’s a concerted effort to pretend we don’t, and that “everyone is beautiful”.

Intelligence we really, really want to be unimportant outside of a few “intellectual” endeavors like solving math problems, so we downplay it, trying to give everyone the same education (by the same methods) and characterizing a dozen different things as “types” of intelligence just so that we can say that everyone is good at one of them (even if we all still aren’t).

Physical abilities, particularly athleticism? Oh, there we make no pretense and laud those with greater gifts. Nobody claims that everyone is equally strong, just “in different ways”.

Oh, and we pretend that not only is “hard work” an entirely innate trait, when in reality it is very much learnable, but we misattribute all sorts of other things (luck, connections, smarts) to it.

The trick is, we need to recognize that your worth as a person is not dependent on your capabilities, but on your behaviors.

Whose Perspective?

A quick thought that popped to mind the other day. One place a typical discussion between someone who supports abortion rights and someone who doesn’t often goes is something like this [assuming some communicating is occurring, and it’s not just a shouting match]:

Abortion-rights supporter: Why should women have less freedom than men? We let men decide what they’re going to do about their health and their bodies; it’s discrimination to tell women what they’re allowed to do.

Abortion opponent: This isn’t about discrimination against women—the situations aren’t the same. Since you can’t disentangle the mother and the fetus, there’s another person affected by these decisions. It would be immoral to not consider the fetus when deciding what is right.

Try this on for size:

Why should a person not be afforded the same considerations and protections as everyone else, just because they can’t speak for themselves?

Since you can’t disentangle the fetus and the mother, there’s another person affected by these decisions. It would be immoral to not consider the woman when deciding what is right.

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If the reason abortion should be restricted or banned is because it affects another person besides the woman—the fetus—then surely the reason abortion should be legal and accessible is because it affects another person besides the fetus: the mother.