“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

—Abraham Lincoln, 1858

I first read this quotation from Abraham Lincoln many years ago, and was struck by its lapidary initial sentence. In 1858 Lincoln was (unsuccessfully) battling Stephen Douglas for an Illinois Senate seat. Just a few years before he would win the presidency and South Carolina would respond by seceding from the Union, slavery and its spread were being hotly debated in Illinois and the rest of the country. Here, among other things, Lincoln is arguing that slavery’s ill effects extend to everyone, even non-slaves: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”

What arrested me about his formulation was the upending of the usual vantage point from which we judge slavery’s evil. It reminded me of Chesterton’s advice on the usefulness of standing on one’s head (“any scene such as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen if it is seen upside down”). Those who heard Lincoln’s statement could, if they chose, open themselves up to perceive that even a forcibly dispossessed slave owner, if it came to that, might not thereby be a loser. Respect for human rights and dignity is not a zero-sum game: Although extending that respect to a group previously denied it would cost the slaveholder financially and upend the social system in which he lived, the South’s slavery-based society did not properly reflect our common human identity as fellow images of God, and so it was not in accord with our rightly understood human nature to avail ourselves of the benefits of slavery. The slaveholder who freed his slaves, whether he did so willingly or ended up being forced to do so, was simultaneously freeing himself from unjustly tyrannizing over a fellow human being. This may not—likely was not—all in Lincoln’s mind as he formulated the sentence, but it is what came to my mind as I read it.

Of course, in discussing slavery it is not only natural but right to focus first and foremost on the harm done the slave. But it is worth recognizing afterwards that the ripples of the slave master’s injustice extend far beyond the slave, or even the family and loved ones of the enslaved, far beyond even their descendants, beyond even those distant in space or time who have suffered through the mere knowledge that such evils exist or existed, and even beyond the approximately 620,000-750,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, along with the maimed, injured, and civilian casualties.

And those rippling effects of the slaveholder’s injustice touched even the slaveholder himself. His ownership of human beings deterred him from honestly acknowledging the immorality of slavery and inclined him to grope among theories of human anthropology and politics, history and religion to justify his denial of human dignity to an entire race of people.

Misperception, whether intentional or unintentional, is almost always dangerous, since we live in a real world rather than a virtual reality that can be shaped and reshaped according to our desires. Unlike conditions in imaginary universes, if you or I step off the curb and fail to observe a car barreling toward us, or if we turn our car into a side street and fail to glimpse a small child darting into traffic, disaster may ensue.

And that disaster will fall on both parties—the doer and the done by, the misperceiver and the misperceived. Sometimes the faulty vision is no one’s fault: The driver has not been speeding, is neither drunk nor texting, and could not possibly have reacted in time to prevent a collision. However, the shock, horror, and soul-searching ratchet up significantly if the driver bore responsibility for what happened. “As I would not be a child killed by a drunk driver, so I would not be a drunk driver,” Lincoln might well have put it if he were addressing an assembly of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and his point would be manifest to all.

Does the misperceiver who experiences minimal emotional trauma from the effects of his misperception still suffer in some way from being the innocent instrument of tragedy? Perhaps, at least to the extent that, in John Donne’s famous formulation, “No man is an island, entire of itself . . . if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less”; therefore, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Innocence of malice or wrong intent will not protect us from all the negative repercussions of our actions, though such repercussions may be so minor (the child may have escaped unharmed) that “suffering” would be an exaggerated word to use. But surely in all cases where someone should have known better—where someone had been taking a gamble and knew it—some sort of natural consequences ensue for the gambler (and these may even be positive—for example, the gambler may be shocked into greater prudence).

And I think the same is true for Lincoln’s slaveholder. He might be less subjectively guilty than the very worst of slaveholders—he might not beat the field slaves, abuse the female house slaves, or callously tear asunder families to achieve the greatest profit. He might instead be a “model” slave owner: an otherwise just man schooled to believe that slavery is a natural and licit human institution and that only the abusive treatment of one’s slaves is sinful. But of course, he would still be wrong in thinking that: He would be misperceiving the moral universe and his place in it. And misperceiving either the moral or physical contours of the world you live in exacts costs.

What kind of costs? Well, in this case they might include a coarsening of moral sensitivity to human suffering, an attenuated sympathy for members of the human race less happily located on Fortune’s Wheel, an unconscious or perhaps semiconscious impulse to exaggerate the differences between Black slaves and their masters. The enumeration of these differences would likely begin with the physical—the color of the slaves’ skin, their consequent “foreignness”—and then progress to self-serving assumptions about other largely invisible characteristics. Ante-bellum apologists for African American slavery commonly asserted their belief that Blacks were not only less intelligent than Whites but were naturally suited temperamentally to slavery and were less sensitive to pain (which of course would be a consoling thought if you were responsible for inflicting upon them such pain).

If we transfer some of these self-serving beliefs to the sphere of abortion and its defenders, the parallels smack you over the head like a two by four. How many professional apologists for abortion have assured us over many decades that the nervous systems of preborn human beings have not developed enough to feel pain as we outside the womb do! Back when saline abortions were common, we were assured that these chemically scalded unborn human beings could not be suffering from the procedure; such denials are still peddled even to those made squeamish by late-term abortions. And any physical recoiling of the unborn from knives or needles is dismissed as reflexive movement.

It is hard to imagine these explanations convincing even those making them. Could so many people—even those with a strong interest in believing convenient untruths, people profiting personally, politically, or professionally from abortion—really persuade themselves of such rationalizations just to make what occurs in abortion on demand more palatable?

But why not? Intentional misperceptions of reality abound, and are perhaps easiest to rationalize when applied to a whole class of humanity. Consider the Nazis peddling the lie that Jews are less than human. There is no reason to believe that their deceptions did not often include elements of self-deception. Just because a viewpoint is self-serving does not mean it is not self-deluding. But even self-delusion exacts costs.

Someone staring with unprotected eyes into the sun during a solar eclipse like the one we experienced last April risks damaging the retina whether or not that person realizes it is a dangerous thing to do. We cannot appeal to the sun to soften its effect on the eyes of the reckless or ignorant, any more than we can appeal to gravity to suspend its operations when a ship collides with a column holding up Baltimore’s Key Bridge.

Similarly, those who have convinced themselves or others of untruths about the nature of the unborn child and the operation of the brutal methods of abortion cannot by mere words alter reality to conform to their unreality. So the pro-abortionist who sets out on this path of convenient misperception must first darken his heart or intellect or both—and they will then remain darkened, barring a radical and grace-filled intervention of reality such as that which launched early abortion activist and abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson on his road to conversion.

Among the abortions Dr. Nathanson performed before his collision with reality was one that should have held special personal significance for him, since it was that of his own child. Reading the account of his pro-abortion career in his book Aborting America, it is difficult not to conclude that his campaign to legalize and expand the practice of abortion was perhaps fueled less by misguided compassion for women than by a desire to sand down some of the rough edges of reality that he himself had bumped up against and resented. Hard edges that we find ourselves colliding with are a classic tipoff that we are in contact with reality.

And despite the pain, being in contact with reality is a good thing, considering the alternative. Author Charles Williams’s 1937 novel Descent into Hell tracks the movement of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, and increasingly solipsistic scholar, Laurence Wentworth, from reality to a self-enclosed fantasy world. A scholar whose work is inferior to that of his rival, a lustful older man seeking adoration and sexual gratification from a young woman with other plans, Wentworth responds to these collisions with unwelcome realities by retreating further and further from real people, real interactions, real demands and attachments. All of these, after all, have proved unwilling to accommodate themselves to his specifications or respond compliantly to his desires. In their place, he fashions a more and more stiflingly complete fantasy version of his life, turning the woman he has lusted after into an imaginary succubus that anticipates and satisfies his every desire. In the final scene he is spotted by acquaintances at a train station, but their presence cannot penetrate the solipsistic madness he is inhabiting.

Although this book was published in 1937, it is difficult not to discern in current-day internet porn and the developing market for sex robots the technologically driven analogues for his self-absorbed attempts at sexual satisfaction. But the sexual realm is not the only one in which human beings can be tempted to substitute fantasy for reality. Another 21st-century advance over Laurence Wentworth’s retreat from reality is our gender reimagination project. And then there are the morbid attempts of plastic surgery addicts to escape the obstinately real by undergoing series of surgeries to transform their facial features into those of a celebrity they idolize.

But in these cases too, misperception and unreality exact costs. As much as hyper-individualists flee from the notion today, and as much as the pandemic period encouraged us to isolate ourselves from non-technologically mediated human companions, and as much as many of the hallmarks of 21st century life, such as social media, online shopping, contactless delivery, and AI-powered chat boxes, might reinforce that hyper individualism, human beings are meant to affect one another, and do so. We were meant to be born into families, deployed to grow and mature over many years as part of intimate groupings of parents and children and perhaps other extended family all living together, influencing and being influenced by one another, stepping on each other’s toes, bumping into one another, grabbing the last slice of roast beef or stealing into the kitchen for the leftover piece of pie, sharing in family chores or ducking as many as possible, learning how to master the unavoidable tasks of daily living and perhaps over time carving out a modest niche of expertise that we are then called upon to perform at need. Cooking, gardening, tinkering with cars or plumbing or computers, hosting parties, decorating living spaces, grouting bathtubs, training recalcitrant dogs, finishing wood floors.

And that’s just at home. Next we branch out into local parks and playgrounds and schools and encounter peers born into the same time and place as we were, destined to share with us many of our time and place’s common challenges, joys, and sorrows—boom or bust cycles; droughts or earthquakes or epidemics; wars, riots, or terrorist attacks; eras of peace and plenty; revolutions in technology that introduce new modes of living and retire old ones.

All of these events that roll across the changing sky of an individual life as cloud formations roll across the physical sky are things we share with those who are alive when we are; they are things that not only affect us but that we in turn affect as well. The rains fall on the just and the unjust, and for a lifespan we are members of that great crowd. Together we get soaked, together we suffer the sun’s heat, or perhaps we share an umbrella or sit under someone’s shade tree or sip someone’s lemonade or stagger into a warm living room to escape the snows outside. And through our children and our children’s children, and through whatever we have done or left undone, we eventually affect those who live after us too.

There is a thing called the “urban heat island” effect: In cities of more than a million people, temperatures test measurably warmer than in the surrounding rural areas; at times the difference is only a few degrees, but under some circumstances it can be much larger. You can look at this (and many do) as just another black mark against humanity, amplifying global warming and the like. But looked at another way there is something almost cozy about it: As, on the micro level, a couple snuggle under the covers on a cold winter’s night to share body heat, so, on the macro level, millions of people are snuggling in the same cityscape, prompting us to consider the awesomely manifold ways in which we human beings act on one another and everything around us.

So in a host of ways, from the heartwarming to the heartbreaking, human beings modify one another just by the serendipity of our shared existence. And we cannot pin down or predict all of the effects of those close encounters. Beyond the immediate ones, most of them cannot even be perceived by us, because they are at too many removes from present actions or are too contingent on too many other factors we are unaware of. Our eyes cannot see the more distant ripples radiating out from every human action.

This is one reason why we need to both acknowledge that everything we do inevitably affects others and simultaneously admit our insufficiency to base moral and prudential decisions solely on cost-benefit analyses or the swiftest means to the ends we seek to pursue. Every action that human beings knowingly, willingly choose has both intended consequences and an expanding wake of unintended ones. The limits of our human vision into space and time restrict us from reading the bottom of the balance sheet for any particular action. No computer yet devised can total up all the chains of our actions and reactions, which in turn collide into the actions and reactions that other people have set in motion.

And of course we are not meant to do such totaling up anyway. It is not only impossible, but unnecessary and undesirable. Instead, we are merely enjoined to concern ourselves with doing good and avoiding evil—not always easy to discern, and not always easy to carry out once discerned, but not always or usually impossible either. Doing this will sometimes require us to make the kind of prudential judgments that consider the appropriate means to good ends, and we may or may not end up making those judgments correctly. But questions of ways and means, though they may involve us in error, should not involve us in evil as long as all possible means to a good end that we are contemplating are morally acceptable, meaning we are not relying upon the desired end to justify sleazy or duplicitous or abusive or otherwise immoral means to that end.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines the goal of human life as eudaimonia, a Greek word usually translated as happiness or flourishing, but which more nearly means something like activity expressing virtue. The eudaimonic life is characterized by “virtuous activity in accordance with reason.” All ancient thinkers knew that happiness understood in a fatuously superficial sense as a state of never-ending pleasure and the fulfillment of all our desires is not attainable in this life, and that our occasional approximations to such a state are bound to be temporary. Even if we briefly achieve what we consider happiness, we cannot fully enjoy it as such, because we are aware of its evanescence.

But if we habitually attempt to engage in “activity expressing virtue,” that launches us in pursuit of rather different subordinate goals, under the guidance of different criteria for the good life. To first identify those subordinate goals, like the Greek philosophers, we would need to explore what we mean by virtue in all its facets—physical, mental, spiritual. We would need to consider what a human being is and what activities best help us thrive, both as individuals and as communities.

According to natural law theorists (of whom Aristotle was one, but so also were great Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas), our ability to identify human virtues and the actions that conform to, confirm, and sustain those virtues is innate in all of us, although we can fail to recognize them or darken our perception of them by repeated bad choices. We call this common inheritance of accessible knowledge about how to act rightly and hence live a life seeking our highest good the natural law. In Christian terms the most complete attainment of that highest good is in the next world, in union with God. But, as many people have pointed out—including C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man—the moral codes of all the great civilizations that have left us records bear remarkable resemblance to one another in their categories of encouraged and discouraged actions. Because the distinctions strike us forcefully and (after all) do matter, we may not feel the weight of the similarities unless we try to imagine a society where stealing and murder, however defined, are not wrong, adultery is not frowned upon, or generosity is accounted a vice. Of course, almost all of us end up violating our moral codes with some regularity, but it is the natural law itself that reveals to us our broken condition in so frequently failing to live up to “our own” standards. In St. Paul’s classic formulation, “For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate” (Rom. 7:15). Too often we let each other down, betray one another, lie to one another, use and abuse one another. At best the accumulated choices of a life make up a very mixed bag, revealing how painfully difficult we often find it to do the right thing, and how the nature of that pain can also make it difficult to see what the right thing is.

In the last year or so two couples that I am acquainted with each received the terrible news that the deeply desired unborn child whose birth they were eagerly awaiting had a medical condition that would not allow the child to survive more than briefly after birth. One of these anguished couples asked friends and family to pray for a miracle; if that miracle was not granted, however, they asked for prayers that the baby be born alive, so she could be baptized and die cradled in her mother and father’s arms. No healing took place, but the child was indeed born alive and baptized, and died cradled in the arms of the grieving but grateful mother and father.

The second couple, advised by their doctor to abort the child, chose to do so rather than carrying the doomed child to term and watching her die. The child’s mother and father then mourned their loss in that different way. Both couples had welcomed pregnancy, and both were left with empty cribs. I am grateful I was never placed in their situation—or in many other “hard case” situations that can push human beings to their moral and psychological limits. But I think the first couple made the better choice, the good choice in a bad situation. They chose rightly because they saw clearly, straight through to the ultimate reality of the situation. They saw the anguish they would have to suffer in carrying their doomed child until birth, and then they elected to embrace their daughter, however short her life, and do for her what a mother and father could do for her. (And yes, our Greek friend Aristotle, that wise but pragmatically pre-Christian pagan, would likely have recommended the second couple’s choice. But then, he would also likely have differed from Lincoln on the matter of American slavery, although our own very “peculiar institution” differed in some ways from the kind of slavery Aristotle was accustomed to—among others in being race-based.)

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” That small and physically defective little girl who died after a brief glimpse of life beyond the womb was preserved from being a victim. Both sets of parents made painful choices—choices that, whether they were hard or easy to come to, could not fail to cause them pain. A great many human choices do, one way or another, in this world with its sharp edges lying in wait for us. But that’s not how we know whether our choice is right or wrong.

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Original Bio:

Ellen Wilson Fielding, a longtime senior editor of the Human Life Review, is the author of An Even Dozen (Human Life Press). The mother of four children, she lives in Maryland.