Though I do not advocate censorship, it would delight me beyond measure were The Dartmouth to forestall printing any future articles by Conor Dugan '00 until he has demonstrated himself fit to write an editorial displaying some manner, any manner, of logical or coherent argument. Past articles of his have been less than illuminating, but his most recent column in the Mar. 30 edition of The Dartmouth, entitled, "A Slippery Slope," has scaled new heights of ridiculousness.
Though previous columns by Mr. Dugan have harangued The Dartmouth readership on behalf of his religious convictions, I wish to emphasize that I have no quarrel here with Mr. Dugan's religion itself. What I cannot silently withstand any longer is his perpetual presumption that: 1. His dogmas represent what all persons value and believe; 2. Even were this not the case, they definitely represent what all persons should value and believe; and 3. That persons with any loathsome alternate beliefs are probably also not bright enough to recognize reasoning so poor as to be intellectually insulted when they see it.
As I have not seen fit to save any of Mr. Dugan's past articles for posterity, I will have to extract from his most recent opus statements to support my claims. Mr. Dugan begins with a paragraph stating it to be "obvious" that "the belief we hold most fervently is that man has some sort of inviolable dignity which cannot be attacked." Substitute "I" for "we" in this statement, and Mr. Dugan has a tautological but reasonable beginning for an editorial. How Mr. Dugan can claim to speak for all of "us," however, (though he leaves it unclear as to who "we" are: Dartmouth students? American citizens? All humans? Or perhaps Mr. Dugan is royalty?) it is impossible to discern. I did not elect Mr. Dugan as my moral representative, and I am reasonably certain that few others have, or, permitted the opportunity, would. It is feasible that some people outside Mr. Dugan's electorate hold beliefs in justice, or spiritual truth, or liberty, more fervently than they hold a belief in human dignity. That our great nation has sent hundreds of thousands of its citizens to noble and brave but decidedly undignified wartime deaths in the spirit of defending such principles seems to support such a claim.
Mr. Dugan next forges bravely onward to the issue of abortion, stating, "We (there 'we' go spouting off again!) declare that man has an inviolable dignity but then in our political regimes we arbitrarily declare whom (sic) has dignity. This reality is made most evident in the institution of abortion." Apparently, Mr. Dugan is intending, somewhat circuitously, to say that an abortion violates the dignity of the involved fetus. The ensuing paragraph uses as support for this claim the fact Mr. Dugan himself believes a fetus to be human. He bolsters this statement by pointing out that people talk to and about fetuses as though the fetuses were human, and that some people have been charged with a "double crime" for murdering pregnant women. I talk to and about my dog and my computer as though they were human. Must all foci of anthropomorphizing conversations be imbued with human dignity? And were I to kill a woman and steal her car while I were at it I would be charged with a double crime as well. However, I am not convinced the car merits bequeathal of human dignity by virtue of this legal ruling. Finally, Mr. Dugan leaves us with a multiple-choice question which asserts that since a fetus is not a dog, frog, liver, or kidney, it must be a human. This ignores the possibility that a fetus might merit a unique category befitting its unique existence. But Mr. Dugan, unfazed, then attempts to use his convictions, poorly supported though they are, as his primary evidence for all of "our" beliefs about fetal status, beliefs which, he helpfully points out, contradict "our" prior beliefs about inviolable human dignity.
In summary, first Mr. Dugan conjures out of thin air a single paragraph declaring what "we" all fundamentally believe with regard to human dignity. This is insulting, to be sure, but not nearly as insulting as the fact that he uses "our" imaginary opinions as the sole basis for an argument which straggles on for another nine paragraphs, using such creative twists of logic as invalidating the law by claiming it to be the corrupted result of misguided "political regimes" and then using the rulings meted out by this selfsame law as support for his argument in an ensuing paragraph. Though he might claim this doublethink to be proof of the contradiction between, "our superficial beliefs," and, "our actual beliefs," I cannot see this as proof of anything other than the contradiction between, "a set of beliefs Mr. Dugan has ascribed to 'us,'" and, "a set of beliefs Mr. Dugan wishes to ascribe to 'us.'"
Would I rejoice were Mr. Dugan's articles to be omitted by future editions of The Dartmouth? Certainly. Do I believe that this is in fact what will or should happen? Absolutely not. I may believe Mr. Dugan's logical fallacies to be of such magnitude that they do not merit any more ink than they have already squandered, but I encourage the right of others to hold alternate beliefs. Mr. Dugan, on the other hand, presumes himself to not only be qualified to tell "us" what we should believe, but to tell "us" as well what we do believe. Then he has the gall to deride "us" as contemptible hypocrites for holding beliefs that he has attributed to us because they contradict the beliefs he has told us we should hold. This not only lends new meaning to the concept of blaming the victim, but suggests that there is indeed some kind of slippery slope down which Mr. Dugan is stumbling.
