> We recognize abortion as a right in contemporary American culture because women cannot have equality in a soul-crushing corporate workplace without it
Completely regardless of any pro life or pro choice bias, I don't really understand A) why you think this is true or B) why you think that "because it is necessary for equality in a soul crushing corporate workplace" is a valid justification for something.
> Similarly free speech and due process are necessary for our form of governance to survive.
And once again, you're justifying the means on account of the ends without justifying the ends as worthy, why should we care if that particular form of governance survives?
Ok, so first I am discarding the idea of universal right and wrong and arguing these arise from within a culture as a consequence of cultural structures. In this way I am largely following thinkers from Aristotle and Cicero through anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Ronald Grimes.
In the past for example, sleeping around might have been seen as morally wrong because it had social implications that may not exist today in the same way. Rights and morality both effectively address proper functioning of society. Other societies draw different lines. The Todas in India for example believed it was immoral for a woman to retain her virginity until after menstruation, and they practiced polyandry too.
The question is what are the social consequences for a given right being restricted or a given immoral action being performed.
Ok, so the justifications for the ends under discussion is accepted because "That's the way things are, ergo that's the way the majority of people have decided that they ought to be by participation". They live in countries with totalitarian democratic governments, they work in soul crushing corporate jobs, therefore those ends are "desirable" without direct justification beyond that?
That seems like confusing is and ought in the exact opposite of the way that humans tend to do it normally?
I think you have to look at government as a product of culture, and I think you have to look at culture as a functioning system. It isn't a question of what the majority have decided. It is a question of how things fit together.
The problem with a "it's just the way it is" argument is that it prevents any possible critiques across cultural boundaries. That's not what I am proposing. I think you have to start from the way it is, look at how things fit together, and then find problems with this. However such a discussion is incomplete unless you can point to why people generally accept something and what incentives they have to accept it.
Let's take a rather major example: female genital cutting in Sudan. It's very easy to just say "this is oppression of women!" but that doesn't really work. A much more thorough review would include:
1. The very real problems reproductive-wise and health-wise this causes, but also
2. The fact that this practice is a way of marking privileged socio-economic status, and therefore giving it up is essentially placing women who would forgo the practice outside of the upper classes, and
3. The fact that this practice has become in the wake of Western criticism a way of circling the wagons cuturally, and a symbol of standing up to perceived colonialism and thus confers additional positive status that way.
Completely regardless of any pro life or pro choice bias, I don't really understand A) why you think this is true or B) why you think that "because it is necessary for equality in a soul crushing corporate workplace" is a valid justification for something.
> Similarly free speech and due process are necessary for our form of governance to survive.
And once again, you're justifying the means on account of the ends without justifying the ends as worthy, why should we care if that particular form of governance survives?
Care to enlighten me? Curious.