Robert P. George

Intesting arguments in support of many things I know to be true but can't always put my finger on. This guy is a prof at Princeton. I will soon be investing in his books after reading this interview about marriage. Hope you enjoy. Here's a taste:

"[Our conventional sense of marriage has become dualistic because]...It's part of a larger trend towards identifying the good or the valuable with pleasing experiences and psychological satisfactions. This helps to explain not only the decline of sexual morality in our culture, but also the widespread use of recreational drugs. Many people (including more than a few Christians) have come to view themselves as consciousnesses (or, for people who retain some level of religious self-understanding, as "souls") that inhabit bodies. Since the body is regarded as merely instrumental, rather than as part of the personal reality of the human being (considered as a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit), moral constraints of any sort on "nonharmful" drugs or "nonharmful" sexual practices of "consenting adults" seem arbitrary and even irrational.

This dualistic conception of persons and their bodies underwrites the evils of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. If human beings prior to the development of self-conscious awareness in infancy, or after its loss as a result of old age or infirmity, are not yet or no longer "persons," then what is wrong with killing them when they are inconvenient to us or because their organs can be harvested for transplantation or experimentation? Hence, the erosion of respect for human life in all of its stages and conditions."