AHunter: I re-read your post and my replies. When you said
“Legal civil life begins when the mom says so.”
I first took that as you stating what you believe to be actual legal fact. If instead, you were suggesting what you would LIKE in a perfect world (and that currently it is NOT true that legal civil life begins when the mom says so), then I retract my intial claim that you do not repect the legality of Roe v Wade, and apologize for that claim.
It still appears that you would favor a birth mother’s right to commit some form of infanticide… I guess as long as the umbilical cord remains connected?
Of course the birth-mother doesn’t have the right to commit infanticide. Everybody knows that under ancient Roman law, only the father had the right to commit infanticide. :rolleyes:
Personally I can’t say the woman shouldn’t be allowed to run her deal there… but I would liken it to late-night infomercials that thrive on being able to confuse people into thinking that something will make their life better or easier through effective advertising. Now I’m not saying Super-Duper Fat-Burner 2000X shouldn’t be allowed to advertise, or that people should not be allowed to watch the commercials and buy the product if they so desire, but I still find the practice irritating and utterly repulsive and truly wish the advertisers could find betters things to do. A few young men showed up at my grandmother’s house a year or so ago and convinced her that she needed to have her roof/chimney cleaned for an exhorbitant amount of money. Its her right to be taken advantage of, but that doesn’t make it a good thing or something that should be encouraged.
Yeah. Back in one of my high school science classes I drew a graph and didn’t label the axes well. The teacher lowered my grade and said “I couldn’t tell what your graph was showing” to which I replied “It’s obvious. Even an idiot could tell what the graph was.” Bad move. Making undue assumptions as to what is apparent because it is apparent to you is not especially conducive to respectful or productive exchanges.
Not that it is especially important, but by definition about half of the world’s population is “below average intelligence”. Making no statement as to my own intelligence or lack thereof, I honestly would not be able to say beyond reasonable doubt what the fetus in that picture is.
You’re right! Only anti-abortionists show pregnant women ultra-sound footage of their babies. Oh wait…
So you claim not to be making any moral judgements regarding abortion, and then you suggest that pro-choice folks refer to themselves with a term that is grossly inaccurate and also portrays them exactly as the “abortion is murder” crowd sees them?
It should be painfully obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that you are equating abortion with murder.
Now then - The question of when personhood (and therefore the right to live) begins is at least as much philosophical as scientific. Some say it begins at conception, some say it begins at birth, others say somewhere in between. How can we decide when abortion becomes wrong when we cannot objectively determine who is right? What would make one set of morals better than another?
As usual, Bob Cos is one of the most eloquent speakers for the pro-life side that I’ve ever seen. I don’t really have anything original to add, but I’d like to reiterate a point he has made in the past, but not so much in this thread. That said, this is my interpretation of what he has said, so if it’s “wrong,” take it up with me, not him.
It is important to realize that there’s not, and will never be, one absolute answer. We will never get to the point where we can take a blood sample from the mother, do a Litmus test of sorts on it, and say, “Aha! The fetus is alive!”
What that means is that all the distinctions we so vehemently defend are arbitrary. Bob Cos, in my opinion, does a great job of saying, “Look, I take this as axiomatic. There’s no way I can prove it to you. It’s my fundamental premise.” I think the rest of us do a much poorer job of doing so.
Perhaps I’m biased here, but it seems that the pro-choice has a tendency to view their stance as rationally and scientifically proven. Such a delusion will inevitably weaken your argument.
I would go with a “ceremonial umbilical cord”, the cutting of which would be a legal act declaring the newborn to be a live birth. After that instant, the newborn is a legal person and intentional injuries to it may be prosecutable as crimes; killing the child would constitute murder; lesser injuries might constitute assault and battery, attempted murder, child abuse, etc., depending on circumstance.
Yet another false analogy. The right to life means that I should be allowed to stay alive if I choose to do so. If I choose not to live, that would be my right as well.
Rights can always be surrendered. I can choose to die for my country, for example. I can choose to exercise free speech, or to remain silent. I can choose not to exercise freedom of worship, and so forth. Your scenario would not be respecting my right to life; in fact, it would forcibly deprive me of the ability to surrender that right, if I so choose.
Which proves nothing. As you know full well, there can be MANY reasons why a bill is not enacted as law.
It could mean that the bill requires refinement, for example, or that powerful lobbyists chose to act against it. Or it could mean that various Congressmen stuck to their own positions, in defiance of the evidence. It would be politically naive to conclude that these medical testimonies were in error, simply because the bill was not passed.
I don’t think that JThunder was ascribing accuracy to the testimonies because they were before a Senate panel. He was responding to charges that were theologically or doctrinally based views…instead of scientifically based views.
In previous threads on abortion (and we can never really have too many abortion threads, right? )…it’s been suggested by some that that there is no medical/scientific basis for the determination of what constitutes a new/unique human life…there certainly is plenty of evidence to suggest that a new human life begins at conception. JThunder used the Senate medical testimonies for one cite…there is another cite here (again with info sourced from non-pro life or non-theological standard medical texts).
As the author of the cite I linked to points out…the notion of “personhood” is a philosophical notion, certainly not a medical notion. A quick glance at this thread would seem to support that…we have some pro choicers ascribing “personhood” to sentience…others to “fully developed nervous systems” …or to “viability” …still others to “when mom decides”.
I still don’t see anything particularly compelling about a ‘right to life’.
I have the right not to be killed for trivial or cavalier reasons, and I have the right to fight back even if your reasons for killing me are neither trivial nor cavalier.
Let’s say that the United States passes a law that says anyone who has received a psychiatric diagnosis from a licensed psychiatrist in good standing, and who has not been evaluated and determined by a licensed psychiatrist to be no longer in need of psychiatric medication, must report to a clinic for evaluation, and if it is determined at that evaluation that such person is in need of psychiatric medication, that person is legally required to take it.
Let us say that I don’t go (and I help other formerly diagnosed ex-mental patients avoid the net) and you, believing yourself to be doing your civic duty as a good patriot, head for the phone to rat me out.
If I knew your intentions and felt that your continued existence was a definite threat to my freedom, might I kill you, and be morally correct in doing so?
It isn’t cut and dried, and I’d have qualms about the decision, but yeah, you’re dead meat.
Moreover, if anyone is to contest the claim of these scientists and medical texts, they should refute it directly. It does no good to simply say, “Well, maybe they were wrong.”
Well wait, that’s exactly the point. Once you put an act into some sort of context, any moral dictates cease to be “absolute,” since if you change the context, you change the morality. Plus, as I also said in that other thread, I don’t believe it’s possible to have any sort of truly objective morality, so I think these new questions of yours are impossible to answer “correctly.”
How do you know that anything you do is morally justified? Do you look things up in some book, or do you justify it to yourself, within the context of your community, which is what I meant by “felt.” One of those Germans would have answered your question, “of course it is morally justified, how could it not be?”
See above. Killing millions of Jews was morally defensible to those doing the killing.
In another post:
Interesting definition of “potential” you’ve got there. Nothing has any “potential” to become anything else if some sort of change, an external event, must be made to it. A child gifted in debate would not be a “potential lawyer” because, without external events, such a child could never pass the bar. An acorn has no potential to become an oak without external events.
I’d have to say the external events are implied when one says, “I think our boy may have some potential to become a lawyer,” or “there’s a mighty oak in every acorn.” It’s only when all chances at those external events occuring have passed that the potential goes away. In this way, every ovum does have the potential to become a human being. Allowing one to go to waste (not fertilizing it) seems, to me, like it should be just as bad as aborting a fertilized egg. The fact that it isn’t complete should be irrelevant, since fertilized eggs do not have the potential (in your sense of the word) to become human beings themselves, either. They require plenty of input from the outside to keep growing, and to grow correctly. My wife’s egg certainly didn’t weigh over nine pounds as soon as my sperm got to it.
I strongly disagree. The presence of those contextual phrases is merely an artifact of the English language. If you wish, we can always coin a new set of terms. Instead of saying “rape purely for sexual pleasure,” just call it “krytoact” or somesuch term. This removes the qualifying phrase, allowing us to ask if “krytoact” is ever morally justifiable.
In other words, the statement itself may contain some internal qualifiers (e.g. raping “purely for sexual pleasure”), but that simply depends on the language which you use. It has no bearing on whether the statement ITSELF is absolutely true.
Since life is a more fundamental right than freedom, I’d say that your action would not be justified.
Put it this way. Your attacker may take away your freedom, and that would be wrong. However, if you kill him, you’ll be taking away his life and his freedom. If you infringe on his right to life, you also infringe on all other rights he may have.
This is why the legal penalty for murder is typically higher than that of, say, embezzlement. It is also why capital punishment is typically reserved for habitual or mass murderers, rather than ordinary attackers or thieves.
(I’d also point out that one should make a distinction between an actual attacker and someone who is merely perceived as a future attacker. Even if we don’t though, the point remains that life is the most fundamental right we can possibly have.)
You missed the point, entirely. We could be having this discussion in Swahili, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to my position. I’m not attempting to judge the “truth value” of any of your statements, I’m trying to judge the “truth value” of an abstract entity we have both (seemingly) agreed to call “absolute morality.” The “presence of those contextual phrases” means that the act being discussed is fundamentally different from the uncontextual “rape of a child,” which, as we’ve already seen, can be interpreted in a number of ways, given a variety of contexts. Whether you call one particular context “child rape purely for sexual pleasure” or “krytoact” or “flirtnip” or “fizgig” doesn’t make a bit of difference to me.
Here: krytoact is morally acceptable within the context of a “private club” for krytoacticists. Whether or not such a club is, itself, morally justifiable is a separate question, and the answer depends on an even wider context.
In other words, every time you decide to examine an act to determine whether or not it is moral, you must examine the context surrounding that act. To write a complete book of moral precepts, it is required that you consider every possible context of every possible act, from every point of view. Including the morality of writing such a book, the morality of writing a sentence about the writing of the book, the morality of writing that sentence, etc… Also including what others might think about the morality of writing such a book, etc…
The alternative, of course, is to say, “well, krytoact is never justifiable to me,” and realize that by saying so, you are defining your very own morality. One which may be, to you, “absolute,” but which even you should understand is not objective.
(Note to all: “krytoact” is a hypothetical term that I used to mean “child rape for sheer sexual pleasure.” As to why this term was used, see previous postings.)
Well Dave, that’s where we’ll have to disagree. I don’t think that raping a child for sexual pleasure is EVER justified. Even if some sickos form a private club for such a purpose, the act remains abominable and ABSOLUTELY WRONG.
What would be the moral implication of krytoact when its done by another child. Obviously this is going to be punished extensively, but as extensively as if it were a 45 year old crack dealer? I highly doubt it… Especially if rape in this sense is only in its statutory context in which the only factor is age.
I really like the way justinh seems to have a neverending store of these seemingly innocuous abortion-related questions. As far as I know, there have been no new developments regarding this issue - I mean to say, no proof of the date at which a foetus begins to have a soul or feel pain, no visions of God from behind a cloud giving us the final verdict - so what is the point of discussing this old argument to death? Since the original post made a point of mentioning morality, doesn’t it just depend on everyone’s individual morality? It seems quite ridiculous to me that people whose morality leads them to value life at all costs can think it so wrong to kill a week-old foetus while thinking nothing at all of slaughtering cows, sheep, pigs and the like for the mere pleasure of eating their flesh. That doesn’t make any sense to my personal morality but I don’t go around trying to force everyone to become vegetarian. Are we really going to gain anything by trying to prove to each other what is moral and what is not? Tell me, has anyone actually been converted in any of these threads?
)…it’s been suggested by some that that there is no medical/scientific basis for the determination of what constitutes a new/unique human life…there certainly is plenty of evidence to suggest that a new human life begins at conception. JThunder used the Senate medical testimonies for one cite…there is another cite