What’s this “my” morality? The same morality applies to everyone. Now, we mere humans have a limited understanding of that morality, and it may well be that my understanding of morality is wrong. In that case, it could certainly be the case (though I presumably wouldn’t realize it) that it’s immoral to force my flawed understanding of morality on others. That’s how we end up with bad laws. That doesn’t change the fact that morality is the goal of law.
And discussions of abandoning infants on changing tables are relevant, because they establish that there is some cutoff point. Once we’ve settled that, then in the words of the old joke, we’re just haggling over the price.
I should also mention, by the way, that while I would have no objection to laws banning abortion past some reasonable (pre-natal) cutoff point, I don’t think that laws prohibiting abortion are the most productive means of addressing the problem. The first and most important step is to try to address the conditions that lead women to seek abortions in the first place.
Assertions. And assertions that few people would agree with.
So why doesn’t the law attempt to legislate against all immoral action, if that’s its goal?
Why can a woman cheat on her boyfriend punishment-free, when most people would agree that such action is immoral?
Aren’t you contradicting yourself here? I thought the goal of the law was to enforce morality? If other factors can outweigh that, it implies another, higher goal.
But anyway: my point in the OP was merely that morality and the law are not the same thing. No-one has debated this essential point.
Saying that morality is the goal of law, even if true, wouldn’t make the law and morality identical. So why the hijack?
Nonsense. Literally. How can this “morality” be the goal of law if nobody knows what “morality” is? You don’t know if your morality is wrong. I don’t. Nobody does. Because objective morality doesn’t exist. And the law isn’t based on it.
And the only reason to think that there’s an objective morality is because you want to hold other people to your morality. There’s literally no other reason. One may pay lip service to the possibility of their own error, but by necessity they will always turn around and attempt to legislate as if they themselves spoke with the voice of god, because the alternative would be to believe that all laws were arbitrary and should be abolished. Of course in reality good laws have much less to do with morality than they do with results; when laws are based solely in one person or another’s moral dictates, like prohibition, blue laws, or the drug war, those as often as not are bad laws.
Bringing this around to abortion, then, I look at results, and obviosly there’s a point of development behind which an abortion is no more destructive than an appendectomy. And there’s a point after which where if you let people abort there will be a mass public outcry, which is probably before the first birthday. Somewhere in the middle a fixed arbitrary line should be drawn. (It should be fixed and arbitrary, rather than based on specific biological development, to reduce confusion over whether one is close to the limit or not.) This line should be chosen to maximize the smooth functioning of society, based on balancing the number of abortions allowed with the amount of mass outcry and rioting.
Personally I think there’s no sensible reason a woman should need to wait into the third trimester to have an elective abortion, so a cutoff could be reasonably placed at that point, or possibly a bit earlier, dependent upon compelling argument. Obviously abortions mandated by medical necessity should be allowed as late as the particular medical necessity, um, necessitates.
IMHO it is the right of free worship (God of life or god of death) and the right to make mistakes and suffer the consequences, but still be accepted by humanity as a person who makes mistakes like all of us. There is no reason to impose any further burden, a woman who loses a child in any method, including abortion, needs Love and healing, not criminal prosecution.
No.
I’m not sure what that has to do with my post though
[hypothetical technology] If there was a way of extracting the fetus from the woman, without killing it (and without increasing the impact on or damage to the woman), the parents should then either care for the fetus/baby or arrange for others to take on that responsibility (via safe haven drop-off, adoption, etc).[/hypothetical technology]
Where’s the contradiction? The law is one tool for attempting to achieve morality, but it’s far from the only tool. Just because we have laws doesn’t mean we should cease to pursue what is right in other ways.
Because there’s no unambiguous way to define “boyfriend”. The law can and does, however, provide for consequences for a spouse cheating (if nothing else, it’ll have impact on any subsequent divorce proceedings).
As for the assertion that there’s no absolute morality, that’s just nonsense. There are some acts that everyone absolutely agrees would be immoral. If there’s no absolute morality, then what right does anyone have to condemn a murderer or a rapist?
Heck, if there is no absolute morality, then the statement “One shouldn’t try to legislate morality” is neither right nor wrong – not in any absolute sense. So why should we insist that this rule should be absolutely followed, if there are no absolute rules regarding right and wrong?
If you can show that “It’s far from the only tool for achieving morality” makes sense as a response to what I said, or as an extension of what you said, then I’ll address the argument.
At this time, it seems like random words to me.
Nice ad hockery there. It’s because we can’t establish whether two people are dating, sure.
But for cheating, the law does not attempt to punish it. It’s simply the case that in divorce proceedings, it is taken into account how the marriage fell apart. There is no “sentancing” based on the adultery.
Many people agree about the morality of many things, yes. That’s doesn’t make morality absolute though.
Basically it’s like this: humans have evolved certain instincts of fairness, empathy etc from living in groups for much of our evolutionary history. These instincts are a useful guide in many situations. But they do not lead to absolute morality, for at least the following reasons:
[ul]
[li]Natural variation. We would expect a “bell curve” of morality, with some people naturally more inclined to evil than others.[/li][li]Religion. Many religions have arbitrary moral rules. This is deliberate, IMO. And it is a cause for disagreement between people of different religions or even different denominations. [/li][li]Reality. Most importantly, our simple instincts do not always unambiguously tell us what the right thing to do is in modern situations. There have been some interesting experiments on this, for example the runaway train hypotheticals. [/li]Rape and murder are a special case of actions: they are actions that we needed to develop responses to in our evolutionary past.[/ul]
Morality and legality have nothing to do with one another. They sometimes overlap by coincidence. We don’t outlaw murder because it’s immoral, we outlaw it because it’s disruptive to society.
Morals are subjective and vary from person to person and from religion to religion. Laws have to be objective. As soon as you try to write morality into law, you have to ask whose morality you’ll be legislating, and how you can reconcile the legislation with the freedom of religion we’re all guaranteed.
Now, this hasn’t stopped our government from legislating (Christian) morality, but hopefully someday it will.
The logical cutoff is the viability of the fetus to exist outside the womb. Since that can’t really be determined with accuracy, I would think that six months would be a reasonable guideline to use. Abortions after six months pregnancy should be only to save the mother’s life.
Not if, as I believe, the purpose of morality is exactly the same as the one you give for law. The reason an act is moral is because it ultimately benefits society. The reason an act is immoral is because it ultimately hurts society.
I don’t know why everyone wants to argue whether a absolute morality exists. If it doesn’t, then Chronos’s argument makes no sense and can be disregarded. If it does, why shouldn’t the ultimate law match it? Heck, why shouldn’t the ultimate law be the same as the ultimate morality?
All Chronos did was make a statement that he believes an absolute morality exists. This fits with pretty much every other Christian*. Just like all religious thought, you can’t prove it false. Why bother?
If you really are interested, why not get another thread? If you do, be ready to have something other than your opinion to back up your philosophy.
*Chronos, you are Christian, right? I know you’re at least a theist, and I think I remember you talking about being Catholic. If not, I still think a belief in absolute morality is religious.
Your statement reflects a system of moral values that has never existed in the wild.
If it doesn’t exist, we can’t legislate for it. If it does exist, we have no way of knowing what it is with any certainty, and thus, we can’t legislate for it. So we don’t need to know whether or not it exists, only that we can’t legislate for it.
Why? That’s all Chronos has brought to the discussion. His opinion that an absolute morality exists, and his opinion of what that absolute morality is.
I have two kinds and I love them with all my heart.
I have a moral belief that abortion is wrong.
That is what we are still talking about right?
Now that being said…I am a women…
Even though I think it is morally wrong to discard a child from my body that does not mean that I do not think that every women should have the chance to decide that for herself. No one has the right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body. If I was terminally ill I would have the right to die or try and get better. It is my choice.
And no abortion and cancer are not the same thing and I was not trying to say that.
However, there are some reasons that abortion is a viable option. Medical reasons can be a strong pull to the decision to have an abortion. Rape is another reason for this decision. If I was raped and ended up pregnant…I would abort that baby. Yes that may be wrong of me but that is how I feel and my choice. Not all women have that kind of strength.
As far as I am concerned the cut off should be around the time that the heart beat and brain functioning kick in. For the child not the mother…:smack:
The heart starts beating at about 6 weeks - which is at most two weeks after a woman would find out she’s pregnant. And a huge amount of women wouldn’t even know they were pregnant at that point, especially if they weren’t trying to get pregnant in the first place.
The quote was “around the time that the heart beat and brain functioning kick in” - emphasis mine. That ‘and’ their means that the latter of the two would be the determining factor, because until then you don’t have the heart beat and the brain functioning.
So, when does the brain functioning ‘kick in’? (Presuming for a moment that we can agree on what counts as a meaningful level of brain activity.)
I got the “and”, but my point was that heart function starts so early it’s meaningless to use it as a cut-off point at all. Why not just say brain function, if that’s really the determing factor?
When does brain function start, really? Like you implied, it depends on what we can agree on as “brain activity”. The brain begins to develop early as well - about week 7. Around week 8 is when the fetus starts moving spontaneously. As far as I can find, the more significant brain development happens in the second & third trimesters, but brain cells are there and doing something very early on.
As a woman who has surrendered a child to adoption I’d like to point out exactly how much you need to rethink this stance. It betrays a woeful ignorance that keeps me from taking anything you say seriously. And this, “no problem in demanding”, is pretty much the problem with the entire abortion debate. By what right do you dare to demand such a thing from anyone?
The decision to abort should be for the woman, who’s body and future are at risk, to decide. Period.
For centuries women have been forced to live by the moral code of a bunch of white, Christian penis’s. They have be ‘forced’ to have children they couldn’t provide for, or protect and sometimes didn’t even want. This kept them tied to sometimes dangerous men, often in abusive relationships. It had nothing to do with morality and everything to do with dominance and power.
Well, now it’s the 21st century, and we don’t have to live that way anymore. Don’t like having someone else’s morality forced upon you? Tough darts, come back in a couple of hundred years and maybe we’ll talk.
It’s only “meaningless” if one is deadset on justifying abortion. It amounts to saying “But that’s too early! How can women have abortions if we use that as the cut-off point?”
