I believe the reason the technique is used is because the near full term baby cant pass easily through the canal with the larger head. A six month old fetus should not require the procedure due to the smaller head. My oldest son was born at 26 weeks at 2lbs, 10 oz. I couldnt imagine the procedure performed on him. Besides, his head was so small that his mom was not really stressed during labor.
To answer your Q, I would still call the procedure a partial birth anytime the baby`s head is too big to pass the canal without causing stress to the mother.
for that matter, empathy ought to be considered a socially valuable trait.
consider the social plight of the person who is cruel to animals, for example. that person is observed being cruel. the connection could easily be made that such a person might be cruel to people as well, and is therefore looked at reprehensibly by society.
a person who leaves milk out for feral cats would often be seen as a “nice person”, and therefore a valuable member of society. so empathy for people and animals are traits that society values and thus allow social contract theory to account for those sorts of things.
On the contrary, I think you’re not acknowledging what social contract theory is all about: SCT involves agreeing to restrict one another’s freedom in order to avoid harm to oneself.
Sure, there are few people who value money more than friendship – but plenty of people who value money more than a particular relative. This is not an uncommon type of murder to be committed.
SCT doesn’t care about whether you engage in actions that harm yourself. It only cares about whether you’ll engage in actions that I consider to harm me. Want to make yourself lonely by killing off grandma? I only care about it because preventing killing grandma prevents me from being killed by you as well. If you kill her and I never find out about it, the social contract doesn’t suffer, and doesn’t say you’ve done anything wrong.
That seems incorrect to me. The social contract would seem to ban “secret killing” as well, simply because people still suffer when someone dies, even if you don’t know that it was murder.
True, this part of the contract works more on the honor system rather than the fear of retribution, but it is still based on the same premise: I don’t want my family secretly killed, and neither do you, so we’ll all agree not to kill people in secret.
That’s actually pretty analogous to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the overall gain is the greatest when all parties cooperate.
DW - However, you may be on the recieving end of the perfect murder. I think you may even want to fold that in to the social contract so you don`t become scratched out yourself by someone committing the perfect murder on yourself.
An ideal society would be one where each is equal and all share the same gain. As DW said, once a persons actions infringe on my freedoms, that person becomes a liability to the society. That person needs to be controlled or removed from society.
The problem in the Prisoners Dilemma is that someone will always want to have the advantage. One or both of the suspects will rat the other just to get the edge.
Sure, I might be on the receiving end of the perfect murder. I acknowledge this.
Thing is, whether I commit a perfect murder has no influence, positive or negative, on whether I am the victim of a perfect murder.
By virtue of the murder’s being perfect, nobody realizes a murder was committed. Its commission doesn’t make murder more acceptable to society as a whole; its specific commission doesn’t make people decide that I oughtta be killed myself.
How do I specifically suffer from committing a perfect murder? Assuming that I’m willing to put up with the loss of grandma, that is.
You can’t build it into the social contract as part of the “honor system”: social contract theory doesn’t rely on honor. It relies on its signatories realizing that they’ll suffer specific consequences for harm they cause to other signatories.
Sure, the social contract bans secret murder. That’s not the point. The point is that signatories to the social contract adhere by its restrictions ONLY INASMUCH AS THEY THINK IT’S TO THEIR ADVANTAGE TO DO SO.
Someone relying on enlightened self-interest has no moral compunction against committing a perfect murder – if they can break the social contract and get away with it, there’s nothing telling them it’s unethical to do so.
Perfect muders happen everyday. Society just chooses to label them differently to offset the repercussions.
Society and social order demands that murder be wrong. Not because of the effects that will happen to the individuals concerned, although that may be used to console or punish the ndividuals concerned. Society demands that murder be wrong because of the repercussions to society if murder was not wrong.
For example, it it was ok to murder, essential members of society can disappear unexpectedly. The politician crucial to the effecient running of the govt, the policemen in charge of keepin order, the school teacher responsible for teaching our children, the banker who lends money and keeps our possesions for us and so on. Murdering these people is disruptive to our society and eventually the local social groups such as towns and cities will be in such chaos as they may cease to exist or function effectively to contribute to the whole.
This social ban on killing is applied evenly. We cant just say you cant murder politicians but its ok to murder dock workers. You cant allow open season on gays and keep christians immune from violence. You cant allow murder on one day and stop it on the next. If one cannot be allowed to be killed then all cannot be allowed to be killed, with certain exceptions, all based on circumstances that society as a whole (or in majority) can accept (self defense, capital punishment, abortion, war, non premeditated, accidental or certain very specific forms of euthenasia) It is wrong to murder because society says so. The rules of of society vary from culture to culture but most see it disadvantageous to have their members be killed by other fellow members.
If a perfect murder is defined as the perpetrator who is not punished by law for killing the victim, then perfect murders do happen everyday. They are called suicides.
You seem to be making the leap from ‘unknown’ to acceptable’.
The fact that the a murder was undetected does not make it acceptable under the social contract. It still violates the contract even if the society is unaware of it at the time, doesn’t it?
This doesn’t contradict what I said. In fact, I said specifically,
“Sure, the social contract bans secret murder. That’s not the point. The point is that signatories to the social contract adhere by its restrictions ONLY INASMUCH AS THEY THINK IT’S TO THEIR ADVANTAGE TO DO SO.”
The steps look like this:
Neither you or I or Grandma want to be killed.
You, I, and Grandma all decide to strike an agreement: you don’t kill me, I don’t kill you. If you try to hurt me, Grandma will step in to stop you or punish you; likewise, if I try to hurt Grandma, you’ll step in to stop me or punish me.
Presto! Social Contract!
We all follow the social contract because we don’t want to be punished, and because we don’t want to lose the protection of the social contract.
REREAD POINT #4!
If I come up with a plan for killing grandma where you know she was murdered but don’t I was responsible, then you won’t punish me for doing so. However, the social contract in general will be weakened: because folks know they might get away with murder, they might try to murder me. BAD PLAN!
If I come up with a plan for killing grandma where you don’t even know she was murdered, then you won’t punish me for killing her. Furthermore, because nobody besides me learns taht they can get away with murder, nobody is likelier to murder me. EXCELLENT PLAN!
Do you see? The social contract has teeth in its prohibitions against most harm I might cause against other people. However, its prohibitions against committing perfect murders (even with preceded by torture) are toothless. If the social contract’s teeth provide my only source of morality, I must conclude there’s nothing wrong with my committing a perfect murder, as long as I don’t kill someone whose company I’ll miss.
It reminds me of an apartment I lived in; for work-related reasons, I ended up breaking my lease on the apartment and moving across-state. I asked the property owner what penalties I’d face for doing so, and she said, “Well, you lose your deposit, of course, and you’re required to pay one month’s additional rent. But,” she continued, “nobody ever pays that extra rent, and it’s not like we track people down to get it.”
I didn’t pay that extra month’s rent. The lease required it, but with such lax enforcement of that provision, it may as well not have required it. The social contract’s nonexistent enforcement of prohibitions against perfect murders mean it may as well not prohibit it; if the social contract is the only source of morality, perfect murders may as well not be wrong.
Its similar to the Ten Commandments that ban coveting. Unless you believe that God can read your mind, who would ever know that you were ever coveting anything? If the Commandment contract is the only source of morality, coveting may as well not be wrong either. Because coveting cant be proven it may as well not be a Commandment. Similar to the perfect murder scenario.
whuckfistle, correct me if I’m wrong, but if you follow the Ten Commandments, you probably believe that God can read your mind. Does he “see you when you’re sleeping, know when you’re awake, know when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake”?
If your morality is based around the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent God, there’s no such thing as the perfect murder, or the perfect coveting.
I was trying to support your stance not attack it. I thought the coveting thing would be a good parallel for someone to better understand your position.
Sorry – don’t mean to jump all over you when you’re trying to support me. However, I do think the analogy doesn’t hold up. Some folks worship god out of self-interest (“God will burn me forever if I don’t worship him”), but since their God is omniscient, there can’t be any loopholes in such a system.
Yet, a society that engages the social contract but still has “unbelievers” commiting the perfect murder is akin to the society that believes in the ten commandments yet has the unbelievers commiting coveting, No?
The unbelievers in the coveting scenario choosing to follow all of the rules that the commandments forward- due to societal pressure, except the ones they can get away with. The true believers will police themselves out of self-interest.
The “unbeleivers” in the perfect murder scenario will commit the murder out of self-interest because they think they will not get caught and are not, by definition, believers and will not police themselves.
kputt- If you read through the thread you will find that I wanted to challenge peoples reasons for why it is wrong, not whether or not is is* wrong.
We all know its wrong, now would you mind telling me why you think its wrong?
No – not if I understand you correctly. What constitutes an “unbeliever” in the social contract?
I can believe that a social contract is a great thing, because it keeps people from murdering me. Not only do people know they’re likely to get punished if they kill me, but people know that if they want to be protected by the contract themselves, they better be ready to punish anyone who tries to kill me. That’s two layers of protection against being murdered that I receive. I’m (hypothetically) a big believer in the contract for this reason.
AND FOR NO OTHER REASON. Those two layers of protection against harm are the ONLY reasons for adopting a social contract-approach to morality. Not because you empathize with your Fellow Man, not because of the golden rule, not because of anything else. Only because it gets other people to watch out for you, and discourages other people from killing you.
Even if I believe in that, I can still kill someone: if I commit the perfect murder, I in no way lessen the twofold protection I gain from the social contract. Nobody is going to punish me for committing murder; and because nobody else realizes how easy it is to get away with murder, I don’t increase the chances of being murdered myself.
Thus, believers in social contract theory are PRECISELY the people for whom perfect murder is an unobjectionable course of action.
In contrast, if you live in a society built on the Ten Commandments, there’s no such loophole for you if you’re a believer.
In either case, we cannot look at nonbelievers in the society to determine their course of action, because we don’t know what the nonbelievers DO believe in.
A Buddhist living in a Christian Society will also object to covetousness, despite not believing in a punitive God: the Buddhist knows that desire clouds the path to enlightenment, and that covetousness is a type of desire. A Utilitarian living in a Social Contract society will also object to murder, despite not believing in the social contract: the Utilitarian knows that the Perfect Murder is unlikely to increase the overall good in the society, and it is therefore unethical.
I also knew that you were asking a philosophical question. It just seemed really stupid to me. BTW, I wasn’t calling you stupid, I was calling the question stupid.
DanielWithrow
Petty sarcasm like that isn’t going to get you very far.
it seems i may have mistakenly used the term “social contract”, you may be right. i’m not 100% knowledgable about what is and what isn’t considered part of the social contract.
if the moral system developed in the social contract is dependent solely on fear of retribution, then the perfect murder is not prohibited in the social contract. like lying and not getting caught. let me reiterate, cuz some have taken a different stance on this:
the perfect murder is not prohibited bya moral system based on fear of retribution alone.
it is not the case that it is prohibited but society’s ignorance allows it to be “moral”. society could consider anyone morally well-behaved if they don’t know what that person’s done. but in this case, a moral system based solely fear of retribution does not even prohibit the act.
i maintain, though, that there are social reasons not to commit “the perfect murder”, even if everyone in the society behaves solely based on their own self-interest.
for what it’s worth, i don’t think kputt ever asked his/herself why murder is wrong. i don’t think he/she knows why he/she thinks murder is wrong.
oh, and another thing, no one worships god but for self-interest. don’t let them tell you otherwise.