How does your suggestion NOT fall under the ends (saving a life) justifies the means (using surgery to abort the child)?
well, that passage doesn’t really seem to be on point. and i will have to demur here and say that i just don’t know what it means for an action to be morally bad apart from the intent with which it was committed.
i just don’t understand what this means.
again, i disagree. but i’m not sure how to get past it in a simple manner that doesn’t involve a great deal of sometimes complicated moral philosophy and theology.
I completely agree with you on these points and it is (to a point) what I have been trying to say since I first questioned in this thread the logic that removal of the tube and child is OK, but removal of just the child is not.
Ah, yes, did you read my question? Let’s take it one at a time. Big breath here.yochumjy:
How does your suggestion NOT fall under the ends (saving a life) justifies the means (using surgery to abort the child)?
The surgeon kills the child. He does it with his own hands. He holds the bloody mass of tissue containing the tiny corpse in his hand.
sounds like exactly the same thing to me.
and i agree with you: any action the point of which is the death of a human being, is wrong.
I agree – however in the present state of medical technology, it is not possible to move the baby and have it survive. And the attempt has an unacceptably high risk factor for the mother.
The explanation doesn’t hold water. You don’t get to just say that because you don’t see a way out of the definition it doesn’t exist. Either the ends justify the means or not. The means is the action taken, the ends are results.
Adding up pros and cons and making a decision about abortion causing drugs makes no sense, otherwise we get to decide whether or not partial birth abortion could be okay under the right circumstances. The church has declared abortion evil. If we use Vern’s definition, then the church has signed a death warrent for all women with ectopic pregnancies. Since we both know that is not true, we have to be able to use the principle of double effect ALONG WITH the declaration of no abortion.
If I understand you, your question is “are you arguing that the end justifies the means?”
If there is an unacceptably high risk factor for the mother, then please show us where that is defined. I honestly would like to know.
YES! Exactly!
I disagree on some of this. Any action that can’t be completed without a death is not inherently wrong. Surgery upon a person to fix their heart, which kills the person is not inherently wrong. If I am assaulted by a person with a gun and while taking the gun away the gun discharges and kills the person assaulting me, I am not in the wrong. The intent was not to kill in these circumstances but to save, the result was death which is not immoral.
Why YOU defined it, of course. A while back you were saying any risk at all of another ectopic pregnancy demanded removal of the fallopian tube.
i actually thought about deleting that example altogether, since i figured my use of “completed” would be misunderstood. and it was. oh, well.
i agree.
I agree with John Doran on this. The death of a human being always has some wrongness attached to it. Something (the death of the assailant) can be a wrong without you being “in the wrong” (without you being held accountable for that evil that happened).
I think removing the tube is wrong, insofar as the tube is what is keeping the baby alive. If you remove the tube, you kill the baby. That is wrong regardless of your intent.
yochumjy:
Oops, sorry John D., I misspoke.
I guess you and I don’t agree, as I said in my last post…
Peace,
javelin
Re-implantation has a 0% success rate (discounting one reported success many years ago.) It also carrys a not exactly negligible risk to the mother.
Actually, the question is how can your suggestion NOT be construed as the ends justify the means. Again, we are not YET talking about my version, one at a time.
Means and ends must be defined through intent AND action. And it must work on all levels. If your intent is to save the mother, that is good. But your action must also be good, even if an indirect evil could occur (sorry, this last sentance was post edited, forgot to complete my sentance)
Actually, the morality must be defined by intent and action. By your definition, lying to yourself becomes easier, since you can justify any action and claim your intent is good. I realize we are both saying this to each other. You will simply say the same thing to me. But which is more rigorous a definition? Forcing your action to result in an indirect death (I’m still waiting for the information on why relocating is so bad), or Forcing the death directly. Intruding into a mothers body is not allways bad, especially say for surgery that doesn’t hurt the child, say an apendectomy. The intrusion into the mothers body is not the highest moral issue here. The morality of the death of the child and how it is accomplished is what I am claiming the issue to be. How does death result? That is what the morality must be based upon. All people will die eventually, what happens to facilitate that death determines the morality of the death.
Oh, all of a sudden you are using my definitions?
Too funny. Your definition makes no sense, as this is not an either or situation. The removal of the fallopian tube is not mutually exclusive with moving the child. You know that, why ignore it?So, what is the risk? If it is on the order of just having a child normally, then it is acceptable, as the woman is already choosing that risk. If it is only slightly higher, probably fits in the same catagory. Even if it is much higher, we must still be aware of the morality of our actions and the intent of the actions. You are using the good intent of saving the mother and ignoring the intent of every action.
Yes, the effective rate of success is 0%, but that doesn’t factor into the morality of the action.
), and are so “safe” nowadays, at least at facilities where they can do surgery to try to save the mother to begin with, that they are generally outpatient procedures. When my wife had hers, she was in my car headed home (me driving, of course!) within three hours of coming out of surgery.