This letter, which may have come in response to this post, deserved a response:

I do not agree with you on abortion but I respect your views. What I don’t understand is why, since you are obviously uncomfortable with torture and conservative apologias for it, you have written so little about it. Most of the time you make comments on the debate about torture rather than on torture itself, and you don’t display anywhere near the same passion and engagement you bring to bear on abortion. (It’s not enough to say that you don’t know as much about torture: If you cared as much as you do about abortion you would take the trouble to master it.) Torture seems to me to be worse than abortion since it involves the state directly committing an evil instead of just tolerating one. To say nothing of the rule-of-law questions.
So why the double standard? I’d like to think that the difference isn’t just that you want to fit in with your Republican friends. Sexual morality shouldn’t be the only part of morality conservatives care about.

I heartily agree with that last sentence, but I don’t regard abortion as a matter of sexual ethics. I regard abortion, unlike many types of sexual immorality, as a grave injustice. Now that you’ve invited me to do some navel-gazing, though, I can think of a few reasons I have written less about torture.

First, the gravity of the evil involved in abortion is greater, as are the number of victims. It is a greater evil because it is always aimed at ending the life of an innocent party. The abortion license is not less problematic than torture as a matter of political morality because it is “indirect.” The state may not directly kill the unborn child but it does itself declare the child to have no rights.

Second, the constitutional implications are different. Nobody is saying that the evil of torture is in the Constitution in the same way that, say, the Supreme Court says that the abortion license is in it. Nobody, that is, is saying that the Constitution requires the executive branch to engage in torture in the way that state governments are required to treat the unborn as un-persons.

Third, there are conceptual and definitional problems in applying a norm against torture that do not exist in the case of abortion (and embryo-destructive research). The philosophical tradition is not as well developed, perhaps because the case is in its nature fuzzier.

I can think of one counter-argument to this set of priorities (doubtless there are others I haven’t thought about). One might argue that the abortion license is well entrenched and will take a long time to end, whereas torture is a recent, Bush-era innovation that can be put behind us if we take the right steps. But (even assuming the basic truth of that account) you could take that as a reason to prioritize either the easier or the harder task. And the other considerations seem to me to be weightier.