Brandon Watson explains Jeremy Bentham’s defense of infanticide :
Bentham holds that homicide is forbidden in law primarily because of its mischievous effects, which he sorts into the two categories of danger and alarm . In other words, we forbid homicide in order to deter it, to prevent the pain and trouble either of repetition of the act itself (danger) or of the bare threat of that repetition hanging over our heads (alarm). With infants, however, neither seems significant.
Also today, George Weigel on Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani’s prophetic fears about religious freedom :
Ottaviani’s fear was that religious freedom would result in religious indifference and then a collapse of religious conviction, which would in turn lead to state hostility toward religious believers and religious institutions. His theological argument against religious freedom, widely held in the Roman universities of the day, rested on the proposition that “error has no rights.”
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