Legion Posted September 10, 2012 Share Posted September 10, 2012 I told you directly and publicly I have no desire to engage you in any way. I hope you'll feel free to do so then. I think we all have the ignore option. If you engage it, then I think it prevents my posts from being visible to you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yrth Posted September 10, 2012 Share Posted September 10, 2012 This is the main reason why I think you're wrong in your harm analysis. I and I would think most people could never accept an argument that authorizes killing 'actual babies' simply because they would not be aware of the harm done to them This doesn't mean I'm wrong, it simply means we as a people have decided to protect babies, regardless of the fact they can't appreciate their future potential. We as a people haven't assigned the same protection to fetuses. Rousseau's general will. Anyway you turn this, it's going to come down to these two factors. What people generally think and harm. Again, it's impossible to be harmed if you have no possibility of appreciating harm. Death, after all, is a harm. Death is a harm for one simple reason. We value life. A fetus, and likely a baby (debatable perhaps at this point) don't value life. What is lost if you take life from something that can't value it? I think it does mean you are wrong. Why would anyone accept a definition of harm that says that an actual infant isn't harmed when it's killed? Animals probably can't appreciate harm in the way that your definition requires either, but they are clearly harmed all the time. Death deprives someone or something of their future -- that's the most obvious reason for why it's harmful. It isn't because that thing values its future or even that it has the capacity to value its future, it's because death robs them of their future and everything good within it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vigile Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Why would anyone accept a definition of harm that says that an actual infant isn't harmed when it's killed? Because anything else requires magical thinking of some sort when considering it cares about its own future and its potential death like a carrot cares about the same. Appreciation is 9/10ths of the moral principle. Death deprives someone or something of their future Exactly. But when a being can't contemplate or appreciate this, it doesn't suffer in any measurable way. This is what you aren't getting. You are applying rules and ideas to morality that can't be quantified in any meaningful way and are merely assumed based on your own personal values. The reality is, a fetus having its future snuffed suffers no more than an amoeba snuffed by a toxin. Neither one has the capacity to give a shit. The future ability to give a shit is the only difference between the two life forms, but again, fetus doesn't care. Anyway, it's impossible to come to terms when a debate is about personal values. Values have to evolve on their own, or not. We're both just rephrasing original points, so this isn't likely to get further. I've just tried to approach the topic as logically as I can. I don't have any emotional connection to the issue either way so I'll leave it to you guys who are more vested in it to hash out. Just out of curiosity though, where did you/do you stand on the Terry Schiavo case? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 I've just tried to approach the topic as logically as I can. I don't have any emotional connection to the issue either way... In my opinion this is unrealistic and dishonest. I've never encountered disembodied reasoning, and somewhere between the cerebrum and the remainder of the body are emotional centers. Emotion is an integral aspect of human cognition and action. Seeing as you have here at least made an effort to express your thoughts, I can thereby deduce that you are also emoting. I have no doubt that you have some sort of emotional investment here. The only question for me is... what is it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yrth Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Why would anyone accept a definition of harm that says that an actual infant isn't harmed when it's killed? Because anything else requires magical thinking of some sort when considering it cares about its own future and its potential death like a carrot cares about the same. Appreciation is 9/10ths of the moral principle. Death deprives someone or something of their future Exactly. But when a being can't contemplate or appreciate this, it doesn't suffer in any measurable way. This is what you aren't getting. You are applying rules and ideas to morality that can't be quantified in any meaningful way and are merely assumed based on your own personal values. The reality is, a fetus having its future snuffed suffers no more than an amoeba snuffed by a toxin. Neither one has the capacity to give a shit. The future ability to give a shit is the only difference between the two life forms, but again, fetus doesn't care. Anyway, it's impossible to come to terms when a debate is about personal values. Values have to evolve on their own, or not. We're both just rephrasing original points, so this isn't likely to get further. I've just tried to approach the topic as logically as I can. I don't have any emotional connection to the issue either way so I'll leave it to you guys who are more vested in it to hash out. Just out of curiosity though, where did you/do you stand on the Terry Schiavo case? You're conflating suffering with the harm incurred by death, but there is a categorical distinction. Suffering requires a present capacity to suffer. Death harms anything that has good in its future, regardless of its present capacity to suffer. If someone were to kill me tomorrow in a painless way *and I wasn't aware of it, I would not have suffered in life and I would not then suffer in death. My death would not matter to me because I would be in an urn somewhere. And yet I would be harmed by death primarily because the death has taken away all the good that I would have had otherwise had. My capacity to appreciate death or even care about it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my death takes away my future. Do you see this distinction? This means that the harm of death applies to anything that is killed, not just things that can appreciate death. If you kill a cat, you have deprived the cat of all the good in its future feline life, despite the fact that it has no idea what is going on. An infant's future is quite different from the future of an amoeba or a toxin. You may even be able to kill an infant painlessly, but this does not effect the harm incurred by death. This isn't a debate about personal values, not really, it's a debate about logic. I appreciate that you're a serious person who thinks about these things and cares about them, and I would just encourage you to think this through again. I do not think we are rehashing original points, I believe I have successfully refuted your argument with a sound logic. Which is a good thing, considering we are talking about infanticide here. IIRC, Terry Schiavo was the brain dead woman whose husband wanted to disconnect her from life support and then got a court order permitting him to do so over her parent's objection. I think brain death is death and if she had no future to be concerned with she was the equivalent of a corpse. *OK reading up on it, it appears that her 'persistent vegetative state' is a condition from which patients sometimes recover and is not technically brain death, so that would obviously complicate things. Absent knowing what she would have wanted before hand, people probably shouldn't be pulling the plug on other people when there is a chance they will recover. However, I'm open to assessing that 'chance' like a reasonable person. If the chance is something extremely low, like .000001%, I'm not against a policy that allows pulling the plug. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Akheia Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 God, this is boring. Seriously, how hard is this? Why is this even a question among non-fundies? Why are we still fucking talking about this decades after we figured it out? It doesn't matter if the parasite in question is an adorable widdle bayyyyyybeeeeee playing patty-cake in the womb while dressed in a pink pinafore frock and a sunflower headband zygote/fetus, or a bright-eyed 22-year-old college student who's discovered I'm a perfect match for his much-needed kidney transplant, or an asshole rapist who just broke into my house and thinks I have a purty mouth. My body belongs to ME. You don't get to tell me I have no say in its resources and tissues being plundered or removed without my consent. I don't care if it's a zygote's many demands, a request for a kidney, or a penis that would just love to violate any of my orifices: I get to withdraw consent to the use of my own body at any time for any reason, and here's the scary scary part for a lot of people: you don't get to even assign a moral component to my decision, because, well, it's MINE, assholes. If I want to refuse the plundering of my kidney because I'm worried it'd leave a scar, that's my prerogative. If I refuse to carry a baby because I'm worried my partner would make my life a fucking living hell if I bore it, whether it was his or not, I get to do that. If I refuse sex because I'm just feeling piqued that day, my potential partner doesn't get to hold me down anyway. At the end of the day, the only person who gets to assign moral components to the decision about the use of his or her body's own resources is, well, the person involved. Nobody else can or should be allowed to have that right. The whole life/nonlife/consciousness/nonconsciousness thing is a smokescreen and a complete red herring. I don't fucking care if a fetus is alive, because it doesn't matter if it is or not. At the end of the day, it's a thing that has attached itself to my body, and its desires don't really play into whether or not it's going to stay there any more than I give a shit what the owner of the penis about to penetrate me thinks. We have a word for someone who has no control over the direct use of his or her own bodily resources. It's not a very pretty word, but anybody who denies another human the right to control their own bodily resources needs to own that word: slave. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yrth Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 God, this is boring. Seriously, how hard is this? Why is this even a question among non-fundies? Why are we still fucking talking about this decades after we figured it out? It doesn't matter if the parasite in question is an adorable widdle bayyyyyybeeeeee playing patty-cake in the womb while dressed in a pink pinafore frock and a sunflower headband zygote/fetus, or a bright-eyed 22-year-old college student who's discovered I'm a perfect match for his much-needed kidney transplant, or an asshole rapist who just broke into my house and thinks I have a purty mouth. My body belongs to ME. You don't get to tell me I have no say in its resources and tissues being plundered or removed without my consent. I don't care if it's a zygote's many demands, a request for a kidney, or a penis that would just love to violate any of my orifices: I get to withdraw consent to the use of my own body at any time for any reason, and here's the scary scary part for a lot of people: you don't get to even assign a moral component to my decision, because, well, it's MINE, assholes. If I want to refuse the plundering of my kidney because I'm worried it'd leave a scar, that's my prerogative. If I refuse to carry a baby because I'm worried my partner would make my life a fucking living hell if I bore it, whether it was his or not, I get to do that. If I refuse sex because I'm just feeling piqued that day, my potential partner doesn't get to hold me down anyway. At the end of the day, the only person who gets to assign moral components to the decision about the use of his or her body's own resources is, well, the person involved. Nobody else can or should be allowed to have that right. The whole life/nonlife/consciousness/nonconsciousness thing is a smokescreen and a complete red herring. I don't fucking care if a fetus is alive, because it doesn't matter if it is or not. At the end of the day, it's a thing that has attached itself to my body, and its desires don't really play into whether or not it's going to stay there any more than I give a shit what the owner of the penis about to penetrate me thinks. We have a word for someone who has no control over the direct use of his or her own bodily resources. It's not a very pretty word, but anybody who denies another human the right to control their own bodily resources needs to own that word: slave. I would agree that abortion is not a simple issue and that it's not particularly helpful to frame it as one. I think people end up talking past each other when discussing morality because moral reasoning is pretty hard. It's not impossible, it's just really difficult. This already-difficult project is burdened further by the collateral baggage brought to the discussion table by the people involved. What if it's not just one but 5 "adorable widdle bayyyyyybeeeeee playing patty-cake in the womb while dressed in a pink pinafore frock and a sunflower headbands?" Weighing the evils, which is worse, letting you choose to end all 5 infants or forcing you not to, and why? I don't understand why forcing someone to do something against their will for a limited time is worse than ending even one infant, much less 5. There are no good options here, but surely some are better than others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Akheia Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 I don't see why it'd matter if it were one fetus or five, any more than it'd matter if it were five men wanting to rape me rather than just one, or ten people who need my blood rather than just one. The point is that it's MY body. MY autonomy. I don't care how much need you perceive. The end decision needs to be the person who is being imposed upon physically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 I completely agree with Pockets here. This is not simple in my assessment. And I'm trying my best to keep an open mind about things and avoid falling into a dogmatic position, convinced that I have it all figured out. I don't. If female choice is the overriding factor, then what about female fetuses whose lives are snuffed out? They will never have the opportunity to make choices in life, because they will no longer be alive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vigile Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 *and I wasn't aware of it, You generally already have the ability to be concerned with this as well as have others who would be personally harmed by your absence. This is not true of a fetus when the mother chooses to abort it. Anyway, again, we are just restating the same arguments in different ways here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentknight Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Abortion is not a simple subject. The real question is when does abortion cross the line into murder? To some people any birth control crosses this line (Catholics). To some people that taking of a potential life that is already in development (fertilized egg, not unfertilized) is the same as murder. To some people it's not wrong until the fetus has developed enough to have a nervous system. And to a few others it's not wrong until the baby is born. I'm of the opinion that it's not wrong until the fetus has developed enough to have a nervous system. A woman is fully in her rights to have an abortion before then. Afterwards though, unless there are complications, I think it's not right to abort the fetus, mainly because it was the responsibility of the woman to decide that earlier... unless a woman isn't learning she's pregnant until late in the pregnancy... which seems unlikely in most cases. It's all about minimizing harm in my book. And I must state, this is my opinion. I'm not forcing anyone to follow it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Akheia Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 This is mind-blowing. Legion, don't be dense. The gender of the person being imposed upon is IRRELEVANT. What about this is hard to understand? You do not have the right to fuck me without my consent under any circumstances. You do not have the right to force me to donate blood or organs to you under any circumstances. You do not have the right to force me to accept you hooking yourself up to me via IV lines for nine months and put me through horrific pain, social censure, and possible lifelong consequences, under any circumstances. And you're a person. Imagine how much less I give a shit if the imposing entity is a clump of cells without any clear or demonstrated connection to humanity. Our respective genders have NOTHING to do with the simple fact that consent of the individual trumps all perceived slights and wrongs you might imagine. Abortion is very simple, just like any other issue of consent. That the outcome is the "snuffing out" of a blob that might under the right circumstances become human one day (much like the stem cells in my thumb might) matters not one single bit. If you accept that there are times when that consent is irrelevant, you cross a rubicon: you start to think that you have the right to enslave another "if the cause is just." But what cause is just? How far is far enough? How much is too much or not enough? You happen, by wild coincidence, to think that YOUR cause is just and YOU think you know how far is far enough. But morality isn't black-and-white. YOU think you know exactly how valuable a fetus is. Well, so do I. Which of us is right? I think it's better to err on the side of granting personal sovereignty over the side of permissible encroachment on consent. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 It's all about minimizing harm in my book. Okay, let's accept this as a premise and explore it a bit. It seems to me that every choice we make alters the future, because choices have consequences. If we wish to minimize harm and suffering in the future, then wouldn't this require that we be able to accurately predict it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentknight Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Without us being Gods we can't accurately predict the future to the extent you imply. If you follow that reasoning you can't do anything in life because you'd be paralyzed by never knowing the full repercussions. However, a woman best knows her current situation in life, and how having a child would probably effect that life. No one else knows better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Akheia Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Abortion is not a simple subject. The real question is when does abortion cross the line into murder? To some people any birth control crosses this line (Catholics). To some people that taking of a potential life that is already in development (fertilized egg, not unfertilized) is the same as murder. To some people it's not wrong until the fetus has developed enough to have a nervous system. And to a few others it's not wrong until the baby is born. I'm of the opinion that it's not wrong until the fetus has developed enough to have a nervous system. A woman is fully in her rights to have an abortion before then. Afterwards though, unless there are complications, I think it's not right to abort the fetus, mainly because it was the responsibility of the woman to decide that earlier... unless a woman isn't learning she's pregnant until late in the pregnancy... which seems unlikely in most cases. It's all about minimizing harm in my book. And I must state, this is my opinion. I'm not forcing anyone to follow it. SK, I actually agree with this, to an extent, though I consider the point of murder to be viability, not a nervous system (most abortions happen well before that anyway; the ones after it tend to be non-elective but therapeutic in nature). Once the fetus is viable outside the womb, then another entity can volunteer to take care of it. At that point I think that a woman should, if she has any choice in the matter, grant that other entity the right to take care of it if she doesn't wish to do so. Modern society has a host of support networks in place for exactly this situation all through a kid's life. Hell, if there were a way for society to take a newly-fertilized egg or zygote off a woman's hands if she doesn't want it, then I'd completely agree that abortion wouldn't even be necessary at that point. But if the fetus isn't viable outside the womb, and nobody else is capable of handling its development, then it is there purely by imposing upon another human being's body that it will flourish, and that is when the mother's consent becomes of paramount importance. That's the litmus test, for me. If my physical body and tissue is demanded, then my consent to the use of my physical body and tissue is absolutely required. To me it's really very simple. I don't know why people say it's hard. It isn't. But as we wrestle with issues of consent vs. authoritarianism, that's where the difficulties come in. We know as humans that consent over the use of our physical bodies is the highest human right. But we have squaring off against that an old regime that has successfully created a series of catchphrases and loaded words/situations to try to force their view onto a world that is fast evolving past their control. I appreciate you understanding how hard it is for women to navigate a world that seems expressly designed to remove their rights and autonomy. Wish there were more of you, brotha-from-anotha-motha. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Akheia, I certainly can be, and have been, dense about things before. I am sincerely trying to understand here. It seems to me that among the things at issue here is human freedom and the future. These things deeply concern me. It seems to me that freedom (or autonomy) itself is complex. What I mean by that is... Whatever freedom may be (I don't assume a priori to know) I think it must be situated in a web of cause and effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yrth Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 I don't see why it'd matter if it were one fetus or five, any more than it'd matter if it were five men wanting to rape me rather than just one, or ten people who need my blood rather than just one. The point is that it's MY body. MY autonomy. I don't care how much need you perceive. The end decision needs to be the person who is being imposed upon physically. I thought we were talking about infants, not fetuses. I am distinguishing between the two in this thread. It would matter because we are weighing harms, and 5 infant deaths seems a lot worse than infringing on someone's autonomy for a limited time. I mean, where is the limit? How high does the number have to go before the balance is tipped? @Legion: I would agree with Akheia that gender doesn't matter when we're talking about bodily sovereignty vs. infant death. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentknight Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 No problem, Akheia. The only thing i think is complicated is finding that line. As you pointed out, we have different opinions on that line. My opinion is that when it's possible for the fetus to have some sort of a brain (I'm assuming that's when it has a nervous system, I'd change that if I learn otherwise). As far as "potential" of a child that's unborn. That's impossible to know. A child could become a great mind, or serial killer or anywhere in between. We can't base decisions on unknowns. That's what religion is, and most of us here agree that it's not right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Akheia Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Pockets, we're talking about fetuses, not about babies. A non-viable fetus is not a baby. It won't be a baby unless it gets to the point of development at which it is viable. And even if we *were* talking about babies, if they required me to hook myself up to them via IV and donate blood and organs to them for nine months, my consent would still be required even if my withdrawal of that consent meant their deaths. Let me turn your question around: How much enslavement is okay? That's what you're really talking about--a point at which it's totally okay to override another sovereign human being's right to decide how his or her body will be harvested and utilized. At what theoretical, rhetorical point is it totally okay to demand another human being go through a physical procedure s/he doesn't want? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentknight Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 The reason I don't draw the line at viability, is I think in cases on concensual sex, there's a responsibility on the part of the individuals involved to prevent pregnancy, and if it does happen anyway, as no birth control is 100% effective, it's then their responsibility to terminate it before it gets too far. If someone is negligent enough to let it proceed past a certain point, then I think it's their own fault, (unless for some reason it wasn't detected before then by no fault of their own). At that point I think it become the woman's responsibility to at least carry it until it's viable and can be taken care of by someone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 My opinion is that when it's possible for the fetus to have some sort of a brain (I'm assuming that's when it has a nervous system, I'd change that if I learn otherwise). I don't understand why cognition is the end-all-be-all of things. I'm fairly well convinced that my mind exists in order to facilitate the living of my life. For me life is foundational, and cognition is an enhancement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silentknight Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 My opinion is that when it's possible for the fetus to have some sort of a brain (I'm assuming that's when it has a nervous system, I'd change that if I learn otherwise). I don't understand why cognition is the end-all-be-all of things. I'm fairly well convinced that my mind exists in order to facilitate the living of my life. For me life is foundational, and cognition is an enhancement. Yes, but we don't bat an eye at killing germs and bacteria and other cellular life it gets in our way. We also don't bat an eye at eating living food (even vegans eat plants, which are alive.) A few cells clumped together is life, but we can't live without killing such life every day. What most people consider wrong is killing intelligent life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yrth Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Pockets, we're talking about fetuses, not about babies. A non-viable fetus is not a baby. It won't be a baby unless it gets to the point of development at which it is viable. And even if we *were* talking about babies, if they required me to hook myself up to them via IV and donate blood and organs to them for nine months, my consent would still be required even if my withdrawal of that consent meant their deaths. See, I don't see this as an obviously true statement. In a situation where there are no good options, we weigh the harms and the decision that leads to the least amount of harm is the 'right' decision. You have to make a case that infringing on your bodily autonomy is worse than five infant deaths, because that is just not self-evident. Let me turn your question around: How much enslavement is okay? That's what you're really talking about--a point at which it's totally okay to override another sovereign human being's right to decide how his or her body will be harvested and utilized. At what theoretical, rhetorical point is it totally okay to demand another human being go through a physical procedure s/he doesn't want? It's not slavery, but I concede that it is force. I think the answer is 'when all the other options are worse.' Practically speaking, that could include an infinite amount of situations, which is kind of scary and makes for good dystopian science fiction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mymistake Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Akheia, I certainly can be, and have been, dense about things before. I am sincerely trying to understand here. It seems to me that among the things at issue here is human freedom and the future. These things deeply concern me. It seems to me that freedom (or autonomy) itself is complex. What I mean by that is... Whatever freedom may be (I don't assume a priori to know) I think it must be situated in a web of cause and effect. The future is 8 billion people. Shortly after that it will be 9 billion people. Then it will be 10 billion. So is it better to let the next generation grow at it's own pace so that they can kill each other in more war and conflict? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted September 11, 2012 Share Posted September 11, 2012 Without us being Gods we can't accurately predict the future to the extent you imply. If you follow that reasoning you can't do anything in life because you'd be paralyzed by never knowing the full repercussions. That makes sense to me. But still, if the causing of harm is a primary consideration, then it seems to me that we must rely on whatever understanding we may have to gauge the consequences of our choices and behavior. However, a woman best knows her current situation in life, and how having a child would probably effect that life. No one else knows better. But why is it always and ever about the mother? And why does it always seem to be about 'now'? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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