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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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It's the conservative way. They hold these traditions sacred.
I suspect that being born from the wrong vagina is a crime for those people.
It just explains so many things: from their criminalization of abortion whilst taking State support away from poor single mothers to emprisioning kids who don't have a mommy and daddy with the right connections or who can afford the kind of lawyer who would extract a massive compensations from everybody involved in putting a kid in prision like this.
Literally there's an aspect of Evangelicalism and the "Prosperity Gospel" that portrays poor people as inherently sinful and evil, and it's not just limited to those aspects of Christianity:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_poverty_and_wealth
Then you read the Bible and like almost all the references to the rich are negative and like where the heck do people even get this crap from.
Hippie socialist Jesus > Supply-Side Republican/Conservative Jesus
Any educated and intelligent person should see that the prosperity gospel is just greed promotion disguised as religious edicts.
I've run audio for maybe a dozen Prosperity gospel events over the course of my career.. Those people are some of the scummiest people I've ever met in rl. The "preachers" usually have a group of thugs acting as security that will run interference for anyone that questions what they're preaching. I've seen people get literally dragged out and then heard, after the fact, that the "security" team "taught them a lesson". The crowd was shocked that someone was aggressively dragged out at "church" until the preacher spun the victim as someone with the devil in them, then everyone would be nodding their heads with a panicked look like "are we ok with this?.. I guess..". Fucking surreal. Also, these people would try to dodge as many bills as they could. On several of the ones I did, the "church" stiffed the AV company I was working for on a $30k+ production.
Yeah I am actually really curious how they explain that, if anyone has a genuine answer.
There is so much talk in the Bible about riches and wealth and being rewarded for being a good Christian but my memory serves that it's referencing the holy spirit or rather the relationship with God is rewarding in and of itself and that the riches and all that is in the afterlife.
And every time I recall it talking about wealth on earth it is vilified and you're supposed to give it away. And of course there this famous quote
Anyway yeah I'm curious how people can teach this aspect of the Bible with such a contradicting incorrect interpretation. I argue that it's a contradicting book in itself all the time but wealth is not one I recall. We have hated the wealthy for millenia lol
Pretty sure avoiding "being born from the wrong vagina" is a popular defense of abortion among liberals.
"It just explains so many things" When you're a moron any description of a cause will suffice for the outcome.
I am pretty sure that body autonomy and a women being able to make her own choices about when to start a family are why we support a woman's right to choose.
There is a multitude of reasons why people support abortion. One of the common arguments is that it is better to not exist than to be born poor or to parents that don't want you (I.e literally the "born to the wrong vagina" argument). This is a widely supported belief and I would say that around 20 percent of pro-choice people I've debated (out of hundreds) use it as their primary argument.
Asserting that there is a single reason why people hold a position is absurd.
FYI bodily autonomy arguments have largely been abandoned in academic ethics, because there is just no existing right to bodily autonomy that is sufficiently strong, and we have no basis for arguing that there should be.
Absolutely Parents who do not want to have a baby should not be forced to carry one to term. It ain't some angel that came down and inhabited the womb that should be laminted as lost.
"It ain't some angel"
But it's a human, and we don't find engaging in active killing of humans permissible do we?
I also love that as a pretty open atheist, PC will constantly try to insinuate a religious motivation (even though most PL religious people don't use the ensoulment argument either).
Maybe that's just because it makes sense to not want a massive amount of expenses in a life where they may have trouble taking care of themselves already.
You really act like it's a bad thing to not have children if you can't financially take care of them.
And none of these have to do with targeted killing of human organisms based solely on the circumstances of their conception?
You don't get to play "the conservatives want to kill and imprison poor children" card, when pro-choice liberals celebrate the exact same thing (not pro-life ones like me).
"You really act like it's a bad thing to not have children if you can't financially take care of them"
This argument falls in the same category of logic error that the "abortion is good because it prevents children from being poor" that I am refuting.
The fact that it is bad for people to be poor, does not follow that they should therefore be deprived of existence, because existence is not the cause of suffering but the poverty. When someone says "I wish I wasn't poor", they are NOT saying "I wish I didn't exist" because they could easily make that happen. They are wishing that they had less hardship.
Likewise your argument is also a failure at descriptivism. Not having children for financial reasons, is not immoral. Abortion is not just "not having children", it is an active deprivation of all future experiences of an existing human organism. That's why it's immoral. (And yes trying to argue that fetuses aren't people is insufficient since one can argue from idealized persons {e.g we don't kill mentally ill suicidal people because an idealized person wouldn't want to die, in other words the immediate condition of the human is gladly ignored), or cases of temporary loss of personhood (regardless of how you define it) which would permit killing many if not all adults.
Point is, it's not immoral no matter how much you cry about it now stay out of other peoples lives.
Pretty sure I can rigorously prove that you accept moral principles, empirical facts and a logical system that determines that abortion is infact immoral, you simply never bothered to analyze it.
"Now stay out of other people's lives"
Can you imagine what a horrible (dare I say immoral?) world you would have if immoral actions could not be restricted? Next time someone wrongs you remember that you are the real perpetrator for expecting them to follow your conception of morality.
Not the original poster, but I would enjoy seeing you rigorously prove that pro-choice views are incoherent. My views:
All human beings should have a right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to deny the use of their body to anyone, even if the person who is using their body is doing so in order to survive, and even if they've previously permitted that person to use their body. If the use can be ended without killing either party, that should be preferred, but if not, then the person being used should still be able to withdraw access.
The real world is messy, obviously, so we have some ambiguity, but in general, this is the guideline.
Easy, define a form of bodily autonomy that permits forcing conscious action upon an individual (this is the basis for many laws^1^ ), but not prohibiting the individual from engaging in an action to override an already occurring unconscious process.
This is necessary because the former is the description of what many morally accepted laws already do, and the latter is a description of what prohibiting abortion is.
In other words this is the exact definition that we need to show is correct to justify abortion on the grounds of bodily control.
Except we can't, and it's obvious why. Saying "you must do X" is clearly stronger than saying "you cannot stop Y from continuing to happen". So we already accept a greater violation of bodily autonomy as good, and the abortion defence is actually contradictory.
We can resolve this by rejecting one of the premises. So which one do you want to reject? The one that is the basis for societal rules, or the one that allows killing humans?
As I already pointed out the bodily autonomy argument is essentially completely rejected in ethics, it's only popular because of Thompson's deeply flawed and overly simplistic paper (primarily because it already assumes that such a form of bodily autonomy already exists).
The first half of what you said is difficult to understand and I'm probably going to need you to simplify it for me.
For the last part- you don't believe that there's any moral difference between:
?
And, follow up question - is a fertilized egg a person in this example? If not, at what point does it become one and have moral weight, in your view?
This is an incorrect phrasing of the situation. The actual question is what moral principles do we already accept? Which ones are more fundamental than others. Instead you are literally affirming the consequent by presupposing that bodily autonomy is morally relevant.(Otherwise,if that's not what you are doing,your phraseology is just bizarre)
Laws force people to use their body regardless of how they feel about it. We agree that it is moral.
Prohibiting abortion is denying the ability to perform an action. We assert that this is immoral.
However, forcing an action is stronger than denying an action. So which premise is wrong? Is it the one that leads societal rules unenforceable, or the one that makes a quarter of the population temporarily unhappy?
There is also the extrinsic teleological argument that pregnancy isn't a violation anymore than your pancreas producing insulin. A belief can be irrational if it contradicts a biological function.
"Would a fertilised egg be human"
As long as it is a separate entity that is living and functional with a probability of future conscious experience. Note, that I don't make the unique DNA distinction because that would render killing clones permissible.
Now unlike some people I don't think that all abortion is immoral, just one's where we have a reasonable expectation of future human experience so long as we do not take action to reduce this expectation. Like how rendering someone brain-dead so you can kill them is just a more elaborate active killing , something like drinking alcohol to render your fetus brain dead is also active killing.
Why?
Do you consider a fertilized egg to have the same moral weight as a person?
Because denying an action is simply requiring that the existing circumstance continue, while forcing an action is to require that the person engage in a conscious action (to specify, it's a stronger control over someone else's body).
"Do you consider a fertilised egg to have the same moral weight as a person"
I already answered this more generally, fertilisation is not the revelant part it is that it is a distinct organism with a reasonable expectation of future conscious experience. Many fertilised eggs do meet this standard, but not all. Likewise fertilised eggs are not the only things that meet this standard. Things like pluripotent stem cells that are being created to form fetuses, also meet this standard.
(I strongly suspect that you are fishing for a specific response, which you find absurd despite ultimately accepting all the premises.)
I'm not. I thought you were pretty clear, but I wanted to check. I'm sort of exploring what you believe, rather than fishing for anything in particular.
So, in your view, if a building were burning, and inside was an artificial womb of some sort with twenty viable eggs that will eventually become people, then would there be a moral duty to save them over one five-year-old child?
Do you believe that it isn't?
The "burning IVF clinic" is a poor instance of analogous reasoning. The reasons why one would save a 5-year old, are not fundamental moral principles but purely psychological. One would save friends or attractive people first as well, this does not grant them greater moral value.
Even if we don't consider it to be purely emotional preference, the "triage" rebuttal can hold as well. I.e the fact that we choose a 5-year old is that their value is more immediately apparent, even if we have no reason to believe them to be more morally valuable.
"You don't believe that it isn't"
The problem here is that if you want to show that something is true, you can't rely on premises being true that require the conclusion to be true. It just becomes a useless tautology that provided no additional information.
How do you identify when a moral rule is a fundamental principle versus a psychological preference?
In your view, is someone who saves twenty viable eggs over a five year old a more moral person than someone who does the reverse? (in some sort of ideal sense, regardless of whether anyone would do this or not)
I don't think that I'm engaging in any circular reasoning. I'm not trying to argue that bodily autonomy is good- I'm making the base assumption that bodily autonomy is good and should be treated as a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of a lot of moral intuitions that I have. That's not any more circular or arbitrary than any other moral principle.
EDIT: Also, I appreciate you getting back to me, and in case we don't talk again until after the holidays, Merry Christmas!
"I'm making the base assumption"
Right, which is the problem... When you are trying to establish if something exists you don't assume that it's already true.
You have actually presented zero argument that bodily autonomy is a right, so we really have no basis for assuming it is. Even if you try to make personal rights arguments this can be refuted as a failed descriptivist argument. Are medical decisions being left to the individual due to a inherent right to bodily control, or the fact that people who are directly affected by a decision chose better outcomes? The bodily autonomy argument does not account for why we think it is good to deny people the ability to make poor medical decisions (i.e children, the mentally handicapped, ignorant people, or in the case of prescriptions anyone without sufficient knowledge). The latter argument does.
"A more moral person"
I think I already answered the question. Both individuals are acting morally by saving others, although saving more people is a better outcome.
"How do you determine when it's a moral principle and a psychological preference"
This is a difficult question. Some cases are apparently obvious, like saving attractive people. In general the problem is searching for the answer that best satisfies our intuitions about morality and reasoning. The primary argument for when a feeling is insufficient, is if the basis for it is too complex. The purpose of a moral system is to provide a set of rules and methodology to determine if an action is morally good or not (otherwise we would just rely on spontaneous feelings, with all the problems of individualistic moral relativism), it does not make sense to rely on feelings about a morally complex action to override a more fundamental principle. At some point you have to say that your feelings about something are not morally relevant.
Where do rights come from, in your view?
Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life?
"Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life"
And just like that....the personhood argument. Remember what I said about every abortion argument boiling down to denying (or affirming) the moral value of a fetus?
Of course if I'm going to be rude, I'll take your statement literally and point out that fetuses are categorically both humans AND existing life so your attempt at distinction fails.
Now what you probably mean is "why does an undeveloped human have the same right to life as a fully grown human". It comes from a descriptivist argument of the wrongness of killing. If it is not permissible to kill adult people on the basis of future conscious experience, then this also applies to fetuses because they too have future conscious experiences.
Now the problem is showing that future conscious experience is the core reason for the wrongness of killing. It's descriptively very powerful, it accounts for the permissibility of letting brain-dead individuals die (or even actively killing them), the impermissibility of killing temporarily unconscious persons, and the impermissibility of active killing of temporarily suicidal persons (the later problem is also fatal to Boonin's cortical organisation argument, as it is not the current desires of an individual that we have a moral imperative to satisfy but rather an idealised person with desires considered rational. Boonin's argument relies on fetuses not having desires to continue living, but this is simply special pleading; a person lacking desires would not permit them to be killed anyway because of the aforementioned idealised rational desires).
Now we have a moral principle that accounts for all of these clearly immoral acts. When we apply it to abortion, we find that it is also not permitted. So do we reject this principle in favor of all the other principles that allow abortion along with the other active killing that we agree is immoral?
Or do we consider that abortion is a complex decision that is clouded by personal preference, desire for convenience, and ignoring empirical facts in favor of prima facie evaluation? (i.e fetuses don't look or act human, therefore they must not be, contrary to all deeper evaluation).
In other words, it seems highly plausible that our superficial feelings about abortion are NOT morally relevant, and the moral principle that does correctly describe the morality of other active killing is also correctly describing the morality of abortion as well.
Note that it is not necessary for the right to life of a fetus to be equal to an adults to make abortion immoral. It simply has to be sufficiently strong enough to prohibit in convenience cases. Just like how dogs don't have to have the same moral value as humans to prohibit killing them for fun, it just needs to be sufficiently high to outweigh any moral value of the fun.
"Where do rights come from, in your view?"
I already addressed this when talking about determining moral principles. They come from our intuitions about what is wrong and what is logical reasoning.
(1/2)
I'm not making the argument that you think I'm making.
Bodily autonomy as a fundamental right
Bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of my moral intuitions. I intuit that it's wrong to rape. It can't be because of the physical harm, because it's still intuitively wrong to rape someone if you drug them and are gentle. It can't be because of the mental harm, because it's still intuitively wrong to rape them if they're unconscious and will never know. Murder is wrong and remains wrong even if it causes no pain, even if the murdered person is unaware that they are being murdered. In both of these cases, you're using someone else's body without their consent.
This principle, that people should be able to control who can use or modify their body, and for what, is an assumption in the same way that you've described other fundamental moral principles- because it makes sense of our intuitions. Once we derive the principle from our intuitions, we can use it to clarify edge cases. To take one example- assisted suicide. Is it wrong? Bodily autonomy says no. If someone asks you to kill them and they sincerely want to die, then it's not wrong. This is borne out when we compare what the principle says to what we see in society: while there are any number of (valid) concerns involving coercion, informed consent, and mental health, there are also hundreds of stories and legends about human beings helping each other to die. That it happens is tragic, but the act itself is intuitively morally permissible.
To me, the idea that bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle seems fairly obvious, and I think it's obvious to most people when not discussing abortion. If someone is using your body without your consent, you feel morally justified in rejecting them.
My view on abortion
As I said at the start, I'm not making the argument that you think that I'm making. I don't intuitively consider a fertilized egg to be a person, but I do intuitively consider a five-year-old to be a person. I'm not sure where you would draw a line to divide non-person from person and so I don't: I assume that everything from conception onward counts as a person because it seems good to err on the side of granting person-hood when in doubt.
I still support abortion until viability.
We have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. My fundamental moral principle of bodily autonomy says that the person being used can withdraw their consent and reject the use of their body. But, in this case, the user will die if they are rejected. Does the principle still hold? Does one person's right to life trump another person's bodily autonomy? If I concoct alternative scenarios in which the same rights are at odds, my intuitions seem to come down on the side of bodily autonomy.
Some scenarios
The scenarios
Imagine that two people are drowning in the ocean and one can't swim. The non-swimmer clings to the swimmer, who is able to support them both but with an increased risk of drowning. The swimmer finally shrugs off the non-swimmer and the non-swimmer drowns.
I intuitively feel that a virtuous person would have struggled on and done their best to save the non-swimmer. That would be the heroic thing to do. Refusing to support the non-swimmer, however, is morally permissible. This scenario isn't as good an analogy as it could be, because there's no direct bodily violation, but two agents relying on each other to act in particular ways. Lets see if we can find something more directly applicable.
Imagine that one person agrees to have their body surgically connected to another in such a way that their organs will do the work of keeping both people alive. The supporting person finally requests that they be separated again, killing the supported person.
Much as in the previous scenario, I can feel both that the virtuous thing to do would be to soldier on and that it's morally permissible to make the decision to leave the supported person to die- in fact, I feel that it's more morally permissible than in the last scenario. Crucially, in this scenario, one is actually violating the body of the other, rather than relying on them to act in a particular way. What happens if we go the other way?
Imagine that one person is sitting by a pond when they suddenly realize that another person is drowning. They decide that, for whatever reason, they will not act to save the person's life.
I feel that a virtuous person would act to save the drowning person, obviously. My moral intuitions about what should and shouldn't be permissible are torn, in this case. In general, they still grudgingly come down on the side of the person failing to act, but there are caveats and special cases. Looking at the law as a proxy for what society feels on the subject, I see that they mostly agree with me.
My conclusion
In each of these scenarios, one person is refusing to allow their body to be used by another when the life of the other is on the line. In each scenario, my intuitions come down on the side of the person doing the refusing- strongly, when the use is direct and invasive, weakly when it involves independent behavior and action. So bodily autonomy seems to hold as a fundamental principle.
Application To abortion
During a pregnancy, we have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. The mother decides that she no longer wishes to allow the use of her body, and gets an abortion. Much as in the previous examples, I may consider it virtuous to carry the child to term, but I can't deny that she should have the fundamental right to reject the non-consensual use of her body.
At this point, I think it should be clear why I think this.
Abortion, of course, is more than just denying someone the use of your body- it involves killing the fetus as well. If the fetus can't survive on it's own in the world, then arguing about this is, to me, moral hair-splitting. Person or not, killed by a doctor or killed by exposure, the fetus is still dead. Where I deviate from the standard liberal position on abortion is when the fetus can survive on it's own. At that point (and granted, that "point" is more of a gray area), both the mother's right to bodily autonomy and the fetus' right to life can be upheld and it now matters whether the fetus counts as a person.
My rule of thumb, as I said earlier, is to err on the side of person-hood when in doubt and so I think that post-viability abortions are not morally permissible.
Continued In Reply
(2/2)
Conclusion
Your views are incoherent
I've assumed throughout, that a fertilized egg has the same sort of moral weight as a child or an adult human being, for simplicity. I don't actually believe this, however. You apparently do. Why? Because an egg has a "reasonable expectation of future conscious experience"? Pluripotent stem cells, as you said, also meet this standard. If that's the case, so do skin cells, with the appropriate technology. Fertilized eggs, as you also said, don't always meet this standard- I assume because 40% of fertilized eggs fail to implant. So if the only rule you have for what "counts" (has the moral weight of a person) is that it has a "reasonable expectation of future conscious experience", and you're specifically excluding eggs that are fertilized but don't implant, and including stem cells that we have artificially coaxed into fertilization, then why is an aborted egg considered a violation of your morality, but stem cells thrown in the trash aren't?
There's no dividing line between one and the other, except the word "reasonable" in your "reasonable expectation of future conscious experience" definition. By which you mean "reasonable to me". A fertilized egg has a "reasonable expectation of future conscious experience" to you, right up until it fails to implant- and then it doesn't anymore. A fertilized egg that implants has a "reasonable expectation of future conscious experience" right up until an abortion- and then it's murder.
The only differentiator here is your opinion.
You claim that rescuing fertilized eggs from a burning IVF clinic is morally equal to rescuing children from the same burning building, but when I imagine a world in which everyone acts on this claim, it's absurd. You yourself wouldn't behave in the way you're describing, but would leave the eggs to burn in order to rescue a single child- no matter how many eggs there were. You claim, further, that this is because there is a difference between the psychological weight we place on people that look like us (children), and not on people who don't (fertilized eggs), but when asked how one might go about differentiating between a psychological impulse and a "true" moral intuition, your answer is that an intuition isn't a moral intuition "if the basis for it is too complex", which feels a lot like saying "you'll know it when you see it."
You don't consider bodily autonomy to be a fundamental right, despite it's simplicity, despite probably sharing the same moral intuitions that I do in many of the scenarios that I've discussed above. If someone were surgically connected to you, should you be able to say "no", whether it would kill them or not, whether it's the heroic thing to do or not? If you were drowning, and someone were using you as a life preserver, should you have the right to push them away, whether or not they would drown, whether or not it would haunt you afterward?
You fail to see that your dismissal of bodily autonomy, when taken to it's conclusion, leads to even more absurdity. If you don't have the fundamental right to reject someone's use of your body, what gives you the right to deny society access to your organs? If it would save dozens of living, breathing people, and you have no right to deny the use of your body, what fundamental principle do you invoke to avoid getting used for parts? A vague claim that "forcing an action is stronger than denying an action"?
Without a fundamental principle of bodily autonomy, you're forced to patch together ad-hoc and weak explanations like this in which you weigh different "types" of actions, try to estimate harm, or appeal to societal consequences in order to justify your right to deny other people the organs they need to survive.
The only conclusion that I can draw from this discussion is that you started with the belief that life begins at conception and should be preserved at all costs, likely for religious or social reasons, and are working backward in order to justify those beliefs.
Thanks for the conversation
It's been interesting.
I've learned a lot about what you believe and why you believe it, and it's given me the opportunity to clarify and refine some of the things that I believe. I think that, regardless of whatever credentials you do or don't have on this topic in real life, your views are contradictory and confusing- but I appreciate your willingness to put them out there for discussion. I think that I've gotten all the use out of the discussion that I can, however, so I'm going to end it here.
I imagine that you'll want to do a closing rebuttal sort of thing. I won't be replying to whatever you have to say, so, if you celebrate-
Merry Christmas!
"Your views are incoherent"
That's often what happens when you fabricate positions. For asking so many questions, you really had no problem jumping to conclusions when it suited you.
My reason for saying that not all fertilised eggs have moral relevance, was NOT based on implantation, it was based on the very same criteria that pluripotent stem cells could have moral relevance. This is only tangentially related to the really egregious lie...
"Then why is your aborted egg immoral but discarded stem cells aren't"
It isn't. I already said that pluripotent stem cells ordered towards development of a grow person are morally relevant. You are flat out lying here.
I was even the person who brought this up explicitly to point out that the fixation on fertilised eggs by you (and most lay philosophers especially the pro-life ones) was flawed. Do you even remember what I said about it? I brought it up to account for a very specific edge case that I think the fertilised eggs argument fails on. I don't think you remember or even understand what I said.
"By which you mean reasonable to me"
No, I mean reasonable as in very likely to. I would say over 50 percent provided we do not intervene in lowering it, but arguing over the specifics of the amount is not a debate I was interested in getting into, and you are clearly unequipped to do so.
"IVF clinic ... I imagine a world"
Again, nobody cares what YOU imagine.
"You would also save the baby"
This is indeterminate, you can't actually know what my actions would be.
I already gave an argument about why one's actions in this circumstance would not be morally relevant, and you just ignored it without any reasoning besides "I think it would be crazy!"
And yet again, this argument is presupposing that the baby is morally relevant but the embryos are not.
"Bodily autonomy....despite it's simplicity"
So you have no idea how moral systems are constructed.
The simplicity of a moral principle is not relevant. Saying "killing is good" is a very simple moral principle, that does not make it a strong or good principle.
The importance of complexity is in situations where we derive a moral principle. Not the actual complexity of the moral principle
We derive moral principles from simple situations to evaluate more complex situations.
All of these arguments that you insist are only solved by a right to bodily autonomy, are better accounted for by minimisation of harm. You seem to try to reject it as "trying to estimate harm" or "societal consequences" but you give no reason as to why these should be rejected. I gave a very good reason why bodily autonomy should be rejected as a description (because it fails to account for many circumstances, and better descriptions already exist for the circumstances it does account for) and you have flat out refused to rebut it.
FYI, the fact that it can be hard to estimate risk of total harm, does not mean that it is not the basis because there are obvious cases that are permitted with minimum risk and prohibited with high risk. In other words your arbitrary rejection likely relies on the continuum fallacy, but that is indeterminate because you never elaborated on why.
"The only conclusion....for religious or social reasons"
Yet again fabricating nonsense to make an argument (in this case poisoning the well).
For your information my pro-life position is relatively recent (probably about the past year) and comes from trying to reason about my positions and actions more formally (since I already studied formal logic as part of my coursework). I used to be pro-choice and over time I realized that it involved carving out exceptions that we have no basis for (aka special pleading). I would also like to add as a centre-left atheist, I do not in anyway benefit socially or religiously from my positions. Infact I'm largely equally enemies with my political and religious compatriots based on their reasoning for positions even if I agree with the conclusion.
While I think your argumentation is better than most people, you fundamentally didn't understand many topics and arbitrarily rejected arguments without ever addressing the basis for them. All in all, it was a complete waste of a conversation/debate, but hopefully some other people will benefit from it.
"I'm not making the arguments you think I am."
You actively avoided making concrete arguments, instead fishing for a specific response exactly like I accused you of. I've debated literally hundreds of people who think exactly like you, I know all your arguments it's extremely mundane. Like I already pointed out you willfully ignore any actual criticism.
You 100 percent are making the arguments I said you were, you simply are ignoring my criticisms of them because it's inconvenient for you.
You blanketly assert that because rape is wrong therefore bodily autonomy is sufficiently strong to permit active killing? How does this follow? Do you not realise the radical distinctions between the circumstances?
"A virtuous person should act (to save a drowning person"
Why? If it is not morally good and there is no obligation to do good, then on what basis do you assert that it is virtuous? This is you attempting to reject a conclusion because it disagrees with permitting abortion via bodily autonomy.
"I intuitively consider a 5-year old to be a person"
Why? As I already pointed out intuition isn't just a mere feeling, it involves a great deal of logical evaluation to determine which feelings are more valid than others. I spent a fair amount of time on this so for you to just reject it as "hurr-durr my intuitions tell me" is pretty insulting but expected from an uneducated person.
FYI, nobody cares about your intuitions, we care about human intuitions. If you are some weird serial killer nobody is appealing to your specific reasoning but general human reasoning.
"Using laws as proxy" Awfully convenient that you chose laws that concern a duty to rescue and not guardianship. If there is a contradiction in laws (as there often is) should we really be citing them to construct a non-contradictory moral system?
"My rule of thumb as I said earlier"
Where? You never said this, infact you have been deliberately cagey about not making any claims that I had to deduce your arguments from the questions you asked.
It's super dishonest of you probe for questions, while trying to hide your beliefs (poorly) and then ignore all the criticisms and rebuttals to popular arguments simply because you're going to spam them at me and then refuse to listen to further refutations.
So is wanking into socks. Get over it.
Empirically false. How are you literally so stupid?
What the fuck is this? Just stop posting.
I already showed that there wasn't if you actually read anything. Nobody seriously contested it.
Funny that the geniuses here haven't been able to do something that has been largely abandoned in ethics.
First, I haven't found any place where you did this. Second, if you did show that "no existing right to bodily autonomy [is] sufficiently strong", I think you probably need to also show why the law isn't in the wrong, rather the moral beliefs of the people in this thread.
I mean, people are. It's a conversation that's still happening.
Gonna need a citation on that one, boss.
Anyone else that comes along can follow along in the main conversation with @jasory@programming.dev and myself over here.
"Show why the law isn't in the wrong, rather than the moral beliefs of the people in the thread"
What law? There is no law in discussion here, and an action being immoral does not necessarily entail that a law must exist to prohibit it. (I've already pointed this out, so the fact that you completely ignored it is just laziness)
"the moral beliefs.."
Because it results in a contradiction with their other beliefs. Essentially nobody will ever claim that a contradictory moral system is good, OR that denying a third party the ability to override bodily control in the interest of others (and often that very person, e.g most people think self-harm is wrong) is good. If neither of these are true then a sufficiently strong bodily autonomy cannot be true either.
"It's a conversation that is still happening"
But there are no actual rebuttals. In fact all you did is go back and assert that bodily autonomy actually is relevant, without even addressing the initial refutation.
This is how every single debate about bodily autonomy goes (or really any bad argument). The person will either reject all criticism without any reasoning, or concede all the arguments and play a pseudo Motte-and-Bailey where they continuously switch between arguments they have already conceded were false. Both are simply instances of a person clinging to a belief that contradicts other beliefs they hold, simply because they think it justifies a result they like.
"Gonna need a citation on that"
Wikipedia says that Judith Thompson is credited with changing the view of abortion to a question of autonomy in the public space. What it does not say is that it changed the view of abortion in ethics. (It didn't, it was basically a phase that was pretty quickly moved on from. I also edit Wikipedia so I would have put in it if it did)
Now this is not argument of Wikipedia's infallibility, but it's absence does show that we have no reason to believe that the public's perception of abortion is the same as academic ethics.
So with just this absence of evidence, it is reasonable (but not proven) to say that bodily autonomy is abandoned when it comes to abortion. It is also reasonable to say the converse.
If you actually search academic literature, for as famous as the bodily autonomy argument is it has surprisingly few defences, even pro-choice/pro-abortion (yes they exist in philosophy) ethicists have criticised it. In fact Boonin is probably the most notable defender of it, but even he concedes that it's not very good, discarding it in favor of a "cortical organisation" argument (which I in turn think is an arbitrary selection of a stage of human development that itself doesn't grant personhood any more than being a human organism).
And again the absence of defences, and presence of criticisms makes it more reasonable to think that it is not well accepted.
As for an actual citation, meta-philosophy isn't that popular of a field and you just have to be familiar with the topic to know what I'm referring to. As someone who does research, I can tell you a huge amount of information you want or need isn't neatly collected and more often than not doesn't exist. It could be that there is a vast swath of pro-choice ethicists who use bodily autonomy arguments, which are awfully silent and don't write papers. But based on the evidence it seems like bodily autonomy is truly not a popular argument outside of motivated reasoning by lay persons.
Is this a bot designed to create an example of disjointed unintelligible thoughts?
Followed by ignorant bollocks about what "those other people" supposedly think.
Ah, it's satire.
Well done!
I said a popular defence, not the only defence. Go to the abortiondebate or pro-choice subreddits and count how many people say that abortion is good on the basis of eliminating unwanted children.
Even better make a post asking if abortion is morally good (not just permissible, good) if the child would be born poor or the parents don't want them. You will receive an overwhelmingly positive response, and you know it.
Nope.
People would at most say that of an embrio, not a child.
Unlike what the "every sperm is sacred" crowd thinks against all scientific evidence, a ball of cells with no brain activity is as much a child as a piece of human intestine, a toe or the cells flaking of your skin every minute of the day are: they're all mindless bundles of cells which happen to have human DNA - organic things, not persons.
The non-morons who support abortion actually set a time limit on how late in the pregnancy it is legal to do an abortion exactly because having thought about it, they're aware that a viable embrio will eventually transit from mindless bundle of cells with human DNA into person (though you need to be seriously undereducated to call a fetus at even that stage a "child") and morality dictates that once it's a person their life is sacred.
This is why in most civilized countries abortion is allowed up to 12 weeks: because before that tne embrio has no brain at all and is as much a person as a human toe or kidney, but once it does have some brain activity, whilst we don't really know if and how much of a person that early in gestation it is, we chose to consider it as person just to be on the safe side hence with the right to live.
Only the ultra-simpleton crowd would think that the ball of indiferentiated human cells the size of a pea which is the embrio earlier in gestation is a child.
PS: The funny bit is that the people you're criticizing have the same moral posture with regards to children as you do, the only difference being that they're informed enough and have thought about it enough to know that an early gestation embrio is nowhere near the same as a child hence it makes no sense for the rights of the woman that carries said embrio to be suspended in favour of that mindless ball of cells.
The arguments of the anti-abort crowd really just boil down to "Because I'm too ignorant to understand that which has been known for over a century, other people must be thrown in jail"
This is ontologically and empirically false. I don't really have time for debunking this incredibly self-masturbatory screed, but holy shit you have no idea about categorisation of beings or an arguments about the wrongness of killing. (You're not exactly talking to someone as mentally deficient as you).
The cortical organisation argument is simply cherry-picking a worse instance that satisfies the criteria of possibility of human experience. The fact that it is already a human organism is sufficient, especially since cortical organisation doesn't grant consciousness and even if it did by definition it would fail to describe the wrongness of killing temporarily unconscious humans.
You clearly don't even understand the meaning of the words you're parroting there, to the point that you ended up making the case for even later than 12 weeks abortion.
It really is a case of your own ignorance justifying that others must go to jail.
"You're making the case for even later abortion"
Well of course, the 12-week limit is pure horseshit. Literally nobody in ethics makes this argument it's merely invented by supremely ignorant lay persons to pander to both sides.
You only feel that it is an argument for later abortion, because you are affirming the consequent (a laughably stupid logic error to make) by assuming that abortion is already permissible.
Either killing humans is permissible period or it's not. Dependency and development arguments fail to provide exceptions that don't also apply to adults.
Your argument works by creating your very own definition of what it is to be "a human" to then say "you can't kill a human".
Redefining the meaning of the words used and then claiming that you're right because there exists widelly accepted moral rules which use those words - but not as you defined it to be - isn't actual logic, it's wordplay.
The foundation of all your arguments on this is a "trust me" definition of "a human", provided as an unchallangeable, undetailed and unsubstantiated axion - change that definition to, for example, "a human is somebody born from a woman" and that entire argumentative structure of yours collapses since in that alternative definition until the moment of birth a fetus is a thing, not "a human".
So you pointedly bypass the actual hard part that matters the most and were the main disagreement is - the whole "when do human cells stop being just cells that happen to have human DNA and become 'a human'" - with an "it is as I say" definition on top of which you made your entire case. That's like going "assume the sun is purple" to make the case for painting the walls of a house with a specific color.
All this would be an absolutelly fine and entertaining intellectual game, if you weren't defending that people should go to Jail when they do not obbey the boundaries derived from your definition of "a human" and treat as "not a human" that which you chose to define as "a human", which is the logic of the madman.
Nope. You are committing a categorical error.
Human is very well defined biological definition, objects within the human set are classified according to material properties that are empirically observable, you are falsely equating it with the philosophical concept of personhood.
"Change that definition..."
Changing the symbol used to represent an object with the same properties as a fetus, does absolutely nothing to the reasoning. Because we are not reasoning about the symbol represented by the string "human", we are reasoning about objects with shared properties (well you aren't, actual philosophers are). Some of those objects have moral value based on these properties, therefore all objects that have these properties also have moral value. What we call it doesn't matter. It seems so ironic that you whine about wordplay, when you literally confused yourself over it.
My argument is that relying on personhood (which you didn't you hilariously relied on bodily autonomy), is still insufficient because personhood membership does not account for wrongness of killing. Remember our moral principle of who is allowed to be killed is derived from determining what categories we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill. This is called analytic descriptivism, and you are trying to use it too, you are just completely incompetent. I did not rigorously prove it to be insufficient, because you never actually made the argument, you simply dropped the bodily autonomy argument like everyone does (unless of course you want to accept the premises, and reasoning and deny the conclusion like your intellectual peers in Bedlam).
"If you weren't defending that people go to jail"
Arguing that an action is immoral, is not the same as arguing that it must be punished. You need a separate argument that immoral actions should be punished or deterred in someway. This is simply a fabrication on your part. In fact if you are such an intelligent logician, can you tell me what logical error you are making here? (Hint: it starts with "affirming", to help you find it since you clearly have no idea).
There is a very large body of philosophical work on this subject, everything you have been arguing is pop philosophy that has been rejected as false for decades to even centuries.
If you were even remotely educated on this topic you would realize that you are intellectually equivalent to a flat-earther. There are so many comical errors I can't address them all.
This discussion however is hilarious to me, next time instead of jerking yourself off over word salad consider that the person you are trying to refute is possibly very knowledgeable on the subject (and possibly has an academic background in it :) ).
I was talking about "A human" not "human" - very different things and the former is definitely not "very well biological definition" (I assume you meant "defined" rather than "definition").
Did you think the quotes were decorative rather than delimitative?
What follows is then mainly bollocks and projecting your misintepretation of my point as somehow a set of inherent personal flaws of mine, always enternaining but not actually making an argument.
You've spent the last several posts saying things like "you do not kill a human" and "it's the same as an unconscious human and you do not kill an uncoscious human" to justify your case but all of the sudden you're saying you haven't relied on the meaning of "a human" which you is inconsistent with the very things you wrote.
Then you delegate the definition of "a human" - aka personhood - to some vague unnamed "philosophers" whilst still failing to provide it and justify it.
Then you restated the same "you don't kill a human" argument this time around using "the wrongness of killing" unless it's "in a category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill", whilst still failing to provide a well defined and justified definition for the threshold between "not a human" and "a human" or, in your knew argumentative structure, being a member of a "category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill" to not a member. Worse "a category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill" is an even more ill defined, vaguer definition that "a human" (starting by who is that "we" that "fundamentally accepts" all those categories and their boundary definitions) - again you're delegating to unamed individuals rather than providing a definition and you even massivelly expanded size of the problem space.
(On the upside, I suppose bring in the very definition of "alive" into the argument will trully fire up on both sides veritable legions of virologists)
--
HOWEVER:
I do agree that if as you now say, you're not talking about forcing your moral on others via lawmaking and your take on this is purelly a moral one, then absolutelly whatever ill defined threshold you have in your mind is right for you and absolutellly you're entitled to try and convince others of that - it is indeed a moral choice to believe that, for example, "a human is formed at the time of conception" and from there derive that, morally, what by that definition is a human developing inside a womb is always entitled to the same protections as a human after having been born.
As long as it's about one's moral guidance in one's personal choices, it's all valid and boundary conditions need not be well defined or justified because "I'll know what's right and what's wrong when I see it" thresholds are good enough for personal moral.
The thing is, you've made your case in a post about legal consequences for somebody from anti-abortion law, hence it is implied that your post is justifying the Law (and if it was not your intention to do so, it would've been easy to make that clear) and that's entirelly different because by that point you're not making a case for "this is a moral point of view people should have" (and hence you try to reason people into sharing it) but instead it it's "this is a moral point of view people should behave according to or be harmed if they do not" (quite literally by being deprived of their freedom if they don't) and that's were all the need for clearly defined and justified thresholds arises because in forcing pthers to comply you have two entities with two sets of rights - since the pregnant women is a human, with the right to freedom - and from the definition of when does a piece of organic mater becomes a human also arises the point were some of the rights of the pregnant woman will be denied in favour of the other human: for the purpose of limiting the rights of a human - the pregnant woman - an ill defined threshold of the "I'll know it when I see it" is just an arbitrary threshold to deny that person's rights.
(From the first comment of yours I replied to, I got the impression you totally missed this: the so-called "pro abortion" posture is not in favour of "poor single women having abortions", it's in favour of "poor single women having the choice to have an abortion" - it's not at all about "people should have abortions", it's about people not being forced either way. This is why you often see that position named "pro choice" rather than "pro abortion" - it's not in favour of abortion, rather it's against limiting a woman's choice on that subject.
If indeed there are people out that think "poor single women should have abortions" I'm on the same side as you - I don't think they should: what I do think is that the option to chose to do so or not should be theirs and they should not be punished either way for their choice)
Personally, if indeed your point is a purelly personal moral one were you do not desire that others are forced to comply with your moral then yeah, it's absolutelly valid and needs not even have well defined boundaries between acceptable and not acceptable and I see no harm in tryng to convince individuals to share that moral point of view and act accordingly in their own personal choices.