But the C that ‘was to exist’, if such a notion should be attributed credence, now won’t exist, precisely because of intervening action having been taken.
Sure, but practically any action will do the same thing. Even for people who don’t have kids themselves, but existing and interacting with those who do, or will, we are changing, if only in small ways at a time, the children who will be born in the future. If we accept that those future children have a right to exist, then simply by going about our everyday business we are all of us murderers thousands of times over, for causing a child that was to exist to not.
My view is that that which does not yet exist shouldn’t be treated as though it does before it does.
Exactly! Thus, you can’t harm (now or in the future) the (two-legged!) child C that the fetus would have developed into by causing circumstances to conspire in such a way that a one-legged child (call it child L) is born (because child C then never exists to be harmed), and, you can’t have harmed child L by doing whatsoever to the fetus, since without that action, child L wouldn’t have existed.
I disagree with that last part. You can harm L (or rather, will have harmed L) regardless of whether or not it would have only existed with that harm. When L comes into existence, that it owes that existence to the harm doesn’t mean the harm is negated. If I cut off one of F’s legs, causing it to become L instead of C, when L exists, it will still be harmed by it’s lack of leg, thanks to me. Just because there is no case where a non-harmed-L could exist, doesn’t mean that my role in causing the harm doesn’t count.
That implies no one has ever been harmed. If someone chops Rob’s leg off, then immediately afterwards, we have Rob2, a one legged man, who would never have existed had Rob’s leg not been chopped off. So Rob2, rather than having been harmed, has been brought into existence. Meanwhile, Rob no longer exists and so isn’t around to have been harmed.
-FrL-
Is the existing L automatically worse off than a hypothetical ‘two-legged’ L that doesn’t exist? If not, in what way is L actually harmed? (It seems to me one could get uncomfortably close to implications of a life lacking a leg being ‘worth less’ than one with two walking sticks, if one considers L as being ‘intrinsically harmed’.) And what’s with cases where the only way a live birth can even happen is through inflicting some sort of harm – if, for instance, some genetic quirk would lead to a fatal birth defect if it’s not corrected at, say, the expense of a limb? Where literally the only way of allowing a life to exist at all would be to have that life one ‘harmed’ by you?
None of this, by the way, means or implies that I think you can do anything you want to a fetus and be in the clear, morally – I do consider actions during pregnancy that may result in birth defects (such as smoking or consuming alcohol, for instance) to be morally reprehensible, yet I don’t feel that I can agree with the reasoning given here. There just doesn’t seem any clear line of demarcation – if I jerk off, am I committing genocide? Can any action truly be judged by its (possible) future consequences? Because that’s what’s being done here, if the possible harm towards child C (or possibly L) is to be taken into account in establishing the moral value of whatever action was taken, as long as there is no guarantee that F would have lead to C with absolute certainty. A more appropriate measure would be, to me, the intent, which includes knowledge of possible future consequences. Can you be held morally responsible for the harm done by an act you committed with good intent that, unbeknownst to you, at some point in the future will cause somebody to suffer? Because there’s some probability that it will for any given action.
Nope. Rob’s been harmed. He may not be harmed now, due to not existing any longer, but the act of chopping off his leg surely was harmful to him. Ask Rob2, he’ll probably remember it very clearly! If the present non-existence of the harmed person negated the harm, murder wouldn’t be harmful.
The existing L isn’t automatically worse off, but thanks to the environment which favours two-legged people over one-legged people, he is rather worse off than that two-legged L. They (or their parents) will likely need to shell out for hospital treatment, perhaps prosthetic legs, perhaps crutches. If nothing else, I imagine he’ll be teased as a kid, though that pretty much is a possibility for anyone. 
If the only way to allow a life to live at all is to lose a limb - it probably depends on whether we’re talking death vs. losing a limb and never existing vs. losing a limb.
I’m confused as to who you’re addressing this point to - surely i’m on your side on this? I don’t think actions can be judged by their future consequences until that future occurs. Intent, as you say, is a good way to measure things, since instead of measuring what has actually occurred, you’re measuring what people believe will occur as the result of their actions, as a factor of why they take them. If I poison your cup of coffee, I haven’t committed murder until you drink it - but i’ve committed attempted murder from the moment I enact my fiendish plan. I can’t be judged by my murdering, because I haven’t murdered you, but I can be judged by my intent to and actions taken to kill you.
Yeah, sorry, that was more of a general clarification attempt, not that it ended up being exactly clear. I just wanted to make sure nobody takes me to secretly lobby for the ‘let’s poke fetuses to see what happens!’-enthusiasts…
I misread your previous post. I thought you were saying that a person and his “future self” are not the same person. But you weren’t.
-Kris
It’s fine to harm the fetus all you want, if you’re going to abort.
Think of it this way, you have a dead body–a human. Now you can either bury the dead body and move on to the next one, or you can use a magic spell which will bring it back to life (but in return you’ll suffer nausia and a sore back for nine months, and you’ll have to spend many hours every day for 18 years helping the resurrected person to reintegrate into society.) Now you’re under no obligation to bring anyone back to life. They already lived as much as they were naturally entitled to, and of course there’s the 18 year regimen afterward.
Now say that you perform an autopsy on the dead body–slice it open, take out organs and put them in jars, etc. I’m sure you’ll find that the dead person doesn’t care two shillings. So you finish and bury the body.
You move on to the next dead body. This time you tattoo “Freak!” into the forehead and cut off both legs below the knee, then use your spell to bring the person back to life. Now I’d venture to guess that the resurrected person, on learning that you had done these things for no reason other than for your own amusement, would be rather pissed. I’d say that the resurrected person has good call to be.
You move on to the third body. You decide to bring this one back to life, but unfortunately, the person had died in a car crash that had smashed one arm into mush. So before performing the spell, you lop the arm off and bandage it. Then you bring the person back to life and explain to them that you were forced to amputate their arm or they would have bled to death when they came back to life. The resurrected person is perhaps a bit sad for himself, but fully thankful to you.
I’m actually a bit unclear on the concept of what, for instance, it means to say that I and my past self are ‘the same person’ – there’s a certain continuity of consciousness, in that I remember always having been (some version of) me, and my body’s also the same to a certain extent, but there are also very significant differences, if you go back far enough even up to a point where an outside observer probably would have difficulties recognizing present-me and past-me as being the same, both in regard to physical and mental characteristics.
But that’s actually rather tangential to what I meant to say, which is that even if there is no continuity of identity between the ‘harmed’ and the ‘unharmed’ person, the harm’s been done – else, there would not be a distinction between the harmed and unharmed person. There’s no necessity for Rob2 and Rob being in any way the same in order for Rob having been harmed by the cutting off of his leg.
Right, because aborting the fetus does more harm to it than any other injury you do to it. But I don’t think your analogy is a good one.
Actually, wrong - it’s okay because if you kill the fetus, there will be no child, and thus, no child to have been harmed.
It’s kind of like if I make a cake - if you mess up the ingredients, you end up with a bad cake, but if you throw the ingredients out without making the cake, it doesn’t matter if you mess them up first.
You’re a different person than me, so that’s perfectly fine. I don’t expect Hindus to eat beef, just to let me have the right to mine.
Your right to what? To have an abortion? As far as I know, that’s not what this thread is about.
The thread is about the relative moralities of things. I presented the abortion of a fetus as the moral equivalent of keeping a dead body dead in terms of morality. You disagreed that these are equivalent. Now I’m saying that you’re fine to that opinion, but you’re going to accept that I think they are equivalent since there isn’t anything deeper to it with which I could possibly convert you.
Well, technically anywhere from 30 to 50 of pregnancies in the US end in miscarriage.
I’m just curious how you’re going to lop a limb off of F without hurting W (Woman).