The Ethics of the Innate Immortality of the Soul

For more than a week now I’ve almost ceaselessly been contemplating this whole “soul”-issue. I’m still far from a perfect understanding of the topic. No human knows perfectly and I guess it will take me still a long time to chisel out my own believes. It is for this reason that I rely on Inspiration as it is in Scripture, on philosophical logic, on science even, to try and appreciate what the “soul” is, and what is wishful thinking.

White strikes me is how our understanding of the soul will influence our ethical basis.

The following are the basic soul-views which I can now quickly think of:

1. The soul is innately immortal.

2. The soul is innately mortal, but may receive Eternal Life as a gift.

3. The soul is innately mortal and that’s the end, or put less esoterically, there is no soul.

For ease of explanation let’s call the proponent of #1 Jack and the proponent of #3 John and let’s use abortion as a vehicle of ethical discussion.

Jack, a typical Religious Right Christian, believes in the innate immortality of the soul. Therefore, he must believe that if a baby is killed (or to put it less emotive – if a foetus is aborted) it will go directly to heaven. I have to ask then, what’s the issue? Why is Jack against abortion?

That child will now experience bliss everlasting. Aren’t you in fact sparing it from lots of pain here on earth? If its soul is innately immortal then you are actually doing it a favour, rather than having it be born as a bastard child; with a mother that is still a child herself; as the spawn of a rapist. What kind of life will such a child have?

In this context, Jack’s pro-life propaganda doesn’t make sense. His argument is that the child is deprived of the opportunity to life. But if the soul is innately immortal then it cannot die, and is really not deprived of life at all. Instead, as discussed above, it will actually have a better “life” in heaven, than here on this sin-stained Earth.

Even if Jack is not a Christian, and doesn’t believe in Heaven, but still insists on the innate immortality of the soul, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, that killing the foetus isn’t an issue, since from Jack’s paradigm physical death isn’t real death.

Jack’s only real argument is not that the child be deprived of the opportunity to life, but rather that it is wrong to kill. This is a different argument altogether, and one that he will only be able to make from an external moral framework. I mention an external morality, because Jack will have a hard time philosophically qualifying why it is wrong to kill if the soul is innately immortal. Jack’s argument must be substantiated by some external morality. Killing must be wrong for some other reason, such as God saying: “Thou shall not kill.” But even this sounds like an arbitrary reason at best.

John, on the other hand, has the right to advocate the pro-life argument. Since John doesn’t believe in the innate immortality of the soul, then aborting the foetus will deprive it of the opportunity at life – since this is the only opportunity at life it has.

John can much more strongly argue against abortion than Jack can, because to John the pro-life argument is sensible. Also, John has stronger motives for agreeing that it is wrong to kill. For John, one’s life is of utmost importance, because there is no other.

James, representing #2, which says that the soul is innately mortal, but may receive Eternal Life as a gift, can adopt similarly strong ethical arguments as John, but can also keep sound spiritual motivations as well.

…ooOoo…

This blog-entry is not really about abortion. I’m still in the process of trying to come to terms with the abortion dilemma myself. Therefore I won’t now box myself in as a proponent of either “pro-life” or “pro-choice”.

What this entry is about, though, is the ethical implications of the innate immortality of the soul. How you understand the nature of the soul has severe implications on your ethical expression.