Posted on 03/11/2002 12:20:49 PM PST by Quester
Is a baby (fetus) truly an intuder in the womb or is he/she an invited guest?
Hasn't the host acted to send out an invitation?
Would not it be the height of irresponsibility (or worse) for a host to send out invitations, but to hope that nobody shows up ... or even worse, to determine to evict any who respond to the invitation and show up, knowing that such an eviction means certain death for your guest(s)?
Place yourself as a non-Jew in Nazi occupied Europe. You know that the Jews are being hounded and herded by the Nazis, ultimately, to the death. You hear, through the grapevine, that some, in your community, have determined to discretely put the word out on the streets that their homes are available for use as sanctuaries to hide Jews from the Nazis. Those that have done this are quietly being considered 'heroes' in your community. You determine that you would like to be held in such high honor as these, and so, you let it be known that you are willing to take in Jews, as well. But, secretly, you have absolutely no intention of hiding any Jews ... after all, in reality, it would put you in danger and, infringe upon your societal freedoms (after all, Jews in hiding will have needs that only you will have the ability to meet). You hope that no one takes you up on your offer. But, your backup plan is that, if anyone does accept your invitation, you will, at your earliest convenience, discretely contact the Nazis and turn your 'guest(s)' over to them to be taken away to death. Once freed from your emcumbrance, you will put your 'invitation' (to death) back out on the street again.
Is this not immoral behaviour?
You lost all credibility when you compared a human being to a wart (virus). Go away.
An aids vector TAKES NOTHING! The infected persons cells do exactly what they were designed to do when utilized by the AID's virus.
The AIDS virus TAKES OVER the operation of the infected person's cells, so that they perform a task that they were NOT DESIGNED to perform. The infected person's cells WERE NOT DESIGNED to be utilized by the AIDS virus.
OTOH, a woman's uterine lining (as one example of many others) was designed to support and shelter the presence, nourishment, and development of the fetus.
To achieve the same ends, you would have to invade her womb with a blunt instrument and inflict severe damage, maim her to the point of impared mobility...
Isn't what you just described (as being similar to pregancy's negative effects on a woman's body) exactly what an abortion does to said woman's body?
Look, if you are at Free Republic trying to convince us of abortion's merits, you are at the wrong place. If you want to learn why it is abhorrent, you are at the right place, so listen up.
Well, Mr. Scientist, do you know how long it takes for that onoe cell to divide into two, and so on? Faster than you can reply to this message.
I can't even believe I am trying to get though to you.
Uh huh. I suggest you answer the question put to you. You are the one who supplied the definitions. If the baby is not a parasite, than it is not a different organism, according to the definition you supplied. That means it is part of the mother's body, does it not? Which is it, is it a part of the mother's body, or is it not? If it is a sovereign entity with rights, as distinct from the mother, why doesn't that make it a "different" organic entity, and therefore, a parasite off your definition?
You could either answer, or you could admit that definition-baiting is pointless, and find a real argument.
That was sarcasm.
Again with the citizenship business. You keep on repeating it in post after post and obviously have invested a great deal of emotional capital in this argument, yet when others point out the moral pitfalls of using this as your ethical lodestar you refuse to comment on them?
Perhaps my earlier post was a bit too detailed so let me present another instance that might be simpler to address. There is pending now in a court in a city not too far from mine a case wherein a citizen may have his citizenship stripped because of his involvement in earlier crimes against humanity. Now, if this person loses his citizenship, and thus becomes someone who is no longer a fully vested citizen, and is even in a lesser class than preborn or newborn children, because he is no longer even a potential citizen, are any moral claims that he might make as diminished, or moreso, than unborn children? If so, then, since evidently by your moral compass those same diminished moral claims of unborns make them fair game for abortion, could this individual then be given a late-life abortion (i.e., killed)? If so, would those doing the killing and those who aid in it, just like the abortionist and mother of an aborted child, escape legal sanctions and moral culpability? If not, why?
Kindly suggest where I have not been clear, and I will make another attempt. Kindly suggest in what manner I connected these two arguments regarding warts and the number of cells. I don't think I did.
Well, Mr. Scientist, do you know how long it takes for that one cell to divide into two, and so on? Faster than you can reply to this message.
uh huh. And in only 43 days, we have an actual heartbeat. Does this mean you concede that conception is not, in fact, when a fetus gains it's inalienable right to life?
No, just too hard to digest in one setting. It seems to me that you have a consistent theme about rights, that you share with many here, that make them a binary switch--either you have them in full force, or you don't have them. But real life with it's real moral problems, isn't like that. Let's consider a couple of your examples, people, such as Alzheimer's victims, lose rights as they become proportionately incompetent. In a world in which courts had perfect insight, they would lose or gain rights in perfect proportion to their capacity to exercise the associated moral competence. This happens every day, and hardly anyone complains about it, which as it ought to be. Are alzheimer's victims or the mentally deficient allowed the same liberty as you? No--how you restrict an alzheimer victim's access to public facilities and thruways whould be a crime if exercised against a competent person, and that's despite the guarantee of liberty written into the Declaration of Independence.
Similarly, teenagers have abbreviated rights and responsibilities compared to adults, toddlers even less, and, I assert, fetuses hardly any. Do toddlers vote, or have religeous liberty? Do you think these things are minor, inconsequential rights? Will a 3 year old be put in prison for causing the accidental death of a playmate? Do you think manslaughter is a minor issue?
Or, alternatively, maybe it's because I think it's quite in important question. As to the moral pitfalls--I am not the one that wants 13 year old rape victims to undergo unwanted pregnancies, or go back to the days of coathanger abortions. Rights are gradually accumulated by the maturing child in every other realm of the law. What makes you think there is anything more of a moral pitfall about abortion, than, say, raising the driving speed limit to 65--an act that we know for certain results in the unneeded death's of about 10,000 citizens a year. Or declaring war on what, by many accounts, could be considered the poorest country with the worst-armed military in the world, and slaughtering them as fast as we can? Oh, in self-defense, as another poster claims gives us a blank check in the murdering department.
Pretty oddly selective moral lenses, if you ask me.
Again you avoid the central point. If the woman chooses to be aborted, than there is no crime. The essential lynchpin of tort harm is that someone does it to you against your will.
Look, if you are at Free Republic trying to convince us of abortion's merits, you are at the wrong place. If you want to learn why it is abhorrent, you are at the right place, so listen up.
I have been listening quite attentively for years. No one here has come up with an original argument to my knowledge. The principle arguments boil down to these two: 1) it is so cute, so brainy, so human, so alive, so viable, so horrible looking when ripped from the womb, it must be a human with rights. Let's call it the sentimental argument, for short. 2) I have Sacred Knowledge, inaccessable to science, as to when rights enter the body of a fetus, vacating the mother's right to do as she pleases with her own womb. This is usually expressed as a shirt-tail cousin of the natural rights argument, whose deficiencies relative to this problem I'll run through, if you like.
I put the question to him--he just babbled on about not suffering witches to live--apparently he is also a little selective about this inalienable right to life thing. So I think I will just continue to try to muddle my way through working with tangible beings that can be relied on to respond meaningfully, and who have to suffer the consequences of wrongheaded moral reasoning.
Second, seeing as many here are investing their time trying to educate you can we consider you sub-FReep?
I don't know--can we consider you rude, unresponsive and dismissive?
Huh? If you think its such an important question, you would have taken more time to consider the consequences of the proposition, instead of engaging in logical fallacies (see below).
As to the moral pitfalls--I am not the one that wants 13 year old rape victims to undergo unwanted pregnancies, or go back to the days of coathanger abortions.
You have employed at least three logical fallacies in a single statement, distraction, strawman, and appeal to motives. In the case of the rape victim, the only "forcing" involved is the result of a violent criminal act. Yet you seek to somehow remedy that by allowing the murder of an innocent human being. That is a rather Draconian and diabolical theory of crime and punishment. No one here wants to go back to the days of coathanger abortions, we just don't want any abortions except perhaps in that most rarest of last-resort cases, wherein one must make a medical decision to preserve at least one life, where the alternative is two fatalities.
Rights are gradually accumulated by the maturing child in every other realm of the law.
Absolutely incorrect and incredible that a FReeper in good standing like yourself should make such an assertion. If you really believe this, try it out sometime, in the clearest of all cases. Go to a maternity ward and, at the moment of birth, which seems at this time to be the legal definition of personhood (a poor one, to be sure), and kill a newborn. By your system of ethics, that should be no big deal. By your moral compass, apparently, the child has not matured, has accumulated no rights, has demonstrated no capability for exercising any kind of moral judgements. If you do this, do you think you will be exempt from any legal or moral consequences? You might think that, but when the warden pulls the switch on the electric chair in which you will eventually find yourself sitting, he and others will judge differently. BTW, while I shouldn't have to say this, based on the content of your previous posts I feel I should: don't really do what I have suggested above. It was a rhetorical challenge. The last thing I would do is advocate the killing of a newborn.
What makes you think there is anything more of a moral pitfall about abortion, than, say, raising the driving speed limit to 65--an act that we know for certain results in the unneeded death's of about 10,000 citizens a year.
You know, I've seldom seen a clearer and more egregious example of a false moral equivalence. There is simply no way to equate the allowance, as a society, of the deliberate, premeditated, proactive decision to kill a specific individual, and produce an outcome that is sure to result in the death of an innocent human being, to a public policy that may result in a greater chance of harm coming to a broader population exposed to that risk on a non-individual basis. The moral issues and shadings are completely different, and your credibility in this discussion suffers if you continue to insist on such apples-to-oranges comparisons.
Or declaring war on what, by many accounts, could be considered the poorest country with the worst-armed military in the world, and slaughtering them as fast as we can? Oh, in self-defense, as another poster claims gives us a blank check in the murdering department.
The issue of self-preservation is an accepted tenet of almost all ethical systems of thought. And, in essence, the issue of killing in the context of mortal combat ultimately encompasses, in some form, this concept. But, even then, one does not have a blank check. Read up sometime on the various attempts to apply ethics in a combat situation. Such attempts generally result in unsatisfactory outcomes in a practical sense, but people have wrestled with them. For example, the notion of legal-illegal orders, "rules of war", treatment of prisoners and wounded, etc., represent attempts to limit the blank-check murder concept you allude to. Granted, in a firefight, these concepts have little practical import, since you goal is generally to get out of there with a whole skin and do likewise for as many of your friends as you can, but still, the attempt is made.
Similarly, in the abortion debate, the pro-life position generally recognizes the single, very limited exception upon which an ethical defense can be made, that of self-preservation of the individual, but this is hardly a "blank check".
Pretty oddly selective moral lenses, if you ask me.
Not really. The pro-life position is remarkably consistent on these issues. I have found that those who attempt to justify abortion on demand usually are the ones who end up with a patchwork quilt of exceptions, special cases, and rules that bend with the wind. A simple application of Occam's Razor usually shreds those rather cumbersome systems and scatters their remains to the four winds.
Have you given up reading what I wrote? I do not claim sacred knowledge--but you do, when you claim to know that rights enter a human fetus at some particular eventful moment in its development--but refuse to offer up tangible, verifiable evidence, rather than orotund rhetorical balderdash delivered with self-righteous certainty.
Another convenience case of right-to-life amnesia. You passed a "law", and hired thugs, called sheriffs, to enforce in by violent means, if necessary, on the pregnant woman. "forcing" is exactly the moral issue on the table, and pretending it isn't there won't make it go away.
Yet you seek to somehow remedy that by allowing the murder of an innocent human being. That is a rather Draconian and diabolical theory of crime and punishment. No one here wants to go back to the days of coathanger abortions, we just don't want any abortions except perhaps in that most rarest of last-resort cases, wherein one must make a medical decision to preserve at least one life, where the alternative is two fatalities.
You speak at length, and pursuasively, but, at bottom, your certainty on this, and similar subjects, is based on a trick, called post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in formal circles. You start with the base assumption that fetuses are full-blown rights bearers, and refuse to acknowledge that it is the basic premise of the logic that is being challenged.
Your exception is the death of your case. Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill had this argument 100 years ago or so ago. Medical intervention is a deliberate, calm act. Self defense has, by long formal legal tradition, 3 attributes, the important one for our discussion being: the danger must be immediate and sudden. If we let your line of reasoning go unchecked, we are soon faced with someone saying "well, this prisoner is innocent, but riots will break and and people will be killed if we don't execute--isn't the best outcome the most moral choice?"
And the answer is: NO. The State is the monopoly holder of the legal power for a human to do violence on another human. Humans being fallible, this requires that the State be made to wear a girdle of Moral Principal, not expedient number crunching. That's why we have a Constitutionally Limited Republic, not a Monarchy, or a Democracy. ...
You have failed to acknowledge my evidence, which wants an answer. How is it that kids don't vote, or have religious freedom, or toddlers can't be prosecuted for manslaughter? Younger people's rights and corresponding obligations are clearly minor, and growing. That is how the world works, and should work, howls of protests to the contrary notwithstanding.
And, finally, your defense of war is just as feeble in your hands, as in that of the previous poster. Having a war with Afganistan is simply slaughtering for revenge and prudential considerations, claiming self-defense here is simply absurd, and puts your argument on the same footing as mine, concerning raising the speed limit. Even when war is on something resembling an equal footing, specific lives are not being specifically defended, prudential national interests are being defended, by targeting specific individuals for death. Mixing this argument with the civil self-defense argument that police shootings have to face every day glosses over the difficulties with your defense of war by bait&switch.
What kind of lawyering is this? We dress up wholesale murder with a few bangles, and that makes it not wholesale murder? Cold comfort to the surviving family members of the victims of our bombings of Libya, or Hiroshima.
Your logical fallacies are getting tiring. Don't you know how to do anything else? You could give lessons in the use or prejudicial language and be named teacher of the year.
The only "force" involved in abortion on demand is when you slaughter an innocent human being, for convenience, or whatever other spurious reason you might postulate. The only possible, ethically defensible position for doing this is self-preservation, so unless your strawman argument results in a pregnancy where 100% assurance of fatality to both parties is the case, your rantings become meaningless.
You speak at length, and pursuasively, but, at bottom, your certainty on this, and similar subjects, is based on a trick, called post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in formal circles. You start with the base assumption that fetuses are full-blown rights bearers, and refuse to acknowledge that it is the basic premise of the logic that is being challenged.
You are misapplying the post hoc objection, and it is an invalid objection unless you are willing to object to admission of reasonable, observable, objective truth in any kind of debate. In the main, my posts have sought to explore the implications of your stated position, which seems to be vested in the citizen=rights nexus. I have pointed out the undesirable and objectionable consequences using non-hypothetical, non-strawman examples. It appears that the pitfalls are a result of your attempt to meld a concept that is rooted in legal and political theory (citizenship) with an ethical postulate, that is, whether or not a clearly identifiable human entity has an inherent right not to have the life with which it has been endowed taken by another based on the citizenship determiner. Its like trying to fit the round peg of citizenship into the square hole of ethics.
Your exception is the death of your case. Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill had this argument 100 years ago or so ago. Medical intervention is a deliberate, calm act. Self defense has, by long formal legal tradition, 3 attributes, the important one for our discussion being: the danger must be immediate and sudden. If we let your line of reasoning go unchecked, we are soon faced with someone saying "well, this prisoner is innocent, but riots will break and and people will be killed if we don't execute--isn't the best outcome the most moral choice?"
And the answer is: NO. The State is the monopoly holder of the legal power for a human to do violence on another human. Humans being fallible, this requires that the State be made to wear a girdle of Moral Principal, not expedient number crunching. That's why we have a Constitutionally Limited Republic, not a Monarchy, or a Democracy. ...
Well, I appreciate that long discussion of an interesting topic, but it is largely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Clearly, issues of self defense need not be limited as you suggest. There are many examples of actions taken over various time periods, immediate and not, in response to perceived threats, immediate or not, that all fall legitimately within the realm of self preservation.
You have failed to acknowledge my evidence, which wants an answer. How is it that kids don't vote, or have religious freedom, or toddlers can't be prosecuted for manslaughter? Younger people's rights and corresponding obligations are clearly minor, and growing. That is how the world works, and should work, howls of protests to the contrary notwithstanding.
I haven't failed to address it. I posted several examples above of the consequences of what you have proposed. You are again constructing false equivalences. The moral issues involved in the examples you discuss do not parallel in any way the question of why an individual should be denied that most basic of all protections, the right to live the life they have been endowed with. The fact that an individual, grown-up or child, cannot vote does not allow someone else the right to kill them. IOW, the lack of a privilege associated with legal adulthood does not invalidate the individual's right to be left alone unharmed by another. It seems your whole position is based on a blurring of ethical concepts and understanding that are quite basic.
And, finally, your defense of war is just as feeble in your hands, as in that of the previous poster. Having a war with Afganistan is simply slaughtering for revenge and prudential considerations, claiming self-defense here is simply absurd, and puts your argument on the same footing as mine, concerning raising the speed limit.
Why is it absurd? If a nation-state undertakes actions which threaten the existence of another, and the lives and welfare of its citizens, cannot one bring to bear the ethical arguments of self-defense? Or are you simply arguing specific cases? If so, then it is possible for reasonable people to disagree on whether a particular war is "just" or "moral", but that does not invalidate (make absurd) the attempt to understand the moral claims associated with acts releated to national policy and defense.
I stated that your speed limit analogy was inappropriate in the case of the abortion argument, and it is. It is a false equivalence. Here is why. If I abort you, you will die. That is assurred. My deliberate and considered action against you as an individual takes your life from you without regard to your feelings, wants, or desires. You tried to equate that with a public policy act of raising the speed limit. It is true, as you say, that statistics bear out that there is a liklihood that the total number of traffic fatalities will increase. But that does not assure, on an individual basis, that doing such will kill you. IOW, accidents may happen, and more frequently, but that is not the same as someone undertaking a deliberate act that they know will kill another. Now, are you capable of distinguishing the moral differences between the two? Because, if not, we'll be better off to let this drop right now.
Even when war is on something resembling an equal footing, specific lives are not being specifically defended, prudential national interests are being defended, by targeting specific individuals for death.
But ultimately, if one is to attempt to justify a "moral" war, one has to appeal to the concept of defending oneself from a perceived threat, which translates, at its basis, into the potential or actual harm to which individuals making up the population of a nation will be exposed. Again, are you complaining about specific wars, or just the concept of armed conflict in general between nation-states? The context of my earlier posts in mentioning this at all was to indicate that in specific cases one can invoke the self-preservation argument as an ethical tenet. You should not confuse that, if you did, with an attempt to justify war are being moral in all cases, because, clearly, it may not be.
Mixing this argument with the civil self-defense argument that police shootings have to face every day glosses over the difficulties with your defense of war by bait&switch.
Again, the context was to acknowledge that self-preservation as an ethical principle could in limited circumstances be brought to bear in arguing in favor of the use of lethal force. A actions of a soldier in the midst of a firefight, for example, may be judged in a different ethical light than those, for example, of a murderer killing someone during a robbery, or the proactive taking of an innocent life in vivo.
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