Oh, I dunno… morality by its nature is not something that should be compromised for the sake of expedience, but law is just full of compromises for just that.
Well, in that case I clarify my earlier to statement to replace “continue” with “continue in a mostly comfortable, safe, predictable manner without disintegrating into fraternal violence”. I guess that was a goalpost that needed moving.
I think I’ll have to disagree. Morality serves the same purpose as law (i.e. it allows societies to continue, and served a useful purpose in human evolution), but that doesn’t mean law needs morality, and indeed a lot of morality is quite useless.
Which doesn’t change the fact that law still requires a moral foundation. One might need to perform certain compromises for practicality’s sake, but as I said – if the law has no basis in right or wrong, then it is purely capricious.
Again, why should we do that? Are you saying that it’s the (ahem) right thing to do? Why not simply exploit people for now and let future generations deal with the mess that you leave behind? No matter how you cut it, your rephrasings ultimately smuggle some form of morality into the discussion.
Yes, you are free to disagree. The point remains, though – every single objection that you’ve raised has either required amendment or is a subtle declaration of right vs. wrong – that is, morality.
Well, this sounds like it’s sliding well into an argument over how words are defined.
I’m operating on the axiom (call it a moral premise, if you must, but I’m not aware of any attempt at “smuggling”) that humans should not live in fear or pain if it can possibly be avoided. Morality helps some of that if the society is relatively simple (the golden rule might be sufficient in a hunter-gatherer tribe, for example), but a more complex society requires codifications.
Well, if someone wants to nitpick my shorthand description of a complex concept like law, I guess I could be offering up amendments until I end up with a monster essay as thick as, well, a law book. Personally, though, I’m skittish of moralities that stem from sources like scripture. The bible describes the (presumably) moral response to rape (to use your example) but that standard doesn’t work in a modern society where women are not effectively property.
Even discarding any argument about the morality of rape, I have to figure that if it were completely legal, women would have to be constantly sequestered or chaperoned, and the rape of one family’s daughter could inspire revenge rapes of a female relative of the attacker, and overall society would be worse off, what with all the wasted energy, lost productivity and resultant violence. I don’t even have to get all hypothetical about it - there are places where rape effectively is legal, or at least punished trivially, and I don’t wish to trade my society for any of those.
So’s morality. Although I’d say the law generally has more informed input from non-moral sources (cost/benefit analysis, other scientific inputs) than most personal moral codes. Also, morality is individual, the law, collective. Yes, ultimately, the *foundation *of the legal system is a single moral choice (the preference or desirability or rightness of societal order) but after that, it doesn’t have to parallel any moral code at all.
Which is why abortion isn’t a black and white issue. In cases of extreme profound “incompatible with life” birth defects, abortion could be seen as basicly " turning off life support"
My opinon on abortion, is that it should be safe, it should be legal and it should be rare.
Wouldn’t it be great if we lived in a world where abortion only needed to be done for health reasons?
Ah, well put.
This was the argument I was missing.
I have heard the accusation thrown that “pro-choicers” describe embryos as parasites (though I have never heard anyone do this).
But perhaps it was simply an analogy: if a sentient parasite attached itself to me, I should have the right to remove it, even if that killed it?
Yes, hopefully this will be the end of the “there’s no difference between morality and the law” sub-thread. People disagree about various aspects of morality, yet there has to be just one law.
Therefore, though one is informed by the other, they are not the same thing, which was the simple distinction I was making in the OP.
(Also as I pointed out upthread: there are lots of actions that we would all agree are immoral but that the law doesn’t give two hoots about).
Just realised the obvious retort here is “But in abortion cases they have the option of giving birth and then adopting”.
Perhaps I’ve erred by discussing the analogy on these terms, especially when it was aimed really at Essured.
From my own perspective it’s simpler to say that there is a cutoff after which it is immoral and before which it is amoral to terminate.
Nonsense. There’s nothing capricious about right vs. wrong. You might disagree with somebody else’s version of morality, and you might even think that some people have some silly moral rules. The concept of morality itself, however, is not capricious at all.
In fact, if morality truly were capricious, then you’d have no basis for declaring your own moral principles to be right and dissenting opinions to be wrong. In effect, you can’t complain about another person’s actions being oppressive otherwise unjust – not if your own morality is noting but pure caprice.
Such policies already exist. They don’t involve changing tables, though, but hospitals or fire stations or whatever the local laws define as a safe haven, assuming the venue has such laws.
As I’ve already said: with great difficulty.
With just about any measure the cutoff which nature provides is fuzzy, but for practical purposes we must draw a clear line, preferably on the side of caution.
I have conflicting thoughts on where the cutoff should be. But for the purposes of analogies about leaving babies, I think the cutoff should be before birth.
Yeah I find it difficult to draw lines as well. I don’t see how other people find it so easy to draw their lines.
I certainly believe that you have a human life at some point before birth but I don’t believe we have a human life at conception. At what point is the fetus “human enough” for us to afford it any rights at all and at what point (if ever) do those rights overcome the woman’s right to choose.
Of course there is. It used to be wrong for a lady to show her knees in public, still is in fundamentalist Islamic states. It used to be right to own another human being, still is in fundamentalist Islamic states. Right v wrong is dictated by the whims of the majority of the society. I don’t know how much more capricious you could get.
There is obviously going to be overlap between law and morals in any society, the people who make the law hold moral beliefs. But there is significant moral belief that is not codified into law and significant law which is not based on moral belief. zoning law, tax law, inheritance law, traffic law. Sometimes law is just designed to make making decisions easier, or to eliminate congestion of use, or traffic, or questions, sometimes a law is made to line the pockets of the persons making the law. That’s not morals.
I have no moral problem in demanding that someone to fill out a few papers so that someone can assign guardianship of a child they don’t want. I do have a problem forcing someone to remain pregnant and give birth for this process to play out. That’s a little more serious than just signing away your rights to a child that is already born.
But seriously…
Laws are an attempt to codify morality AND preserve order - yes. It is immoral to impose your morality on others. Therefore, laws should be imposed only when there is a general social consensus about the morality and social good the specific law enforces, and laws should be used sparingly. Where we seem to have problems with laws is when one of these criteria is not met.
Personally, I have 2 close family members that have had abortions - 2 because of real health problems that could have killed the mother too (kidney failure threatened her twice). So, that “life of the mother” risk really does happen. She wanted a child so badly she tried a second time… In the other case, the two fetuses had about half a brain between them - nobody is served by bringing a pair of turnips into this world, even if they would only lived a few weeks or months. Or maybe they live a few years. Where’s the joy in that outcome? Again, the mother tried again and she had a healthy baby 2 years later.
Neither were using abortion as an excuse for birth control.
