Is calling your opponent a “worthless dickface” an example of your famed stoic objectivity? I find it amusing that those that claim to be ruled only by logic and annoyed by useless emotion often get into a hissy fit trying to claim it.
Anyway, you said (or implyed) that cold, hard, scientific evidence would prove that a zygote is a sentient human. Or made a claim along those lines.
I will donate $25 to the pro-life charity of your choice if you can convince me. You may begin.
(Disclaimer: This offer applies to RexDart only. Should he change his claim I reserve the right to withdraw my offer. Void where prohibited.)
Wow, it’s almost as if all these abortions are being performed on zygotes…('cuz that’s what you keep saying over and over again).
And yet…thats not really the truth is it? As a general rule, by the time a woman discovers she is pregnant…the organism ha developed into an embryo, often a fetus
Maybe if I just keep click my heels together and shout “ZYGOTE ZYGOTE ZYGOTE, CLUMP OF CELLS, BLOOD CLOT, ZYGOTE ZYGOTE”…that will make it so!
(Note that my point in this post is NOT about personhood, but your constant (in this thread and others) referral to zygotes being aborted, when as a general rule they aren’t).
90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester, well before any sentience.
I’m just countering the pro-life meme of full term babies being stabbed in the head with the statistical reality that most abortions are perfomed on zygotes or non-sentient embryos.
Also, in this thread I was speaking in the context of rape victims who would presumably be seeking to terminate pregnancies as soon as possible.
I would just like to say that the woman in that link has a really nice ass.
Is that wrong?
That’s a good point. However, one must then address the question of exactly when a zygote transitions into a fetus and then into a baby and then into a voting citizen. And at which point it is bestowed with more rights than its host. I don’t think we’ll ever come to an agreement on that, and all opinions will be nothing more than that.
Thank Og for RexDart, however, who should be along shortly to provide dispassionate concrete evidence of these exact transitional moments, and seperate me from my $25.
Ummm…so? (perhaps you missed the point in my previous post where I said I was NOT addressing the notion of “personhood” in my post). Those abortions are not being performed on zygotes…unless you got a cite for that?
Howzabout I help you out there, sport?
Most women don’t even KNOW they’re pregnant until the third week or later…WHEN THE ORGANISM IS NO LONGER A ZYGOTE.
Wow…I’ll have to tell whoever said that IN THIS THREAD to shut their pie hole…Oh yeah, you were just making a nice looking straw man for yourself.
Well seeing as how my problem was with your use of the word ZYGOTE (you DID get that point, right?) and NOT “non sentient embryos”…I’m sure you can provide the “statistical reality” to back up the claim that we’re talking about ZYGOTES being aborted, right?
Well is she had the MAP, we’re not talking about “termination of pregnancies”…right?
Otherwise, we’re still generally not talking about ZYGOTES being aborted. And like I said earlier, you refer to abortions of ZYGOTES in most of these kind of threads. Some people talk about “blood clots” or “clumps of cells”…you talk about aborting zygotes…even though you know that elective abortions are generally not done on zygotes.
John, you made the same mistake in your second post, you claimed as an absolute fact that abortion it murder. In your mind and your opinion it is murder. To a lot of us thought, it’s a right of the birth mother, not some smarmy politician or holier-than-thou moralist ideologue(you).
If you think the adoption system isn’t broken, you’re flat mistaken. THere are tons of parents willing to adopt healthy white babies, and very few parents out there who want to adopt mixed-race or multi-racial children with drug and health problems. There are many more of the latter in the system than there are of the former.
Even if the politician isn’t smarmy and the moralist ideologue isn’t holier-than-thou (these are extreme hypotheticals), it still makes no sense to pass a one-size-fits-all law when abortions really need to be considered case-by-case. Much in the same way that if break a collar bone I don’t want to seek the disapproval of the religious right before considering whether to get it set.
I have some friends that were like that. They wanted healthy and white, but after so many failed attempts, “settled” for a mixed race baby. I have some other friends that agreed to adopt the non-white child of a crack addict. All four parents and all two kids are happy as can be.
Just thought we could all use a little good news right about now.
My mini-rant against Diogenes is a distinct case, justified because…
A) it’s Diogenes
B) he is a worthless dickface, and
C) my judgment of him has no real-world consequences whatsoever, and unlike a debate over the natural law and moral truth, an opinion about a single person is narrow, particularized, and largely subjective; if I were to enter into a business relationship with him, then of course an objective inquiry into his merits and flaws would be required
No I didn’t imply that. What I said is that emotional response is not a legitimate method of evaluating truth. The world of knowledge is not divided cleanly into the physical sciences on one hand and subjective emotional judgments on the other. If that were the case, then a determination that murder is wrong would simply be equivalent to saying “murder…booooooo!” The physical sciences help to uncover the facts necessary to make a determination, but correct moral judgment requires applying the correct principles to those facts. If you believe that all moral judgments are merely attempts to disguise emotional response, then you are a moral relativist in the highest degree and there’d be no point trying to demonstrate anything to you. But in that case, your own moral indignation is mere emotional distaste and carries no more weight than any other, so I suggest you don’t trod down that path.
For another point, my claims were about personhood, not sentience. Sentience means “having sensory perception”, and in some debates it takes on an extra meaning wherein it is about being aware of sensory perception, or becomes synonomous with “consciousness”.
Personhood is simply that which makes an entity morally considerable, a quality attaches natural rights to the entity. My argument is that however we frame the criteria for personhood, the moment at which personhood attaches to an entity cannot be the time at which it passes through the birth canal. There are no significant differences between the thing about to emerge and thing having emerged. Since personhood has clearly been determined to have attached to the newborn baby, no matter how premature it is born, then such must also be extended to that baby when inside. Furthermore, at no precise determinable moment during gestation is there an event that significantly alters the nature of the unborn child. The popular trimester framework, and such terms as “fetus” and “embryo” are merely arbitrary, in that they do not represent a fundamental change in the thing they refer to.
Logic demands a cutoff point, a threshold. There must be a point at which we can say “here it did not have rights, but here it does,” and be able to point to a relevant difference between the two things that allows us to make the judgment correctly. There is no such point between the time of fertilization and the time just after birth, so either both are persons or neither are persons. (While we could possibly point to “viability” as such a point, the ability to survive outside the womb, this would make personhood dependant on an external variable, the present abilities of medical science. Personhood is a quality possessed by a thing, not a mere relational quality.)
If you believe that a moral proposition can be true or false, then these are the sorts of inquiries you have to make most of the time. This is the sort of inquiry I was referring to when I suggested using logic and method and excluding emotion. Ethics along with mathematics and geometry are things that exist in the real world, and the real world yields evidence of their presence, but they are not of a nature that allows exploration purely through the physical sciences. Yet all do exclude emotion from a legitimate inquiry.
Since I never implied in the first place what you thought I implied, given your simplified epistemological framework, I assume we can consider your “wager” null and void.
So does this bill mean that a woman who knows that having a very hot bath can cause miscarriage, and does so while she is unknowingly pregnant can be charged with involuntary manslaughter?
Just trying to get a feel for the nuances of this.
Well, the only word in the statute seems to be “intent”, which really doesn’t clarify the mens rea requirement. I would assume the intent-level would be “purposefully”. The mens rea would apply to all elements. Since there is nothing inherently wrong about taking a bath, I doubt the courts would accept a purposeful taking of a bath as sufficient to satisfy that requirement, and it does say with the intent “of causing or abetting the termination” of the unborn child.
Generally, the only time that mens rea can be satisfied merely by purpose to commit the underlying action, without purpose to commit the specific criminal offense, are cases where the underlying action is deemed to be “wrong” enough on its own. For example, a law criminalizing the distribution of underage pornography requires only the intent to distribute pornography, not requiring any intent that the porn distributed be of underage models. This is because the court considers the shipping of pornography to be somewhat “wrong” in the first place, merely tolerated by the law, and they judge it would be better to put the risk on the porn dealers so as to encourage them to take extra precautions.
Since the bill defines life and pregnancy as beginning with fertilization, this seems to preclude use of IUDs and the morning-after pill. Both primarily work by preventing implantation. How would they police this? Ban the MAP and future placement of IUDs, of course, but what of those already in use?
Jesus, this is vile. BTW, it would also apply to normal birth control pills.
I reapeat; only a fucking sociopath would force a woman to carry the spawn of a rapist.
Hey, Dart shouldn’t you be out at the abortion clinic with your little plastic fetus and your fucking sniper rifle? Fuck you, you fucking sanctimonious zealot.
Did you know I once paid for an abortion? Best fucking money I ever spent.
This idea is absolutely asinine. No politician whose only concern is furthering his or her own career is any position to tell me, a person with a very severe auto-immune disorder that will do definite damage of unknown mangnitude to my body should I ever attempt to carry a pregnancy to term what it is I should do if my birth control fails.
Forget the hypothetical heart condition. I’m glad I don’t live in South Dakota. The decision as to whether I would endure a forty week immune response directly targeting the DNA both of me and of the fetus cannot possibly be made in a just manner by anyone but me. The politician trying to get re-elected doesn’t have to live with the pain, the hives, the fatigue, the heart and lung inflammation, the loss of cognitive ability, the impaired kidney function that I have to go through either all at once or serially as a result of this condition. The doctor can at best tell me what I might be facing and what medical options exist to prevent damage. The only person who should ever be deciding whether that kind of pain and suffering is something I’m willing to do is me.
And now the South Dakota legislature thinks they know better and they should force me to go through that? I guess it’s easy to make that choice when it’s not you who will do the suffering. Fucking arrogant bastards, every single one who voted in favor.
That’s why some people claim men shouldn’t get to vote on the abortion issue; it’s much easier to be sanctimonious about it when secure in the knowledge that you’ll never have to make that decision. When it’s not your sex life, your marriage, your mental health, and the control of your epilepsy at risk, I guess it probably is a bit easier to howl “But it’s a BAYBEEE!” Me, I don’t have that luxury.
Whatever it is, baby or lump of tissue, it’s not as important to me as my ability to live my life without the constant terror that my birth control might fail. One of the hallmarks of civilized society is that its citizens don’t have to live in fear. Apparently, South Dakota doesn’t want to be civilized.
I have to say that mandating that a woman who is raped and becomes pregnant as a result to carry that fetus to term seems inhumanly cruel.
It’s not like she wasn’t victimized enough by the rape, she has to endure the physical trials of pregnancy and childbirth, what I’m sure are agonizing and conflicting emotions, the legal responsibilty, and to top it all off, the expense of the delivery.
I can’t see it any other way than as a crime on top of a crime.
Would the insurance cover that pregnancy? Assuming she was insured, of course?
If she were married, would her husband be listed as the father on the birth certificate? Would the husband be the father in the eyes of the law? Just curious.
And I repeat, that is ridiculous hyperbole. Sociopath?? Way to skip right ahead to demonizing your opponents. I hope for your sake that you don’t speak to people IRL like that, or else you must come off as one of the most angry, bitter extremists on your block. Even people prone to agree with you would be turned off by that.
BTW, just to remind everybody, my understanding of rights does allow for an abortion when the pregnancy was due to rape. I only stepped in to defend the people who hold that position from accusations of “cruelty”, to note that there were logical steps one could follow to reach that decision. Not everybody believes that an emotionally disturbing consequence is enough, on its own, to abandon a moral conclusion.
Oh well then a big hearty FUCK YOU in return. Are you seriously equating me with a SNIPER??!! What the ever-loving fuck? You have NO fucking sense of perspective. You fucking prick.
You are, without a doubt, the stupidest, most ignorant, most vile worthless offensive motherfucker here. When in the WORLD did it become acceptable to compare someone you disagreed with here to a FUCKING SNIPER? Jesus fucking Christ, grow the fuck up you piece of dogshit. You have not a single shred of redeeming value. Every time you hit a keystroke, your monitor vomits.
Your “arguments” are never anything more than the most simplified dogmatic presentation of whatever side you purport to agree with, and you treat the opposing view either as demons set out with malignant purpose to destroy the world for the sole purpose of pissing you off, or just dismiss them as imbeciles not worthy to have the great and powerful Diogenes stoop so low as to acknowledge them.
“DURRR, he’s pro-life, so he must be one of those guys who waits outside abortion clinics and snipes people!”
Jesus fucking Christ, you dirty little prick. That was the least responsible thing I have ever seen anybody say on these forums. If you can’t advocate a position on this board, or even discuss the position favorably, without being equated with a sniper or a murdering “zealot” to use your words, that’s fucking ridiculous.
You are a complete fucking ass. Fuck you up the nose with a sledgehammer, prick.
Re-read what you wrote there, now take special notice of what rude and inflammatory phrase I did not use in this reply, and you’ll understand the difference between myself and jackasses like you.
Unlike you, I understand the positions taken by those who are on the other side, I understand their motivations, and I sympathize with their position to some extent. I am very often frustrated at them, but I don’t cast them as malignant demons or “sociopaths” with evil intent. You see “pro-life” and immediately think “wacko who kills doctors”. If you wanna think that way, I can’t stop you. If you wanna write that way here, and do that to me, no fucking way.
This makes no sense. So if someone you don’t know ties you up, gags you, and puts you on my boat without my knowledge and I discover you there when I’m in the middle of the Atlantic, I’m perfectly in my rights to throw you overboard? After all, I didn’t invite you on board.
And I’d still like to hear about your conception of rights, but I suppose the answer remains “go read Ayn Rand”.
Yes, you have that right. It’s your property, and so no other person can claim a right to remain upon it unless you yourself brokered such an agreement or are otherwise responsible through your own actions for creating his presence.
In practice, of course, the ocean or river upon which you sail is going to be the property of some other person (in our present world, most likely a government), and you sail on those waters subject to an agreement between you and them.
My central point is that only you can forfeit or otherwise limit your own rights. Others cannot do that to you, they cannot create positive obligations binding upon you. From the very first day of Property class at law school, we’re taught that the right to exclude is the foundation of the theory of property rights. For you to be obliged to allow someone to remain on your property, you must have voluntarily waived your right by acting to create that person’s presence. Since you have not done so in this example, you don’t lose those rights. The man who tied and gagged me and put me on your boat cannot waive your rights by so doing.
If one had to keep the man on board, what other obligations would be imposed on you? Do you have to feed him? What if food was scarce? Do I have to drop him off at port somewhere? What if I had alot of money invested in this trans-Atlantic shipment and going back to drop him off would be a burden? Once you open the floodgates there’s no limits to the number of supposed obligations that one might impose upon the shipmaster, none of which he voluntarily undertook.
Well, I can sense the scorn of Ms. Rand in that sentence, but I did not take my entire philosophy spoon-fed from her.
I developed my sense of rights and positive vs. negative obligations largely during my study of torts. At law, we are often obligated not to act, but are usually not obligated to act. We are not legally responsible for our omissions as we are for our acts. As the example my professor often gave, it is perfectly within the law to walk by and see a person stuck in a hole and decline to help them out. But if you told that person before he got in the hole, “hey bro, if you go down in that hole I’ll pull you back out when you want,” then you would be obligated.
The way the act/omission distinction develops into the distinction between positive and negative rights I learned from various readings and discussions on the 'net here and elsewhere. I gave a pretty good summation of my rights theory in the “hypothetical ethical dilemma” thread over in GD a week or two back, you can search for it if you wanna know.
I had never even seen Ms. Rand discuss positive and negative rights in those terms until I happened across a short essay in the appendix of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal a few days back. Having developed my opinions independently of her, there are certainly some disagreements in some places, though I think she mostly sees things the way I do.
So we kill the involuntary stowaway. And that protects his right to life… how? He didn’t get into this situation voluntarily either. Why is the boatman’s right more important than the stowaway’s?
But, apparently, he can waive yours.
My response remains: life sucks. Get used to it.
I don’t scorn Ayn Rand. I’ve read too little of her works to scorn her. I’ve read just enough to vaguely remember something about two people assessing the same situation having, necessarily, to reach the same conclusion, otherwise one of them (possibly both) is guilty of evasion, which is apparently a bad thing.
That may well be the law where you are, but that doesn’t make it morally right (or morally wrong, for that matter). We can let morals guide our laws, but not our laws guide our morals.
That’s where you told me that your philosophy was too complex to explain just yet, so I should go read Ayn Rand instead.