Acting with good intention, and without committing any moral evil, you do your best to minimise resulting harm. If you can only grab one, you reach for the one you feel you can most likely save. That’s applying morality principles purely objectively. Noone would be overly blamed if, their human faculty of empathy biased their action to saving the born child even if that one had the lesser chance of survival.
We see the same attitude taken by SSM advocates. The hold that the teachings of the Catholic Church are “offensive”, “bigoted” and contrary to “anti-discrimination” principles. One major political party in Australia takes the view that to oppose SSM is so inconsistent with goods such as “justice”, “human rights” and the like that it will in due course no longer allow its members a conscience vote on this issue.
The child is an innocent, not there of her choice, and existing as nature would have it. She has the same right to life as the mother. *
Kill is not murder. We need a good intention, an act (capital punishment) which is not itself morally evil, and we need to have a good faith belief that the act causes more good than harm.
Because the act of abortion does not - cannot - pass the test of a moral act.
No. It’s an entirely flawed characterisation. We ARE entitled to kill, noting “to kill” is not a morally meaningful act - it lacks moral informatoin. I AM entitled to kill an aggressor (a person who is not innocent) if I fairly judge that I need to kill to save myself.
That’s certainly true in respect of appearance, stage of development / maturity and even our human sense of empathy and attachment.
Answered in Post #82.
The humanness that underpins the (moral) prohibition on murder is not connected with state of development. And state of development does not undergo a step change of any moral significance at the time of birth., or at any other time. Conception is the only step change of moral significance.
I don’t see how those two thing could be compared, morally or any other way. We each have a right, and to some extent a duty, to control the course of our own life. But Divine law places limits on what we can do to that (or any other) end. One of the limits is not to intentionally kill innocents (murder).
My definition of murder is not the same as the others. For instance, I consider strapping a chained person down to a table and injecting them with poison against their will murder. I’m sure you don’t. I consider dropping a bomb on a city knowing that it most likely killed many innocent “humans” murder.
Capital punishment is not the intended killing of the innocent, so it does not fit the definition of murder. CP is not immoral if used when truly necessary. It is immoral when used when not necessary; when it does more harm than good.
No, all innocents share the same absolute right not to be intentionally killed. All killings constitute a grave harm.
That is not the transition to “humanhood” that science or common sense recognizes. Let’s be thankful that self-preservation rarely if ever arises as motivation for abortion these days.
All innocent human life is entitled to the same absolute protection. Were that held to be so for all human life in every situation, you know full well abortions would continue, demonstrating the real hypocrisy.
A medical procedure, directed at the mother’s body, which is necessary to save her life, is a moral act and not an abortion. The act becomes an abortion when the act is directed to killing the child.
Had we had your (name removed by moderator)ut along the way, I’m sure the thread would have turned out better.
It tells us that if an act is motivated by the desire to do harm - it is immoral.
The death penalty must not be exercised out of a desire to see a dead man. It is properly exercised when that is necessary for the defence of order and the community.
He is not an “innocent”. He is guilty of murder which makes punishment and actions to prevent him re-offending just.
The Church certainly does not say that the death penalty as a means to avoid cost is a good thing! Sections of the community may well. The Church agrees that custodial sentence is far preferable (in essentially all cases) and that there is far too much recourse to the death penalty, be that to feed a perceived desire for vengeance in the community, or for cost savings, or for some other reason.
I realize the Church doesn’t say these things and I didn’t mean to imply that it does. I was only trying to point out what I see as some of the contradictions inherent in taking a pro-life stance without believing that all human life must be protected. The Church itself certainly does have a consistent pro-life ethic; it’s only some of the members who don’t.
While you say that the stand is not consistent, you do realize the church still allows the death penalty. Right?
He said “the Church does have a consistent pro-life ethic”, not that it does “not”.