Arguing About Abortion

[HarryStotle]

In short, Divine Command Theory is odious to you precisely because it represents a will that might properly have ontological justification for relieving you of your free will, which is why you propose YOUR liberty being the arbiter of morality, for no reason except that you can go about willing things.

We can dispense with your “liberty principle” with the same ease that you dispense with Divine Command Theory (which, by the way isn’t what an educated theist would either propose or defend, despite the fact that you misrepresent it in any case, with your misunderstanding of what free will implies to begin with).

 

[VanitasVanitatum]

After the Enlightenment, premising an ethic on Divine Command theory was no longer good enough.

Your god may have told you x, but my god said y. And HIS god said anti-x and anti-y.

So now we have to come to rational consensus on our rules. And when in doubt, don’t make one.

That consensus has no more weight than the Divine Command theory because it is based on premises and axioms that are just as arbitrary.

 

[HarryStotle]

So now we have to come to rational consensus on our rules. And when in doubt, don’t make one.

Here again, we have a fundamental problem with your “liberty principle.”

A “rational” consensus means there are good MORAL or pragmatic reasons for taking specific actions over others. That presumes an objective morality, or at least an objectively real world, one that is accessible to thought and reason, and that has preeminence over freedom, otherwise why would a consensus leading to “rules” presume those rules can overrule individual freedom?

Agents endowed with free will, will things for good reasons, — moral or pragmatic — not 'just ‘cause’ they can without any constraints.

You want to insist freedom of will is the “null hypothesis,” but why would any agent endowed with a free will assume that a morality that derives from concordats worked out between free wills is something that has the authority to dictate behaviour to them?

Why wouldn’t they merely insist their freedom — if they are sufficiently powerful — can be sufficiently free, unfettered and unconstrained by folks with the hobbled view of “freedom” that you possess? They could, rationally, argue that their freedom ought to take absolute pre-eminence because it is uniquely theirs.

Now they might, following some temporary pragmatic notion provided by you, be willing to compromise their freedom until they can get the upper hand, but they see no reason for such constraints on their freedom to be permanent or even rise to the level that pretends to be a “moral” position, except to deceive others into such social contracts.

 

[otjm]

ut the reason your perspective is unacceptable to me and many others is that its robs a woman of her control over her own body if she doesn’t want to be pregnant.

If she does not want to get pregnant, then she should not engage in acts which cause pregnancy.

Some people’s answer to that is birth control; the Pill is the biggest joke men have made on women since the time the mind rememberth not.

Once upon a time we generally had respect for the life of a child. Your myth of "under the table is the myth (among others) which Planned Parenthood and abortion favorers have repeated ad nauseum. The great majority of abortions pre R vs. W were done by physicians who would make themselves available. As it was done against the laws, it was done on the quiet. But the “coat hanger myth in a back alley” is just that - a myth; right up there with “it is just tissue”.

 

[MamaJewel]

thank goodness, we’ve made huge strides in achieving this is the US, especially in the last generation. Modern sex-ed and the easy availability of contraceptives has crashed the teen-pregnancy rate, for instance.

Funny thing with contraceptives and teen pregnancy, so many young women utilize hormone bc to control female problems and/or acne. It amazes me as a college student to see how beneficial “the pill” has been for helping young women live normal lives free of menstrual issues that commonly impacted young women from my generation 30 years ago. Today’s young women don’t constantly have to suffer with horrible periods and terrible pain that used to keep women home from work and school.

As far as the parenthood - consent issue is concerned, we have to tread lightly when we teach new generations. The attitude of convenience of elective abortion just because one does not want to be a parent is phasing into other aspects of society.

It is becoming common for mothers to hand off a child to a family member or other individual because she no longer fully consents to playing a mommy role in her child’s life.

The catechism denotes “Direct abortion…willed either as an end or a means”, which creates some moral difficulty if abortion is intended as a means to save the mother’s life. There is a fine line to separate an abortion as a means and indirect abortion.

True.
In my case, I had my cycle chart that I had made an error with the initial 1st day of cycle because of a period that was actually a mini-hemorrhage at the time. I was so fatigued and anemic that when I began bleeding a few days after what I thought had been my cycle, I absent-mindedly noted the second bleeding issue as the 1st day of the cycle.

The discrepancies of the chart created a question of the actual gestational age of the pregnancy and since it was an early pregnancy, the inability to get an image of a heartbeat did not necessarily indicate embryonic demise, if the pregnancy was earlier than later. When looking at hormones, the levels weren’t increasing like they should have been, but they weren’t falling like they should have been either.

My providers and I had a hunch that I had experienced a missed abortion, but I wanted to err on the side of caution because of the timing discrepancy and lack of absolute conclusive data. Fortunately, I lived a very short distance from the hospital, so my providers (reluctantly) agreed to let me try to miscarry at home. It was at home that the process progressed so quickly that I earned a ride to the nearest hospital and the 4 paramedics attending me waited by my gurney until they could hand me over directly to the ER doctor.

In hindsight, we realized that embryonic demise had most likely occurred. If I had terminated the pregnancy by D&C in a hospital settting like my doctors wanted me to, it would have been licit out of medical necessity because my body had failed to spontaneously abort.

 

[MamaJewel]

No, no. I got the point. I just counter that parenthood is for the willing and absolutely no one else.

Playing devil’s advocate.
So what happens when a parent isn’t willing anymore?
The brain of one’s progeny now develops through age 25 years. That’s a long commitment, if you ask me.

Besides, you’re not a parent unless there’s a person. And there’s not a person, unless there is a birth and first breath (or an organ donation).

ahh, liberty

 

[Lion_IRC]

Right.
The one thing all pro-Abortion on demand advocates have in common…
They’ve already been born

 

[Neithan]

Your decision to err on the side of caution despite the risks was brave, to say the least. Thank you for your witness to those doctors. I’ll say a prayer for the soul of the deceased.

 

[Stephen168]

So I proposed that -

P. Freedom is the default moral state.

P. Some Approximation of the Golden Rule (Unto others as to you) - a hidden, assumed premise (my error)

C. Act freely while being careful not to restrict the self-same freedom of others

So you would agree with Kant’s categorical imperative?

Does ‘libertas’ give a person the ‘freedom’ to take another’s natural rights?

 

[Stephen168]

I went there. Liberty is the beginning. The default. The null. It’s not the end. Using the that premise and a premise approximating the Golden Rule, we can arrive at most of the more enduring moral laws on the planet that transcend any religion. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t do bad stuff to people.

After a sea Captain agrees to transport a person, free of charge, from New York to Hamburg, is it moral for him to change his mind half way there and throw them overboard to certain death?

What if the person was severely handicapped; lack any mental capacity?

 

[MamaJewel]

I’ll say a prayer for the soul of the deceased.

Thank you.
Your kind words and prayers just made me cry.

 

[Stephen168]

Stephen168:

After a sea Captain agrees to transport a person, free of charge, from New York to Hamburg, is it moral for him to change his mind half way there and throw them overboard to certain death?

Except the person in question is a stowaway, pilfering supplies, who came aboard without permission.

No, when a Captain agrees to transport a person they are not a stowaway. Therefore, they are consuming supplies made available to them, and they crossed the brow with permission.
Because you felt a need to change the question, I assume you think it would be immoral for the sea Captain to change their mind and throw them overboard.

 

[Stephen168]

No, when a Captain agrees to transport a person they are not a stowaway.

But the captain did NOT agree.

Yes, he did agree, because I said so in my question. I’m not talking about pregnant women and their risk. I’m asking: After a sea Captain agrees to transport a person, free of charge, from New York to Hamburg, is it moral for him to change his mind half way there and throw them overboard to certain death?
You can’t answer my question because you believe the sea Captain would be acting immorally, and you can’t admit it.

 

[Pattylt]

If you do not believe, you should be forced to act as though you believe.

Forced? This scares me…

 

[Hume]

Hume:

…premising an ethic on Divine Command theory was no longer good enough.

The problem here is that you are using a straw man argument to support your view of what theistic morality looks like.

Theistic morality is divine command theory.

Now you can attempt to hid it behind appeals to nature, as some Catholic thinkers have done. But they’re still appealing to a god via it’s supposed creation.

Calling “divine command theory” divine command theory is not a strawman. It’s truth.

You’d be a much better debater against those you ideologically oppose if you’d realize that and tailor your arguments accordingly.

As of now, they require language I don’t subscribe to.

This Divine Command thesis of yours is basically you projecting YOUR liberty principle into the heavens.

The problem is that you are presupposing something about the the moral landscape, i.e., that there is none, and that there is no objective right or wrong, good or bad.

Because there is no good or bad unless it’s been named as thus for a reason - apropos, it’s been “argued” for.

Some things are easy to make arguments for - no god required. Murder, theft and a host of other things found across practically all cultures are moralized for or against because there are good, objective reasons for going so. Again, no divine arbiter needed.

Mores that are much more dependent on divine command aren’t as common outside cultural niches - like, for example, the Catholic prohibition on men who can’t “consummate” being married. It’s much harder to make a rational argument for that one, ergo it’s not nearly as common outside Catholic circles.

This is clear from your depiction of the moral battle between “gods.”

There isn’t a concession there that there could be a God — you are merely begging that entire question to begin with by assuming God (and morality) are human inventions.

Sure. That which cannot be discretely observed, either directly or indirectly, cannot be said to exist with any certainty.

As juvenile as it sounds, you can no more prove your god’s reality than the ancient Greeks could prove Zeus’s.

In effect, you are saying NOTHING is objectively good except liberty…

No, it’s just that moral liberty is simply what IS. Whether you force a “good” or “bad” label on it is your own convention.

 

[Hume]

Besides the fact that you haven’t shown how a truly free will can even be operative within a materialistic and causally determined universe, you haven’t proved atheism to be necessarily true, either.

I’m more than happy to concede that free will may not exist in the material universe. But as of right now, it appears to be so and there isn’t much set evidence to the contrary. As a rule for moving ahead, the “duck principle” seems to apply. But be sure, if it ever gets thrown out by scientific inquiry, I’ll change my view on it.

On god, the default isn’t atheism. The default is classic agnosticism.

I can’t prove to you there’s no god. I don’t have to. I don’t claim there isn’t one. “Probably not” is as close as I come.

I just claim that you’re no more capable of proving yours than the other thousands of claimants before you.

In order for your liberty principle to even be possible as the “null hypothesis” in morality you have to demonstrate libertarian free will is possible within a causally ordered universe.

In short, Divine Command Theory is odious to you precisely because it represents a will that might properly have ontological justification…

This is no more than fancy-speak for “it looks like it could be true and I like it”.

That consensus has no more weight than the Divine Command theory because it is based on premises and axioms that are just as arbitrary.

DCT presupposes a god.

Libertas merely presupposes that you can make choices. There seems to be some evidence that you have that capacity.

I require fewer moving parts; fewer assumptions.

Why wouldn’t they merely insist their freedom — if they are sufficiently powerful — can be sufficiently free, unfettered and unconstrained by folks with the hobbled view of “freedom” that you possess?

This is a great argument for modern democracy as opposed to the church-state intermingled authoritarian regimes of the past.

Tyranny is incrementally being relegated to history’s dust heap - thank goodness.

If she does not want to get pregnant, then she should not engage in acts which cause pregnancy.

Whether you agree or not, the consent to sex is not the consent to pregnancy.

Here we simply disagree.

At any rate, you don’t get to play a role in a pregnancy of anyone other than your own. Your own. You don’t even have an authoritarian say in the pregnancy of a female spouse.

On the birth cert. in my state, under “father” is the word “optional”.

 

[Hume]

Hume:

No, no. I got the point. I just counter that parenthood is for the willing and absolutely no one else.

Playing devil’s advocate.
So what happens when a parent isn’t willing anymore?

Typically relatives (usually grandparents) step in or the child goes to the foster system.

The brain of one’s progeny now develops through age 25 years. That’s a long commitment, if you ask me.

Agree fully. Greatest commitment there is.

Besides, you’re not a parent unless there’s a person. And there’s not a person, unless there is a birth and first breath (or an organ donation).

ahh, liberty

So you would agree with Kant’s categorical imperative?

Does ‘libertas’ give a person the ‘freedom’ to take another’s natural rights?

As we’ve mentioned earlier many times, when conflicts arise we need to employ other rules to solve them.

The golden rule (unto others as to yourself) and the inherent equality of persons are ideals that we’ve generally consented to across culture and time as those acts as rational brakes on the abuse of liberty.

As I’ve stated ad nauseam, liberty is where we start. It isn’t the end.

Moral liberty partially explains why if you separate twins at birth and sent on to Salt Lake City and one to New Delhi, one would probably be a Mormon and one would probably be a Hindu.

The religion dominated their environment, so they elected on some level to consent to it. There is no innate religion except maybe the desire for religion in general.

After a sea Captain agrees to transport a person, free of charge, from New York to Hamburg, is it moral for him to change his mind half way there and throw them overboard to certain death?

No, the captain agreed to the transport. The exchange that took place denoted a tort, a common law contract, even if nothing was signed.

A woman does not do the same by simply having sex.

What if the person was severely handicapped; lack any mental capacity?

If you go on long enough, the “plug” is eventually pulled on you, I’m afraid. Behind every 20 year coma patient is a family bankrolling the tragic spectacle.

 

[HarryStotle]

You’d be a much better debater against those you ideologically oppose if you’d realize that and tailor your arguments accordingly.

As of now, they require language I don’t subscribe to.

I see. So you absolve yourself completely of the need to ‘subscribe to’ language or the arguments of those YOU ideologically oppose, yet you require others to necessarily adopt the language and ideology you subscribe to and “tailor their arguments accordingly.” Utterly audacious of you.

So you want to set the rules and terms of play by presuming the playing field and its “framing,” then demand others play to suit your ideological presuppositions.

So one set of rules to make me a “better debater” in order that you be held to no such restrictions?

You do understand you aren’t making an argument here, at all, so much as attempting to frame the entire debate, from the beginning, in your favour. Nice try, however…

"You’d be a much better debater against those you ideologically oppose if you’d realize that and tailor your arguments accordingly" instead of presuming home field advantage.

Continued…

 

[HarryStotle]

Theistic morality is divine command theory.

Now you can attempt to hid it behind appeals to nature, as some Catholic thinkers have done. But they’re still appealing to a god via it’s supposed creation.

Calling “divine command theory” divine command theory is not a strawman. It’s truth.

Yeah, no. Your depiction of divine command theory is a straw man because it relies on your assumption that a will — whether human or divine — can only be a valid reality if it is unencumbered and therefore ‘free’ to act. Unfortunately, any will so unencumbered can only act capriciously and with no significant purpose or reasoning.

But if you want to bring informed reasoning and a meaningful teleology back into the conversation, then…

Riddle me this: which of these two wills would provide the most informed and, therefore, the BEST probative choices everywhere and at all times towards the best possible ends?

1. A human will confined by time, place, and all manner of limitations related to biology and finitude?
2. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent will who is the very ground of existence and the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of all of contingent reality?

Ergo, if 2) exists, such a will would NOT be capricious and facile but infinitely beyond all questioning or dispute by 1).

And if any instance of 1) claimed some supererogatory power to override the “divine commands” [your term, not mine] of 2) we could reasonably ask what it is that gives any instance of 1) the capacity to even question 2) — other than sheer audacity and an opinion of itself that far exceeds its resources to underwrite any such opinion of itself. :crazy_face:

Ergo, the only way a “divine command” — properly understand — could even be questioned by 1) is if YOUR conception of a divine will (capricious and facile) is presumed from the get-go.

It is you who are “hiding behind” ideological presuppositions.

My only “presupposition” is that IF the God of classical theism and Catholicism) exists, THEN his will is, by definition, infinitely superior to ours by every possible metric.

Your presupposition is that God cannot exist and therefore any “command” from a fictitious “God” is as capricious as the will of any human free agent — speaking of ideological presuppositions.

 

[Stephen168]

So you would agree with Kant’s categorical imperative?

Does ‘libertas’ give a person the ‘freedom’ to take another’s natural rights?

As we’ve mentioned earlier many times, when conflicts arise we need to employ other rules to solve them.

The golden rule (unto others as to yourself) and the inherent equality of persons are ideals that we’ve generally consented to across culture and time as those acts as rational brakes on the abuse of liberty.

As I’ve stated ad nauseam, liberty is where we start. It isn’t the end.

Moral liberty partially explains why if you separate twins at birth and sent on to Salt Lake City and one to New Delhi, one would probably be a Mormon and one would probably be a Hindu.

The religion dominated their environment, so they elected on some level to consent to it. There is no innate religion except maybe the desire for religion in general.

Because you didn’t answer the questions, can I assume you do not agree with Kant’s categorical imperative?

And you believe ‘libertas’ gives a person the ‘freedom’ to take another’s natural rights.