Scylla, chill dude, there are only so many hours in a day and since, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got one heck of a lot of replying to do, I’ve not had time to respond to every post. I’ll try & get round to it in the next couple of days. Rest assured I’ve not forgotten it.
DDG’s article does not support your claim; as I pointed out then, there is quite a difference between “100% fully developed” and “functional”. Our legs do not stop developing until our teens, yet they are fully functional long before then. And again, you are trying to hold me to a criteria I never ascribed to. I deny personhood to a human only when the current possibilty of conscious thought is impossible; when the requisite brain structure for thought are not sufficiently developed, or is destroyed beyond the point of functionality. My decision that thought it impossible at this point is based on EEG readings which are contraindicative of thought, and the scientific determination of doctors as to what physical structures are required for the possibility of thought. You keep insisting on pretending that my criteria somehow would lead to me cheerfully advocating offing anyone who smacks their head or whose IQ is a few points low, and I’m bloody sick of it. For someone who complains about pro-choicers making straw men, you sure seem to do it yourself a great deal. Either show that the examples (retardation, comotose) you use are materially analogolous in brain functionality to a fetus prior to the functionality of the complex cerebral cortex, or admit your attempted analogies fail.
Claim all you want. You have yet to prove, by the standards held by the medical community, that thought is impossible for your examples.
As you like. You have provided weak, uncited or previously-discredited-for-your-purposes, and subjective evidence that fails to establish a useful analogy, but you did provide evidence. Your argument as to the impossibilty of thought in retarded or comotose persons appears to be analogous to claiming that there might not be a cat in a box, so it’s OK to smash the box, even though when you open the box and look in it the cat’s always there, just because when you don’t look in the box you don’t see the cat. If there are brain structures in place and fucntional that allow for the capability of thought, and the EEG readings are indicative of thought, under what bizarre justification would anyone but you assume that thought is impossible with enough certainity to permit killing?
You have claimed that conscious thought is “doubtful” for these examples, but you have not shown that these humans have EEG reading indicative of the inability to think, nor have you shown that their cerebral cortex is nonfunctional. Barring such evidence, all you seem to offer to support your opinion that thought is impossible in your examples seems to be “well, retarded people are really stupid, so maybe they can’t think at all” and “well, EEG readings seem indicative of thought in comotose people, but maybe they’re not really thinking anyway”. I would hardly call your claims well-supported. Either furnish some medical evidence that retarded/comotose humans are incapable of thought, or drop it.
Our ability to think is what separates us from other living things. If you had to choose between killing an anencephalitic infant that has never thought and never will think, and a sentient, conscious, speaking alien, which would you choose? I would choose to preserve the life of the alien. The most important thing I have in common with other persons is my capacity for thought, not my DNA sequence. When a person is brain dead, when they no longer have the capability of thought, we no longer accord them the same rights to life as a thinking person. The human body is alive, in that case, but the person is dead. If you want to say that they’re persons, but we can still kill them, fine, but then you are admitting that persons do not have an inherent right to life.
You keep tying right to life to ability to survive without the aid that you have arbitrarily decided is “natural”, and I think that is a grave, grave mistake. Just because a human cannot live without medical support, or may not live more than a few years even with medical support, that does not mean it is acceptable to kill them, right? So your attempt to claim that anenecephilitic infants might be considered to have less of a right to life than fetuses solely based on the fact that they will need medical care to live for several years is a red herring; all the more so because anencephelitic infants can survive without medical care, just not terribly long. But so what? If I get very sick, I might not survive terribly long without medical care, either, and I might die in a few years no matter what you do. My theoretical situation, in terms of health, is exactly analogous to that of an anencephelitic infant. Therefore, if, as in your theoretical example, we can condone the killing of anencephelitic infants, we should equally condone killing the theoretical me. We don’t, of course, but if the sole deteminant of “right to life” is ability to live in a “natural” environment, we would. Therefore I think your argument on this point fails.
And I note that you ignore the rest of my post, so I ask again …if I am a sick human fated to die in two to three years even with medical intervention, do I have less fo a right to live than a month-gestated fetus? Is it acceptable to deny me medical care so that I die in a few days rather than a few years?
[Edited by Gaudere on 11-27-2001 at 11:35 AM]
Ummmm . . .
I hesitate to even stick my toe in here, but I can’t resist the urge to poke the anthill a little.
Ray Heller, you keep going on and on about how outlawing abortion would “enslave” women, “forcing” them to carry their children to term, taking away their rights . . .
(Now apart from the cases of rape and failed birth control which, while debateable issues of their own, are a very small percentage of pregnancies . . .)
Who was it who chose to have sex? There’s a very simple way to avoid getting pregnant–don’t fuck.
Are you seriously trying to say that it’s oppression to restrict abortions when we all know it’s the boingy-boingy that causes pregnancy?
Sorry, Sparky. That horse don’t trot. Even if all abortions were outlawed, any “oppression” is a matter of free will. It isn’t slavery if you enter into it by choice.
Eh, I disagree. In the old-timey days, people sometimes had to sell themselves into slavery to take care of debts. Now, they knew going into debt might result in being forced into slavery (like “boingy-boingy”, as you put it, might result in a pregnancy), but they did it anyway, and then became slaves when they could not pay their bills. But although the circumstances that led to their slavery were willing, we still consider them slaves.
I would not consider being required to bear a child in modern society fits the classic defintion of slavery, but that is because a pregnant woman is not regarded as being on a lower level than the fetus, nor is regarded as lacking in some essential element that nonpregnant women have. True slaves, even though they might be powerful, were always seen in a slave society as being inferior in some manner to free persons. What you would call a person required by law to allow a living thing/potential person to continue to be housed in their body is an interesting question, but I don’t think slave is exactly the right word.
Gaudere:
That was indentured servitude, not slavery, or do you maintain that every man who’s forced to pay alimony is a slave?
Maybe I should expand on that a little.
The people in the olden days who got into debt and had to sell themselves into a term of service were indentured servants and were very different from slaves who generally aren’t considered human.
People are often required to change their behavior, pay a debt, or otherwise live up to the consequences of their poast actions without it being called slavery.
A father paying alimony is a fine example.
It also leads to the double standard pertaining to abortion and child support.
A man can have sex once, and if that union produces a child he can be forced to pay child support without any recourse. He can’t consider whether or not he wants to have a “fiscal abortion” from the situation.
The choice to have an abortion or not is strictly up to the woman, and the man is the one who’s forced to live with the consequences.
It seems to me that if we’re going to have legal at will abortions and give the woman an exit strategy, we also have to give the man an exit strategy as well.
For example, if there’s an unwanted pregnancy, and the man doesn’t want the pregnancy, but the woman won’t get an abortion than he shouldn’t be compelled to pay child support.
If we don’t do it this way, it’s a double standard. Pro-choice becomes pro-choice for women, but no-choice for men.
Nope, it was genuine slavery in some cases. In some, yes, you just worked off your debt and then were free, you were not natally alienated and could not be sold, still had equal rights to a freedman, but in others you were sold to genuine slavery. Violators of various taboos or laws could become slaves, too, though their acts were willing. Say if you kill a buffalo on a Wednesday, a tribe removes all your kin-claims and you are sold to a neighboring tribe who use you to carry their tents. How is this not slavery?
Alimony is not similar to slavery because the alimony-payer does not belong to the person they are paying, nor are they seen as lacking in honor or inferior in rights to non-alimony payers, nor are they natally alientated, cut off from their people, nor does the entire income and possessions they earn and own belong to the person they pay alimony to (even the peculium, the belongings and income certain slaves were allowed to keep, was considered to belong to the master). Alimony is a required payment, that’s all; it is not even indentured servitude, because all you owe is money, your direct servitude to a particular person is not required.
I thought you were just referring to indentured servitude. I completely forgot about the “Buffalo poaching slavery clause.”
Point conceded.
The “men shouldn’t have to pay child support if women can have abortions” is a whole 'nother thing; look up the old threads, we’ve had some good ones. However, don’t dispute my claim that a person who willingly acts in a way that might result in his slavery may still be a slave based on the fact that a man can be required to support his child and we don’t consider it slavery. Child support is not slavery. Neither is making abortions illegal necessarily the enslavement of women; however it’s not NOT slavery because of the willingness of the acts that resulted in the slavery, it is not slavery because the woman is not treated as a slave. Not is a classic sense, anyway, and if you want to play fast and loose with metaphorical defintions you end up fuzzying the whole situaation and all sorts of people become “slaves”.
So:
child support!=slavery
illegal abortions!=slavery
a person who has lost natal ties, honor, and the capacity for possessions and is the property of a other, whether the circumstances were a possible consequence of his actions or not==slave
Fair enough, Gaudere.
I think my point remains intact, though. In our hypothetical all-abortions-are-illegal state, no woman is forced into childbirth because they are not forced into pregnancy.
Gaudere:
I thought I just conceded. Shall I reconcede? Is a double concession necessary? Can I just fall down and beg for mercy?
When you said “ye olden days” that brought to mind revolutionary/colonial periods and I thought for sure you were referring to indentured servitude. The “Buffalo poaching clause” was slightly facetious, but not sarcastic. I’ll happily admit that such phenomenom as you describe did occur. Certain actions could get you sold into bonafide slavery in the distant past.
Technically though this is not “ye olden days,” but “Yon primitive days.” That’s what threw me.
In case I didn’t mention it, point conceded.
Sheesh.
[sub]grumble grumble, I’ll fix her! Wait till she sees all the coding errors I’m going to make. That’ll show her![/sub]
I posted my second one before I saw your concession. But go ahead, beg for mercy and concede some more. I likes that. 
Well, andros, I realize I’m nitpicking here, too, but I think you can say a woman was “forced into childbirth” even if they were not forced into pregnancy, and even if they know that abortion is illegal. Mr Debtor or Buffalo Hunter knew the consequences, too, but woudn’t you still say they were forced into slavery? They’re certainly not slaves by choice, though their actions that resulted into the slavery were free. But so they’re forced, so what? We force people to do all sorts of things. It’s only if we deny them their rights by force for insufficient reason that it’s worth fighting against.
OK, I’m too new here and too conflicted on this subject to jump into this topic with both feet, but Ray, one of your points is giving me a headache.
I cannot get my mind around why you believe that if I - hypothetically, because I don’t - oppose abortion, I must neccessarily be willing to take responsibility for the children that will result from the legal implementation of that opposition.
Do you oppose killing retirees? Seriously. Let’s say I were to introduce a piece of legislation making it legal to off anyone whose major source of income was social security. You oppose me, on moral grounds. By your logic, I would be COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED in arguing: “you have no right to oppose this, unless you’re willing to take financial responsibility for each of those people.” This is utterly, completely, illogical.
And don’t go off on one of your “but the elderly are people and fetuses aren’t” tangents, because that’s not the point here. The point is, you can oppose the destruction of a thing without being willing to personally provide for that thing. In the same way, I support maintaining national parks, even though I personally will not go clean them, care for the animals in residence, or pay developers for the income they lose by being unable to build the SuperBigMallOfAmerica there.
- Frank
C’mon, Gaudere, let’s put that {sym} font to work!
child support [sym]¹[/sym] slavery
illegal abortions [sym]¹[/sym] slavery
Now, doesn’t that look better? 
[SUB]Nah, I don’t have anything to add to the discussion, though I’ve been following it with great interest. You guys have been covering things pretty well.[/sub]
**
Dueling axioms! Cool!
I agree: If something by definition never existed, then it cannot experience harm. Of course, by my definition the entity does exist (I’m assuming you use “exists” to equal “personhood” in the above). And there certainly are philosophies that do not absolutely require sentience to define personhood–yours, for example, or else the soon-to-recover brain-dead patient I always roll into these discussions would quickly be a goner if left up to you (and that ain’t the case).
We agree that sentience is such a precious, defining attribute that even the potential of it morally demands that we respect someone’s right to live in cases of brain death (where recovery is possible). Then why not for a fetus, whose circumstance is essentially the same? That’s where our axioms really veer off (after a near collision!).
Because your philosophy requires sentience to exist for personhood to begin–but, again, it does not require it for personhood to persist. This seems arbitrary and pat to me, somehow (as other people’s axioms often do, unlike mine, which are always shining examples of lucid reason). Prior sentience carries no weight with the brain-dead patient who will not recover, nor should it. Why then does it matter the least bit for the patient who will recover? Shouldn’t the only important distinction be that a patient will soon be sentient? Isn’t that what makes that scenario morally compelling while a brain-dead patient without hope is merely tragic?
We are necessarily slaves to time physically. Morally, however, we needn’t give in to time’s arbitrary nature. To abort a fetus that we agree will likely achieve sentience, but doesn’t have it right this second–well, something real is lost, it seems to me: the future of this undeniably (to me) real being, a future that this being will move inexorably through if only he or she is not harmed. And, of course, that is exactly what is stolen whenever a person is killed: that person’s future, nothing more or less. Gaudere, I realize you would likely counter that one can’t steal something from a “someone” who doesn’t exist. But, for me, the second we determine that this entity, if left unmolested, has a sentient future, we agree it is a “someone.”
Here’s another hypothetical, one I don’t remember if we’ve ever discussed (beagledave, I know how much you enjoy hypotheticals, if you’re reading along–at least I’m not using time machines in this one): suppose we could determine exactly at what point a given fetus would gain sentience. Would you have any compunctions regarding abortion if consciousness were to occur for a particular baby in only an hour? How about a minute? A second? Would any of these scenarios alter your decision?
Perhaps not. And I suppose the same applies to me; the span of time that separates the fetus from sentience matters not a whit (he says replacing his pearl-handled axiom in its holster, a tendril of smoke curling delicately from its barrel).
I figured you remembered. I just always attempt some sort of segue whenever I go to one of my canned speeches. And I can certainly understand why you’d rush to the rescue of the pro-choice cause given the circumstances.
RTFirefly:
Not to a C or C++ programmer, which I suspect is where Gaudere is coming from .
No…it’s not because I believe the brain dead person is still a person that makes me want to revive it (I don’t think I do think it’s a person when it can’t think, really). It’s that it was a person. If a sentience that exists is destroyed, that sentience was hurt. You can remove that past hurt by restoring it. However, if a sentience has yet to exist, it cannot be hurt by continuing not to exists, nothing was ever there to be hurt. (The brain-dead human will become a person again upon recovery, and it’s personhood will stretch over the gap in the same manner that a book continues even if there are blank pages in the middle. I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether you consider the blank pages in the middle to be a part of the book, as long as the story goes on after it.)
Potential isn’t actual. It’s not the potential future sentience of a momentarially quiescent brain that I think makes it a moral obligation to revive the brain–except for the fact that that renewal of sentience will erase past harm–rather it is the actual, existing past hurt that happened. All sorts of things could happen, but until it does or did, it’s not really there. The harm the sentience suffered by brain-death really, clearly, actually, obviously happened. Not “might”, “can” or “could”: did.
Sure, potentialities should be taken into consideration, but as far as I am concerned, every day I choose to not realize a potential sentience, whether it is by not having sex, by using birth control, or even (theoretically) having an abortion. I may even use a physical act to prevent the potential sentience from becoming actual, whether it is inserting an IUD or having an abortion. I don’t think I can hurt a potential person, no matter how close to the realization of a potential it is, or I’d be having guilt trips about the many eggs that I have allowed to die without realizing their potential. Sure, it would take a physical act (I hope) for them to realize their potential, but since you are quite willing consider me morally obligated to take physical acts to allow the potential sentience of a brain-dead person to be realized, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t consider me equally morally obligated to take a physical act to realize the potential of my eggs.
The reason I allow the same personhood to “stretch though” a period of brain-death is because we expereince temporary interruptions in our consciousness streams all the time; when we sleep, for instance. Even if our brains actually stopped each night, it is reasonable to assume that we would be the same person when they restarted. Therefore, we acknowledge that “me” can persist throughout these periods. However, we have no recollection of existing before we were capable of thought, therefore it seems unreasonable for me to assume that identity can exist before thought, whereas temporarily brain-dead persons do recollect existing both prior to and after interruption in capacity for thought.
Nope, not a bit. Not even if it was a second. Well, assuming it is the parent’s wish, that is; I’m not recommending killing all nonsentient fetuses/babies without the parent’s consent, of course.
How about you? If you knew for a fact that sentience would occur in a newborn baby 95 years from now, are you morally obligated to preserve the life of the child until it does? What about if our capacity for preservation of the body becomes advanced, and we know a baby will become sentient in six hundred years, yet only be sentient for an hour?
CMK: Actually, Java. But I left the world of Java behind many years ago to play with design.
[Edited by Gaudere on 11-28-2001 at 06:36 PM]
**
I don’t believe there’s an obligation to create a being, but we are compelled to protect, or at least not harm, an existing being. Our brain-dead guy belongs in this category, as do the pre-born, who may not have fully developed any of a number of critical attributes, but who clearly are themselves a good bit more than potential. An egg is not yet a being; it is merely raw material, no more worthy of protection than the meal you ate that provided the nourishment that helped you to produce the egg. Women have no moral obligation to keep themselves perpetually pregnant. But once pregnancy occurs, the circumstance is substantially different.
Well, it depends. I may have given you the mistaken impression that I believe any chance for life must be preserved, regardless of circumstance, regardless of the effort required. That’s not the case. It is often an extremely hazy line, but I think that there is a distinction between allowing the natural process of dying to unfold and ignoring a fellow human being’s need for assistance.
Some people may believe that no super-human effort is too great to preserve life, regardless of the pain and suffering of a terminal patient, regardless of the wishes of the patient to simply let death follow its natural course. I do not agree. Certainly there are circumstances where it is immoral to prolong life.
And the notion that we’re all dying may be technically accurate, but I see a real difference between aging and the physical process of dying. I saw my father-in-law die of lung cancer, and it was terrible. Permitting him to fade away at the end was substantially different than, say, refusing to hit your brake when someone stumbles in the road in front of your car, even though in both instances life could possibly have been prolonged by an active step on another’s part.
So, should we spend billions of dollars to actively preserve the possibility for a baby to be sentient six hundred years from now, but only for a few seconds and in great pain? Can we calculate how may other lives could be saved with the money spent on this child? If this process required our active intervention to continue, it may be moral to allow this death to occur. Tweak the circumstances a bit and perhaps I’ll answer differently. Nothing’s ever crystal clear, I guess.
Hopefully this doesn’t seem inconsistent, but, really, I don’t believe there are many absolutes in life, even for issues like abortion. An abortion to save the life of the mother, for example, could be the most moral alternative available. IOW, if I’ve given you the impression that my beliefs rest on a “life at any cost” foundation, they don’t.