ABSTRACT
Several years ago the Parliament of Canada deliberated legislation dealing with capital punishment and abortion. In discussing these issues, a colleague of ours said that he did not understand people who were against abortion, but for capital punishment. He couldn’t see, he explained, how someone who viewed abortion as killing babies could support the death penalty. Didn’t people like that realize, he asked, how inconsistent they were—in support of killing in one case, but against in the other? Neither our colleague nor the rest of us, who were agreeing with him, were aware at the time that we showed the same inconsistency, but in the opposite direction. That is, our liberal beliefs led us to be prochoice on abortion but anti-capital punishment. In other words, we were against the execution of convicted murderers, but for the ending of the lives of fetuses. Why did the apparent inconsistency of others loom so large while our own inconsistency remained hidden?
