Arguing About Abortion

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VanitasVanitatum said:
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Hume:
Exactly how is this measured in observable terms?
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By the immediate and forseeable effects.
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Which is vague enough to mean you can not actually measure it.

What you offer here isn’t a fact, it’s a hope.
 
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Ok, well. When you can tell me how it’s actually measured…

Thanks Van.
 
Hume said:
Bodily autonomy requires an element of will. The right of self-government is a good definition.

If she wants it there, no problem. If she doesn’t, problem.

Hope that helps.
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Is the fetus another person to govern, or part of her self-government?

On the former, we have conflicting liberties, but no clear justification for infringement. On the latter, you’re arguing that liberty is violated by the person’s own body.

Where are you getting this argument? Is this your own thinking or did you read it somewhere, or did someone teach it to you?
 
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Hume said:
you’d have to make an argument as to why a woman should lose her bodily freedom, here.
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Perhaps it was a mistake to think said freedom is absolute? What is the nature of woman? Of mother and child?
 
Hume said:
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.

When we inevitably have conflicts of liberty, we have to create rules to solve them. The best rule is that in a conflict of “wills” between a fetus that has none and a mother that does, we have to default with the mother. It’s the only rational outcome. Her body. Her will. The fetus has no will and it requires her body in a way mother doesn’t owe.
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You haven’t presented a philosophical or well-reasoned argument above, so much as a psychological projection of self-interested egoism.

Your basic or “null” position is, essentially, that you as a subjective ego ought to be left alone to do what you want when you want. In order to make that a sustainable position, you are essentially making a “social contract” with other subjective egos that you won’t tamper with their egoism (their “right” to do what they want when they want) if they don’t impinge upon your “right” to do the same.

You haven’t, then, presented a rational argument, but merely an appeal between self-centred egos to respect each other’s self-centred egoism.

Again, that isn’t a rational nor a moral argument because it completely leaves untouched the question of what is “good for” human beings qua human beings.

The assumption is that whatever the self-absorbed ego residing within human consciousness wants is what is “best” for it. You haven’t actually defended that claim, as a rational or philosophical one, because you give no reasons for anyone to think that self-absorbed egos have anything like an intuitive or infallible apprehension of what is actually for their good.

A self-absorbed ego merely wanting something is not sufficient to demonstrate that what that self-absorbed ego chooses will be to its ultimate good.

With absolutely no connection to the telos or what is objectively good for that self-absorbed ego, you haven’t established that what that self-absorbed ego wills is actually for its good.

Essentially, your argument is that self-absorbed egos ought to have full rein to want what they want for no reason other than they happen to want it.

That is hardly an implementation of reason, logic or well-considered ethics.
Hume said:
If you wrote that the default represents “nothing” in ant of my science labs of philo classes, you’d have gotten a red “X”.
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I would humbly submit that your “science labs of philo classes” were a waste of time, effort and money.
 
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Hume said:
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.
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Just to be clear, merely because you baldly assert that we “CAN arrive at most of the more enduring moral laws”, does not mean that you actually have completed the hard work of making that connection.

My point would be that liberty doesn’t get us to the “more enduring moral laws” in the sense of justifying them, so much as the “more enduring moral laws” require autonomous responsibility — i.e., that moral agents have the capacity to originate novel causal chains.

That is hardly the same thing as liberty justifying morality. Just the reverse, actually. A properly understood morality is what warrants but also constrains some level of moral autonomy, i.e., liberty.

Ergo, you have the picture backwards because you begin with self-absorbed egoism and attempt to justify morality from there. The more reasonable view is that a proper understanding of human nature, complete with an apprehension of what is the fulfillment or telos — the reason humans exist — warrants or necessitates a modicum of liberty.
 
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Neithan said:
So if a fetus is biologically part of the body,
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No… The body of the babe … resides and grows in the Womb of the body of the host mother.

It is its own person… from Conception

Abortion is Murder

Such are the Teachings of Catholicism…

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EndTimes said:
No… The body of the babe … resides and grows in the Womb of the body of the host mother.

It is its own person… from Conception

Abortion is Murder

Such are the Teachings of Catholicism…
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Not only the teachings of Catholicism, but the facts of embryology. A new and genetically distinct member of the human species has its beginning at conception. We all began in the same way.
 
1.5 Billion of the most helpless - Murdered WorldWide.

SATAN is Pleased…

_
 
Yes but as we are acutely aware nowadays, the concept of reality in the legal realm is a rather separate thing from natural facts. But law has a great impact on society, so we do have to argue our way out of the legal entanglements somehow (or force a violent revolution, but I think that’s an absolutely last resort). I see natural law increasingly as something that has to be freed from the existentialist tropes our courts have devised to justify unnatural, and damaging, legislation.
 
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The problem is natural law is theistic in premise. Atheists, agnostics, and perhaps deists are not going to consider it a sound basis for law or morality. It’s the prime reason I don’t accept it.
 
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Hume said:
But what must also be true is that those rights are completely, 100% overshadowed by the rights of the mother over her very own body.

It’s hers. Fundamentally. She owes it to no one. She can give it willingly. But she doesn’t have to.
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People are free to have this thought process but it’s simply wrong. Nobody owns their own body no more than you own the air you breathe or the blood that pumps through your veins. A mother’s body belongs to God. You have the free will to defile it but the consequences for those actions will eventually be paid.
 
To be fair, an atheist does not have a sound basis for morality at all, just facts (the is-ought problem). Since natural law already has precedent in common law jurisdictions, it is not unreasonable in principle.
 
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brishen said:
The only difference if made illegal is women (and young girls) will get “under the table” with no safety; it will not stop abortion.
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That is one of the most often repeated lies of the abortion industry. Prior to Roe vs. wade, abortions were not done in a “back alley with a coat hanger”; they were done by physicians, often in a hospital setting, on the quiet.

Yes, abortions will continue; but not to the tune of the 61,800,000+/- . If Roe vs. Wade were overturned tomorrow, it would not end abortions; it would just be left to the states to each determine if abortions would be allowed - and some states (such as Louisiana) likely would outlaw them, and some states (such as New York) might allow them up to the time of delivery. Federal funding likely might cease.

We know know that upon fertilization, there is an independent being, separate from its mother’s dna and separate from its father’s, but reflecting both - it is not just some “tissue” in the mother. We know now when a feta, heartbeat starts; we know when the child can react to pain. It is a child, and the pro abortion crowd will not admit that no matter how pushed they are on the matter. It ain’t a rhesus monkey until it comes out of the womb, and then voile! it is a baby.

and if it is murder to kill the child once born, then how is it less of a child in the womb? Why does exiting the birth canal award it with the right to life (which is why taking the life is murder) after, and not before? One does not have to have a focus on ethics when taking Philosophy (it is usually just one course for undergraduates); it is not even a matter of ethics; it is a matter of logic.

So since you say you disagree that killing the child just before it clears the birth canal (or any time before that)is not illogical, please explain.
 
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