Tao, he is very selective. Lewis quotes from the Bible the commandment “thou shalt not
But he does not quote Moses’ order to “let no breathing thing live” in the
conquest of Canaan.
Nor does he quote any of the biblical passages on slavery.
West devotes a lot of space to the debate over the moral status of fetuses. But
there is no clear Biblical statement that life begins at conception. On the contrary, the
only Biblical passage that seems pertinent suggests that a fetus’s life has less value than
that of a fully formed human being.
Even the papal statements on abortion concede that
the belief in life as beginning at conception cannot be based on the Bible. By contrast,
many Jews interpret the Biblical account of the creation of Adam as suggesting that a
fetus does not become human until there is a respiratory system in place, because Adam
was less than fully human until God breathed life into him.
On this and other moral issues, it is not clear how we could grasp the transcendent
moral standards sanctioned by God if we did not already have a natural moral sense.
West makes a lot of the connection between Darwin and eugenics. In Darwinian
Conservatism, I argue that Darwin supported “good eugenics”—such as legally
forbidding incestuous marriages that would produce harmful physical and mental
The recent efforts of Ashkenazi Jews to discourage the marriage of Tay-
Sachs carriers would illustrate such “good eugenics.” But I don’t see any evidence in
Darwin that he endorsed Francis Galton’s utopian schemes that we could properly
condemn as “bad eugenics.” West says that “Charles Darwin himself praised the idea of
eugenic restrictions on marriage.”
But West doesn’t notice that Darwin was specifically
concerned about the effects of incest, which should be of concern for most people. Also,
90
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 97.
91
Numbers 31; Deuteronomy 20:10-20.
92
See Exodus 21:22-27.
93
Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, 117-22.
94
West, Darwin’s Public Policy, 5:9.
39
Convention