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To: chimera
I agree that one can't rest one's ethics upon the senses, but it still has a role.

You illustrate, ahem, my point with your word pictures of abortion. Most pro-choicers prefer not to see those pictures and will go great lengths to get away from those pictures. They see a dismembered person, I assume, and that bothers them.

For that same reason the Nazis shipped the Jews off to the "work camps" and "relocation centers" - out of view of the vast majority of Germany. For all the propaganda, most Germans couldn't really see the Jews as total "non-persons". Or even the "enemy" in its full sense.

(I have this association just now of "taking leave of one's senses" and "moral disintegration".One reason I changed from pro-abortion to pro-life many, many years ago was partly because of an honest facing up to the reality of what I was advocating.

I think of the pictures.

That, and the moral indefensibilty of the act, based on facts of science and logic and reason.

The senses and reason and culture come together into a "moral gestalt".

And so far, I don't have even a hint of perception of the fertilized egg as a person. A picture of a ruined egg wouldn't bother me.

Along with pictures, I think of actions as a kind of summing up. For example, a thought experiment with me sitting as juror doesn't end with me finding a fertility clinician guilty of murder for incinerating surplus fertilized eggs.

I can understand a reason for such a law, that we need the insurance against dehumanization of real persons. I don't buy it, but can understand it.

I haven't had the ethical perception shift yet, where I see a person in the egg, worthy of defense for its sake.

711 posted on 06/24/2003 8:18:31 PM PDT by secretagent
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To: secretagent
My point was that while what we perceive or don't perceive with our senses might affect our outlook, it doesn't change the reality. Vesting another's humanity in the perceptions of an external agency is a prescription for bloodshed on an unprecendented scale. Where humanity has trod this road there has been nothing but massacre after massacre, holocaust after holocaust. My concern with the pro-abortion position is that it establishes, as a point of law, the ability of one person to do anyway with another simply as a matter of preference. This runs contrary to almost all ethical and moral precepts, and turns back the clock on thousands of years of ethical reasoning.
732 posted on 06/25/2003 5:33:01 AM PDT by chimera
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