an abortion thread with no personal attacks

[Akka]

It has to be the intent of the actor. If the actor does not believe they are harming a human then things will be less straightforward. I think voluntary manslaughter would be a cleaner fit. That would probably rest on the assumption that the actor has a defect in their thinking that negates "malice."

I doubt that "assassination" include any idea of "malice". It simply deals with premeditated and planned killing, AFAIK.

This all, of course, rests on the principle that the pro-life arguer stipulate to the honesty and good-faith belief of the pro-choice individual that an embryo isn't an entity with human value/protection.

Meh, I've the tongue (well, finghers rather) blue with repeating the same proof about how we value "people" and not just human DNA, and an embryo doesn't even have the actual organs necessary to be a person.
I tend to say that "good faith" is MUCH more lacking from people who constantly avoid this obvious point.

 

[Winston Hughes]

@Traitorfish

I'm not some kind of raging liberal ideologue, who is convinced beyond all doubt that existing solutions are the best possible, and all dissent is heresy. I'm just extremely sceptical about an approach which seeks to tear down existing solutions now, but defers the question of how to replace them until some indeterminate point in the future. (I know you don't like to be reminded of this, but I feel it's necessary to point out that Marxists have some seriously bad form here, historically speaking.)

The fundamental point that you're missing is that fiction is not the same as falsehood. When I say that we need to believe in rights for them to exist, I don't mean that we have to believe they have a material foundation, just that they represent a useful way of approaching moral questions. If we stop believing in that utility, then they will cease to have that utility. There is certainly value in proposing alternative ways of looking at such an issue, but there is no value at all in simply dismissing this approach without suggesting a meaningful alternative.

 

[Traitorfish]

Fair dos.

 

[bernie14]

Nice attempt to get me back to an ad hominem with the personal flaw thing. Not transparent at all

I did have an argument, since I posted it. And I used it to support a subjective point. Which I also have been clear on. Your problem at the moment you set of on the hypocrisy/ad hominem trail and now don't want to look premature in that conclusion, so whatever I say will not hit home. You will just go on and on and on. Fact of the matter is: you were wrong. Your statement was false. Erroneous. Bollocks. Sparked by a kneejerk feeling of indignation. Now realisation sets in: "Oh dear, I might have been a bit of a plonker". Which is fine by the way. Other reactions have made it clear my point was a little ambiguous. So accuse me of not wording my argument properly. Accuse me of being provocative to spark reactions. You'll get no objections from me. But cease this dead-end road you're on.

If using emotional terms to support an argument is a personal flaw, it's one we are all familiar with (calling people out on using ad hominems or accusing others of hypocrisy when that's no where near the case for instance)

For that you really need to reread my post. Or one of my many explanations.

Bottomline: if after this you are still of the opinion I am accusing people of hypocrisy and/or using ad hominems, nothing trivial like reality will change your mind.

.....not only have you been able to figure out what pro lifers are REALLY thinking but also what I am.....reality?

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm not sure why you find it so incomprehensible that a person might infer from the actions of another their views on a given issue. Perhaps you think that people's minds and bodies function independently of each other? That what pro-lifers think and what pro-lifers do belong to two completely distinct and non-overlapping spheres of being, with no possibility of inferring the one from the other? It's possible that this is the case, and more power to you, but it's not something that you have any good reason to expect from the rest of us.

I think this might be where we are diverging. We are admitting that if the world turns away from them, then they don't exist. There is no external force to dictate them outside of ourselves. However, if we "act like they are true anyway" then they do exist, significantly and measurably.

Bear with the bad analogy please - It feels as if you are saying "Football has no rules, they don't exist."

What you're describing here is legal rights, though, not natural rights, and that's not what the abortion debate is actually about. If it was just a case of establishing whether a foetus had a legal right to life, or a woman has a legal right to bodily autonomy, we'd simply consult a lawyer working in the appropriate field and he would clear everything up for us in a jiffy. So clearly this is about something more fundamental than that, something which we do not claim to construct but rather to reveal, and my contention is that these alleged revelations are baseless.

That doesn't stop us from acknowledging the existence of legal rights, or from working within their terms, but it does have implications for how we engage with them. We can no longer say that such-and-such group has a set of rights, and then demand that this be legally recognised, we can merely say that we think they should be accorded it. Nobody has an intrinsic right to free speech, for example, we simply think that it is a good idea to accord it to certain people in certain circumstances. It becomes a simple question of utility. But that this isn't actually how the discourse is conducted, even among those who explicitly style themselves "utilitarian".

(Now, speaking for myself, I think that the fundamental problem with the ethical language of "rights", natural or legal, is that it poses as being fundamentally unfree, able to move only within the terms offered to us by these "rights". I regard that as absurd, as completely contrary to the obvious facts of the matter, which is that we are in ourselves completely and utterly free: that any restrictions on free are imposition, by ourselves or by others. We do not need to say "I have a right to free speech", but rather that "nobody has a right to prevent me from speaking".)

 

[Farm Boy]

What you're describing here is legal rights, though, not natural rights, and that's not what the abortion debate is actually about. If it was just a case of establishing whether a foetus had a legal right to life, or a woman has a legal right to bodily autonomy, we'd simply consult a lawyer working in the appropriate field and he would clear everything up for us in a jiffy. So clearly this is about something more fundamental than that, something which we do not claim to construct but rather to reveal, and my contention is that these alleged revelations are baseless.

That doesn't stop us from acknowledging the existence of legal rights, or from working within their terms, but it does have implications for how we engage with them. We can no longer say that such-and-such group has a set of rights, and then demand that this be legally recognised, we can merely say that we think they should be accorded it. Nobody has an intrinsic right to free speech, for example, we simply think that it is a good idea to accord it to certain people in certain circumstances. It becomes a simple question of utility. But that this isn't actually how the discourse is conducted, even among those who explicitly style themselves "utilitarian".

(Now, speaking for myself, I think that the fundamental problem with the ethical language of "rights", natural or legal, is that it poses as being fundamentally unfree, able to move only within the terms offered to us by these "rights". I regard that as absurd, as completely contrary to the obvious facts of the matter, which is that we are in ourselves completely and utterly free: that any restrictions on free are imposition, by ourselves or by others. We do not need to say "I have a right to free speech", but rather that "nobody has a right to prevent me from speaking".)

I guess I wouldn't share your distinction between natural and legal rights. Or to be more specific that natural rights are anything inborn, they by necessity are human legal constructions. "Natural" ones just seem a subset of legal rights we bequeath simply by virtue of sapience. I never considered that some might define a natural right as something that is supernaturally(?) present. If that is how you view it of course it doesn't make any sense.

 

[Traitorfish]

You're unfamiliar with the theory of natural rights? "We hold these truths to be self-evident", etc.?

 

[Farm Boy]

I am familiar enough to know that the document you are quoting is laying out the groundwork for a subset of legal rights, elevated above most legal rights.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, yes, but the authors were confident that the document was the legal recognition of entirely pre-legal rights, and that recognition derived from and was only valid as a derivative from those pre-legal or "natural" rights. Take the comments of the contemporary radical Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. [...] They consequently are instruments of injustice. The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

What Paine claims is that he possesses a set of inherent, "natural" rights, which legal rights merely express, and are only legitimate insofar as that expression is legitimate. (This is where thinkers of his era derived the claim to a right of revolution: that people were not bound to a legal code which did not constitute an authentic expression of their rights.) For him, rights are not a convenient fiction, but something very real indeed.

 

[Winston Hughes]

I regard that as absurd, as completely contrary to the obvious facts of the matter, which is that we are in ourselves completely and utterly free: that any restrictions on free are imposition, by ourselves or by others.

This is an interesting line of thought, but how do you reconcile the idea of natural freedom with our genetic predisposition towards social organisation?

If we were solitary creatures, then only the law of the jungle would apply, there being nothing to push us into accepting any moral limitation on our actions. Rights, in that case, would certainly be a meaningless concept.

But since we, as a species (if not always individually), have no choice but to work and live together - and thus require norms and rules through which cooperation can be achieved and competition managed - how can we conceive of our freedom as having no natural limitations?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

.....not only have you been able to figure out what pro lifers are REALLY thinking but also what I am.....reality?

It's what you have been doing from the beginning isn't it?

Difference being, I said from the get-go I based my conclusion on what I said I hoped I would do in their shoes based on their posts. I never even said this was actually the case. You on the other hand were unable to point out any accusations of hypocrisy nor of me using ad hominems. You bolded a portion and just went: "There". So, if those didn't live in my post. Nor in any intention I had, where do they live?

Indeed.

I think you hear me knocking. And I think I'm coming in. In fact, I'm already in. I'm on your couch, drinking your beer.

 

[bernie14]

It's what you have been doing from the beginning isn't it?

Difference being, I said from the get-go I based my conclusion on what I said I hoped I would do in their shoes based on their posts. I never even said this was actually the case. You on the other hand were unable to point out any accusations of hypocrisy nor of me using ad hominems. You bolded a portion and just went: "There". So, if those didn't live in my post. Nor in any intention I had, where do they live?

Indeed.

I think you hear me knocking. And I think I'm coming in. In fact, I'm already in. I'm on your couch, drinking your beer.

Sorry ziggmiester, not even on the same continent.....At least you have a sense of humor..... But be careful!!!! I live in a "stand your ground" State!!!!

I think there is a big difference in "basing my conclusion on"

what I said I hoped I would do in their shoes based on their posts.

and what you originally said

I believe that every most persons with a moral bone in their body would do more than nag

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Yes, I posed that they are people with moral bones.

I'm a terrible person.

edit: checking my post, I even said so in the next sentence.

 

[Gary Childress]

Based on what I've seen, it seems like if you want to find a bunch of people getting infractions, just type "abortion" into the thread search.

Definitely agree with this.

People bypass the auto-censor, make tasteless personal attacks, etc.

Agree. Some people definitely do.

So this thread is for a CIVIL debate on abortion. Any opinions are welcome but please be polite about them.

There is a point where abortion should be permissible and there is a point where it should not be. Aborting a pregnancy by using a spermicide is, to me, generally, way out on the permissible end of the spectrum. Aborting a 1 month old baby, to me, is generally way out on the unpermissible end of the spectrum. The tough part is drawing the line at where pemissible/unpermissible should begin to take effect. Generally killing a sperm cell or an egg typically isn't deemed "murder". Killing a 1 month old baby generally is.

Clearly women carry the child but that does not give them the right to do with the child whatever they want after a certain point. I believe that human beings have rights which we as citizens agree upon and bestow upon each other in this agreement. I don't believe rights exist outside the universe somewhere carved in stone, so to speak. But to me that does not mean that rights thereby do not/cannot/should not exist by human convention.

 

[Zelig]

So this thread is for a CIVIL debate on abortion.

Why? The current situation is fine, no debate required.

 

[LucyDuke]

Aborting a pregnancy by using a spermicide is, to me, generally, way out on the permissible end of the spectrum.

Pregnancies can't be aborted with spermicides. Spermicides destroy sperms, not zygotes or embryos or fetuses. They are contraceptives.

Generally killing a sperm cell or an egg typically isn't deemed "murder".

It also isn't abortion.

 

[Arakhor]

Generally killing a sperm cell or an egg typically isn't deemed "murder". Killing a 1 month old baby generally is.

That's the problem with this topic 'generally'. Not only is it wildly emotive, with lots of passionate people muddying the debate with hysterical comments, there's also absolutely no consensus on the terms in use. Personally, I draw the line at 26 weeks or whenever it is that the baby's heart starts beating.

 

[Gary Childress]

Pregnancies can't be aborted with spermicides. Spermicides destroy sperms, not zygotes or embryos or fetuses. They are contraceptives.



It also isn't abortion.

Sorry, I was sloppy with terminology. What I should have said:

On the one end of the spectrum, preventing a pregnancy by killing a sperm cell or egg is not considered murder but killing a 1 month old baby is. The difficulty with the topic of abortion is determining at what point to draw the line.

 

[Glassfan]

I draw the line at conception. Prior to conception you just have random sperm and egg. Any birth control method that prevents conception is OK. My wife and I decided on a vascectomy.

But at conception you have a developing human being, who could grow up to be a person and have children of her own. Any birth control method that depends for it's efficacy upon the killing of a growing baby is not OK.

This is merely my opinion, not my committment. I'm not willing to hurt or kill anyone over it. As a couple we decided on the one and not the other.

 

[Gary Childress]

I draw the line at conception. Prior to conception you just have random sperm and egg. Any birth control method that prevents conception is OK. My wife and I decided on a vascectomy.

But at conception you have a developing human being, who could grow up to be a person and have children of her own. Any birth control method that depends for it's efficacy upon the killing of a growing baby is not OK.

This is merely my opinion, not my committment. I'm not willing to hurt or kill anyone over it. As a couple we decided on the one and not the other.

Hmmm. So it isn't a matter of when a fetus becomes aware or sentient or whatever but rather at the very point a human is conceived they have rights. Interesting.