Are you seriously suggesting that violating laws is acceptable as long as the violator believes he’s ethically correct? :eek: Might as well nuke the planet, then, because that way lies anarchy.
So, if I understand Apos correctly, my belief that it’s wrong to kill people is only valid if I’m prepared to kill in order to promote it? I respectfully disagree.
As other people pointed out, Hill had plenty of other options in trying to save lives, which didn’t involve killing anybody. The analogy with “holding up signs next to the death camps” is a false one, because the Nazi death camps weren’t established by a democratic government - no amount of sign-waving would change the minds of the Nazi overlords. Even in my most cynical moments, I do not believe the United States is like this; your country has legitimate, non-violent means to effect change in the law.
(I am relieved by Apos’s concession that “murder may not always be the only option” (emphasis mine). It does make debates a lot less messy when you’re not actually obliged to murder anyone who disagrees with you. 
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So those dangerous anarchists Gandhi and Martin Luther King are going to cause nuclear war?
I am sure the French Resistance in WWII violated a few laws, and employed violence as well. I am also sure they were morally justified in doing so.
And perhaps John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, but the discussion goes marching on.
Regards,
Harriet Beecher Shodan
As Shodan pointed out, history treats those who violate “unethical” laws very kindly. We don’t say, “That damned Harriet Tubman was a filthy lawbreaker!” or “I hope Raoul Wallenberg is rotting in hell for his dastardly actions. He broke the law!”
Julie
Btw, tho it hasn’t been mentioned here, the news reports have often either referred to the now-late-&-in-the-hands-of-a Just-God-Who-I-Am-Sure-Is-Not-Happy-with-him Paul Hill as a Presbyterian minister or a former P… m… First, he was a minister in the very conservative & very anti-abortion Orthodox Presbyterian Church, not the mainline Presbyterian Church USA or even the conservative Presbyterian Church of America (of which D. James Kennedy is probably the best known cleric.) Second, the OPC excommunicated Hill some time before his crime because of his advocacy of killing abortionists.
Guess the state “aborted” him.
Slight hi-jack possibly.
Who constitutes ethics? An unethical law must be measured against an ethical law, but I fail to see who is able to say for sure what is or is not ethical. So one can say it’s ok to kill babies, but it’s not ok to kill those who kill babies, but I fail to see how one arrives at this and claim ethics. I know then the debate goes into who is a baby, or if a baby is a human, but I’m not really trying to go there, more how one defines ethics in a country that no longer takes the word of God as a standard.
We have abortion, and the killing of the doctor, but both are murder, IMO, whether the country thinks it’s ethical or not.
No, but the danger comes from the nutjobs who think that their moral view allows them to break any law they dislike. At least Ghandi and King, when they broke the law, did so in a peaceful manner.
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It’s fairly easy and has been shown multiple times throughout history. There are plenty of majority atheist, non-christian, and even completely pagan (by western standards) countries in the world, they don’t seem to have any problem defining ethics. There cultures may be (and probably are) much different than how you might want to live, but their people get along just as well and have no problem dealing with issues of ‘right and wrong’.
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No because even if you consider the fetus the same (morally) as a fully formed human, its termination is lawful, and is therefore not ‘murder’ anymore than a soldier killing an enemy during battle or a policeman exchanging gunfire fatally with a terrorist. For a deliberate death to be considered murder, it has to be done unlawfully and with malice (though not necessarily pre-meditation).
Oh, and I forgot to ask, When was it that our country took the ‘word of god as a standard’. Last time I checked, the country was founded by a bunch of deists, a few christians, and a couple of atheists. Please stop Idealizing your countries history. Nostalgia ain’t just a river in egypt.
Yup
This has been done before, ad nauseum…folks accusing non violent pro life folks of being “cowards” or of not really believing what they say…all because those pro life folks don’t think that responding in violence is such a noble thing.
I sure as HELL hope you’re not suggesting that Hill was the moral equivalent of the French Resistance, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Are you?
John Brown was a murdering thug, btw.
Although I do dislike taking about Germany, by your definition then it wasn’t murder to kill anyone they wanted, which brings us right back to what was talked about earlier.
John Brown is a bullshit analogy. The goal was to free slaves. That was a goal which could be accomplished without violence.
I don’t think many people would argue that shooting somebody who is about to stab a two year old would be criminal or immoral. If, as some would have us believe, a fetus is inherently no different than a two year old (and has the same right to life) then pro-lifers should have no problem with using deadly force to prevent the killing of a fetus.
The fact that they don’t shows that (imo) they don’t really believe deep down that a fetus is the same as baby. Either that or they just don’t want to go to prison.
Just to pose an absurd hypothetical, what if we decided to legalize neonaticide? Let’s say the government decides that it’s ok to kill newborns withiin 24 hours.
Would it then be morally acceptable to use deadly force to prevent the killing of a newborn baby even though it would mean prison (or the death penalty) for doing it? Would any of you pro-lifers be willing to do it?
If not, why not? If it would be acceptable then what is the difference between a new born and aa fetus. Why would the rules change?
Well, Diogenes the Cynic - if anything, the period within which a women can receive a legal abortion has shortened within the past ten years. But you do pose an interesting question to the anti-choicers out there.
My body, my choice. You want to stop abortions? Wonderful, I certainly hope you have a really large dinner table, we’ll just send all those unwanted crack babies and third world starving infants to your house.
I don’t know what you mean by “acceptable” (to WHO?), but it is certainly what is ethically mandated.
Are you seriously suggesting that if something is right, you won’t do it merely because someone formed a government to control the neighborhood you live in, bought some guns, and called it illegal?
Again, this argument is nigh nonsense. People have been trying to change the law, and so far, for decades, they’ve failed. In the meantime, millions of fetuses have been aborted. The fact that the nation is democratic is utterly irrelevant. The fact is, from the point of view of one who asserts that killing a fetus is out and out just as bad as murder, is that it is going on right now. And the people who have the monopoly on legitimate violence are currently backing it up. That may change someday (I hope not), but a possible and uncertain future would hardly justify the ongoing acts of the present, nor relieve anyone’s moral burdens to prevent what they see as murder now.
As sick as it may seem to me, who puts vastly reduced value on the lives of fetuses compared to grown men, Hill undoubtedly stopped more abortions by killing that doctor (and the bodyguard who was protecting him) than he would have by lobbying Congress, or really, by any other means at all. Indeed, all he would have had to do was, by his act, save the lives of two or three fetuses, to make his actions justified, in his mind.
You can dismiss him as a crackpot, but I think most people are very scrupulously avoiding having to face his actual reasoning.
I think Diog has posed an excellent question, much clearer than my presentation. Counterfactual: Killing infants is suddenly made perfectly legal. You consider killing an infant as immoral as killing any person. A house down the block from you is where exhausted parents bring their babies to be killed. In fact, the professional baby euthanizer is just at this very moment walking into his house to kill some babies. What are you going to do: wander off and sign a petition?
I mean, murder aside for a second, can you honestly then claim that meekly protesting the ongoing and routine killing of healthy infants is an appropriate response? And I don’t mean “appropriate” even in the sense of “the morally obligated response.” I mean it in the sense of it even seeming like sane behavior in clear understanding of the situation. It’s like hiring a rodeo clown to perform at someone’s funeral.
That makes about as much sense as saying that, because I oppose the death penalty, I am personally obligated to house convicted murderers in my house for the duration of their sentances. Which is to say: it makes no sense.
I am happy to accept that killing fetuses, especially in the early stages, is not very wrong at all. But I’m not willing to accept an argument based on the premise that ones ethical obligations are different just because they concern the working of one’s body.
Doesn’t anyone believe that this man deserves to die for taking another life???