Ben Shapiro producer: Property more valuable than life.

en Shapiro is very pro-life. He’s so pro-life he once berat­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ist at BBC, call­ing him a “left­ist,” because the jour­nal­ist (Andrew Neil) dared to ask him a how-would-you-reply-to-those-who-say ques­tion. It had to do with the Geor­gia abor­tion law that crit­ics claimed could poten­tial­ly jail women for hav­ing mis­car­riages. What would you say to those who call the law “bar­bar­ic,” Neil asked Shapiro. Shapiro went on the attack, assum­ing that Neil him­self was call­ing it bar­bar­ic, and waxed out­raged that any­one would describe the “pro-life posi­tion” as “bar­bar­ic.” Shapiro was forced to apol­o­gize lat­er, after he found out that Neil is a con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ist and pro-life him­self. (Shapiro did­n’t both­er to do his home­work about Neil ahead of the inter­view.) I wrote about all of this here, and it’s a great illus­tra­tion of how Shapiro is superbly pro-life: He’s so pro-life he finds Left­ies hid­ing under every bed; he’s in his 1950s.

I recall all this his­to­ry about Shapiro’s supe­ri­or pro-life­ness because his producer—someone named Jere­my D. Bor­e­ing, whose pro­file pic makes him look like the stereo­typ­i­cal Angry White Male—has now tweet­ed that prop­er­ty is of more val­ue than many lives:

In the main he’s get­ting dumped on for this, which is encour­ag­ing. Bor­e­ing is deeply con­fused. If some­one breaks into your prop­er­ty, you cer­tain­ly do have a right to defend your­self with lethal force—but only if your own life or safe­ty is at stake. If some­one is in your dri­ve­way beat­ing up your car with a base­ball bat, you’re not allowed to kill him. Only defense of life mer­its tak­ing anoth­er life, nev­er defense of prop­er­ty. In a riot, police cer­tain­ly have the right to use dead­ly force against riot­ers, but they’re quelling the riot in order to pro­tect the lives and the safe­ty of per­sons, includ­ing their own.

This is not a triv­ial dis­tinc­tion. Prop­er­ty is not more valu­able than life. It is not the same thing as life. By putting it the way he does, Bor­e­ing in effect says the qui­et part out loud: For self-described con­ser­v­a­tives, wealth is more val­u­ble than life. For self-described con­ser­v­a­tives, wealth—not life—is the high­est good.

But not even guilty life is of more worth than inno­cent life. You can take the life of B to pro­tect the life of A, but only when there is no oth­er option avail­able to you. In a riot, or a war, that’s a dif­fi­cult judg­ment call and peo­ple act a great deal more out of instinct and fear and the heat of the moment than rea­son, and that’s per­fect­ly under­stand­able. But as a philo­soph­i­cal point, you pro­tect the life of A when it is threat­ened, but that does not make A’s life objec­tive­ly more valu­able than B’s. If B has already killed A and you arrest B, you are no longer per­mit­ted to kill B unless there is no oth­er way to pro­tect C.

Pope St. John Paul II said in Evan­geli­um Vitae 9: “Not even a mur­der­er los­es his per­son­al dig­ni­ty.” Some will object: But Alt! Per­son­al dig­ni­ty and the right to life are two dif­fer­ent things! Except that the con­text of JP2’s dis­cus­sion at this point is Cain’s mur­der of Abel. Cain is wor­ried that oth­er peo­ple will find him and kill him, and God puts a mark on Cain as a warn­ing to oth­ers. He puts the mark on Cain to pro­tect Cain’s life; Cain has a right to life because of his per­son­al dig­ni­ty. The two things are con­nect­ed, not exclu­sive. Here is the full pas­sage:

And yet God, who is always mer­ci­ful even when he pun­ish­es, “put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him” (Gen 4:15). He thus gave him a dis­tinc­tive sign, not to con­demn him to the hatred of oth­ers, but to pro­tect and defend him from those wish­ing to kill him, even out of a desire to avenge Abel’s death. Not even a mur­der­er los­es his per­son­al dig­ni­ty, and God him­self pledges to guar­an­tee this. And it is pre- cise­ly here that the para­dox­i­cal mys­tery of the mer­ci­ful jus­tice of God is shown forth. As Saint Ambrose writes: ‘Once the crime is admit­ted at the very incep­tion of this sin­ful act of par­ri­cide, then the divine law of God’s mer­cy should be imme­di­ate­ly extend­ed. If pun­ish­ment is forth­with inflict­ed on the accused, then men in the exer­cise of jus­tice would in no way observe patience and mod­er­a­tion, but would straight­away con­demn the defen­dant to pun­ish­ment. … God drove Cain out of his pres­ence and sent him into exile far away from his native land, so that he passed from a life of human kind­ness to one which was more akin to the rude exis­tence of a wild beast. God, who pre­ferred the cor­rec­tion rather than the death of a sin­ner, did not desire that a homi­cide be pun­ished by the exac­tion of anoth­er act of homi­cide.’ ”

Those who say that the lic­it­ness of the death penal­ty is “tra­di­tion­al Catholic teach­ing” should note that John Paul II quotes St. Ambrose to estab­lish that God does not desire death in pun­ish­ment for death. St. Ambrose describes the death penal­ty as “homi­cide.”

Do not be fooled when self-described con­ser­v­a­tives self-describe as pro-life. Their eth­ic is not pro-life but pro-birth and pro-wealth. You can’t describe prop­er­ty as more impor­tant than any life and still get to describe your­self as pro-life.