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Episode 195 - Is Roe Viable? (w/ Norm Finkelstein) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-07-25 10:39:59
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Briahna's favorite sparing partner, author and activist Norm Finkelstein, returns to Bad Faith to discuss chapters from his upcoming book pertaining to Roe v. Wade, the Dobbs opinion, free speech, and "woke" culture. Is the Right right about their being no constitutional basis for abortion rights? Is the left dodging the question of when life begins, or is it actually morally unnecessary to pin that down (or peg abortion rights to viability at all)? Finkelstein also weighs in the recent debate over whether the left should support Twitter bans for hate speech, and opines on whether it's a "slur" to label someone a bigot.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube to access our full video library. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands)

Comments

Anonymous

I had to clock out at the 32 minute mark, Norm's arguments weren't interesting or logical. "We don't know when life begins" should be an argument for keeping abortion legal, because in this country you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Since there is no proof when life begins, you cannot qualify abortion as taking a life.

Nick

This was tedious. Bodily autonomy should be an inalienable right and if you were the only person in the world with the same blood type no one can compel you to donate an organ to a living person. The rest is window dressing and it didn’t need to be an hour and a half. I have subscribed for pretty much the whole run of the show but it really feels like Bad Faith is becoming more of an accurate description than a tongue in cheek epithet.

Anonymous

Spin off podcast? Good duo

Colin Clark

This was refreshing, though the whining from commenters is predictably tedious. I would love to get Norm going on population control in China and Israel, two places he knows well. I have had 2 kids and 2 abortions and typically despise conversations on this topic, but this was good listening, as good as it gets from 2 folks who have definitely never been pregnant. (sorry if I'm wrong about that Bri, I just ... Get that vibe.)

Liska Ostojic

20 min and I came on here to brag how I felt good that even I could argue Norm’s points down so maybe I’m learning a little from Brie, only to discover the majority of comments here are smarter and better reasoned than Norm’s lol Oh well, we can all be proud. Also, regarding the Jewish/Catholic thing… can’t believe Brie doesn’t point out (or maybe will later) Nazis didn’t believe Jews deviant because Jews believed in Judaism/the Torah, but because *they were Jews*! Proof being, conversion away from Judaism didn’t save any Jews from the Holocaust. Didn’t we just go through this with Whoopi?? No one today (at least the vast majority) has issue with Catholics for being *Catholic* (in a racialized/essentialized way) but for wanting to impose their beliefs on others (and even then it’s a minority of Catholics who do, is my understanding). Anyway am prob going to tap out. Kind of enjoyable and I’m happy my beliefs/values/understanding stand up under scrutiny but also I don’t have time to rehash every single thing 🤷‍♀️ Happy Brie creates a space for it though, AND goes toe to toe with him!

Anonymous

On the one hand, I appreciate that Briahna tried to have her “should Twitter have the power to ban…” conversation with a more appropriate guest, though Finkelstein didn’t seem to want to have this conversation either. Nice try, Brie. On the other hand, this guy was pretty infuriating, as many have noted. That being said, listening to this guy reminds me of a random thought I had just the other day that we may end up in a society where Gone with the Wind is rehabilitated as the greatest movie of all time and Casablanca is the pariah. I think this is the kind of scenario he’s trying to get us to contemplate. But, yeah, Finkelstein was a total ass. Just curious, does he consider “woke” to be a slur? He has no problem de-legitimizing a messenger that he deems to fall into that category, no? Is it not a slur unless it’s “woke-ist”???

Anonymous
>>88365489

Quick clarification—The analogy I’m making is that I think Finkelstein would say that the possibility of the status of GWTW and Casablanca flipping is a warning that we should be cautious about condemning GWTW. This is absolutely NOT my position. GWTW is a piece of shit that has caused innumerable harm and fully deserves all the hate it receives. If we do end up in a society where GWTW is rehabbed, it’s not because we (correctly) condemn it now. And I guess I’d call the idea about Casablanca being pariah’d just an amusing (to me) shit-take on my part.

Babbaboosh

I said it before and I'll say it again: the sanctity of life argument is arbitrary and capricious. This country pays people on a continual, monthly basis to die for it's cause(s). If Norm wants to do a joint venture project on demilitarization or some other leftward project like 'the environment' or whatever, cool; I'll hear it. But a condescending, wordy, elaborate argument to take the 'L' in good faith is not acceptable and unwelcome in the war tent. If he feels bad about that fundamental rejection he can cry about it with all his civil rights on a different podcast.

Anonymous

Having listened to the entire episode, now, it seems like these two things are true about Norman Finklestein: (1) His moral intuitions lead him to the conclusion that “all human life is sacred,” including pre-neonates. If this is right, it seems reasonable to say that his belief in this conclusion motivates the analogy he draws between our moral judgments of the eugenics movement’s acts of forced sterilization and abortion. Today, we don’t popularly accept that individuals with genetic or developmental disorders are less valuable as Human beings. This is because we recognize the value of all Human lives. Because at some point a fetus becomes recognizable as Human—a special status that most believe distinguishes us, morally—abortion is potentially analogous to eugenics, Norm thinks. At the very least, he believes that the ethical questions concerning the beginning of Human life are serious. He’s offended that others either don’t take it seriously or don’t care.

Anonymous

(2) Roe didn’t provide an appropriate (satisfying) answer to the ethical question of when Human life begins, particularly in the context of US Constitutional law. Therefore, Roe is an awful decision. Norm spent a lot of time explaining his intellectual dissatisfaction with Roe and approval of Dobbs *as arguments.* As a instructor and graduate student of philosophy—the discipline that originated modern mathematical and propositional logic—I have some sympathy with Norm on this issue. Like Norm, I’d like people in our society to generally produce good arguments, with honest and charitable attitudes. Perhaps Roe is, when evaluated as an *argument,* awful. I’ve personally never read it. All of his intellectual virtues aside, it seems like the real problem for Norm is that (a) society doesn’t take ethical issues seriously enough for his taste and (b) no one has an argument that satisfies, convinces him about when a fetus becomes a member of the Human community and at which point, abortion becomes morally (legally?) impermissible.

Anonymous
>>88388460

All this said, what’s the upshot? He doesn’t like the “cavalier” attitudes of some leftists. Okay? Beyond finding such attitudes personally, morally distasteful, does he have anything to say? Is he simply criticizing the attitudes of many leftists? Clearly, he prompts his undergraduate students to think critically about laws like Roe. That’s fine as an exercise in legal critical thinking. But is he concerned, at all, with offering a better legal argument on the legality of abortion? If not, then he’s not helping matters. Critique is fine but not particularly helpful when not accompanied with suggestions for doing better.

Anonymous
>>88388460

Otherwise, it’s like—dude, people have been arguing about viability and the ethics of abortion for decades. There are books and essays to read. We don’t need to keep having the same arguments, as though no one has ever thought about the subject matter. If you’re not satisfied with those arguments, Norm, tough shit. Welcome to philosophy.

Anonymous

Finkelstein equating his reading “How to be an Anti-Racist” to Captain Ahab’s violent obsession with slaying Moby Dick tells me everything I need to know about how he truly feels about black folk. And then he called it a “so-called” book. He’s very disrespectful.

Jonathan Rose
>>88480604

It might not be all that useful to base your entire opinion of how someone feels about something based on one critique of one book written by one person. Speaking as a black person who's followed Finklestein for quite some time, he has a long track record of calling out anti-black racism and anti-Arab/Muslim sentiments within his own community which has caused him to become a pariah to many in the Jewish community. I think at the very least, he's a complex person with both good and bad traits like all of us and it's a lot less black and white than you're making it out to be.

Anonymous

I’m not “making him out to be” anything. I’m expressing my impression of his comments, some of which I thought were outright disrespectful. My opinion is as useful as any. I won’t be silenced just because you don’t like what I have to say.

Anonymous
>>88534308

Not sure there was an attempt to silence you - this board feels like a good place to challenge each other's opinions. When you say that you've heard everything you need to know about this guy, I will share Jonathan's view that there is *so* much more to know about Finklestein. Though as fallible as the next person, his record on racism and inequality is way too vast to discount him by a single comment. I find that he often delivers provocative comments that demand scrutiny, but when he fleshes things out they often make quite good sense.

Anonymous
>>88534308

Not sure if anyone's reading down this far but just wanted to update a bit on this - while Finklestein's loud-mouthed manner has been a source of some comedy in the past {despite its cringey proximity to my own dad's irksome mannerism), I definitely think he should lay off whatever tea he was drinking in the debrief. A weirdly poor performance from him.

Anonymous
>>88322522

I'm so annoyed that this argument wasn't brought up in the episode or in the follow up DeBrief episode (unless it's in the remaining 25 minutes I have yet to listen to). Literally the argument is as simple as until you're arguing that all type O- people should be forced to donate blood, until you're arguing that everyone should be tested at birth and put on an organ/bone marrow registry and be forced to donate when their compatibility necessitates, then the argument of viability is a fucking smokescreen for ruling class cultural narrative imposition. According to this woowoo moral-handwringing viability argument, literal corpses have more bodily autonomy than pregnant people.

Anonymous

Finkelstein says “woke” people with such hatred- interesting that he admonishes Catholics are being treated with hatred. Then he says he doesn’t believe he knows the truth anymore right after saying there’s no abortion protection in the constitution and that’s the “truth”