I must have missed when the right to life was established as absolute and it was extended to fetuses. These are two rather glaring flaws in your argument. I get that you assume these to be true and base your arguments on them, but that prove they are valid assumptions to make.
And this, since you dragged my name into it:
Your little transitive logic chain is blatantly invalid. It is not true that life trumps liberty trumps happiness/property - certainly not in the United States where the death penalty exists, as well as a right to use deadly force in personal defense. Those two examples alone end any notion that the right to life is paramount - obviously it can be overridden under specific circumstances, and one of the pro-choice arguments is that abortion is one of these circumstances even if we decided that fetuses had rights.
You’re fond of saying things along the lines of “well, if you believe X, you obviously must also believe Y or you’re being inconsistent”, where Y is something deliberately absurd (i.e. being pro-choice must mean being pro-rape). Well, right back at you - if you believe the the right to life is paramount, you obviously believe that someone who is being assaulted has NO right to fight back if it may kill the attacker.
So a loanshark’s enforcer says to Jim: “I’m not gonna kill you, I’m just gonna break your legs.” The only thing Jim can can say is “Oh, okay. Go ahead.” because he has no right to do otherwise at the risk of the enforcer’s life? You obviously believe this. Or is it “different” ?
First of all, no one has said the right to life is absolute, especially since I’ve on more than one occasion said that (1) abortion is permissible in some instances and (2) that people have a right to defend themselves with equal force even at the cost of someone else’s life. So this part is clearly invalid. Second of all, no one has assumed that the right to life extends to fetuses, but rather that it should extend to fetuses and that there’s no reason not to extend it to them, as it’s extended to all other humans (what is =/= what should be). So this part, like the first part, is also clearly invalid. Moving on…
Someone is not given, for example, lethal injection as an expression of someone else’s liberty or happiness. They are typically given it for violating someone else’s right to life, for when you violate someone else’s right to life, you forfeit your own right to life. If someone, for example, is killed while trying to inflict grave harm upon another, it is not done as an expression of the someone else’s liberty or happiness, but because individual’s have the right to defend their lives with force equal, but never more, to the force the aggressor is using against them.
Neither of these examples prove that the right to life is not paramount to liberty, happiness or even property; it proves that it the right to life is not absolute, which no one has said it is. So please do try again.
I must say, Bryan, that you seem to have a very short term memory. So short, in fact, that you seemingly cannot remember the arguments we had less than two months ago. So instead of retyping what I’ve typed out to you many times before, I simply direct you back to where we went over this before.
The only thing wrong I can see is that I left out the word “doesn’t” in the final sentence, an annoying error I make from time to time.
So your transitive chain of “Life > liberty > happiness/property” is wrong, then. Gotcha. Therefore, I guess, any conclusions you’ve based on it are suspect.
By the way, does “defending myself” count as “happiness”? Does it only apply to lethal threats?
No, let’s not move on. Are you arguing that such a rights extension should occur? If so, that’s fine. I’d ask if you’ve considered the consequences of such an extension.
And if you’re considering digging up that slavery statement I made a while back, I’ve mulled it over and realized my position needed some clarification, though even then it’s not very relevant so I won’t elaborate here.
How is this relevant? The person the convict killed (possibly decades earlier) will still be dead. The execution will not undo the original violation. The execution is not stopping an ongoing violation (i.e. its not like the executioner is breaking up a hostage situation). The executioner is not operating out of self-defense. His happiness and property are not at risk.
Doesn’t this all just mean there there are times when one can kill another legally, even if no threat of personal harm exists? If not, then the executioner should be arrested immediately after the convict is dead, or stopped in the act.
Your response at the time included this nugget: “Only when someone threatens your life can you kill them” which is clearly incorrect (certainly current U.S. law disagrees with you), so I dismissed it and simply lumped it in with all your other failed statements.
In fact, as far as I can tell, you could simply have said from the very start: “Abortion is wrong because God said so”, and your argument would have exactly the same weight. I can’t recall anything you’ve said that rose above that level.
…Yeah… I really did lol @ this post. This is weak, even for you, Bryan.
There are more than that, but we’ll get to them in due time.
Except-- <insert drumroll here>– it’s not wrong and you’re still welcome enough to show that it’s wrong. I wholeheartedly welcome you to do so, though every time I’ve asked, you’ve somehow failed to comply. Well, maybe not “somehow”. I should say “expectedly”. As I’ve said in the past and will continue to state, the only circumstance in which life is deemed to be lower on the proverbial totem pole than liberty or happiness is abortion. Nowhere else can one be deprived of their life simply for the liberty or happiness of another.
No and if you would have read the link you were given the first time which explained the concept of self-defense, you would have understood this and would not have needed to ask (you do realize I don’t post links for my own enjoyment, correct?). But, alas, you did not read it then, you did not read it now and you very likely won’t read it in the future. So around and around and around we’ll go in your dubious logical Merry-Go-Round.
You just now figured out that’s what I’m arguing? You mean it only took you 5/6ths of a year to figure it out? Well, better late than never, I suppose.
No, this means that crimes have punishments. Much the same way you can be deprived of your liberty if you deprive someone else of theirs (i.e., you can go to jail for kidnapping), you can be deprived of your life is you deprive someone else of theirs. It’s rather simple. Though, to be honest, I have no idea why you’re harping on this, since your original claim was about the permissibility of self-defense and somehow assuming that my position necessitates that someone willingly let themselves be acted against because the perpetrator has an absolute right to not be harmed in any facet.
…Yeah…
Considering the above was in response to you mentioning self-defense even at the cost of another’s life, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that the above response was in relation to the aforementioned statement about self-defense, even at the cost of another’s life.
So are we going to keep going on this Merry-Go-Round or are you going to find something else?
Well, I’ll be away for the weekend, but if this thread is still going on Monday, I guess I’ll be back to continue pointing out the emptiness of your arguments, for as long as it amuses me.
I’ve done a lot of scrolling through the abortion debate, but did Magellan01 ever come back and give this grand logical argument against SSM we keep hearing about?
Feel free to use the Search function. If you, and others, were unable to read the words on the screen in the past, why should I bother typing them again only for them to be treated as invisible? And then have a bunch of dolts lie claiming I’ve never given a rationale. No, you guys feel free to circle jerk without the porn—'kay?
No, you do not capisce. The above tortured logic would only be true if the ability or inability to get pregnant was the *only *factor involved in whether or not a person supports abortion access. But actually there are many other factors - the chief among them being religious belief. Perhaps women are more likely to be heavily religious than men, therefore skewing the poll results. As a general rule, if there are many factors then you cannot draw specific conclusions about a single factor from statistics. You’ve tried this trick several times and it just won’t fly. Didn’t you have to take statistics to get your degree? I know I did. Maybe that was another class you slept through.
No, the inevitable ‘this is a matter of opinion’ response. As I said before, I know exactly what the biology textbooks say. None of them opine on matters of philosophy. If you genuinely don’t understand the difference between a blastocyst and a living, breathing, thinking, human person, then I just don’t know what to tell you.
You want every fertilized egg to receive the full protection of the law, right? But you are aware that not all fertilized eggs implant, right? And that a woman can reduce the chance of implantation by doing such hideously criminal things as drinking caffeine or smoking. So lots of women are creating little tiny human beings and then killing them and just flushing them merrily down the toilet. OMG arrest them all now!
How about the objective truth that a fetus is dependent on a woman to incubate it and a baby is not. I really don’t see why you find it so difficult to distinguish between these two states.
As Bryan has quite eloquently pointed out, this is utter bullshit. There are many cases where we deem that killing another is permissible. As I mentioned above (and you conveniently cut out, presumably because you couldn’t deal with it), a woman who is being threatened with rape can kill her attacker in self-defence. Do you really think that a woman shouldn’t be able to defend herself because her right to safety is superseded by his right to life?
I have yet to come across one (yes, one) good point against SSM. Every argument I’ve come across is mired in ignorance, bigotry, fear, selfishness, narrowmindedness, and just plain crappy logic. Most “facts” stated by the anti-SSM folks tend to be complete fabrications, too, I find.
As for abortion, I think it’s a little trickier because it’s more opinion-oriented (with justifiable differentials), but I’m still pro-choice and think it should be largely a function of scientific definition. Leave the religious goobleygock out of it.
