It’s kind of amusing that in one post you say Quicksilver misrepresents your position immediately followed by another post in which you misrepresent mine.
Well, this is your error. Obviously basically no one on either side of the debate puts this much thought into it. Like you pointed out, even of abortion in fact is wrong it’s extremely practical. And you might notice that the people who voted and campaign against abortion tend to be those who aren’t affected much by it being taken away. (men, women over breeding age, women with the means to raise a child)
But if you really want to know where you went wrong, now you know.
That’s not true:
Ok, so older are pro choice than younger. Exactly the people who won’t have to raise a child or who have the resources. Also less educated and religious people. This is a bit of a flaw with democracy - why should people who aren’t fully educated or who believe in bullshit get significant decision making power? We don’t trust unqualified doctors or nuclear power plant operators, why do we trust unqualified people to choose the government?
I wonder if a government where the vote only goes to those who pass a series of standardized qualification exams has been tried…
It looks like a much more even mix than I would have guessed. The major standout is that contrary to what you said, having a lower income seems to make you more likely to be pro choice. But, the huckleberry that pro life is all old white guys telling young women what to do is bullshit.
The problem is in part getting such exams that don’t favor some people over others. Creating entirely neutral tests is harder than it might appear.
And the other problem, at least in the USA, is that the history of such tests is that they were deliberately and blatantly used to discriminate; which lead both to their being outlawed overall, and to a general distaste for starting them up again.
/end hijack, sorry --.
Please don’t take my post as agreement with your point. Your identity’s relationship to your body is qualitatively and fundamentally different from your identity’s relationship to property. Fantasy scenarios don’t change that reality.
That is not what you said on the astral plane last night.
I love me some fantasy stories. One of their functions is to help us find the borderlines of reality. Astral projection is a great example of this: it don’t work, because the patterns that make up our identities require a biochemical matrix in order to exist, in much the same way that a painting needs pigments and canvas to exist.
And thorny locust’s point was great:
To build on this: if what makes you you is some pattern that forms in your brain, then prior to the formation of that pattern, you don’t exist.
You might get upset if someone throws the Mona Lisa into a trash compactor. You’d probably feel differently if someone threw away a tray of oil paints and a stretched canvas, even if it could potentially become the next great work of art. It’s the pattern made from the materials, not the raw materials, that matters.
You don’t know that. For all you know, the human “self” might run better on a ‘93 DOS machine than it does in our brain if you could translate it.
Nobody knows what you are claiming.
If.
And if turns off when you got sleep, fall under anesthesia, or go into a coma then you don’t exist during that interval either.
So at what exact point do the canvass, and oils become the Mona Lisa? (Mona Lisa is actually on wood)
Following this analogy, the human brain does not finish developing until age 24. That would be the equivalent of Da Vinci’s finishing stroke.
At what point between conception and age 24, does a “person” come into existence?
Before I had kids I would have thought that it was well after birth and that personhood was the the product of socialization being painted upon the wood or canvas of genetic biology. My two children had very different personalities apparent on the day they were born, the traits of these personalities have been continuous since that day and are apparent in the persons they are now. I am pretty sure that they were persons when they came out of the womb (which was a surprise.)
Then too, any artist will tell you that the materials inform the art. Rodin (I think) said something along the lines that his process reveals the sculpture within the stone.
I don’t fucking know. What I do know is that nobody else fucking knows either. You can pretend to know, but you don’t.
You can’t tell me exactly what makes a person a person and when that begins.
If you think abortion is ok because one is not killing a person than that argument requires that personhood be rigorously defined in a rational fashion. You simply can’t do that. You have to guess.
Arguments that Justify abortion by saying a fetus is not a person all fail because they don’t define person in any demonstrable way.
The whole “it’s a work in progress” and therefore ok to terminate is ridiculous because we are all works in progress up until we die. Our brains don’t stop developing until age 24, but we don’t kill teenagers claiming they are not persons.
The entire a fetus is not a person is built on a whole shuck and jive that seeks to avoid a rigorous definition of personhood.
You might be thinking of Michelangelo:
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
I 100% sure know it doesn’t run better on anything else, because it doesn’t exist on anything else. Speculating about what it might do in the future, or in a fantasy, is only relevant for distinguishing between that fantasy and what’s actually real.
That’s not what actually happens, though. And a static pattern isn’t an absent pattern Compare the blank DVD to the Frozen DVD sitting in its box: just because the Frozen DVD isn’t currently playing the movie doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as the blank DVD.
Which grain of sand makes a heap? The Sorites Paradox is a real tempting one when discussing abortion; but what we can say for sure is that there’s no Mona Lisa before the paint goes on the canvas (wood, whatever), and even after the first dozen strokes it’s not so big a deal to start over or to get rid of it.
There’s no rational bright line to draw. Any line we draw must be arbitrary. That’s okay.
That’s it.
Rodin was the one that Said “Fuck you, Godzilla”
I always get those two confused.
Please don’t make claims on behalf of others unless you have good reason to do so. LHoD’s comment about the materialistic nature of the brain and the completely unproven nature of some kind of spiritual “mind” is entirely graspable.
Kids; they come out of your vagina and ruin your life.
When they graduate med/law school.
I’ve come pretty damn close. Twice. They weren’t even mine.
It hasn’t been for a lack of trying. There’s a lot of things we don’t have a good explanation/definition for. But we understand the unavoidable consequences and must make decisions based on the best information we have at the time.
I don’t think he’s claiming I’m incomprehensible; I think he’s claiming that we can’t know for certain that what I said is true.
Which, well, yeah. I mean, like, can we ever know ANYTHING for sure, maaaaaaaaannnn? Isn’t this whole universe like totally unknowable given our limited comprehension? Duuude.
I take a certain level of uncertainty as given. No claim I made registers above baseline uncertainty.
As long as you and yours fall on the right side of the line, I guess that’s true.
The problem with arbitrary lines is that they are arbitrary, and they tend to get drawn where people would like them to be so that they can do what they want, rather than where they should be:
Like slavery? That’s ok no harm done, just draw the line so that black people are not persons.
Wanna start a master race? Just draw the line to exclude the Jews.
Etc, ad infinitum throughout human history.
Making the line arbitrary is a problem. A case might even be made that in the entire history of the human race there has never been a worse problem.
If you wish to justify abortion under the grounds that a fetus is not a person, than you need to define what constitutes a person, show how fetuses don’t fit that definition but everybody else generally considered a person does.
Or, you can actually just conclude that we don’t actually care that much about killing persons in general, so what is the big deal?
Okay, you’re off the rails now. That’s not remotely related to what we’re talking about, and it’s getting weirdly personal.
I did gather by and by that the OP wanted a purely philosophical navel-gazing nonmaterialistic analysis of the morality of abortion completely divorced from any empiricism or other mention of real-world consequences but that was a tad undercut when he started comparing respondents to Nazis.
You don’t need a rigorous definition, if by rigorous you invoke the sorites paradox. The secular consensus seems to be that personhood, like sentience, is an emergent property. It is agreed by most that personhood develops at some point between conception and birth, inclusive. That’s about as far as consensus goes.
How do you feel about viability as the point of no return? That is about 24 weeks, and is the position taken by Planned Parenthood among others. At that point the pregnancy can be terminated without killing the fetus, and there has been plenty of time for the mother to notice she is pregnant and get an abortion. Unless there is some extenuating medical necessity to abort, I don’t see why the fetus should be aborted at that point.
~Max