Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
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 laws1 ), 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.
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.