First go after babies in their wombs, and now justices in their homes.  The logic of attacking the justices comes inevitably out of the logic of Roe.  As Aristotle showed us, logically valid reasoning based on false premises leads to false conclusions and wrong actions: "illogic" in practice.  So we now see yet another result of the logic of Roe, and Casey even more.  Here it helps to see its source — not from great sages like Socrates and Confucius, or prophets like Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, but from the existentialist thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and his enamorata Simone de Beauvoir, French public intellectuals post–World War II.  Sartre set out the principles, and Beauvoir applied them in her book The Second Sex, the wellspring of contemporary women's liberation.

In his "first principle of existentialism", Sartre skipped over plants and animals and compared humans to an inanimate object:

Consider ... a book or paper-cutter.  One cannot postulate a man who makes a paper-cutter but does not know what it is used for.  For the paper-cutter, [its] essence ... precedes existence.  Now if we conceive God as Creator ... the concept of man in the mind of God is like paper-cutter in the mind of the artisan. But in atheistic existentialism, which I represent ... there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and this being is man. ... This means, first of all, that man exists ... and only afterwards defines himself ... [since] he himself will have made what he will be.  Therefore, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it ... man is what he conceives himself to be ... after his thrust into existence.[1]

Beauvoir, a better writer, put the same point succinctly: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."[2] She did not say 'becomes more a woman,' but says simply "becomes a woman," because she is not really a woman from birth, even though born with a female body.  Likewise, we are not born a human, but create our own essence.  So what is a man at first?  A sort of "locus of freedom" to choose and act — and, in acting, to create his own essence.  This is the illogical but powerful idea still very much with us.  

  The most powerful and widespread result of Sartrism is in the area of sexual morality.  Sartre's "first principle" that "existence precedes essence" is a fundamental but usually unrecognized source of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the mainstreaming of homosexuality in the 1990s, the endorsement of "gay marriage" by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, the distinction between psychological gender and physical sex, and the consequent idea of one changing one's gender at will.

As often in their relationship, Beauvoir's actions were more personal and hazardous, Sartre's more self-serving.  In his novel, The Age of Reason (1945), Sartre's main character pays for an abortion for his mistress.  In 1971, Beauvoir signed the Manifesto of the 343 prominent French women who publically admitted they had had abortions and called for its legalization.  Since existence precedes essence, and the human essence is created by one's actions, although it is sad to terminate what might have been a human, what was killed had not yet acted enough to attain a human essence.

The next year, this Sartrean inference provided a central but unacknowledged foundation for the reasoning of the American Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973).  The so-called "fetus" (a misuse of the Latin term when the nature of the thing is dropped, since the "fetal" pigs one dissected in high school biology were still pigs) was thought not yet to have performed actions sufficient enough to constitute it a human worthy of legal protection.  So when had it done enough?

At this point the Court committed a logical blunder.  That point is birth, the justices said.  But even on Sartrean principles, this conclusion is nonsense.  For the process of birth is not an action taken by the fetus.  It is the mother who is acting, pushing the "fetus" out.  The "fetus" is being acted upon, a passion or undergoing in Aristotelean terms, the opposite of an action.  So if a thing's action is what creates its essence, and birth is not an action performed by the "fetus," birth cannot possibly add something to make it human.  It is simply being moved from one place to another, from inside to outside the mother, which results in its first cry, which is indeed its own action, but not its first action, and it does not make it human.  In their rush to judgment, then, the Court were not even logical Sartreans.  Their desires got in the way of their own logic, a mistake typical of Sartre and Beauvoir, and their current intellectual progeny.

The call for attacking the justices in their homes, then, simply follows the illogic laid out by Sartre seven decades ago.  Those styling themselves most free and up-to-date are simply slaves to an outworn theory and, as slaves, are doing great harm.

R.E. Houser taught philosophy and logic for 40 years and was awarded the Aquinas Medal "for eminence on philosophy" by the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2019.  His Logic as a Liberal Art: An Introduction to Rhetoric and Reasoning is now available.