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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Pro-life rhetoric and the abortion debate
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Eliab
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# 9153
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Posted
I've recently read Life's Dominion by Ronald Dworkin (a US academic lawyer) about abortion (and euthanasia, but I want to talk about abortion), and found it something of an eye-opener.
Dworkin starts from the argument (and this is my paraphrase, his book is obviously longer and more rigorously argued) that the abortion debate has essentially been hijacked by rhetoric that reflects minority views on both sides - whether the foetus is (morally speaking) ‘alive', or ‘a person' with full human rights. The argument is presented as if it were one between pro-lifers (who think abortion is basically murder) and pro-choicers (who don't). In fact, most people (not all, but most) even on the pro-life side, don't really believe that at all. They certainly believe that the unborn child is valuable ("sacred" is the word he uses, though explicitly disavowing any necessary religious implication) but not that it has moral personhood.
In support of that he relies on the near-universal judgments that abortion is more acceptable:
early rather than late in pregnancy;
following rape rather than consensual sex;
where the woman's life is at a greater rather than an ordinary risk from the pregnancy; and
where because of defects, the child's expectation and quality of life is likely to be vastly lower.
None of that makes much sense if the foetus is simply a person like any other. We don't allow people whose existence innocently endangers others to be murdered and it would be bizarre (rather than commonplace) to hear it argued that its more acceptable to murder a young, highly disabled person whose father is a rapist than it is to murder anyone else. Therefore (goes the argument) whatever we say when arguing against abortion, we do not in reality think or feel about it as we do a murder, but (if we are against it) as we do a sacrilege - the wrongness of it is based as much or more on the meaning and degree of the investment in the object violated as it is on its inherent worth.
He goes on to assert (he argues the point much more briefly, perhaps because he thinks it less controversial) that most pro-choicers feel similarly - there isn't the simple binary divide that is often presented. Few pro-choicers think that the decision to abort has no moral consequences, and they generally agree with pro-lifers about the factors that make abortion better or worse.
The consequences of seeing the debate in those terms is (Dworkin argues) that in US constitutional theory, Roe v. Wade is right. Foetuses aren't constitutional people, so the jurisprudence rightly focusses on the right of citizen and the public interest, not on the rights of the foetus. As the principles behind the US constitution require that citizens ought broadly speaking to make up their own minds about what they consider sacred and valuable, a woman who wants an abortion, especially early in pregnancy, should be allowed to decide that for herself.
Is Dworkin right? Is it correct that the "abortion is murder" rhetoric is false advertising which most pro-lifers don't really believe? Would it be better to cast the debate in terms of varying value attached to the unborn, rather than the binary question of whether it is a person? Could it still be argued that abortion should be illegal, by pro-lifers who do not assert that the foetus is a living entity with moral rights from conception? - maybe not under US constitutional theory, but all the world is not the US.
I stopped being pro-life in my teens, after hearing a pro-lifer interviewed on TV who equated the murder of an abortion doctor with the termination of a pregnancy. Realising that I could not ever agree with that, and that if I did I would find it hard not to conclude that killing abortionists would be justified in defence of innocent life (which would be plainly wrong), I've been very reluctantly pro-choice because I could not think of abortion as murder, even though I still thought of it as pretty horrible. I'm attracted to Dworkin's line of argument because it fits with my moral intuitions: sacrilege is exactly how I feel about abortion. It is the destruction of something - a potential life - which should be honoured. But I wouldn't want people to be locked up for sacrilege, or see an argument for stopping them by force, if they confined themselves to the desecration of their own property. Can the pro-life position afford to abandon the contention that abortion is murder?
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
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Crœsos
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# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
Is Dworkin right? Is it correct that the "abortion is murder" rhetoric is false advertising which most pro-lifers don't really believe?
Yes, he's right. Even leaving aside the question of the murder of abortion providers, the fact that most abortion opponents balk at the idea of imposing criminal penalties on women who obtain abortions betrays their insincerity on this point. Either they don't really believe abortion is murder, or they believe that women are child-like in their lack of moral agency.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
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Bran Stark
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# 15252
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Posted
I fully believe that "abortion is murder", morally speaking. But since this appears to be quite the minority position, I recognize that at present it's a waste of effort to try to introduce massively unpopular laws punishing mothers seeking abortion. As long as we can prevent abortions in the first place, saving lives is more important than "justice".
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IN SOVIET ЯUSSIA, SIGNATUЯE ЯEAD YOU!
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Crœsos
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# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Bran Stark:
I fully believe that "abortion is murder", morally speaking. But since this appears to be quite the minority position, I recognize that at present it's a waste of effort to try to introduce massively unpopular laws punishing mothers seeking abortion. As long as we can prevent abortions in the first place, saving lives is more important than "justice".
That's an interesting position. Most theorists of criminal law believe that imposing criminal penalties on certain behaviors (like murder) are part of prevention. Why do you consider abortion an exception to this?
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
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Alogon
Cabin boy emeritus
# 5513
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Posted
How about: abortion is violence to women? Sticking tools into a woman's body to solve a problem is so characteristically male.
The argument has been made.
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Patriarchy (n.): A belief in original sin unaccompanied by a belief in God.
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Crœsos
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# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alogon:
How about: abortion is violence to women? Sticking tools into a woman's body to solve a problem is so characteristically male.
The argument has been made.
Doesn't the same argument apply to any other surgical procedure?
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
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Horseman Bree
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# 5290
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Posted
But we don't legislate against specific forms of surgery. Surgery is done for problems that the patient has, not because the outside observer feels good or bad about it.
Abortion is the opposite case: the rules against abortion must be enforced, often (usually) by people who can't get pregnant, because the outside observer thinks that he/she has a moral right to intervene or because their god has told them something that the woman in question hasn't heard.
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It's Not That Simple
Posts: 5372 | From: more herring choker than bluenose | Registered: Dec 2003
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Josephine
Orthodox Belle
# 3899
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Posted
Eliab, that makes a lot of sense to me. It explains something that has always confused me -- the positive regard that pro-lifers usually have for in vitro fertilization. If you really thought a zygote was a human being, the fact that people have their early development monitored (and they're killed if it seems to be going wrong), that they can be considered "excess" and stored in a freezer, or destroyed when they're no longer wanted or needed .... it's macabre, and deeply disturbing, if they're people.
But if they're sacred objects, and they're being used appropriately, in the effort to bring forth a baby, then there's not so much cognitive dissonance.
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I've written a book! Catherine's Pascha: A celebration of Easter in the Orthodox Church. It's a lovely book for children. Take a look!
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Eliab
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# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Bran Stark:
I fully believe that "abortion is murder", morally speaking. But since this appears to be quite the minority position
Do you think that "fully believing" (and not just saying) abortion to be murder is a minority position within the pro-life movement? Or are you saying that the pro-life position as a whole is a monority one, but most of those holding it do really believe that abortion is murder as strongly as you do?
quote:
I recognize that at present it's a waste of effort to try to introduce massively unpopular laws punishing mothers seeking abortion. As long as we can prevent abortions in the first place, saving lives is more important than "justice".
OK, I accept that in any campaign there is an element of strategic thinking, so that important or conceivably attainable goals are prioritised over lesser or impossible ones. Dworkin's contention goes beyond that, though, in saying that almost all of us, pro-lifers included, have a way of morally evaluating the ethics of abortions which is not consistent with an "abortion is murder" principle.
Thought experiment: suppose some angel or devil were to give you the gift of supernatural rhetoric such that you could persuade a bare majority of people to support your choice of abortion law (the remaining 49.9999999999% being unconvinced and continuing to believe as they presently do), what law would you have enacted? Would your ideal (rather than attainable) abortion law provide that women and medical professionals involved in abortions suffer the same penalties as other murderers (life imprisonment, death ...)?
quote:
Originally posted by Horseman Bree:
Abortion is the opposite case: the rules against abortion must be enforced, often (usually) by people who can't get pregnant, because the outside observer thinks that he/she has a moral right to intervene or because their god has told them something that the woman in question hasn't heard.
That sort of argument is, of course, wholly circumvented by the "abortion is murder" ethic. If a foetus is a person, then the fact that the observer learned of its personhood from a deity is a secondary consideration - it is much more important to save its life. And clearly, as a person, it has claims in common humanity to give the observer a moral right to intervene. It seems likely to me that holding "abortion is murder" almost as an article of faith, insulates one from almost all pro-choice arguments, because murder is so obviously wrong, and preventing it so obviously right, that arguments about autonomy and privacy and women's rights, important though they are, must be secondary.
But if we abandon that, and say that terminating a pregnancy isn't (in the early stages at least) the act of killing a person, we have a very much more nuanced debate about values, and personal rights, and liberty of the individual, and public interest and public conscience, where all the pro-choice arguments have real force. I suspect that, unless the concepts of God and sin are introduced (which in US constitutional theory is a big "No"), the pro-life case isn't strong enough to resist them. That would explain why the pro-life movement needs the "abortion is murder" rhetoric, even if few people really believe that in their hearts.
I'm pleased to see Crœsos post on this thread because I've previously argued with him that the pro-life position does make sense and is consistent if you accept that the foetus is a person. I am beginning to think that I was wrong about that, hence this thread.
[ 14. June 2011, 10:11: Message edited by: Eliab ]
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
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Joan_of_Quark
Anchoress of St Expedite
# 9887
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Posted
Also, people's views evolve over time and are often not entirely logically consistent. I wasn't as surprised by Mousethief's link as I might have been had I not had a very surprising discussion with my relative X a few years ago. She is adamant that all abortion is murder but her very good friend Y has had two. X doesn't think Y is likely to come after her with an axe, nor that she should be imprisoned as she should if she killed a child or adult etc etc.
Hereabouts, about thirty years ago, miscarried babies did not get funerals, but anti-abortion protesters never seemed to complain about that. Now funerals and burials or cremations are the standard. I wish I knew when this changed and how - it seems most likely the change was driven by mourning parents.
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"I want to be an artist when I grow up." "Well you can't do both!"
further quarkiness
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
There's an ambiguity in the phrase 'abortion is murder'. It's supposed to assert that abortion is killing a human being, possessed of the usual human rights (most notably the right not to be killed). However, not all killing of human beings is murder. Killing a human being could also be something such as manslaughter, accidents, killing in war, self-defence, etc. One isn't therefore committed to thinking that abortion is morally consequential in the same way as murder. (But that doesn't make a good slogan.)
Vegetarians used to use the slogan 'meat is murder'. I don't think they were suggesting prosecuting butchers for murder either.
At least one reason for thinking abortion should be treated as less serious than murder is that it's considered morally acceptable. Consider someone who thinks great apes should have human rights. Is that person thereby committed to thinking that someone who killed a gorilla for bushmeat in the Congo civil war is morally guilty of murder (and cannibalism)? Should an anti-slavery activist in the late eighteenth century have set out to prosecute Thomas Jefferson for kidnapping?
A thought experiment for the people who think the 'abortion is murder' line is inconsistent. Suppose you lived in a society in which infanticide was considered morally permissible. I am going to assume that most people here think infanticide is killing a human being. How would you behave differently from anti-abortion campaigners in the real world?
(Obviously anti-abortion campaigns, in the real world US at least, are normally proxies for a hard right-wing politics, and generally funded as such.)
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Alogon:
How about: abortion is violence to women? Sticking tools into a woman's body to solve a problem is so characteristically male.
The argument has been made.
But a lot of the very early abortions these days don't require a surgical procedure at all. Have you not heard of RU486?
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
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Invictus_88
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# 15352
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Posted
Clarity. Clarity. Clarity.
i. Murder is a legal term. If it's illegal, it's murder. If it's legal, it's not.
Abortion is not murder, killing in legitimate warfare is not murder, the death penalty is not murder; but all in different ways are the ending of a human life.
ii. Human Life vs. Personhood.
Pro-life arguments tend to hold to a belief in the Sanctity of Life, but this is distinct from personhood as usually understood, so it is not a contradiction for an individual to be personally more viscerally horrified by having two close friends commit murder against a fellow adult than by having two friends who have procured abortions whilst holding that the murders and the abortions are in the same category of immoral destruction of a human life.
This latter conflation of the terms "Life" and "Personhood" is an important part of the above pro-choice argument's critique of the pro-life position...of more properly speaking the Sanctity of Life argument.
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Eliab
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# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Consider someone who thinks great apes should have human rights. Is that person thereby committed to thinking that someone who killed a gorilla for bushmeat in the Congo civil war is morally guilty of murder (and cannibalism)? Should an anti-slavery activist in the late eighteenth century have set out to prosecute Thomas Jefferson for kidnapping?
Nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without a law) surely applies: it would be rational to say that slavers and poachers should not face criminal sanctions for acts done which were not at the time illegal, but that once the desired passes, they will become illegal and if the behaviour is repeated it will be punished.
Someone might argue that the acts are so plainly wrong that a retrospective law is justified, but I don't think they have to for their position to be coherent.
I don't think anti-abortionists are necessarily inconsistent if they say (and mean) that they don't want to punish past conduct, or if they recognise that there's no chance of getting the law passed which they want. They likely* are inconsistent if they say that abortion is morally equivalent to any other murder BUT that they positively want it to be treated differently.
(*only "likely" to be inconsistent, because I think you could believe abortion to be murder AND also acknowledge that there is a real moral question about it on which reasonable people can differ. That would make a difference. A penalty appropriate to those who know that what they do is murder may not be appropriate for those who merely ought to know, and different again to what is appropriate for those who have a good excuse for not knowing. There is a culpability as well as a harm element to sentencing)
quote:
A thought experiment for the people who think the 'abortion is murder' line is inconsistent. Suppose you lived in a society in which infanticide was considered morally permissible. I am going to assume that most people here think infanticide is killing a human being. How would you behave differently from anti-abortion campaigners in the real world?
I would want the law changed to make infanticide illegal. I would consider the age of the child irrelevant, similarly it's health or the manner of its conception - I wouldn't even want to discuss such issues as they would distract from the main point that killing babies is always terribly wrong, and it is a trivial consideration whether one particular instance of it is more understandable than another. I would want child-killers to be prosecuted, and while dificult personal circumstances might afford some mitigation in determining sentence (as they do for any offence) they wouldn't ever be a defence. My inclination (overcome only by considerable moral effort) would be to treat parents who had infanticised with great loathing, and little sympathy. I would oppose the creation and use of infants for destructive medical experiments, no matter how benign the purpose. I would regard the suppliers of infanticide services as mere assassins, not medical professionals, and when I heard that one had been murdered, I would feel pretty much the same mix of emotion I felt to hear of Osama bin Laden's death, rather than condemn it as a horrible crime. Even if I didn't feel inclined to murder one myself, I would quite understand someone who did.
That is, there are anti-abortion campaigners who take what I think would be a consistent position analogous to what I think is the natural one to take on infanticide. However these are the ones generally regarded as extremists, not as typical of most pro-lifers.
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
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Joan_of_Quark
Anchoress of St Expedite
# 9887
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Invictus_88:
ii. Human Life vs. Personhood.
Pro-life arguments tend to hold to a belief in the Sanctity of Life, but this is distinct from personhood as usually understood
I have never heard this distinction made and can't work out for myself what the difference could be between a human life and a human person. Admittedly, I am very new to this debate, so may be asking for a clarification of the blindingly obvious, but would someone oblige? Thanks!
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"I want to be an artist when I grow up." "Well you can't do both!"
further quarkiness
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Invictus_88:
i. Murder is a legal term. If it's illegal, it's murder. If it's legal, it's not.
Abortion is not murder, killing in legitimate warfare is not murder, the death penalty is not murder; but all in different ways are the ending of a human life.
Not really. "Murder" in this debate is an ethical and rhetorical term, not a technical one. It is used because of the associations of wickedness and criminality, but everyone knows that it's not being used in the strict legal sense (except posibly aspirationally).
And that's fine. Just because the legal system co-opts an existing English word and concept to define an offence does not mean that the word is disabled for every other use. "Abortion is murder" is a meaningful statement about which it is possible to have an opinion. It is not an oxymoron. You can sensibly disagree with the principle, or with the rhetoric, but not the syntax.
quote:
ii. Human Life vs. Personhood.
I should have defined the term as I used it. By "person" I need "thing that ought in the moral sense to be treated as a human being". I use "person" rather than, say, "human life" because it is hard to argue that a foetus is not, biologically, both human and alive. However the issue is not biology, but ethics, and the question of whether a foetus has the ethical status of a "person" isn't resolved by counting chromosomes.
"Person" in this sense does not necessarily imply "personality" - conscious individual identity - even though personality is often what we think ethically important about personhood.
quote:
it is not a contradiction for an individual to be personally more viscerally horrified by having two close friends commit murder against a fellow adult than by having two friends who have procured abortions whilst holding that the murders and the abortions are in the same category of immoral destruction of a human life.
Well, no, in the sense that visceral horror is an emotional response, and as such simply exists. It cannot be contradictory, because it is not any sort of proposition. As it happens, I feel more visceral horror for some abortions than I do for some murders. That tells you something about what flips my emotional swiitches, but very little about my views on their proper place on an ethical or legal scale.
If you are suggesting that it is a coherent position to take that killing, say, a love rival or business competitor is morally equivalent to having an abortion, but that it shouldn't be illegal because it happens to bug you less, then I disagree. I think that is a contradictory position. But I've no issue with the fact that your emotions are differently engaged.
But in any case, the point of using "murder" as a term in the abortion debate is to bring in the associations of that word, which, for most normal people, include visceral horror. The pro-life rhetoric seems to me to imply that whether or not we actually feel that about abortion, we ought to, BECAUSE they are morally the same.
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
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Invictus_88
Shipmate
# 15352
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Joan_of_Quark:
quote:
Originally posted by Invictus_88:
ii. Human Life vs. Personhood.
Pro-life arguments tend to hold to a belief in the Sanctity of Life, but this is distinct from personhood as usually understood
I have never heard this distinction made and can't work out for myself what the difference could be between a human life and a human person. Admittedly, I am very new to this debate, so may be asking for a clarification of the blindingly obvious, but would someone oblige? Thanks!
Caveat: Some people conflate Human Life and Personhood and do so intentionally for some particular purpose, however the original post does it unconsciously and causes confusion. That settled, below is the more usual distinction.
Human Life is that thing possessed by and defining of the human organism, and Personhood is that plus the common discernible outward accidents: the personality, experience, outlook, and capacity for interaction with the world (etc); that to which we refer when we talk about "that kid Justin" or "Helena from the corner-shop" or whoever else that we know.
Personhood is what we usually bond to in social situations, but Human Life is that state of being-alive that sets us apart from the dead and from other species of creature. Human Life exists before the personhood of infancy (in immediate newborns, in pre-birth conceived life, for example), after personhood (in the very severely brain-injured, and in those so close to death as to appear dead), and in the temporary absence of personhood (in those in medically induced coma or - one can argue - in people knocked unconscious or sleeping).
That last example is a trickier one hanging on from old philosophy debates, but the rest are more typical examples of Human Life where it doesn't overlap with Personhood. I hope that's clearer!
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Invictus_88
Shipmate
# 15352
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
quote:
Originally posted by Invictus_88:
i. Murder is a legal term. If it's illegal, it's murder. If it's legal, it's not.
Abortion is not murder, killing in legitimate warfare is not murder, the death penalty is not murder; but all in different ways are the ending of a human life.
Not really. "Murder" in this debate is an ethical and rhetorical term, not a technical one. It is used because of the associations of wickedness and criminality, but everyone knows that it's not being used in the strict legal sense (except posibly aspirationally).
And that's fine. Just because the legal system co-opts an existing English word and concept to define an offence does not mean that the word is disabled for every other use. "Abortion is murder" is a meaningful statement about which it is possible to have an opinion. It is not an oxymoron. You can sensibly disagree with the principle, or with the rhetoric, but not the syntax.
quote:
ii. Human Life vs. Personhood.
I should have defined the term as I used it. By "person" I need "thing that ought in the moral sense to be treated as a human being". I use "person" rather than, say, "human life" because it is hard to argue that a foetus is not, biologically, both human and alive. However the issue is not biology, but ethics, and the question of whether a foetus has the ethical status of a "person" isn't resolved by counting chromosomes.
"Person" in this sense does not necessarily imply "personality" - conscious individual identity - even though personality is often what we think ethically important about personhood.
quote:
it is not a contradiction for an individual to be personally more viscerally horrified by having two close friends commit murder against a fellow adult than by having two friends who have procured abortions whilst holding that the murders and the abortions are in the same category of immoral destruction of a human life.
Well, no, in the sense that visceral horror is an emotional response, and as such simply exists. It cannot be contradictory, because it is not any sort of proposition. As it happens, I feel more visceral horror for some abortions than I do for some murders. That tells you something about what flips my emotional swiitches, but very little about my views on their proper place on an ethical or legal scale.
If you are suggesting that it is a coherent position to take that killing, say, a love rival or business competitor is morally equivalent to having an abortion, but that it shouldn't be illegal because it happens to bug you less, then I disagree. I think that is a contradictory position. But I've no issue with the fact that your emotions are differently engaged.
But in any case, the point of using "murder" as a term in the abortion debate is to bring in the associations of that word, which, for most normal people, include visceral horror. The pro-life rhetoric seems to me to imply that whether or not we actually feel that about abortion, we ought to, BECAUSE they are morally the same.
Then it is not a literate understanding of ethics, or or sin - if put in those terms.
They are morally equivalent in that they are "the morally wrong destruction of a human life", but ethics and the consideration of sin goes much further than that.
Quite apart from the relative and variable factors that may and may not apply to this or that murder or this or that abortion, there are inherent differences.
In an abortion, the life ended has not had the chance to warrant it, so is by necessity the murder of a complete innocent - whereas someone murdered (i.e. wrongly killed as an adult) is not necessarily killed as a complete innocent.
On the other hand - the one taken into account by legislators - the ending of foetal life doesn't immediately discernible gaps in families, in economies, or in the visible life of society. By contrast, though both are the ending of a life, murder is the extinguishing of personhood, a person to whom others are invariably in some way emotionally attached or economically involved or connected by some other visible interaction, so abortion by its very nature is a less obviously disruptive/destructive ending of life.
There is, as you hopefully see, an area of discussion where objective differences between abortion and murder can be discussed, without conflating the two together as "murder" (and so as equal/the same) and thus confusing the real issue.
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Invictus_88:
Human Life is that thing possessed by and defining of the human organism, and Personhood is that plus the common discernible outward accidents: the personality, experience, outlook, and capacity for interaction with the world (etc)
To clarify: I'm using "personality" to mean what Invictus_88 means by "personhood".
My "personhood" doesn't mean that, nor does it mean "human life". It is not a descriptive term at all, but an evaluative one. To say (in my sense) that a foetus is a "person" ISN'T asserting that it has "human life" or "personality", it is asserting that morally speaking, it ought to be treated as a human being with rights. It is possible to believe that "persons" should be so treated because they have "human life" OR because they have "personality", but neither is an inherent part of the definition I intend when I use "person".
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
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Bran Stark
Shipmate
# 15252
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
Do you think that "fully believing" (and not just saying) abortion to be murder is a minority position within the pro-life movement? Or are you saying that the pro-life position as a whole is a monority one, but most of those holding it do really believe that abortion is murder as strongly as you do?
I'm guessing that a certain number of pro-lifers, though I don't presume to say how many, believe the same as I do, but are afraid to admit it in polite company. But many more probably sincerely believe that a fetus is somehow less than fully human.
quote:
Thought experiment: suppose some angel or devil were to give you the gift of supernatural rhetoric such that you could persuade a bare majority of people to support your choice of abortion law (the remaining 49.9999999999% being unconvinced and continuing to believe as they presently do), what law would you have enacted? Would your ideal (rather than attainable) abortion law provide that women and medical professionals involved in abortions suffer the same penalties as other murderers (life imprisonment, death ...)?
If 95% of citizens are pro-life, and abortion is considered a quite rare and disgusting act, then I'd feel confident in enacting penalties substantially equal to what we see given for murder today, both for mother and doctor.
But if it's 51%, I'd probably have a civil war on my hands if I even thought about punishing women seeking abortions.
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IN SOVIET ЯUSSIA, SIGNATUЯE ЯEAD YOU!
Posts: 304 | Registered: Oct 2009
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
*only "likely" to be inconsistent, because I think you could believe abortion to be murder AND also acknowledge that there is a real moral question about it on which reasonable people can differ. That would make a difference. A penalty appropriate to those who know that what they do is murder may not be appropriate for those who merely ought to know, and different again to what is appropriate for those who have a good excuse for not knowing. There is a culpability as well as a harm element to sentencing
The above strikes me as plausible. It depends on your philosophy of punishment. There's a retributive theory, deterrent or rehabilitative theory, and others. I'm inclined to a joint theory: punishment is only permissible if it can be justified on both retributive and also on deterrent or rehabilitative grounds. There's always a presumption against punishment. If so, it's not terribly surprising that someone who considers abortion to be homicide(*) doesn't think it should be punished as murder.
My impression is that most politically active anti-abortionists tend towards a fierce retributive theory, so that explanation may not apply.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
A thought experiment for the people who think the 'abortion is murder' line is inconsistent. Suppose you lived in a society in which infanticide was considered morally permissible. I am going to assume that most people here think infanticide is killing a human being. How would you behave differently from anti-abortion campaigners in the real world?
I would want the law changed to make infanticide illegal. I would consider the age of the child irrelevant, similarly it's health or the manner of its conception - I wouldn't even want to discuss such issues as they would distract from the main point that killing babies is always terribly wrong, and it is a trivial consideration whether one particular instance of it is more understandable than another. I would want child-killers to be prosecuted, and while dificult personal circumstances might afford some mitigation in determining sentence (as they do for any offence) they wouldn't ever be a defence. My inclination (overcome only by considerable moral effort) would be to treat parents who had infanticised with great loathing, and little sympathy.
Can I ask you to consider a bit further? By comparison, I would certainly regard a contemporary who I knew owned slaves with moral loathing, while I wouldn't regard Washington or Jefferson with the same loathing. In the same way, pagan greeks and romans regarded infanticide as acceptable (although I think they preferred to expose babies rather than actually kill them). Now, living in a society that's been broadly Christian since Aidan and Cuthbert and Augustine, that seems a fairly obnoxious attitude. But would a Christian who lived in pagan Rome have been able to feel the same way? The moral rigourists - the Tertullians and so on - might have been able to condemn all pagans as immoral without hesitation. But would Christians who didn't separate themselves out from their pagan neighbours have been able to muster quite that sense of self-righteousness?
(For that matter, do you really regard someone like Hetty from Adam Bede with great loathing?)
(*) can we use homicide as a blanket term to cover all cases of killing human beings, whether or not legally or morally murder as such?
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
Either they don't really believe abortion is murder, or they believe that women are child-like in their lack of moral agency.
The pro-choice case is based on the fact that there are a large number of cases in which bearing a child is a source of hardship and distress to the pregnant woman. Does it really amount to regarding women as lacking moral agency to think that the kinds of case that dispose people to favour legalising abortion should be recognised in law as providing extenuating circumstances?
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
But would a Christian who lived in pagan Rome have been able to feel the same way? The moral rigourists - the Tertullians and so on - might have been able to condemn all pagans as immoral without hesitation. But would Christians who didn't separate themselves out from their pagan neighbours have been able to muster quite that sense of self-righteousness?
They did seem to feel that way. Its not just Tertullian who condemns infanticide. Athenagoras does. And the Didache forbids it. Not just Christians either, some pagans were against it, especially ones influenced by Stoics.
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The pro-choice case is based on the fact that there are a large number of cases in which bearing a child is a source of hardship and distress to the pregnant woman. Does it really amount to regarding women as lacking moral agency to think that the kinds of case that dispose people to favour legalising abortion should be recognised in law as providing extenuating circumstances?
If you allow "hardship" or "distress" to be considered exonerating factors for other murderers then it's perfectly consistent to both consider abortion to be murder and to not impose criminal penalties on women for seeking an abortion. Of course, if such a case for exonerating circumstances is made, I'm not sure there would remain grounds to criminalize abortion in the first place.
It should also be noted that those in favor of banning abortion are typically not the type to consider an extensive range of exonerating circumstances valid for most other crimes.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Soror Magna
Shipmate
# 9881
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The pro-choice case is based on the fact that there are a large number of cases in which bearing a child is a source of hardship and distress to the pregnant woman. ...
No, it isn't. There are plenty of other reasons why a person would be pro-choice. OliviaG
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"You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean." -- Tony Kushner, "Angels in America"
Posts: 5430 | From: Caprica City | Registered: Jul 2005
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Crœsos
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# 238
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Posted
On the other hand, to the extent that "hardship" or "distress" are considered legitimate mitigating circumstances it's because they're considered to diminish the capacity for moral judgment. Arguing that these apply generally to all women, or even just to all pregnant women, seems to be an argument that women in general have a diminished moral capacity.
Working from a real-world example, I can't really see anyone making the argument that Susan Smith would have been immune from prosecution if she'd hired a professional killer to murder her children instead of doing it herself.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by OliviaG:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The pro-choice case is based on the fact that there are a large number of cases in which bearing a child is a source of hardship and distress to the pregnant woman. ...
No, it isn't. There are plenty of other reasons why a person would be pro-choice. OliviaG
Oh good. I was going to answer that absurd claim but I see you got in before me.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
Posts: 63536 | From: Washington | Registered: Jul 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
They did seem to feel that way. Its not just Tertullian who condemns infanticide. Athenagoras does. And the Didache forbids it. Not just Christians either, some pagans were against it, especially ones influenced by Stoics.
I'm presupposing that all early Christians thought that infanticide was wrong. What I'm not sure about was whether they thought infanticide made somebody a moral monster. If invited to a respectable party (obeying Paul's instruction to not ask whether the meat was previously sacrificed to idols) and finding that a known infanticide had also been invited, would they have treated the invitation as if they'd been invited to dine with a murderer condemned by general society?
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by OliviaG:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The pro-choice case is based on the fact that there are a large number of cases in which bearing a child is a source of hardship and distress to the pregnant woman. ...
No, it isn't. There are plenty of other reasons why a person would be pro-choice. OliviaG
There aren't any other reasons that are worth anything.
The page you pointed too lists a lot of counterarguments against anti-abortion arguments. It seems to rather hope that the case for abortion goes by default.
The only thing amounting to a positive argument I can find are these two:
quote:
The fetus is totally dependent on the body of the woman for its life support and is physically attached to her by the placenta and umbilicus. The health of the fetus is directly related to the health of the pregnant woman. Only at birth are they separate.
quote:
Margaret Sanger said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.” This concept is fundamental for women.
Is this a concept that's supposed to be fundamental for all humans, or is it something that only applies to women?
I'm rather resistant to this kind of argument. It starts out as if it's only about abortion, and then before you know it it's turned into full-fledged Objectivist nonsense about parasites and abolishing the welfare state. The kind of autonomy and control over one's body that are being appealed to are fantasies that make Objectivism half-way plausible. They might work for angels. They don't work for placental mammals.
The baby on being born does not suddenly become a full-fledged adult human being feeding himself (sic) solely by his (sic) own hard work hunting mammoths.(*) The baby is still absolutely dependent on other human beings. If all the adults around it fall ill, the baby isn't going to thrive either. All that's changed is that the baby is no longer dependent on one specific adult.
Thought experiment: if humanity develops a surgery technique that allows the foetus to be transferred along with the placenta to another woman's womb, would that suddenly alter the legality of abortion?
Thought experiment: does a siamese twin have the right to kill her twin?
The website is also rather insistent that opposition to abortion is a religious matter, because personhood is not a proven biological fact. I wasn't aware that any criteria for when killing a human being becomes morally impermissible was a proven biological fact. It's not as if there's a good secular argument to which dogmatic religious believers are the only dissenters.
The argument that the right to not be killed should start at conception(**) is simply that the foetus is identifiably the same entity as the adult human being. That's a purely secular argument. It doesn't depend on the Bible (the Bible says nothing particularly to the point) and the Pope has not made any ex cathedra pronouncements on the matter.
If you take the right to life to start elsewhere, I can think of three secular candidates.
Capacity for pain. I don't see that this justifies right to life. It justifies right to not have pain inflicted, but it does nothing to rule out, for example, painless killing of adults. If the army lets off a bomb next to an adult human being, the human being has no time to feel it. That doesn't make it acceptable.
Viabilty/independence Quite apart from the fact that this seems to make the morality of abortion dependent on the state of technology available, I don't think anybody actually advocates it consistently. As far as I'm aware, no legislature allows for induced labour as a substitute for abortion once the foetus has passed the somewhat arbitrary viability threshhold. Yet if people really took the viability argument seriously then they would. Also, the viability/independent argument is inherently suspect for reasons given earlier.
Ability to consent or some other form of personhood Really if this isn't to amount to subjective impressions, it doesn't come to anything until the child is at least able to speak. And probably not until the child is able to make and hold promises.
If we're to take the secularist objection to religious believers imposing their beliefs on other people seriously, then the right to life shouldn't start until the child is capable of participating for their own right in the hypothetical social contract.
Anyway, that's all slightly off the point.
If something is an argument for abortion it must be able to function as an argument for a particular abortion. The positive reasons for legalising abortion are simply that there are situations in which women might legitimately want to have an abortion. The reason that the woman has an abortion is the reason in favour of legalising abortion in general.
(*) For that matter, most Objectivists can't support themselves by their own hard work hunting mammoths.
(**) Strictly, this should be point beyond which identical twins and chimerism become impossible.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
It should also be noted that those in favor of banning abortion are typically not the type to consider an extensive range of exonerating circumstances valid for most other crimes.
That is of course true. It would seem that they're holding a set of three beliefs that together are mutually contradictory:
1) Abortion is murder.(*)
2) There are extenuating or exonerating circumstances that apply to abortion.
3) Few or no circumstances extenuate or exonerate any other crimes.
Of those three beliefs, I think 3) is the most pernicious and the one I'd soonest see people reject. I'd prefer someone's commitment to 2) made them give up 3) than the other way around.
(*) For the sake of argument, assume that they mean murder specifically.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Thought experiment: if humanity develops a surgery technique that allows the foetus to be transferred along with the placenta to another woman's womb, would that suddenly alter the legality of abortion?
First off, such a procedure as you describe would involve aborting the pregnancy. Secondly, we don't have to conjure hypotheticals like that in a society where organ transplants exist. For example, does someone who needs a transplant have a legally enforceable right to a lobe of someone else's liver? If we assume that the state can't force the "donor" to surrender the use of other organs, why is the uterus an exception?
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Invictus_88:
They are morally equivalent in that they are "the morally wrong destruction of a human life", but ethics and the consideration of sin goes much further than that.
[...]
There is, as you hopefully see, an area of discussion where objective differences between abortion and murder can be discussed, without conflating the two together as "murder" (and so as equal/the same) and thus confusing the real issue.
I don't follow you. Possibly because I have an illiterate understanding of ethics. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Your first post seemed to be asserting that there was no contradiction between holding that abortion and murder were morally equivalent, but treating them differently because of a non-moral factor: visceral horror. I disagreed.
Now you appear to be saying that they are not in fact morally equivalent (except in one limited respect), for sound moral reasons (murder is the destruction of a personality, abortion is not). What on earth have I written on this thread which makes you think that I would disagree with that?
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
On the other hand, to the extent that "hardship" or "distress" are considered legitimate mitigating circumstances it's because they're considered to diminish the capacity for moral judgment. Arguing that these apply generally to all women, or even just to all pregnant women, seems to be an argument that women in general have a diminished moral capacity.
That seems a rather implausible principle.
Someone steals a wallet because he or she's starving. They shouldn't be prosecuted, not because hardship has impaired their moral capacity, but because that's not morally wrong.
Someone mugs someone for their wallet and kills them by accident because he's starving. Now, morally one's not permitted to mug people even if one's starving. But it's still not quite as culpable as if one's not starving. Not because moral capacity is impaired, but because non-moral reasons are comparatively more important to someone who's starving than to someone who's healthy.
A woman kills her abusive husband with a kitchen knife while he's eating dinner. That's not strictly self-defence. (I believe most cases in which abusive husbands are not strictly self-defence.) Now, I don't think it ought to be permissible to kill people under those circumstances. But I still think the law ought to go lightly on such cases. That doesn't mean I think that the woman has diminished moral responsibility.
Anyway, punishment may be permitted for retributive reasons but it's not solely justified by retributive reasons. Someone who kills a child under distress or hardship is less likely to need rehabilitation than someone who does so because they want to marry a rich spouse.
Now most anti-abortion campaigners may adhere to a purely retributive view of punishment in other areas of life. But if so, I'd rather they became consistent in extending their acceptance of rehabilitation rather than in restricting it.
quote:
Working from a real-world example, I can't really see anyone making the argument that Susan Smith would have been immune from prosecution if she'd hired a professional killer to murder her children instead of doing it herself.
I'd rather not work from real-world examples like this, because the endemic sexism of the media obscures rather than clarifies. And we don't know what reasons were really going through her head. (Self-reporting isn't necessarily reliable.)
A couple of points: I don't think pro-choice campaigners are claiming that aborting so as to be free to marry a rich spouse is the primary reason for abortion in most women. I'd feel that the law ought to be more lenient if a woman put her youngest child in the back of the car because she couldn't pay the bills for her oldest three. Not that I'd think that made it ok, but it makes it less not ok.
The law is a blunt instrument. There's a case for setting it up so that there's a presumption of leniency for abortion and a presumption of severity for infanticide, depending on what cases the legislature thinks more likely to obtain and so on.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Can I ask you to consider a bit further? By comparison, I would certainly regard a contemporary who I knew owned slaves with moral loathing, while I wouldn't regard Washington or Jefferson with the same loathing. In the same way, pagan greeks and romans regarded infanticide as acceptable (although I think they preferred to expose babies rather than actually kill them). Now, living in a society that's been broadly Christian since Aidan and Cuthbert and Augustine, that seems a fairly obnoxious attitude. But would a Christian who lived in pagan Rome have been able to feel the same way? ... (For that matter, do you really regard someone like Hetty from Adam Bede with great loathing?)
I'm not sure I answered the question you asked, in fact. I was answering from the perspective of me (with my background and expectations unchanged) being somehow displaced into an infanticidal society. Yes, it would be different if I had grown up in such a society and begun to question its ethics from within - I'm just not sure exactly how different.
I agree with what I think is your point - cultural expectations do influence our moral judgments, not only in what we find immoral, but in what we find shocking, monstrous and abominable. A sin which is acknowledged to be a sin, but which practically everyone does will may be condemned, or discouraged, or even punished, but will not usually be reviled.
The specific cases:
Washington/Jefferson - Actually, I disagree on this one. I'm not a historian of the period, but I think that there was enough information, divergence of practice, and controversy at the time for a slave-holder to perceive that his slaves were fellow human beings, with pleasures, pains and aspirations like his own, and whose happiness, hopes and dignity were being injured against their will in the cause of the owner's enrichment. Is anyone going to suggest that either Washington or Jefferson were such a dullard as to lack the capacity to be able to perceive this? Or that they were moral cowards and conformists who, even if they perceived it, were psychologically unable to differ from their neighbours on the issue? That would strike me as somewhat unlikely. I suppose I agree, though, they were not in today's position, where slavery is illegal and condemned by the whole of society, so that to revive it would be an innovation in wickedness.
Greeks and Romans infanticide - The problem here is that the mindset in which killing a baby or abandoning it to die as a deliberate, unforced, decision is even possible is alien to me. Perhaps they didn't think that an unwanted baby was a "person" with independent rights at all. If so, the case is almost parallel to modern abortion - the difference being that (as I'm trying to explore in this thread) moral opposition to abortion does not have to be, and often is not, based on a recognition of the foetus's personhood, which is a grey area, whereas for ancient infanticide, possibly the question was not "when does an infant become a person?" but "when does this infant acquire moral autonomy such that it is no longer fully subject to my will?". Point taken that the moral climate must have been so different that modern opinions cannot be a good guide to ancient culpability.
Hetty - The same cannot be said for Adam Bede's world. Infanticide is not acceptable there - on the contrary it is a capital crime. And Hetty knows that. She knows that society will condemn her for it. She knows that her baby is capable of suffering. She is capable of being deeply upset by its cries. She leaves it with the expectation that it will die, but deludes herself, and supresses her conscience with the (wholly unfounded) hope that "someone" might find and save the child, though she takes no steps whatever to bring this about. She thereby acknowledges that the baby has the right to live, and that it would be very much in its interests to be rescued from the deadly situation in which she has placed it. She has, in fact, all the necessary data to know that she is undertaking the murder of another human being. I don't think that there is any question about what she did being wrong. She does, of course, do it while in great distress, when she is almost suicidal, and where the baby represents her certain ruin. There is definitely a question about whether she is entirely in her right mind at the time. But if one thought that she acted with full moral responsibility and awareness, I think it would be an inescapeable conclusion that this was a monstrous and loathesome act.
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Thought experiment: if humanity develops a surgery technique that allows the foetus to be transferred along with the placenta to another woman's womb, would that suddenly alter the legality of abortion?
First off, such a procedure as you describe would involve aborting the pregnancy.
It would indeed. But I don't think anyone has an objection to aborting the pregnancy as such. What people say they object to, as far as I'm aware, is aborting the pregnancy in such a way as to kill the foetus or result in its death.
quote:
Secondly, we don't have to conjure hypotheticals like that in a society where organ transplants exist.
Actually we do, because organ transplants don't raise the particular question we're looking at.
In English law, once the foetus is over 24 weeks it's considered viable on its own. And therefore abortion becomes illegal. But, as far as I'm aware, you're not allowed to induce labour deliberately. (Someone correct me on this.) This pos
quote:
For example, does someone who needs a transplant have a legally enforceable right to a lobe of someone else's liver? If we assume that the state can't force the "donor" to surrender the use of other organs, why is the uterus an exception?
The analogy isn't: may the state force the donor to give up their kidney or other organ? The analogy is: the donor having already donated the kidney and the kidney having already been transplanted, is the donor entitled to forcibly reclaim their organ? Should the operation to remove the organ to replace it in the original donor be inevitably lethal, is the recipient entitled to the protection of the state in preventing the forcible removal of the organ?
Your analogy.
If as a result of an administrative or surgical error in hospital I wake up from anaesthetic to find that a lobe of my liver has already been removed and transplanted and is now in another patient who will die if it is removed from them and replaced, no I do not think I have any right to remove the liver from the recipient, and yes, the other patient is entitled to the protection of the state should I attempt to forcibly remove it. I am entitled to claim compensation from the hospital, but not from the recipient.
Do you disagree?
Let's consider a different scenario. Imagine that:
a) it didn't require invasive surgery to remove a kidney. Indeed, there was a chance that a kidney could be 'donated' without any intervention whenever somebody engaged in certain everyday (though non-essential) activities;
b) it did require medical intervention to return the kidney to the original 'donor';
c) the 'donation' wasn't permanent: the kidney returned after a bit under a year;
d) the 'donor' had in every case themselves received a 'donation', and had they not received such a 'donation' in no case would they still be alive.
I think all of the above would alter our moral intuitions about the case.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
But if one thought that she acted with full moral responsibility and awareness, I think it would be an inescapeable conclusion that this was a monstrous and loathesome act.
I agree that it's a monstrous and loathesome thing to do. Whether it makes the person in question a monstrous and loathesome person is another matter.
Hetty is not an admirable person certainly. she's vain and foolish. Nor is Effie Deans from The Heart of Midlothian admirable. But I think we feel that when Dinah visits Hetty, or still more, when Jeanie walks to Edinburgh for a pardon, we don't think that they're expending compassion or moral energy on someone on whom it is either corrupt or saintly to spend it.
Looked at from an act-centred morality, killing a baby is a horrible thing to do. From an agent-centred perspective one would say that someone might do it, under those particular circumstances, without thereby being so far below ordinary standards of virtue as to be unacceptable.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Joan_of_Quark
Anchoress of St Expedite
# 9887
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Let's consider a different scenario. Imagine that:
a) it didn't require invasive surgery to remove a kidney. Indeed, there was a chance that a kidney could be 'donated' without any intervention whenever somebody engaged in certain everyday (though non-essential) activities;
b) it did require medical intervention to return the kidney to the original 'donor';
c) the 'donation' wasn't permanent: the kidney returned after a bit under a year;
d) the 'donor' had in every case themselves received a 'donation', and had they not received such a 'donation' in no case would they still be alive.
I think all of the above would alter our moral intuitions about the case.
(d) might need a bit of refinement?
- in every case, the donor's own donation happened before they could be said to have made a choice about it
- everyone in the population has received a donation, but people in one arbitrary half (the brown-eyes vs. the blue-eyes) will never be called upon to make a donation, in spite of the fact that they too have received same
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"I want to be an artist when I grow up." "Well you can't do both!"
further quarkiness
Posts: 1025 | From: The Book Depository | Registered: Jul 2005
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sharkshooter
Not your average shark
# 1589
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Thought experiment: if humanity develops a surgery technique that allows the foetus to be transferred along with the placenta to another woman's womb, would that suddenly alter the legality of abortion?
First off, such a procedure as you describe would involve aborting the pregnancy.
It would indeed. ...
Likewise, a C-section is also aborting a pregnancy. I don't expect anyone would argue that a c-section is similar to, or should be referred to as, an abortion.
Going a bit back, I am one who believes there is no difference between an abortion doctor and a serial murderer.
That being said, I don't think vigilante justice is appropriate in either case, even if the law of the land disagrees with me and prosecutes/punishes one and not the other. Justice, in this case, will rest with God, and I trust Him to be better at it than me, and better than our justice systems.
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Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer. [Psalm 19:14]
Posts: 7772 | From: Canada; Washington DC; Phoenix; it's complicated | Registered: Oct 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
Going a bit back, I am one who believes there is no difference between an abortion doctor and a serial murderer.
Oh come on.
Even granting that what the abortionist is doing something that is morally equivalent to killing a human child, it doesn't follow that the abortionist is morally culpable in the way that someone who kills toddlers would be. Suppose a Nazi thinks that killing Jewish toddlers doesn't amount to killing children: the Nazi's reasons for thinking that are essentially morally corrupt - nobody could reason themselves into such a belief without moral corruption. Even granting that the abortionist is making intellectual errors they're not rooted in moral corruption in the same way.
People who bombed civilian targets in the Second World War, whether using conventional or nuclear weapons, certainly killed children. Again, even if you think they were morally wrong to do so (I do), they're not morally equivalent to someone who sets out to kill toddlers in person.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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sharkshooter
Not your average shark
# 1589
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Posted
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Originally posted by Dafyd:
... Again, even if you think they were morally wrong to do so (I do), they're not morally equivalent to someone who sets out to kill toddlers in person.
They make a living from killing humans. So, perhaps I should have compared the abortionist to an assassin?
Does that make it better for you?
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Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer. [Psalm 19:14]
Posts: 7772 | From: Canada; Washington DC; Phoenix; it's complicated | Registered: Oct 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
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Originally posted by Joan_of_Quark:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
d) the 'donor' had in every case themselves received a 'donation', and had they not received such a 'donation' in no case would they still be alive.
I think all of the above would alter our moral intuitions about the case.
(d) might need a bit of refinement?
- in every case, the donor's own donation happened before they could be said to have made a choice about it
- everyone in the population has received a donation, but people in one arbitrary half (the brown-eyes vs. the blue-eyes) will never be called upon to make a donation, in spite of the fact that they too have received same
True. Do those refinements make any serious kind of moral difference though?
The second one is the more interesting. The fact that some people are receiving a benefit that they're never going to be called upon to pass on is unfair. Whether that unfairness affects the transaction between the donor and recipient is another matter. It does affect the relationship between the blue eyes and the brown eyes, especially if, despite the brown eyes never 'donating', the brown eyes has to be around in order to trigger the 'donation'.
Basically, the organ donation analogy doesn't prove what Croesos wanted it to prove. But there's a fundamental flaw with the whole project of analogy. The vehicle in any analogy involves some kind of extreme medical intervention if it isn't completely sf or fantastical. But human reproductive biology isn't fantasy. It's what we are. We'd be a completely different species with an unimaginably different culture if our reproductive biology was any different.
You use the phrase 'people in an arbitrary half'. 'Arbitrary' is a strange word here. It's hardly a coincidence which half gets pregnant. You couldn't explain the differences between men and women to an intelligent alien without explaining human reproductive biology.
The flaw in the debate could be expressed by saying that an intelligent alien could read screeds of abortion debate from both sides without learning what a placental mammal is. Both sides argue as if what we fundamentally are is angels or pod people or something else entirely asexual. I said on the Ship a few years ago the anti-abortion side think we aren't placental mammals, and the pro-choice side think being a placental mammal is a ghastly imposition.
Now just because we start with those facts doesn't mean that we should put up with them. (As pointed out, if fairness applies then they're not fair. Exhibit A in the case against intelligent design.) Obviously, a just society tries to mitigate the unfairness. But how a just society should do so is not really addressed by the rhetoric.
(It's certainly not addressed by anyone using far-right libertarian arguments on either side.)
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sharkshooter:
They make a living from killing humans. So, perhaps I should have compared the abortionist to an assassin?
Does that make it better for you?
No. Soldiers, for example, make a living from killing humans, and we don't think they're morally equivalent to assassins.
Strictly soldiers don't have to actually kill humans to be paid. But I doubt you would revise your judgement if abortionists were employed on the same basis as soldiers.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I agree that it's a monstrous and loathesome thing to do. Whether it makes the person in question a monstrous and loathesome person is another matter.
Hetty is not an admirable person certainly. she's vain and foolish. Nor is Effie Deans from The Heart of Midlothian admirable. But I think we feel that when Dinah visits Hetty, or still more, when Jeanie walks to Edinburgh for a pardon, we don't think that they're expending compassion or moral energy on someone on whom it is either corrupt or saintly to spend it.
Looked at from an act-centred morality, killing a baby is a horrible thing to do. From an agent-centred perspective one would say that someone might do it, under those particular circumstances, without thereby being so far below ordinary standards of virtue as to be unacceptable.
I think I agree with all of that. Could you spell out the application to abortion as being (or not) comparable to murder, to see if we disagree there?
For me, there are all sorts of things that lessen personal culpability for murder, or which make the fact of a murder less shocking to my emotions. Not all murders are the same: I can't read a newspaper report of someone who, say, shoots a fleeing burglar, or bludgeons an abusive or unfaithful spouse, with the same incomprehension and horror as I would that of a rapist who kills his victim, or even the cold-blooded elimination of a rival in business or crime.
The same applies to abortion as well. Some situations so plainly evoke sympathy that even though I think abortion generally wrong, I find it easy to see why an ordinarily virtuous person would have one. Others, not so much.
The difference is that the act itself changes how I regard those various situations. An example (and it may be a peculiarity of mine, I accept) is that I can very easily see how a victim of adultery could be so deeply hurt that, without being any more wicked than many quite decent people, they react with sudden and deadly violence. I'm sympathetic. I still think it is murder. I wouldn't dream of proposing that the law of murder should contain an exemption allowing the culling of adulterers. I would hope that personal shock and grief gets taken into account in sentencing (as it should for any crime) but the point is that such personal mitigation is relevant because it (partially) explains how a not-exceptionally-wicked person could commit an act which, if it had no excuse, would be in the top rank of wickedness.
For abortion, the act itself, quite apart from any of the reasons for doing it, seems less obviously and less seriously wrong. So I can (and many pro-lifers in fact do) suggest that all the excuses that make a decision to abort immediately comprehensible (health risk, disability, rape...) should actually be exceptions to a ban on abortion, whereas almost no one thinks that the strongest temptations for murdering should be complete exceptions to that law. And I can, for instance, rationally say "I thoroughly disapprove of her reasons for having an abortion, but I suppose it's her decision to make" and everyone, even if they disagreed, would understand how I could say it. That's not true about murder.
It seems to me that the judgement that abortion is (morally speaking) comparable to murder is not a natural or obvious one, and it actually requires some quite involved and non-intuitive thinking to get to that conclusion. Having a religious conviction that the most important part of a person is a non-material soul probably helps to get there (though even that does not lead there inexorably). I think it is unfortunate that this question dominates so much of the debate as the central assertion of the pro-life position, when in fact there is a whole range of broadly anti-abortion arguments to make which seem to me to sit rather uneasily with the proposition that abortion is murder.
[ 20. June 2011, 11:43: Message edited by: Eliab ]
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005
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George Spigot
Outcast
# 253
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Posted
I got some pro-life rhetoric for yah. Trailer for the movie The Life Zone. Warning some may find this disturbing. I know I did
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn_Iq9D_Clg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Spoiler: Women are held captive by sadistic doctors for wanting abortions, and forced to carry their babies to term. In the end it is revealled that they all died during their abortions and the "prison" was purgatory. The women who choose to keep the babies go to heaven, the woman who still doesn't want her baby is sent to he'll.
I bet this piece of sick and twisted rubbish is already being shown to youth groups. Bastards.
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C.S. Lewis's Head is just a tool for the Devil. (And you can quote me on that.) ~
Philip Purser Hallard
http://www.thoughtplay.com/infinitarian/gbsfatb.html
Posts: 1625 | From: Derbyshire - England | Registered: May 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
I think I agree with all of that. Could you spell out the application to abortion as being (or not) comparable to murder, to see if we disagree there?
I've been ventriloquising, - my personal views consist largely of being not sure what the applications are. (I'm pretty sure that I don't think abortion is morally equivalent to murder in any useful sense myself.)
As I said above, I personally think that the law isn't solely there to dish out moral retribution. Just because two acts are morally equivalent doesn't mean that they should be legally equivalent. That an act is morally wrong (under some description) is a necessary justification for making it illegal but not a sufficient justification. You have to show that punishing it also serves some other purpose. It might be deterrence; it might be rehabilitation of the criminal.
If an anti-abortion campaigner thinks that making performing an abortion illegal would deter but that making requesting an abortion illegal wouldn't deter, and if they're unwilling for the state to pay for rehabilitation or don't think rehabilitation is needed, then they might judge that there's no point in making it illegal.
I don't think that theory of the law is one held by most anti-abortion campaigners. But I'd regard it as a good thing if it were.
Rather, I suspect the underlying sentiment is actually that anti-abortion campaigners can see how someone like them might be desperate and would do it, and are therefore basing their reactions off the sentiment that people like them oughtn't to be punished. They can't understand how someone like them could set up as an abortionist, so punishing abortionists is fine. That's not a very creditable or principled sentiment, but my impression is people work that way much of the time.
[ 21. June 2011, 12:13: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Joan_of_Quark
Anchoress of St Expedite
# 9887
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by George Spigot:
I got some pro-life rhetoric for yah. Trailer for the movie The Life Zone. Warning some may find this disturbing. I know I did
I managed to watch about half of that trailer. If anyone here is recruiting Angry Young Ladies to overthrow the patriarchy, they could do worse than to hand out copies of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" to girls coming out of the cinema, and follow up with a home visit and a free Kalashnikov a week later.
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"I want to be an artist when I grow up." "Well you can't do both!"
further quarkiness
Posts: 1025 | From: The Book Depository | Registered: Jul 2005
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Louise
Shipmate
# 30
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by George Spigot:
I got some pro-life rhetoric for yah. Trailer for the movie The Life Zone. Warning some may find this disturbing. I know I did
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn_Iq9D_Clg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Spoiler: Women are held captive by sadistic doctors for wanting abortions, and forced to carry their babies to term. In the end it is revealled that they all died during their abortions and the "prison" was purgatory. The women who choose to keep the babies go to heaven, the woman who still doesn't want her baby is sent to he'll.
I bet this piece of sick and twisted rubbish is already being shown to youth groups. Bastards.
George,
This thread is aimed at discussing a more nuanced approach to thinking about abortion Life's Dominion by Ronald Dworkin (see the OP). I cannot think of any way in which that is helped by posting a link to a highly-provocative trailer for a film. Could you not start a separate thread for that, and give the discussion on this thread a chance to flourish without being derailed? Or better still that would make a good Hell post.
cheers,
Louise
(not posting as host)
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Posts: 6918 | From: Scotland | Registered: May 2001
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