Examining Hidden Assumptions in the Abortion Debate

In an 1884 lecture to students of the Harvard Divinity School regarding the seemingly interminable Freewill vs Determinism debate that had animated philosophers, theologians, poets, and plowmen for centuries, the American philosopher Williams James began by noting: "A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.  This is a radical mistake.  I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground -- not perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will imply."