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.
Show me. I think you are just pulling a pseudo-logical security blanket over your head, myself, and I think the only way you can even attempt to establish that is by assuming to begin with that fetuses have mature rights, the very assumption I am questioning.
The only "force" involved in abortion on demand is when you slaughter an innocent human being
Hogswill. If you use the law to prevent a woman from doing as she pleases with her own body, you are using force. Holding your nose and pretending the law works like a teaparty, and doesn't require guns and jail cells to work is not an argument, it is just wishful thinking.
Such as the bombing of Hiroshima?
I think I have given sufficient examples now to suggest that the confusion is not mine. The best way to preserve the most lives in a war is to surrender immediately. We fight wars because national sovreignty and national interest supercede the sacred right to life. Do you claim, like strict libertarians, that the US should only fight defensive wars when invaded? Do you abjure the Gulf War? The Panama War? The War in Europe in WWII?
Now, lets just see what we think about this as a moral difference. Your claim, if I may paraphrase it, is that because I spun the barrel of a revolver with only one bullet in it, and than shot you because you were downrange of my target practice field, that it isn't really murder because the odds were better that you would survive, than that you wouldn't, from my action. Do you think that gives the shooter a free ride? Apparently, you do.