Yes, this is the utility and convenience argument. There is a lot to it. If you accept that a fetus is a human life/person than you are forced to abandon sanctity of human life and think that not all human lives have equal value.
This is distasteful.
My big conclusion if I have one is that there is no answer pro choice, or pro life that you can hold without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. It’s a lesser of two evils thing, and neither of those two are particularly small.
Which is why it is such a tough and divisive issue.
Possibly. Personally, I think that there are good and bad reasons for abortions, and I believe that some abortions might be morally wrong. But I think it would be far more wrong for the government (or any other authority) to take away a woman’s choice in this.
Only if they’re stowing away inside someone’s body.
I think it’s more compassionate than the alternative. Even better would be figuring out (with science and technology) how to give every woman 100% control of their body’s reproductive functions, such that no one ever got pregnant unless they wished it.
I think a comparison is not warranted and clouds the issue. i.e Is a fetus intrinsically more valuable than a sociopathic murderer? Is an apple better than an orange?
Disagree. Most people, but not all, have intrinsic value to somebody. I mean, even a sociopathic criminal has a mother who loves him. Unless she was his first victim. Okay, a sociopath probably would not be missed. Except…
It’s generally considered bad to kill people indiscriminately. Nevertheless, exceptions are many and frequent. In a more just society, killing should be held to a minimum, including those of sociopaths convicted of crimes.
One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic. - Joseph Stalin Soldiers keep on warrin’; People keep on dyin’; World keep on turnin’… - Stevie Wonder
One way or another, society extracts a price for the benefits it bestows.
There is the matter of non-judeo/christian societies that are also 1000s of years old.
I submit that “organic morality” was the genesis (as it were) of Judeo-Christian ethics, not the other way around.
The presumption her is, is that the Star Wars script was hanging around in the ether waiting for George Lucas and not Scylla. Given sufficient time and opportunity, you might have come up with the script. There is nothing special or unique about Judeo-Christian philosophy. Other religions and civilizations have had a similar moral code when it comes to killing, theft and various anti-social behavior.
Let me try. I don’t wish to kill Scylla because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life running from Scylla’s friends and family. It’s in my long term interest to remain on good terms with Scylla and perhaps even share and pool resources for our mutual security. I suspect Scylla feels the same way. If not, I’ll extend the same offer to Andy and perhaps we’ll either defeat Scylla in combat or get him to join us after all. Safety in numbers,etc.
It doesn’t even have to be that sophisticated. I believe Jane Goodall’s study of chimps identified this behavior among chimp groups and territorial disputes. Far as I know, chimps don’t exhibit religious rituals or belief systems. We’re only barely smarter than chimps.
A body is just a pile of meat. The only thing that makes it different from any other property is that a boat can be replaced, a body not so much.
This argument depends on you granting special consideration to one’s body above other property. What makes your bag of meat so special? That may end up being a difficult logical argument to make, or not, I haven’t Thought about it enough to conclude that it was one of those things that seems simple and self-evident, but might prove difficult to articulate rationally.
I can bypass this argument in the stowaway example, by adding the caveat that you find the stowaway on your boat in the middle of the ocean. Unfortunately there is only enough water on board to keep one of you alive. Is it ok to toss the stowaway off the boat?
That’s a utility argument. It makes sense, but again, you have to give up the sanctity of human life to espouse it rationally. Some argue that there is a potential slippery slope that occurs once you say this kind of thing is ok. It leads to Euthanasia, justifications for final solutions, all kinds of nasty stuff.
I myself am not a big fan of slippery slope arguments
Agreed. The best way to solve a really tough ethical conundrum is to not allow it to materialize.
Btw, none of my comments are an attempt to persuade. I just spent a lot of timing thinking about it, and evaluating the arguments as best I could. I mention things like the stowaway conundrum not as gotchas but as things to think about, and because I’m curious arrive at their conclusions.
Yes. Not all of these come up with the sanctity of human life.
If that were so, you would expect isolated cultures to reach the same conclusions and have the same values, especially about big ones like the sanctity of human life, or the sovereignty of the individual. They don’t.
The argument is that the one two punch of Greek reason and Judeo-Christian ethics, became dominant and the foundation of western culture, really taking off during the Enlightenment. It pretty much wiped out and/or changed other value sets to the point where we now believe our values are universal and intrinsic and organically inspired. This last is false as their are other cultures in existence now that have not adopted these values, and the degree that some of them have is not to the degree that we have.
I’m kind of in the middle of this from a personal standpoint. I think there are some organic values, but the sanctity of life, and sovereignty of the individual are constructs (to name to biggees.)
The other interesting thing is that as far as I know there are no cultures or civilizations at all that do not have their roots founded in atheism.
This presents a couple of problems to the organic crowd: they don’t have any examples to support their case. Also, it is suggestive that religion is a necessary precursor to morality in much the way that say a steam engine is a precursor to the industrial revolution. (The analogy goes far enough that you could argue that we don’t need steam engines now, and neither do we need religion,)
And others have come up with different ones (still founded in religion, though.)
I think the analogy to the extent that it’s hard to argue with the success of western culture just as it is hard to argue with the success of Star Wars. If I pulled a copy of The Last Starfighter it Enemy Mine out of the ether, it’s not like anybody would say “Wow, Scylla. Great Job!”
The problem with Sam Harriss’ argument is that he produces A veritable clone of judeo Christian ethics and says he can derive it.
Similarly, I’ve seen Star Wars. If I produce a script for it, and claim I’ve done so independently after I saw the movie, you might be skeptical. Sam Harris has been indoctrinated all his life with Judeo Christian ethics. In that sense he has also seen the movie.
Logically sound, though all this talk of ganging up on Scylla and murdering him is a little uncomfortable.
But so far so good.
But you go know that Chimps are murderous motherfuckers. Bands of chimps isolate, kill and murder other bands of chimps. They kill within their own band. Goodall really struggled with this, what not to.
They do work together, sometimes from an enlightened self-interest standoint, but they have no qualms about murdering their own kind when it suits them.
If a band of chimps sees a line strange chimp in the distance, they are likely to opportunistically murder it.
Western civilization posits that it is bad to do these (presumably that restrains us.). We posit that their is an intrinsic value to human life.
To go back to your Andy, Scylla, Quicksilver self interest alliance example: suppose the the three of us are out there in the wilderness watching each other’s backs. We have no religion or values or socialization or culture other than what we have invented on our own. We have been isolated since birth. Life is tough, but our alliance let’s us survive.
We come across a farm with a farmer with three hot daughters, pigs, sheep (dibs!) all the makings of the good life.
Unfortunately, the farmer wants no part of our alliance and tells us to get lost.
Scylla comes up with a radical idea. “Let’s kill the motherfucker and take all his stuff!” (Why me? Well I can’t insult either of you in GD by suggesting it’s your idea,)
Fortunately, you, Quicksilver, have evolved highly sophisticated ethics organically. As you know, Scylla is always 100% willing to concede a rational point. So, explain it to me?
Why shouldn’t we kill the selfish bastard, eat pork, rape the women and live the good life?
Why should the pro-choice argument have to address the anti-abortion arguments and not the other way around?
It would make just as much sense to say that the anti-abortion arguments you list are bad arguments because they don’t address the bodily autonomy argument as it does to say that the bodily autonomy argument is a bad argument because it doesn’t address one of the specific points that you seem to have declared are the only ones that should count.
Going with the moment of conception is also arbitrary and can also in some cases present horrifying and troubling consequences.
You’re trying to draw a bright line where one doesn’t exist. I understand that it bothers a lot of people not to be able to draw such lines; but that doesn’t make them real, and insisting on pretending that they are does real damage.
Humans are not the only creatures with a sense of justice.
That sense has evolved in humans and at least some other social species, probably succeeding in doing so because it helps us to live in groups. Humans may also have evolved a tendency to believe in gods, possibly for the same reason; but considering the huge variation in human religions and in what if anything they mean by ‘god’, I think it’s far more likely that the religion evolved from the morality than the other way around.
Possibly a fair argument; but I think applicable to a very large number of issues, so am not sure why you seem to be approaching it primarily from the angle of abortion.
– and I think you’re on extremely shaky ground in claiming that Christianity shows greater respect for human life than religions from other traditions. An awful lot of people have been killed over tha last couple of thousand years in the name of Christianity; including quite a few within the last century.
As to your last example: the farmer’s daughters might murder (or execute) you for killing their father and/or for raping or trying to rape them. But then, the way you phrase that example reads as if you think the daughters are part of his “stuff”, not people who have found your behavior so untrustworthy that they don’t want you around.
It doesn’t. I could have written it backwards. The pro life is argument is one big one and easier to explain. Their are many pro choice some arguments and some are more involved. It was easier to write it the way I did. Feel free to rewrite it backwards in your head if that is how you like to think about it.
Bodily autonomy is addressed. I said something along the lines of the pro choice argument accepts bodily autonomy but resists the idea that you get to kill somebody to keep it. This follows logically because if my right to bodily autonomy extends to killing another person then I am depriving them of their bodily autonomy. Therefore, not killing supersedes bodily autonomy from the pro choice argument.
Yes it does have serious consequences. It is not arbitrary. Before conception, you have two partial human genomes, halves fro two distinct people. Neither are more special or replaceable than a fingernail clipping. After the moment of conception you have a distinct and unique human life. Barring accident or interference or defect that unique human life will develop into an autonomous human being. At no other point that I am aware of can you draw a distinction between that unique human life and any other “person” that we all already agree we are not supposed to kill.
It seems to me that there is a bright line. If you can show me how the moment of conception does not mark the moment in which a distinct and unique human life comes into existence, and how that thing is not a “person’ by any definition that does not apply to other persons generally accepted as such, I will concede your point, gladly.
I did not know this. I’m a little skeptical. Could you elaborate?
For a male dolphin, it is just to kill baby dolphins from females he has not mated with. This puts the mother back in estrus, allowing the male dolphin to impregnate her with his DNA. In response to the this, female dolphins have become dolphin sluts. Sleeping with as many males as possible so that they can’t be sure whose offspring is whose.
This is all just and proper I’d you are a dolphin. Is that what you mean?
Not all, but some. I use judeo christian because that is the foundation of western culture, not because I claim it is superior. I did say explicitly that having those values, and following them are two separate things. “Lip service” was the term I used.
There are three of us and one of him. Andy is a bad motherfucker. I am confident we can take him. In this example, the only ethics we have are those the three of us have come up with on our own in isolation in the wilderness. We have never seen women before. We know they look interesting and arouse our sexuality, in much the way his food arouses our hunger, but it hasn’t even occurred to us that they might be persons and not stuff.
Fortunately quicksilver is very very smart. He has spent a lot of time thinking, and has derived a sophisticated modern morality organically.
He is going to explain to us why the murder, rape steal plan is wrong. I am sure everything will work out ok.
Then why did you claim that arguments that don’t address your four points are bad arguments for that reason, but not require those four points to address all the arguments in the otehr direction?
It’s not addressed in your four points.
A fetus – let alone a zygote or a blastula – has no bodily autonomy. It cannot exist without the use of another person’s body.
Your argument would not allow a right of self-defense, or a right to kill someone to prevent them from killing someone else, or a right to war under any circumstances. Are you a total pacifist?
Any egg cell or sperm cell is alive, human, distinct, and unique. Why should combining the two create a bright line?
Way too late and need to go to bed. Here’s a few cites to start with.
You’ve never seen women before? The three of you have been managing on your own since you were infants too young to focus?
That’s not remotely a normal human societal situation, even aside from the fact that you’d all have died. Trying to conclude from that example anything about how humans work who have grown up in normal social situations would be a mistake.
But in any case, there still wouldn’t be three of you and one of him. There’d be three of you and four of them. Your posited ignorance of that fact would make you more vulnerable, not less.
I’ve been toying with a thought experiment lately about lions. We can observe that when a male lion takes control of a pride by defeating the previous alpha, he routinely goes on to slaughter the cubs of his predecessor. We don’t see evidence that the lion has performed a rational analysis of the situation and independently arrived at the conclusion that it is in his best genetic interest to kill these cubs so the females will spend their energies gestating and raising his cubs instead - we can infer that the behaviour has become reinforced through evolutionary success and is fully instinctive.
Now speculate on continued evolution if the lion’s environment began offering a slight genetically reward for intelligence, wait a million years, and we might see panthera leo gradually morph into, say, panthera leo erectus and, after a million more years, panthera leo sapiens, a self-aware species capable of complex reasoning. There is no requirement, though, that this requires the abandonment of all ancient instincts. Certainly homo sapiens have not shed all of our own ancient instincts, after all. If the emergent panthera leo sapiens societies attempt to codify their morality, could they embrace a principle along the lines of:
It is the moral duty of a lioness upon remarriage to cleave to her new husband and dedicate herself to the cubs they produce.
The lions might no longer actually kill their stepchildren, but there is a clear moral imperative in their society that their mother abandon them to their fate when she takes a new husband. If they survive, it is lion-god’s will. If they don’t, that is also clearly lion-god’s will. When exactly panthera leo sapiens started to believe in lion-god is lost to antiquity, but they attribute the moral code to the wisdom of lion-god and not to the result of their own evolution, assuming they ever realize that evolution actually occurs.
In humans, Judeo-Christianity is about 3500 years old if we generously include its Babylonian precursors. As a species, homo sapiens existed 50-100 times longer than that, and precursor hominids far longer still. Attributing morality to ancient instinct has a far stronger foundation than the veneer of latter-day scripture.
I could have. I could have listed the different component values of each pro choice argument, said that in order to be valid a pro life argument needs to overcome these components values, and then do what I did in my previous post to you and show that the pro life argument demonstrates that the right to life either supersedes or is a component value of that component value.
This would mean that I would restating the pro life argument over for each pro choice argument, making my OP several times longer than it already is, and even more tedious. This way I only do it once, which is more efficient. You should see that since there is really only one
Pro choice argument worth considering and that it invokes the nuclear bomb of values (the proscription against killing) that it is much simpler and efficient to do it this way.
This does not reflect a deliberate preference for the pro choice side, but rather is a necessity of efficient structure, readability, simplicity, and avoiding redundancy.
If you are still not satisfied, Feel free to rewrite my OP backwards point by point with the pro life argument overcoming the values of each pro choice argument and you will quickly see what I mean.
The 2nd and third points of the pro life argument contain it.
.
Later, I address it directly, when I relate it to the relevant pro choice argument:
“There is another series of arguments that simply ignores items 1-4, and instead makes other assertions. Some of these assertions are compelling and easy to agree with. “A women has a right to control her own body.” “Unwanted pregnancies cause great hardship and damage and destroy lives.” Etc. The reproductive rights arguments fail for the same reason. Most would agree that a woman has the right to control her own body, but at the same time she doesn’t get to kill other people to do so”
True. This would be a long digression in my Op, and there are many such I could take. I have presented a framework of the major arguments, not an encyclopedic encompassing of every single offshoot. In this case the pro life argument would state that the proscription against murder supersedes the right to control one’s body, just as the prescription against murder prevents you from throwing a stowaway off of a boat in the middle of the ocean. That the fetus is dependent is of no account. So are babies, and invalids, etc. we already agree that we don’t just kill a person because we find its needs inconvenient.
I dont see how a careful reading of my OP could allow you to come to those conclusions.
It is not unique. It’s a piece of the donor, like a fingernail. Conception combines DNA from two donors creating a unique third human life at the moment of conception.
I need to stop there. At least for now.
Interesting. I am glad you shared. It’s a bit of a tangent though. I have already stated that you can build up a morality based on enlightened self interest without religion, though.
On top of being strong, Andy is incredibly resourceful, and resilient. Quicksilver, is incredibly intelligent. My contribution to the group is being along for the ride and saying things like “let’s kill that guy, and take all his stuff.”
I’ll tell you what, pal. You don’t judge my childhood, and I won’t judge yours.
We have Andy’s brawn quicksilver’s brain, and my greed.
In your example, you could see that if your lion society sat down and said: “this is to confusing our morality has to much baggage from instinct and religion. We need to sit down and develop a new morality based on pure reason.” It would not produce the exact same morality it had previously been using.
Sam Harris seemingly believes you arrive at the same big Judeo Christian values through reason.
Experiments in game theory tend to show that this is not the case. Enlightened self-interest only goes so far.
Let’s say you do just that. And, some time later, you wake up to see one of your fellow killers standing over you readying a deathblow. And, startled, you ask him what the heck is going on. “Oh, hey,” he says, “I thought this is the agreed-upon new arrangement; was I mistaken? See, that farmer hadn’t taken an action against me — or, near as I can tell, against anyone — and we figured the proper response to a guy like that just minding his own business was to kill him and take stuff. I gave that a lot of thought, and decided it’s officially now my personal code; and there you were: just minding your own business while taking no actions against me! Per my newfound code, the proper response is: to kill you and take your stuff.”
Lot’s of things wrong with this thought experiment, nevertheless me and my smart brain will try to parse it to come to a reasonable conclusion about why it would be bad to kill the farmer on sight given these specific circumstances:
Having formed our band of brothers, we presumably did so with the understanding that there is safety in numbers and it is more efficient to hunt and fight as a group rather than as individuals. Yes, we must share the spoils, but then there are more spoils to share at the end of each day, so we are better off as a result.
The farmer has things we want. We could just kill him and take them. But I recommend a moment’s pause to consider the following:
He may be alone now and we have the advantage but we have to consider not just our short term but our long term interests
There are other farmers in this valley. Experience tells us they probably know each other. Some may be this farmer’s brothers and cousins (likely for the time). If we kill him, the rest of the community will likely become very angry with us. Will certainly seek revenge.
We can kill, take and run, but we’ve been doing so for a number of years now and all we have to show for it is what we can carry. Also, we’ve had some pretty narrow escapes with scars to prove it. Andy still has an arrow tip buried in his ass that keeps him awake some nights.
So,Plan “B” guys (hear me out):
We don’t kill the farmer
We offer him our services (protection/labor) in exchange for food and shelter
We spend the winter here and see how it goes with the daughters (or the sheep - I don’t judge)
If he tells us to fuck off, we reconsider killing him if we’re desperately hungry
Or, we go to the next valley over and find a farmer who is more amenable to our offer and then we come back with him and his fellow clansmen and help them take this valley with the understanding that we get to keep this lovely farm by the river and the three daughters (and the sheep).
PROFIT!.. And you were afraid there’d be no killing and raping. There will be. We just need to be more circumspect about it.
How did I do?
But we’ve gotten very far afield from the main topic of abortion. Getting back to that, I just want to point out that specifically the Christian position on abortion is a late comer to the moral landscape of today. Jesus had nothing to say about it, for one. Jews consider the first 40 days of a fetus’s life to be immaterial. ‘A sack of water’, is how I believe they refer to it.
Finally, the reason I find that the religious justification for the pro-life position has weak standing is that the biggest abortionist in history is not man, but god. Specifically, the Judeo-Christian God, for those so inclined. Only ~50% of fetuses are viable under ordinary circumstances. A large number is naturally aborted. Which might lead some (me among them) to conclude that god is perfectly okay with abortion. Furthermore, there is no great admonishment for abortion in his literature. I mean, even “Thou shalt not kill” was immediately followed by genocide, one of many massive man inflicted atrocities committed in the name of god to follow.
Yes. I’d say “Wait a minute. The three of us formed an alliance based on mutual self interest. The farmer was not part of that alliance and refused to join when we gave him the chance. Don’t get me wrong I am all for the murdering of people minding their business, and taking their stuff, but only outside of the alliance. It even seems that we have set a “join or die” precedent here where we have to offer people a chance to join our alliance before killing them (but I’m not sure of that.). The only reason why we get all this great stuff and keep it is because of our alliance. Kill me, and you give up 1/3 of our collective strength. Now put away that Axe and go to bed.”
I’m not sure how you came to this interpretation of Harris’s beliefs. As I understand it, his stance is that human moral instinct vastly predates human reasoning ability, which itself significantly predates theism in general and JudeoChristianity in particular. He hypothesizes that neuroscience could reach a point where the human brain is fully mapped and we can observe the biochemical processes of morality, rather than ascribing it to something supernatural like an angel whispering in one’s ear while a demon whispers in the other.
This might allow a future society to biochemically manipulate morality and that clearly poses several potential dangers, but so does social engineering in general.
You’re determined to make me sorry for bringing up Sam Harris, aren’t you?
I think Sam Harris thinks that Judeo Christian morality had co-opted an already well established moral framework which would have continued to be further refined through reason (perhaps to an even better result) without the religious dogma to muddy the waters.
Disturbingly well. I guess there is a reason we made you the plan guy. You may notice that your efficient and mercenary argument makes no appeal to abstract concepts of right and wrong, holding us back from murder and rape.
I had simply suggested we kill one person.
Your plan proposes an apocalypse upon the valley where we potentially wipe out everybody if we don’t get our way.
Where are those organically founded hydro Christian type values that suggest rape and pillage is wrong?
Fun hijack, but I think we have gone far enough. Agree?
It seems to me that this argument is pretty easily overcome by the religious.
I could use the same logic to say that God kills every person on this planet, so he must not value human life very much, so It must be ok to murder anybody any time I feel like it.
The answer is that the ways of God are not the ways of man.
Further, I could say “using you logic God kills everyone even though he says he loves us, but he only kills half of fetuses before they are born. Therefore he must love fetuses twice as much as he loves the born. Therefore abortion is twice as bad as murder.”
I’m not sure you have the Jewish thing exactly correct. I think it’s more about not supposing to mourn fo it, rather than an ok to kill it thing. It’s not important enough and I am too lazy to check.
