Alison McCulloch

Fighting to Choose chronicles one of the most important yet neglected chapters in New Zealand’s recent political history. More than thirty-five years ago, at the height of the second wave of feminism, New Zealand passed a conservative abortion law that bucked a trend in the West toward liberalisation. How did this happen in a country proud of its progressive social policies – particularly its record on women’s rights? And why is such a cumbersome, expensive, endlessly litigated set of statutes still on the books? In Fighting to Choose: The Abortion Rights Struggle in New Zealand, Alison McCulloch sets out to answer those questions by taking a close look at the people involved and the tactics they employed in waging what was – and continues to be – an intense and impassioned battle.

One of the most difficult questions of Kant's theory of morality and freedom is: How can a noumenal being make a difference in a phenomenal world? ;This dissertation offers one possible solution to this problem that emerges from Kant's radical transcendental idealism and follows the method of the Critique of Pure Reason. This solution shows that Kant's practical philosophy as outlined in the Critique of Practical Reason is as idealistic, or mind-dependent, as is his theoretical philosophy, and necessarily so since both emerge from the same faculty-driven mind. ;The faculty crucial to freedom is reason, and it is, I argue, through reason, that we introduce into the realm of non-moral nature abstract, idealized, and irreducibly moral entities that are grounded in a noumenal self over which we have a certain control. Thus, it is not that freedom involves an interference in nature, but instead that the noumenal self freely creates a unique and radically new aspect of that nature. ;I use an investigation of some of the key distinctions and faculties of the first Critique on which to build my case, in particular the constitutivity-regulativity distinction. I argue that constitutivity is an indicator of ontological irreducibility such that where Kant argues reason acts constitutively---in the practical/moral sphere---he is pointing to a distinct order of things, in this case moral entities. I compare these with mathematical entities to show that there are indeed examples of ontological orders other than that of objects in nature like rocks and trees. ;Freedom, on this account, is a kind of reason-based creation or constitution of moral entities that are ultimately manifested in the human world of value. This view is contrasted with the kind of freedom that might emerge from an empiricist metaphysics, in particular, the metaphysics of David Hume