"I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me"
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The statement announces two things at once: a refusal of the rights-based framing of abortion and a candid confession of uncertainty about what should replace it. That double move is signature Stanley Fish. As a literary theorist and legal scholar, he has long argued that abstract principles do not decide hard cases; rather, institutions, histories, and interpretive communities do. Rights talk, in his view, often functions as a rhetorical trump that conceals political and moral contestation under the mantle of neutrality or universality.
Calling abortion a vexed area underscores the collision of incommensurable commitments: the moral status of the fetus, a pregnant persons autonomy and bodily integrity, medical realities that shift with technology, and a states interest in potential life. A pure principle is ill-equipped to reconcile these collisions. Saying he does not support abortion rights distances him from the claim that there exists a freestanding, transcontextual right that should override other considerations in every case. Yet he declines to leap into the opposite absolutism. What he would support remains unclear because, on his view, clarity does not arrive by deducing from first principles; it emerges from concrete arrangements hammered out in practice.
The stance fits the broader arc of Fishs work, from There Is No Such Thing as Free Speech to The Trouble with Principle, where he contends that putatively universal rights and principles mask substantive, partisan judgments. He prefers outcomes justified by their local, institutional, and pragmatic fit over outcomes justified by abstract maxims. In abortion policy, that might mean calibrated regulations, attention to viability and medical facts, and democratic settlements that acknowledge plural moral worlds without pretending to dissolve them.
The remark is not indecision masquerading as sophistication; it is a model of intellectual humility in a field prone to slogans. By separating skepticism about rights language from blanket moral certainty, Fish invites a politics of negotiation, not purity, where competing goods are balanced rather than theoretically annihilated.
Calling abortion a vexed area underscores the collision of incommensurable commitments: the moral status of the fetus, a pregnant persons autonomy and bodily integrity, medical realities that shift with technology, and a states interest in potential life. A pure principle is ill-equipped to reconcile these collisions. Saying he does not support abortion rights distances him from the claim that there exists a freestanding, transcontextual right that should override other considerations in every case. Yet he declines to leap into the opposite absolutism. What he would support remains unclear because, on his view, clarity does not arrive by deducing from first principles; it emerges from concrete arrangements hammered out in practice.
The stance fits the broader arc of Fishs work, from There Is No Such Thing as Free Speech to The Trouble with Principle, where he contends that putatively universal rights and principles mask substantive, partisan judgments. He prefers outcomes justified by their local, institutional, and pragmatic fit over outcomes justified by abstract maxims. In abortion policy, that might mean calibrated regulations, attention to viability and medical facts, and democratic settlements that acknowledge plural moral worlds without pretending to dissolve them.
The remark is not indecision masquerading as sophistication; it is a model of intellectual humility in a field prone to slogans. By separating skepticism about rights language from blanket moral certainty, Fish invites a politics of negotiation, not purity, where competing goods are balanced rather than theoretically annihilated.
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| Topic | Human Rights |
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