It really helps if your beliefs also have you assume that women are frigid by nature and sex is a chore to them, that it’s only meant for procreation, and if one of you is in the closet.
A man has your lung. He needed it because he lost his due to disease. You want your lung back: you don’t really need it, since your other is still healthy, but nevertheless having just the one is risky and inconvenient. The man will die if you take your lung back.
Now, morally speaking, is there a difference between these two ways the situation might have arisen?:
a) You were asked if you would like to donate, and answered in the affirmative, signing all the right consent forms.
b) You were kidnapped, drugged, and your lung removed without any consent whatsoever.
Is taking your lung back murder regardless of a) or b)? Or is b) somehow a lesser moral crime?
In my view, choice and responsibility come together. Most of the time, we can find enough choice such that the distribution of responsibility seems fair. For consensual sex, the mother has choice and the fetus does not–thus we might (depending on our moral weighting factors) lay the responsibility on the mother. In the case of rape, neither mother nor fetus had choice, but unfortunately those are the only two parties that can possibly bear the responsibility. We might well lay responsibility on the fetus in this case.
For the record, I am more-or-less with Chronos, and don’t consider myself pro-life or pro-choice.
That isn’t analogous with abortion at all, since you are speaking of a situation with two people. Not a person and a mindless thing. A better analogy would involve some scientist who needs your lung to keep alive his experiment, a giant mindless mass of cells.
The mother’s choice always overrides because she is a person. The fetus isn’t. Equating the two is grossly insulting to women, you imply that they are less than an animal.
The OP is asking how a pro-lifer might justify it. Pro-lifers–at least the religious kind–believe fetuses are people. You think they’re wrong on that point, and to a great extent I do as well, but that’s not relevant to the discussion.
c) You were told that the activity you were about to engage occasionally results in loss of lungs, but that as long as you took this pill there was a 99.9% chance that wouldn’t happen, and even if it does, well… we have an app for that.
When I consent to sex, I consent to sex, not incubating another human for nine months and then potentially caring for it for 20 years. Kinda like how when I get in a car, I accept the risk that I might get into an accident, but I don’t consent to be left to die at the side of the road, since I knew the risks.
Leaving aside for the moment that it’s probably not a good idea to make policy based on some possible analogue to a ridiculously contrived and bizarre hypothetical, I would like to hear from a pro-lifer (who makes the exceptions for rape) that agrees it would be OK to take back the lung in either of those scenarios.
Because, while I haven’t completely thought through my position, I don’t think you can have your lung back whether you agreed to give it away or it was taken by force, if getting your lung back means certain death for the recipient. Your hypothetical seems to suggest that, in your view, a pro-lifer would not allow you to have the lung back if you agreed to give it away, but would allow it if it were taken from you.
Now, I’m sure you can make the scenario even more contrived (what if the recipient was the one who stole the lung, etc.), but I think for the analogy to work, the recipient has to be an innocent receiver of the lung.
In any case, my position, I think, is that you don’t get the lung back either way.
Fair enough. But we might also express the situation like the following:
c) You enter a lung donation pool. You know going in that only 0.1% of lungs are a proper match and so you almost certainly won’t be chosen, but the possibility is there. You receive a token ($100, say) sum for the service.
This raises many questions, many of which are not germane to the discussion (such as: when a man consents to sex, does he automatically consent to providing for the child for the next 18 years?).
In any case, I’m not sure how you justify the statement about accidents. Of course you consent to the possibility that you will be left to die on the side of the road; no law of man or nature says that you will always be cared for. The only way you could not implicitly consent is if you were genuinely ignorant of the possibility. To make it more clear: if you jump off a tall building without extra equipment, you consent to the probability that you will splatter on the pavement.
He does (or at least should) not, IMO, at least not for as long as I have the legal right to an abortion.
Perhaps I wasn’t entirely clear. I accept the risk that I may die by the side of the road because help doesn’t arrive in time. I do NOT accept the risk that if help arrives, it stands by idly and says “Hey, you knew this was a possibility.”
There’s help for unwanted pregnancy, and you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
If you think my example is ridiculously contrived, you have not read many philosophy texts :). I could have made the man a violinist…
It’s hard to argue, I grant. A pure utilitarian might say that it’s never acceptable to take the lung back, assuming the man is a valued member of society. But then, a pure utilitarian might say that the doctor is also morally sound in performing the involuntary transplant in the first place. I suspect most would disagree with that.
One might argue for a principle where if choice was denied to a party, the most reasonable solution is to restore the status quo. This is more or less how the law works: if X steals from Y, then X must return the money to Y, regardless of how much he might need it. If Y gifted money to X, then no return is necessary.
In the lung situation the status quo is that the man dies. That’s what would have happened if there were no external involvement at all. So it seems reasonable to return to that situation if the donor wishes it.
Yes, that is a reasonable qualifier.
I see.
This line of reasoning only works, though, since you know in advance that emergency help is available under the right circumstances. Your choices might be different were that not the case.
Suppose I walk up to a roulette table, and split my life savings on every number but 00. 00 is then spun. Of course I can say that I didn’t consent to losing my money, but the reality is that those were the risks.
We could have made a law that says people in this situation get their money back. Is that reasonable? Maybe–I won’t argue either way–but in any case the point is that the gambler doesn’t “get” to say that he didn’t consent to losing the money. The law was what it was at the time.
So in a place where abortion is illegal, you do in fact consent to the possibility of giving birth, even when using protection. You might not like it, and you may have a very good argument for why abortion should be legal, but none of that changes your implicit consent at the time.
I’ve always wondered how come I, as a guy, can’t get away with the “I just consented to sex!” line of reasoning. I’d like to blame misandry/the matriarchy.
I do in fact have one other line of argument that a friend used. It seems to be unique to him, and in my opinion is a non-starter, but in any case I’ll describe it.
He believed in “life begins at conception” not because of some immaterial soul, but because that’s the first point where you can say that you have a genetically novel human. It’s not a person, yet, but it is something deserving of protection for reasons beyond “convenience” (for lack of a better term: he realized full well that pregnancy is more than inconvenient) but short of more extreme situations like rape.
I quizzed him on how this works in the presence of identical twins, chimeras, clones, etc., and he had no adequate answers. Nor could be answer at what point during conception is the correct cutoff, since conception or anything else does not occur in zero time. So I don’t think it works. Still, I think it has an interesting feature in that for most people, conception is the point where they can say they they started existence in some way. That it fails some of the time isn’t too damning since no measure that I’ve seen works all of the time.
In your example, I think a woman has a right to choose the sex on the basis of birth control or not. If she is deceived, then her right to choice has been circumvented, and she hasn’t consented. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it rape in this instance, but for purposes of this argument she has not consented.
I agree somewhat. The idea is that its a woman’s body, but before I can wholeheartedly endorse that I’d like to see convincing arguments that impact on a person’s body is the only impact that matters. A man’s property matters too, and if he is forced to pay child support then consequences to his body come into play too.
If his only reasonable alternative is to find employment in a dangerous or unhealthy occupation, it seems like there is some force going on that affects his body too.
Does seem a bit anti-man.
So long as you agree to refers to pro-choicers as baby-killers.
I’ll never understand how “pro-lifers” can justify bringing more unwanted children into the world. Do you have any idea what it’s like for a woman to raise a child she didn’t want? What it does to her, and what it does to the child? It’s a no win situation… And yes, I do think abortion is the better choice.
And along those same lines they talk about women using abortion as birth control as if that’s a common occurance. However, I’d rather see women doing that than being forced ito carry and raise a child she didntt want. I knew one woman who had over five abortions. At first I feilt slightly disgusted, until I thought about how she would have five kids iright now if not for the abortions. And trust me, that would be much ,orse!w
You’re wasting your time. You won’t get such an argument from the majority of pro-choicers since they well enough know that the majority of abortions are done for reasons unrelated to the woman’s body, but rather reasons which would affect a man and a woman equally.
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Closed at the OP’s request. Thread going off the rails.
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