"A fetus lacks sufficient neural abilities to function, and therefore to 'count', as a human person. More to the point, a fetus is basically unconscious, so it doesn't suffer conscious pains if it is aborted. Therefore, fetal abortion is not immoral or cruel."
Reply:
According to Freudian theory, a human functions in three psychic dimensions: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the dominant, fundamental dimension, comprising the most basic somatic drives. The ego is just the "tip of the iceberg" in human behavior. The real engine is below consciousness. Human nature subsists in its unconscious functions. Delving into a person's subconscious is delving into the person's real character. Conscious behavior is by and large a lattice of pseudo-drives and confabulation constructed to protect one's id or even to protect one's own ego from one's own id.
In so far as a fetus is an unconscious humanoid, it is an archetypal Freudian agent. It displays all the somatic drives that an ego will eventually gild: homeostasis, nutrition, expansion, crude stimulus response, etc. Just because the fetus does not (presumably) consciously feel pain during an abortion does not mean the abortion is not being performed against a human subject. Indeed, just because a psychiatric patient is not consciously aware of his innermost drives does not mean those drives are not human drives.
Therefore, a fetus is a true human person and abortion is cruelty against an unwitting subject.
Friday, May 20, 2011
A Freudian proto-argument against abortion…
Labels:
Agency,
Anthropology,
Culture and News,
Demographics,
History of Science,
Logic,
Morality,
Philosophy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
62 comments:
I think it's perfectly reasonable to conclude a fetus, embryo, zygote, or haploid is a human person and killing it is cruelty. This does not detract from a woman's right to an abortion in the slightest degree.
One Brow:
Greetings, stranger.
Please elaborate on your point.
Can I take you to mean that torturing, or at least murdering, infants is a right we have in response to trespassing?
I think removal is a right we have to trespassing. I would happily support legislation that required live removal in any feasible circumstance, but acknowledge the right of removal alwaqys applies.
Should you be forced by the state to keep a trepasser alive in your house, even/especially when removing the trepasser means they will die in the streets?
One Brow:
So your thesis is that, while a fetus is a human person, pregnancy is fetal trespassing and that abortion is a woman's protection of her property rights?
Rothbard lives.
I actually find the property-rights view pretty plausible; it makes a lot more sense than the no-person view, the no-consciousness view, and various other popular reasons for supporting abortion rights. Then again, there is something rather fishy about framing the whole question in terms of whether the right to life includes a right to inhabit someone else's body when they don't want you to. As so often, the whole framework of 'rights' leads us away from asking and thinking about reasons: it should matter a great deal, I would think, what reasons someone has for having an abortion, just as it matters a great deal what reasons someone has for killing an adult, or for stealing bread from a grocery store, or lying to someone, or anything else that ordinarily falls into the category of unreasonable acts. Focusing on reasons for abortion might lead us to appreciate that if we really want to put an end to abortions, we should seek to create and sustain social and cultural conditions in which having an abortion really would be flatly unreasonable, or would not even seem reasonable. That seems to me to be superior to the two currently dominant alternatives of pretending that our circumstances have no important impact on our decisions and our reasons or claiming to wish that abortion were less common but in fact doing little about it -- both of which, I think, are symptoms of thinking about the issue in terms of 'rights' as though they were some sort of
ground-level moral concept.
Sorry; it's been a while since I've stopped by to pontificate. I've missed it!
Codgitator (Cadgertator),
I think that is an analogy, not a precise argument. However, I do think the state has no right to say that a person must use/continue to use their own body in the service of another individual.
The argument put forth by Rothbard and Rothbardians doesn't quite rest on an analogy, but on the idea of 'self-ownership'; the idea is, very roughly, that the rights we (allegedly) have to our property are an extension of the rights we have as owners of ourselves. So it's not as loose as an analogy, though the idea that we 'own' ourselves clearly requires an extension of the concept of ownership as most people ordinarily understand it.
Rather than bandying about my own views, I suppose I can ask you: what do you take yourself to be claiming when you say that someone does or does not have a right? What is the relationship between the claim (i) X has no right to do Y and (ii) X should not do Y (or, just as well, (i) X has a right to Y, (ii) X should not be deprived of Y)? Are they just equivalent? Are claims of the first form supposed to explain or justify claims of the second form? In either case, why should anyone believe that X has no right to do Y, or that X has a right to Y? I can't really even begin to form a judgment of a claim like "the state has no right to say that a person must use/continue to use his or her own body in the service of another individual" until I have some idea of what that right-claim is supposed to involve.
I think there are many ways you could justify "X should/should not do Y", but I ndon't see rights has having a connection to what individuals should or shoud not do. Of course,perhaps by X, you also meant to include governmental entities (which have no rights in and of tehmselves). Basically, rights result in restrictions we accept on our behavior, either individually or collectively, to recognize the ability of the person holding the right to make an informed decision. So, saying "the state has no right to say that a person must use/continue to use his or her own body in the service of another individual" would mean that the individual would be expected to make an informed choie in the matter, even if we disagree with that choice.
Just for consideration: If a woman simply enjoys sexual freedom and companionship with a certain man or any man, basically welcoming in a casual intruder, since no solid definition of a relationship exists other than a few dinners, events, petty disagreements, or shack ups, or there is no time period to truly discover each other in all aspects of personality, except for the serious, yet, care-free intimacy of sex, and the woman in her jejune abandonment (“I’ll worry about commitment later, or who cares” attitude) becomes pregnant, was that barely known entity of man a willingly admitted trespasser (since the relationship was not predicated on in-depth knowledge [note: even married couples spend years unraveling unknowns]), or would he (wants sex, you don’t, but then you’ll get no nice toys or dinners), figuratively speaking, become an even more obvious trespasser and commit a sort of social quid pro quo rape? After which, the woman becomes pregnant. Is he then a friend, fiend, or simply the trespasser she bent over backwards for? (no double entendre intended; or, pun)
Since, in many cases, there are no true feelings, or very shallow feelings or faith, between men and women today...the hook up thing...a woman encouraging trespassing for a feel good experience, even though she might realize that the man engaged in a no-commitment sex-capade is trespassing, she, even if she doesn’t like the idea of his aggressive moves, permits the trespass (since, hey, there might be a commitment!). She becomes pregnant having permitted trespass. This angers her, she realizes that perhaps she should have intervened and stopped the so-called, somewhat-committed man by killing him or beating the crap out of him. Instead, she will remove his trespass foot prints, and probably never see him again, because statistically men walk away very fast from the results of hobby sex, AKA, casual relationships—no commitment, but I’ve got her on a string.
So, isn’t the woman denigrating herself, humiliating herself, by being so easy to accommodate someone enjoying her fruits, and, who, when the harvest is done, walks away, leaving the woman to deal with her faux-free-will and her own humiliation? Technically, this is no better than a woman being raped. To allay her mental health, the woman rationalizes (must be agonizing being an object of desire) and constantly defines the term trespasser in her mind. Free will is not a reason to humiliate yourself and make your body like an entrance and exit exam for anyone. Who really benefits from such feel good freedom experiences over the years? If you say you do, I defy you to prove it. Pro-choice is just a euphemism for bring-it-on humiliation. Women should think better of themselves, I would hope and pray.
I've given the issue some thought and my final analysis of One Brow's argument is: malarkey. Morally repugnant, too.
1. If a fetus trespasses on a woman's body and can therefore be dispatched, children do the same to their parents' and therefore should be just as easily dispatchable. But they're not, ergo, modus tollens, etc. Infanticide is the basis for ephebocide and thus ultimately homicide. Not a slippery slope argument; more of a reductio.
2. Only if a woman signed a contract for every act of coitus could she claim the after effects of any such act (viz. a fetus) violated her pre-established "boundaries." Further, the infant isn't guilty of trespassing per se. It's a passive victim of being implanted where it knows not by whom it knows not. If I got permission from a land owner to drive a remote-controlled car, devoid of passengers, onto his property, only for us to discover that a bound hostage had been placed in the trunk, the land owner would not be in his rights to kill someone who had no intention or knowledge of trespassing. The car is a penis and its lack of passengers is birth control, if you didn't follow.
3. If it's unjust for a person to allow their biological resources to be utilized by someone else, then a man could argue his (share of) DNA is in jeopardy by being incubated in the woman he happens to have impregnated. As such, it should be in his rights to extract his DNA (i.e. abort the fetus), despite a woman's objections, since she's just "squatting" on what's his by biological justice.
mightygreekwritingmachine,
Again, while I want to avoid stretching the metaphor too far, a trespasser would be one who is notwelcome. A man having consensual sex is not a trespasser, regardless of how appropriate or inappropriate the sex is considered to be. I'm not sure if you were attempting parody, counerpoint, allegory, or rhapsody, but you equating the offspring with the father confuses your point rather than claifying it. For one, it fails to address women who carry the child even while rejecting the father, and also women are in secure marriages but nonetheless have abortions.
Codgitator (Cadgertator),
Thank you for your forthright comments.
1. Actually, you can't force a parent to physically care for a child in the USA. If they allow a child to die from neglect, you can prosecute them. On the other hand, any parent can approach children's services at any time and turn their child over to the state, and this is not a crime. The state can extract financial considerations from the parent, but can not force teh parent to provide care directly. You'll note that this is parallel to the position of the third comment, where I pointed out I would support legislation that required any viable fetus to be born alive.
2. The landowner still retains teh right to have the bound hostage removed from his property t any time, even if it would result in the hostage's death.
3. I have addressed my argument solely on the basis of what provisions the state should or should not enforce upon the woman. Of course it is just for here to carry any fetus. Is it the duty of the state to force everyone to act justly?
If the argument is that no one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, but abortion should be outlawed and instead replaced with removing any viable fetus (knowing that 'viability' may well one day, perhaps soon, reach back to 'day one') to a place where the fetus can continue to grow, then hey. That seems like a great way to outlaw abortion in a roundabout way.
As for OP argument itself, I have to admit it's quite a clever application of (what I know of) the Freudian concept of a person. And I do have sympathy with the idea that the 'unconscious' can still be a person. Perhaps there's a way to develop this more and more.
I find this whole conversation bewilderingly obscure. I conclude that I can't have much of a conversation with OneBrow, because he claims (i) the state has or should have no right to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, and (ii) rights have no connection to what people should or should not do. Unless I get some fuller explanation, I can only conclude that whatever he means when he says that the state does or should have no right to outlaw abortion or do anything else, he doesn't mean that they shouldn't do it. I can't see how these two claims could conceivably be consistent or how the second could be true if he isn't just using the sign 'rights' to symbolize a concept completely unrelated to the one that ordinary goes by that name. If he wants to clarify, I'll be happy to engage with the clarification. If not, I've got nothing more to say except "huh?"
As for Elliot's response to the trespassing argument: I'm sympathetic, but I don't think your objection really goes as far as it needs to. For a good defense of what is more or less the same position, check out Roderick Long's 'Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights' at http://praxeology.net/RTL-Abortion.htm. He explicitly addresses your point about born infants vs. unborn children. Do note that I'm not endorsing his argument; I'm just not sure that I have a very good response to it, and I suspect that mine would be rather different from yours in any event.
Well, perhaps not "rather" different, but different.
ONE BROW...
Thanks for your response, but trespassers, by legal definition, are primarily there to take something away and gloat over the purloining or they are just vandals.
Again, if a woman is willing to humiliate herself, even a married woman, by pretending that consensual sex (the main reason this entire abortion argument exists) is absolutely, conscientiously consensual, then, as I noted, some men can carry consensual to extremes and become quite heavy-handed about forcing themselves on the supposed consensual partner for whatever reason, and in many cases the woman yields to the trespass.
If a married woman secretly has an abortion, then her "marriage" is one of control and not commitment. Women humiliate themselves every single day by exposing their bodies, going on photo galleries, sex trade magazines, and prostitution (some even married; it’s as if they think no one has ever seen a nude woman!).
If women see their free will as anything and everything, then their uterus simply becomes a production line for cheap laborers. It degrades the human person. I know of a man who gives dogs abortions (and cats). Do you believe that is right? If not, why wouldn't a human with a human in her body need the same sense of respect for life? If you don't have a problem with the dog abortionist (he doesn't like feral dogs or cats), then it is, of course, your choice. My question is: Why isn't life precious to you instead of just a consensual inconvenience? Statistically, consensual relationships with little or no authentic, trusting commitment account for an enormous number of women contracting very serious diseases.
Why did Bernard Nathanson (now deceased, 2011), the doctor who founded NARAL and had affiliations with PPHood come to realize that abortions were murder—absolutely? He performed over 5,000 abortions personally, including his own son, and his clinics performed over 50,000+. Nathanson saw a fetus being aborted on an ultra-sound, and he, being a very smart doctor, realized that the fetus was in pain and agony.
If a woman becomes pregnant by Mr. X or Y, and carries the baby to delivery and cares for it and raises it...great!...whether she is married or not.
I speak with many women about this issue, and it's worth speaking about. I have faith in women because without them, as you well know, we would not be having this debate.
Blessings.
I must sleep now as I need at least 3 to 4 hours a day.
One Brow:
It's actually a kind of compliment for me to be so "blunt", since I know you're a reasonable enough person not to fly off the handle, as so many comboxers do.
Now, since I find djr is citing more from actual libertarian thought than your libertarian argumentation seems to be doing, I'll take a leaf from him to explain why I find your thesis malarkey. A person's self-possession is legitimate if/insofar as it doesn't impinge on another person's self-possession. Yet, while you admit the fetus is a human and that disposing of it is cruel, you use the mother's personal self-possession to trump that of the fetus. This is bad reasoning. And the reason find it all so "morally repugnant" is precisely because, by your argumentation, the vaunted libertarian impulse to liberate "the individual" (whatever such a specter might be) from governmental and contractual injustices, is being employed to subjugate all interpersonal relations to the logic of contracts and statist largesse. If you honestly think an infant is trespassing on a woman because she received a man's sperm and her body naturally responds to hosting that infant, I think you have some ethical principles to sort out before you can look your wife or your own children in the eye. That's not an ad hominem, at least, not in the confused modern sense of the term, though it is one in the classical sense of the term. I admit I am inclined to agree with E. Anscombe that certain moral theses in and of themselves disqualify the promoter of such theses from being taken seriously as a *moral* reasoner.
djr,
I appreciate your request for clarification. I'm just starting to look at these things philosophically, and have no real training outside of mathematics, so I'm sure I do put things together badly from time to time.
Unless I get some fuller explanation, I can only conclude that whatever he means when he says that the state does or should have no right to outlaw abortion or do anything else, he doesn't mean that they shouldn't do it.
I see rights as recognizing the ability of people to decide for themselves what they should do or not do, day or not say. Governments are not people, and would not have rights. I would technically agree that the the government having no right to outlaw abortion is not sufficent reason to say they may not outlaw abortion. The reason the government should not ourlaw abortion is the infringment upon the rights of the person who would actually carry the child.
I can't see how these two claims could conceivably be consistent or how the second could be true if he isn't just using the sign 'rights' to symbolize a concept completely unrelated to the one that ordinary goes by that name.
I may in fact be guilty of that, and if so, I will endeavor to corrrect myself in the future.
Crude said...
That seems like a great way to outlaw abortion in a roundabout way.
I've never heard my position described as such, but can not find fault with the description.
mightygreekwritingmachine said...
Thanks for your response, but trespassers, by legal definition, are primarily there to take something away and gloat over the purloining or they are just vandals.
Well, I have tried to be cleat that the notion of "trespasser" is more analogous than legal, but even so, your description of the legal definition does not match the notion of "unwelcome intruder" I usually associate with the word. Although, fetuses d take things away from women and do cause damage, your characterizatin does diminish the analogy anyhow.
Again, if a woman is willing to humiliate herself, even a married woman, by pretending that consensual sex
I find this argument mysogynistic, and feel no need to take it seriously enough to warrant more response than this note.
I know of a man who gives dogs abortions (and cats). Do you believe that is right?
I see aborting dogs and cats as morally neutral.
Why did Bernard Nathanson (now deceased, 2011), the doctor who founded NARAL and had affiliations with PPHood come to realize that abortions were murder—absolutely?
I have no idea. For every person like Dr. Nathanson (if he really aborted his own son, wasn't that a violation of medical ethics?), there are nine other doctors who have performed thousands of abortions and have not come to view them as murder.
Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...
It's actually a kind of compliment for me to be so "blunt", since I know you're a reasonable enough person not to fly off the handle, as so many comboxers do.
I hope to prove worthy of your description, and was quite pleased with the "bluntness".
Yet, while you admit the fetus is a human and that disposing of it is cruel, you use the mother's personal self-possession to trump that of the fetus. This is bad reasoning. And the reason find it all so "morally repugnant" is precisely because, by your argumentation, the vaunted libertarian impulse to liberate "the individual" (whatever such a specter might be) from governmental and contractual injustices, is being employed to subjugate all interpersonal relations to the logic of contracts and statist largesse.
I can see where you might claim rights of the fetus is subjugated to such logci, but this is a situation where the rights of one person will be denied. Is the right to live for the fetus able to trump the right of the woman not to carry the fetus? Is there a reason this applies to fetuses and the women that carry them, but in no other situation (I'm assuming you don't support the right of the state to force you to give blood to someone else who is dying, please correct me if I am in error there).
If you honestly think an infant is trespassing on a woman because she received a man's sperm and her body naturally responds to hosting that infant, I think you have some ethical principles to sort out before you can look your wife or your own children in the eye.
You seem to be saying that my position somehow demeans my wife and/or my children. I must disagree. My wife chose to care for and nuture every child who entered her womb (we have five), giving me a great gift of love and respect by allowing me to be a father to her children. My children are precious gifts that could have been taken away, but instead are here to adored. I feel no need to sort out any principals in this. However, if you wanted to be more detailed in what you mean, I will consider it.
I admit I am inclined to agree with E. Anscombe that certain moral theses in and of themselves disqualify the promoter of such theses from being taken seriously as a *moral* reasoner.
That's OK. I don't have the knowledge or skills to be taken seriously. However, I appreciate your willingness to dialogue with me, nonetheless.
Well, Brow, here's a teaser.
Consider the following two claims:
1. Person P has a right to X (say, to have an abortion, to own private property, to eat meat, to choose with whom to have sexual intercourse, whatever).
2. Person Q ought to allow Person P to X if Person P chooses to X (so, Person Q should not interfere with Person P having an abortion, should not steal Person P's property, should not compel Person P not to eat meat, should not force Person P to have sex with someone).
My question is this: what is the relationship between these two kinds of claim?
There are a variety of answers that are at least somewhat plausible. One answer that is implausible, however, is that there is no connection between them. For if, for any persons P and Q and any value of X, claims of the second form are not true when claims of the first kind are, then claims of the first kind would be meaningless.
Just consider the following train of thought: "Well, Mark has a right to eat meat. Nonetheless, there is no reason for me not to stop him from eating meat." I can see no way in which those two thoughts could be mutually coherent. For if there is no reason for me not to compel Mark to refrain from eating meat, then what could it mean to say that he has a right to eat meat?
I take it that your earlier claims about a lack of connection between rights and what people ought to do went something like this: if Mark has a right to eat meat, it doesn't follow that he should or shouldn't eat meat. That seems true. But my question wasn't about the connection between Mark's rights and what Mark ought to do. It is about the connection between Mark's rights and what other people should and should not do to Mark. You seem to acknowledge that to say that Mark or Person P or whoever has a right to X, then other people should not interfere with him when he wants to X, whether or not Mark or Person P should X. If so, then you acknowledge a necessary connection between these two kinds of claim.
If you follow me this far, then I want to ask you: what on earth is supposed to explain that connection? Why think that anyone has a right to anything, or that anyone else should not interfere with that rights-bearing person? Is a right something that a person has which explains why other people shouldn't interfere with his exercise of that right? Or is saying "Mark has a right to eat meat" just another way of saying "people shouldn't interfere with Mark if he chooses to eat meat"?
These are the kinds of questions I'm curious about, because I suspect that most people who are beholden to the language of rights have no coherent answer to them. I've met some people who seem to have just such coherent answers, but it's usually hard to know what someone thinks about these questions from their use of the language of rights.
djr,
Thank you for your claification.
If you follow me this far, then I want to ask you: what on earth is supposed to explain that connection? Why think that anyone has a right to anything, or that anyone else should not interfere with that rights-bearing person? Is a right something that a person has which explains why other people shouldn't interfere with his exercise of that right? Or is saying "Mark has a right to eat meat" just another way of saying "people shouldn't interfere with Mark if he chooses to eat meat"?
I'll start from the end: yes, I would say that "mark has a right to X" is another way of saying "people should not interfere with Mark if/when he chooses to X", at least legally. It seems to me you could make various distinction between legal rights and appropriate behaviors. Even if I have a right to smoke tobacco, I think it's also valid for my wife to interfere with that right, but not for the government.
I don't think having a right to do X explains anything about the value of doing X or why people should not interfere with X.
I think we havea shared vision of having a free society, and an integral part of a free society is that people have rights.
I think those three answers together are the answer to the first question.
ONE BROW:
If you'll take note, I was particularly speaking and writing about consensual sex between unmarried individuals. Your wife, having had five children, God bless her and you, have proven pretty much the joy of what should be rather than the horror of what could've been.
You wrote: "Although, fetuses d[o] take things away from women and do cause damage, your characterizati[o]n does diminish the analogy anyhow."
Did your wife, for instance, have something taken away and was she damaged? Obviously, there is something amiss regarding your observation. If you are saying that your wife did lose something and was damaged, are you agreeing that consensual sex (married) is indeed trespassing resulting in one person damaged more than the other?
Since you are a family man, when the egg and sperm met in your wife, my take on it is, that fertilization was a BORN person, not an unborn person (I am avoiding unborn as the technical term most use it as). I believe at the union of egg and sperm the result is a BORN human being. Did you, or do you believe any other husband feels that at that point the damage begins and the trespasser is within?
Incidentally, it is a class A felony to kill a dog or cat in most developed cities in the USA.
And, how could Dr. Nathanson have violated medical ethics, at that time, when he admittedly had no medical ethics about human life. Like the skilled jewel thief, why would he give away his secrets? I was told he made a statement that women, married or single, were just income and customers.
My suggestion is this, as many people have suggested, why not, since women have their own free will and it's their bodies, let them kill their own fetuses? There are cultures that have the tools for such an event and it would save money. Also, why should any OB/GYN carry malpractice insurance, since the S. Court has deemed the fetus basically a lump of flesh, and since it’s not a person, why not get these malpractice rates down?
Again, God bless you, you’ve met the test and passed with five children. Why argue against what you have and love?
Corrected:
And, how could Dr. Nathanson have violated medical ethics, at that time, when he admittedly had no medical ethics about human life? (inserted ? mark)
mightygreekwritingmachine said...
Did your wife, for instance, have something taken away and was she damaged?
Yes. Our children took so much nutrition directly from her eating increased considerably. She was damaged internally and externally by her pregnancies. Do you really want details? I hesitate to pus the boundaries on a blog that is not my own.
If you are saying that your wife did lose something and was damaged, are you agreeing that consensual sex (married) is indeed trespassing resulting in one person damaged more than the other?
You have the oddest notion of tresspassing I have encountered. Trespassing requires an unwelcome intrusion. The equivalent in a sexual relationship is rape. Damage that goes beyond entering territory is not a required part of trespass.
So, my answer would be that I do not consider consensual sex to be rape, as far as I can tell.
(I am avoiding unborn as the technical term most use it as).
OK, but when you do so, you also lose any of the connotation that comes with the word prior to the change of definition you wish to apply to it.
I believe at the union of egg and sperm the result is a BORN human being. Did you, or do you believe any other husband feels that at that point the damage begins and the trespasser is within?
Yes, the "trespass" begins, but the damage does not appear until later.
Incidentally, it is a class A felony to kill a dog or cat in most developed cities in the USA.
If that were true, most animal shelters could not operate.
And, how could Dr. Nathanson have violated medical ethics, at that time, when he admittedly had no medical ethics about human life?
Ethics apply to professions, even is the members of those professions privately disagree.
I was told he made a statement that women, married or single, were just income and customers.
When they are carrying your child, they are not just income and customers.
My suggestion is this, as many people have suggested, why not, since women have their own free will and it's their bodies, let them kill their own fetuses?
I'm not aware of anything that prevents them from so doing, if the woman so chooses. Therefore, I interpret you to be saying that you suggest requiring women to forego the advantages of professional medical care. I find the determination to punish women fairly typical of the pro-life crowd, and this is another good example.
Why argue against what you have and love?
As I pointed out, my argument demonstrate the great appreciation and gratitude I have for my wife and children.
One Brow said...
Codgitator (Cadgertator),
"I think that is an analogy, not a precise argument. However, I do think the state has no right to say that a person must use/continue to use their own body in the service of another ..."
Does this apply to your own spouse? The issue here, as you must know, is that abortion is homicide. If a woman gets pregnant by her own need for gratification (married or unmarried), it seems she’s irresponsible with her own body, which is going to be damaged by abortion, no matter what she may have been told by pro-death people.
If a person gets a new car and then recklessly messes it up, and then says he/she wants another car with more power and goodies, and wrecks that car, and then asks for another car....ad nauseam...eventually not only will the cars pile up, but her body will become damaged junk from all the traumas (please think through this analogy imagining all implications for society). Post-death/abortion studies have shown many negative life-long traumas from abortion/homicides on the woman, and in some cases on the man, and later the accomplices in the murders often become anguished and tormented.
Although, fetuses d take things away from women and do cause damage, your characterizatin does diminish the analogy anyhow.
The point is that you agree about the damage, which as you pointed out did not come from rape. End of story.
continued for ONE BROW....
"My wife chose to care for and nuture every child who entered her womb (we have five), giving me a great gift of love and respect by allowing me to be a father to her children."
Care for and nurture, and have medical care, not an abortion. Great, every child (human being) in her womb, please let the Supreme Court know, post haste!
“By allowing me to be a father to HER children.” Pronouns and prepositions can be tricky. I’m sure you meant OF OUR children and accepted her sacrifice of pain and any injuries. This is good news.
Trespassing is like any word, always evolving.
If someone trespasses on your property and is not a threat to you, you can’t shoot or harm them. You must call the police. I’ve actually tested this legal loophole. If you can’t prove your life is in danger, lethal force will land you in jail. So, essentially, you would have to hold the trespassers at bay until the police came, or demand they leave your property.
The state in no way is telling women they can’t choose. We’re saying that once a life is in your body that you permitted to be there, removal of the trespasser without intervention by say an adoption agency would be using lethal force on a human being.
No woman knows if she will get pregnant or not when she cats about whether she uses contraceptives or not or is married or not. You and I don’t know that, either.
One other point: some US states have what is sometimes called consensual trespass or open trespass, and it works like this: If a man and another man go around together as pals, and one night they go to supper, and Man A leaves his car keys on the table and heads to the restroom; and, man B, decides to take the keys and drive off in Man A’s car. Man A comes back, calls the police, and waits. The police inform Man A that there is not much they can do about it since Man A left his keys openly on the table, and Man B took the keys and the car. The police report can’t say it was a stolen vehicle. Man A invited the trespass. Man A’s insurance company will not pay for the car. The damage was done by inviting trespass. (This happened to a neighbor of ours.)
"Ethics apply to professions, even is the members of those professions privately disagree."
Obviously, you do not know how medical ethics work. If you are a doctor, which doubt, I’d be wary of your services. Medical review boards can be very tough on non-ethical physicians, as can lawyers. Canons of ethics prevail in all jurisdictions.
Also, you’re mistaken to believe doctors don’t look at patients (including you) as $$$$$$. This has happened more and more since the increase in malpractice and the elimination of the Hippocratic Oath (honor be damned!) Try not paying a hospital or physicians’ group!
"I'm not aware of anything that prevents them from so doing, if the woman so chooses."
Therefore, I interpret you to be mean that you suggest requiring women to forego the advantages of professional medical care. I find the determination to punish women fairly typical of the pro-life crowd, and this is another good example.
Again, you and your wife agreed to have children, requiring proper medical care, which is a blessing in my mind. However, in the same vein you indicate that she, not you, sustained damage, whatever that means is within your relationship. However, suppose she had told you she did not want to be damaged any longer and there will be no children past the first two; and, if there are, there will have to be an abortion—secretly done by her own hand , say, to avoid the cost or the embarrassment.
Abortions, having seen them up close, do damage women and society. By your manner of approaching this issue, whether you’re pro-life or pro-death (abortion), you are not realizing that an intrusion into a woman and any inkling of damage begins as the egg and sperm are instantly turned into a human being.
CONTINUED FOR ONE BROW.....
“Professional medical care.”
Medical care is not homicide or mutilation of the body. Medical care is not involved in abortion, since there is no care. Women go for an abortion for an end to a living part of their bodies, not for care. Women go to an OB/GYN for care for the living and growing within their bodies. You’re confusing care with euthanasia. The Nazis and Communists called their medical programs medical care, too. In this regard, the state must protect all citizens from diabolical activities, which Dr. Nathanson spoke about.
If you read planned parenthood vs Casey you’ll see that the ruling had nothing to do with law or choice and it is a fiction about “women’s care.” The court made its own legislation in violation of the separation powers and with a vapid argument, to boot. Parenthood implies, nay, means life and life giving and life sustaining. Evil always has a euphemism for everything, like relativism and libertarianism.
Irresponsible sexual activities that end in poor choices are fraught with damage and distress and mental illness, which, in no way help society, since it takes babies to make a world, well, a world where life sustains our earth and everything in or on it. As the numbers topple and the wild cats begin to calm and age, and two riders will be approaching, as Bob Dylan sang, and the wind will begin to howl across a barren landscape, and those five beautiful children of yours will find a world bereft of that which sustains us all, LIFE. Opportunity comes knocking...once, generally. A libertarian world is no better than a Marxist Socialist world, where selfishness rules and the rules that save and enhance mankind are pitched into the abyss.
You chose life; therefore, you must go forth and tell anyone who considers ending a life to avoid that horror and choose life, by seeing the joy you have in your own children. One bad choice should never build another.
mightygreekwritingmachine said...
One Brow said...
"I think that is an analogy, not a precise argument. However, I do think the state has no right to say that a person must use/continue to use their own body in the service of another ..."
Does this apply to your own spouse?
Yes.
The issue here, as you must know, is that abortion is homicide.
Yes, I agree it is.
If a woman gets pregnant by her own need for gratification (married or unmarried), it seems she’s irresponsible with her own body, which is going to be damaged by abortion, no matter what she may have been told by pro-death people.
It always comes back to punishing women for their behavior. It is the woman's choice what risks of damage she should face.
Post-death/abortion studies have shown many negative life-long traumas from abortion/homicides on the woman, and in some cases on the man, and later the accomplices in the murders often become anguished and tormented.
Studies can say many things, depending on how they are conducted.
Care for and nurture, and have medical care, not an abortion. Great, every child (human being) in her womb, please let the Supreme Court know, post haste!
So other women can be forced to do what she did out of love?
“By allowing me to be a father to HER children.” Pronouns and prepositions can be tricky. I’m sure you meant OF OUR children and accepted her sacrifice of pain and any injuries. This is good news.
No reasonabvle man can ever be 100% ceetain of paternity, sans a DNA test. :) More seriously, if they are our children, they are her children.
If someone trespasses on your property and is not a threat to you, you can’t shoot or harm them. You must call the police.
The police will then remove them for you. Also, whether you can do so or not yourself varies from state to state, and I believe can depend on whether or not the property is a personal residence, as well.
The state in no way is telling women they can’t choose. We’re saying that once a life is in your body that you permitted to be there, removal of the trespasser without intervention by say an adoption agency would be using lethal force on a human being.
At the time the woman had sex, the analogous trespasser did not exist. It is therefore incorrect to say she permitted a person to be there when that person did not yet exist.
Also, the police do not force landowners to wait to remove someone until they can leave the property safely. They remove the trespassser immediately.
No woman knows if she will get pregnant or not when she cats about whether she uses contraceptives or not or is married or not. You and I don’t know that, either.
It always comes back to punishing women for their behavior.
One other point: some US states have what is sometimes called consensual trespass or open trespass, and it works like this:
Interesting, but not really relevant, since the analogous Man B did not exist at the time the analogous Man A had the analogous supper.
Obviously, you do not know how medical ethics work. If you are a doctor, which doubt, I’d be wary of your services. Medical review boards can be very tough on non-ethical physicians, as can lawyers. Canons of ethics prevail in all jurisdictions.
Why would you tell me I don't know medical ethics work and then repeat back to me what I said, with more detail?
Also, you’re mistaken to believe doctors don’t look at patients (including you) as $$$$$$.
Patients have money for doctors ever since there have been doctors.
Again, you and your wife agreed to have children, requiring proper medical care, which is a blessing in my mind. However, in the same vein you indicate that she, not you, sustained damage, whatever that means is within your relationship. However, suppose she had told you she did not want to be damaged any longer and there will be no children past the first two; and, if there are, there will have to be an abortion—secretly done by her own hand , say, to avoid the cost or the embarrassment.
I would strongly recommend against the decision for her to do it by her own hand.
Abortions, having seen them up close, do damage women and society. By your manner of approaching this issue, whether you’re pro-life or pro-death (abortion), you are not realizing that an intrusion into a woman and any inkling of damage begins as the egg and sperm are instantly turned into a human being.
Whether you are pro-slavery or pro-choice, it's not up to you to choose the thype of damage the woman is willing to risk.
Medical care is not involved in abortion,
Ranting is not persuasive.
Elliot, where are you? We miss you.
One Brow: "It always comes back to punishing women for their behavior."
Yes, and abortion always comes back to punishing fetal humans for their existence.
djr:
I've been busier on some fronts than I'd like to be, but busy enough for satisfaction on other fronts. Moved into a larger apartment, setting up more private classes, reading quite a lot, helping at a new English Mass for Taichung, watching a number of Asian films (and, yes, some "blockbusters" now and then!), etc. I need to write more, I know. God have mercy.
ONE BRow:
Obviously, you do not know how medical ethics work. If you are a doctor, which doubt, I’d be wary of your services. Medical review boards can be very tough on non-ethical physicians, as can lawyers. Canons of ethics prevail in all jurisdictions.
Why would you tell me I don't know medical ethics work and then repeat back to me what I said, with more detail?
You missed the point, but then you keep missing the point. Nathanson was often sanctioned. Doctors, can have doctors prosecuted. Canon's of medical ethics are laws governing medicine, but you want to adhere to the concept that a fetus is not a human, and until you agree that it is, your arguments are fruitless. Doctors who kill human beings lack any medical ethics, period. Abortionists and doctors who prescribe contraceptives are like ambulance chasing lawyers. How many of them do you see picketing Pro-Choice buildings? None. How many women who had abortions picket in front of Churches, schools, clinics, etc. showing how proud they are of their choice? None.
Also, you’re mistaken to believe doctors don’t look at patients (including you) as $$$$$$.
Patients have money for doctors ever since there have been doctors.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You need to read the history of medical care. YOU are just a buck to a doctor and so is your wife. Birthing a human being involves the doctor damaging membranes in the uterus. I used to be a medical photographer, so I’ve seen it happen. Besides, you keep avoiding the issue of birth control which is like pest control—it’s poison. Check the stats on cervical cancer and other female cancer issues.
One other point: some US states have what is sometimes called consensual trespass or open trespass, and it works like this:
Interesting, but not really relevant, since the analogous Man B did not exist at the time the analogous Man A had the analogous supper.
This was simply pointing out that trespass can have various meanings or definitions, which is what I am addressing from one of your previous posts.
Again, you and your wife agreed to have children, requiring proper medical care, which is a blessing in my mind. However, in the same vein you indicate that she, not you, sustained damage, whatever that means is within your relationship.
I would strongly recommend against the decision for her to do it by her own hand.
Wrong again. It's done quite frequently. Believe me, you’d be the last to know. I did notice that you did not address the issue of ---“By allowing me to be a father to HER children.” Pronouns and prepositions can be tricky. I’m sure you meant OF OUR children and accepted her sacrifice of pain and any injuries. This is good news!"
Her pain, her damage, her children.
Point is that slowly but surely, the states are coming to their senses and abortion and PPhood will be on the ropes, and as a taxpayer I will laud that. The next thing you know is women will want the government to pay for plastic surgery, but, then an abortion is a form of reconstructive surgery, ask an abortionist. The feds don't mean anything in this matter. States regulate abortion funding, besides it's mostly blacks who are being aborted...the old South has found a new form of bondage and disposal. Choice is not the issue here, lack of responsibility leading to damage, mental illness, and growing medical diseases.
I hope your wife is able to be home with the children, which is as it should be in a married family. I’m not opposed to women working at home, but society has lost its footing due to women’s lib and their break-neck, blind push to overtake men.
I think I left a comment on this before, but it is not here now.
Codgitator (Cadgertator) said...
Yes, and abortion always comes back to punishing fetal humans for their existence.
My post wqas a description of rhetoric. I have never seen a pro-choice person use punishing a fetus as a justification for abortion. I regulary see anti-abortion rhetoric that amounts to punishing women for their actions.
I have not been careful in my typing, so perhaps our inability to communicate meaningfully is base largely on that. I will try to improve.
mightygreekwritingmachine said...
Nathanson was often sanctioned.
If he performed abortions on his family members, I have no doubt this is true.
Canon's of medical ethics are laws governing medicine, ...
While there is likely to be a high degree of correspondance between ethical and legal behavior in a medical field (as elsewhere), it seems unlikely to me they are the same thing.
Rant snipped.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You need to read the history of medical care.
There was a time and place in the history of medical care where doctors were not paid for their services? If that is not what you mean, I'm not sure what you mean when you say the notion that patients have been money for doctors ever since there have been doctors is wrong.
This was simply pointing out that trespass can have various meanings or definitions, which is what I am addressing from one of your previous posts.
OK. Thank you for the clarificaiton.
However, in the same vein you indicate that she, not you, sustained damage, whatever that means is within your relationship.
Actually, I meant physical damage to her body. It has had a minimal effect on our relationship, as far as I know.
Wrong again. It's done quite frequently.
I knew that. I'm not sure how that knowledge makes my recommendation wrong.
I’m sure you meant OF OUR children ...
I have no evidence the children are biologically mine, nor would I care. Further, I don't see why "our" is puperior to "her" here.
I hope your wife is able to be home with the children, ...
Because I would be such an inferior homemaker?
One Brow:
Of course no one on the pro-choice side is going to come right out and say they abort fetal humans as a form of *punishment* for trespassing… er, wait, that's the entire gist of your position! The mightygreekwritingmachine is right to classify abortion as a primarily cosmetic surgery.
That last sentence is severely unfair. Even if one supposes that abortion is always unjust (which I take to be, with some qualifications, quite likely true), and even if one further supposes that it is always unreasonable to commit injustice (which I take to be far less likely true), it remains fairly apparent that the reasons that people often have for seeking abortions are extremely weighty and pressing, and not at all on the level of a desire to have a straighter nose or to tighten up your droopy, wrinkly face. It is no objection to this point that many abortions may be sought for extremely trivial reasons; the point is simply that in many cases women who seek abortion do so out of desperation and terror, and with deep regret. Even though, ex hypothesi, this fact does nothing to justify the abortion, it takes something verging on a brutalized moral imagination to seriously compare abortion to cosmetic surgery.
The trouble with the trespassing view, though, is even deeper than you suggest. Of course its defenders don't claim that abortion is a punishment for trespassing, since punishment supposes that the person being punished is capable of responsible agency, and no fetus is capable of that (Rod Long, whose defense of the trespassing view is the best I've seen, actually rejects the justice of punishment). Defenders of the trespassing view make the far more radical claim that it the trespasser's responsibility is irrelevant. I actually find that part of their view fairly convincing; after all, if a schizophrenic were to attack me with an axe and I were to kill him in the process of defending myself, I don't think I (or anyone else in that situation) would be guilty of an injustice simply because no schizophrenic is morally responsible for his homicidal outbursts (if you don't like that example, change it: this time the schizophrenic axe murderer is about to murder a two-year-old...). The trouble with the view, as I see it, is that it places no restrictions on the legitimate reasons that an agent may have to remove a trespasser. Granted that a trespasser is anyone to whose residence on your property or in your body you object, it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that your reasons for objecting are irrelevant. Nor does it seem at all obvious that the situation with unborn children is really analogous to the schizophrenic axe murderer; neither is a responsible agent, but one is threatening to kill you while the other depends on you for its very existence. In short, the trespassing view seems to require that reasons are irrelevant; but surely reasons are relevant.
djr,
I found your commnt so balanced and precise that I have nothing to add to it. Thank you.
I do have a follow-up question: if we agree that the reasons for getting an abortion are important to determining it's morality under the trespassing analogy, do you feel that we can make those determinations legally?
Codgitator (Cadgertator),
I have no intention of disputing your takeon the gist of my positon. As I said, I was referring to rhetoric. Internal motivation is hard to fathom.
One Brow:
The reason I responded with such a blunt "thesis" is precisely because you are divining the "internal" motives of pro-lifers, but then retreat from it on some kind of rhetorical "reflective equilibrium" grounds. I do also find it a bit soap-operatic to characterize most abortions as driven by dread and moral angst. The numbers are not so coy: a great many abortions are cosmetic. I am still pondering other comments of late.
If I can't dvine internal motivations from words that directly express them, then no motives at all can be divined, I should think. Perhaps you feel I have mischaraterized the words of mightygreekwritingmachine, and I'm open to discussion on that. Perhaps you feel there is no moral implication to the term "cats about", and it is my error to assume there it one?
One Brow:
The only reason I'm not ignoring you as a coy troll is because you have a record in my eyes of being honest, if not always self-consistent. So, let me restate why I have such a hard time being charitable with you positions in this thread (plural). On the one hand you defend the cruel and inhumane act of abortion on the grounds that it is fetal trespassing but then on the other hand reject the pro-life position *basically* because it amounts to blaming women for their woes. I find this inconsistency truly galling. Remember: your explicit position is to defend abortion as a just punishment of fetal humans for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, yet you charge opponents with a position, which they explicitly reject, that opposes infanticide just in order to punish women for being on the wrong penis at the wrong time, as it were. You can persist in divining such malice from straightforward pro-life argumentation, but meanwhile your opponents can simply quote you: we abort the fetal among us because they are wrongdoers. Yet, presumably, holding women to anything like a similarly stringent standard of justice is just "hating on" the victims. As I said, before, I find your position disgusting in its own terms, but even more odious the more you entangle it with such conceptual hypocrisy. If a human's right to life can be so easily abrogated for impinging on its elders' convenience, then parents have a right to kill their children when they become unruly in their post-uterine liberty. Best to keep them "in their place" in the first trimester or so. But alas they slipped the net!
ERRATA:
…youR positions…, not you
…inhumane act of abortion on the grounds that it is PUNISHMENT FOR fetal trespassing…
To respond to both of you in turn:
1. I too would find it a bit soap-operatic to present "most" abortions as driven by "dread and moral angst." But I didn't intend to present it that way. For one thing, I honestly have no idea what the circumstances of "most" abortions are. That's not a skeptical point; it's just a profession of my own ignorance (though it's worth noting that social science research methods are unlikely to be of any help here). Second, "dread and moral angst" is a bit stronger than what I had in mind. Fear, helplessness, and desperation are more apt. The only people I've personally known who have had abortions certainly felt that way. Remember, I'm agreeing for the sake of argument that abortion is always unjust and that injustice is never reasonable; my point is simply that it's mistaken to compare abortion to cosmetic surgery unless you add the vacuous qualification "when it's done in the same spirit that one gets cosmetic surgery..." I'm aware that people do sometimes procure abortions as though they were more or less equivalent to having a non-malignant cist removed. But even if that turns out to be the standard case (and the pro-life literature I've read, with its emphasis on the emotional turmoil of abortion, suggests otherwise), there would remain a very great number of cases that are as I describe.
For what it's worth, I don't think you would be giving anything up if you were to agree with me here. You need not modify your views on the morality of abortion one bit by acknowledging that people often seek abortions in times of distress. After all, why think that acting rightly is always easy, particularly when it involves making oneself and others vulnerable to risks and resisting one's fear of the consequences? By analogy, you would be making the same mistake that I think you are making here if you were to claim that every murder were equivalent to killing somebody for their fancy shoes: though the act may be no more justified, when someone commits murder out of vengeance or to protect others from a dangerous criminal, the whole moral situation is rather different: granted that all of the acts are unjustified, there is a world of difference between the reasons that motivate people in each case.
That said, I think your analogy is spot on insofar as any purported defense of abortion presents it as though it were no more serious than cosmetic surgery.
2. As for how laws could determine whether there are sufficiently good reasons for an abortion: that depends on what, if any, sufficient reasons there are for an abortion. There may not be any; my rejection of the trespassing analogy is that it doesn't even allow us to treat reasons as relevant.
Suppose, though, as I think most people believe, that many abortions are unjustified but some are reasonable. It wouldn't follow that laws should not restrict abortion. For one thing, it isn't an obvious flaw in a law that it prohibits some actions that would in fact be reasonable. Traffic laws do that on a massive scale; procedural rules governing hiring practices sometimes do; laws against theft almost certainly sometimes do; so, arguably, do laws that prohibit private punishment of offenses. In every case, though, it matters a great deal whether the overall conditions that are the law's context make the acts that the law prohibits more or less reasonable. Laws against certain kinds of theft are themselves less reasonable when great numbers of people are unable to meet their basic needs in any other way; the prohibition on private punishment of offenses depends for its justification in part on the ability of the public legal system to punish offenses effectively, fairly, and consistently.
In other words, laws and social and political institutions can affect the reasonableness of acts as well as simply prohibiting them. Thus, I don't think any serious discussion of abortion legislation can proceed unless the participants in the discussion agree to consider whether and how the whole ensemble of political arrangements can (or can't) impact the good reasons that people have for abortions. I don't see much of that kind of discussion anywhere; the pro-life camp sometimes seems content to make abortion illegal, no doubt on the assumption that no abortions are ever remotely reasonable; the pro-choice camp, for its part, seems content to say that they'd like to work to reduce the overall number of abortions without making it illegal, but offers little in the way of suggestions for doing that beyond supporting the dispensation of free prophylactics and "reducing poverty," and certainly never considers the possibility that it could be reasonable to prohibit most abortions by law if social and political conditions were to change in other important respects.
djr,
Again, while we may disagree in certain fundamental beliefs, I find no flaws in your analysis. Thank you for answering my question.
Codgitator (Cadgertator),
I shall endeavor to live up to your faith in my honesty.
Remember: your explicit position is to defend abortion as a just punishment of fetal humans for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,
I would not characterize my position as such, although I can understand why you interpret it as such. In fact, I have tried to be clear that my position is that every fetus which can survive should have the right to be removed alive. Much as an insane (which does *not* mean dangerous)trespassor on your propety should receive help, not punishment, so too sould a fetus receive all the help deserved by any other human, in my opinion. A death that occurs from an abortion is not a punishment to the fetus, but an unfortuate side-effect of the woman exercising her right.
yet you charge opponents with a position, which they explicitly reject, that opposes infanticide just in order to punish women for being on the wrong penis at the wrong time, as it were.
To be clear, I do believe that many of the people in the pro-life movement care about the life of the fetus, period.
However, there are two points I want to not about why I no not feel this positon is typical. First, if it is really about the life of the fetus, then prior intial violations like rape and incest are irrelevant. Yet if I recall correctly, a majority of pro-life supports also support exceptions for rape and incest. Is the life of a fetus less valuable in these situations, or is it because of the behavior of the woman.
Second, this blog is hardly the first place I have seen terms like "cats around" applied to women having abortions. I saw no remark where you felt my characterization of the phrase was incorrect.
You can persist in divining such malice from straightforward pro-life argumentation,
Do you feel that mightygreekwritingmachine has been using "straightforward pro-life argumentation", or are you saying that I have falsely attributed this motive to you? I acknowledge the phrase "always comes back to" was hyperbolic. No major political movement is composed of people with identical motivations.
but meanwhile your opponents can simply quote you: we abort the fetal among us because they are wrongdoers.
That is an interesting claim. I am charitably assuming it is meant hyperbolically. It seems clear this is an issue you feel very strongly about.
... then parents have a right to kill their children when they become unruly in their post-uterine liberty.
I believe I addressed a major difference or two already in this thread.
I guess I'm confused. OneBrow finds no flaws in my arguments. Yet my arguments are sharply opposed to his own, or so I thought. Should I take the reference to fundamental disagreement to indicate that OneBrow thinks rationality rests on arbitrary foundations? Or, to cease this bizarre use of the third person: are you supposing that our disagreement can't be rationally adjudicated?
As for the death of a fetus as an "unfortunate side-effect of a woman exercising her right," I'm not quite sure how the achievement of an agent's intended goal is supposed to be a side-effect. If I intend to drink a glass of water, is my drinking the glass of water just a side-effect? If it is, then everything anyone does, and any consequence of that action, is a side-effect. But then so would "exercising a right" be a side-effect. A side-effect of what? The whole notion of a side-effect is incoherent unless it stands in contrast to something.
Alternatively, if I intend to quench my thirst, is my drinking a glass of water just a side-effect? It seems not; for it is in fact the principal means whereby I quench my thirst. It may be an unfortunate side-effect of my drinking a glass of water that I deplete my household's supply of bottled water. But whether I knew that I would have no more bottled water left over after drinking a glass, depleting my household supply is neither my aim nor the means to my goal. It is a genuine side-effect.
Now, are we seriously to suppose that having an abortion stands to "exercising a right" as depleting my household's supply of bottled water stands to quenching my thirst?
(continued...)
You've denied that rights stand in any necessary connection to what the rights-holder should or should not do; thus if a person has a right to X, she also has a right to not-X. But let me ask you: do or should people have rights to do things that they simply shouldn't do? Granted that having a right to X entails being free to X or not X even when one should do otherwise; in that sense, having a right entails having "a right to do wrong." But in most cases, the rightness of the action which a person has a right to do or not do is highly dependent on context. But do or should people have rights to do things that they always or usually should not do independently of context?
One reason to say "no" is that otherwise it will be very unclear why anybody should have rights to anything. If person P has a right to X relative to person Q, person Q should not interfere with person P when person P chooses to X or not to X. But if people could have rights to perform acts which are always or usually unreasonable, then it would be unclear why they should not have a right to rob or murder others when they feel like it; one would think that we do not have this right because we should always or usually refrain from killing and robbing people. But then, if I had a 'right' to kill whoever I felt like, then none of those people would have rights against me, and presumably neither would I against them. Consequently, the whole idea that any of us have 'rights' would turn out to be ridiculous; we should say, instead, that people should do whatever they want and just dispense with the language of rights.
So, if you agree that we don't have rights to do things that are always or usually unreasonable, then your continued insistence that women have a right to an abortion whether or not the abortion is reasonable or right begins to sound, well, pretty irrational.
Perhaps, by contrast, what you mean with all this talk of women having rights to have abortions even though abortion is unreasonable is simply that the law should not prohibit them from having an abortion whether or not abortion is reasonable. But why? You certainly don't think that the law should prohibit people from sexually molesting children regardless of whether that's unreasonable. What's the difference supposed to be with an abortion (indeed, why isn't an abortion worse, since it not only inflicts severe damage, but actually annihilates a person?)
In short, your whole strategy here seems to be to avoid the real issue: you grant that abortion is a terrible thing, but deny that this amounts to a sufficient reason for the law to prohibit it. But then you owe us some sort of account of why the state shouldn't prohibit this thing, but should prohibit a whole lot of other terrible things.
Finally, though I won't begrudge you any negative comments about the mighty greek whining machine, I don't think it's especially productive or intellectually responsible to focus on the alleged motives of pro-life people. My judgment on that issue differs from yours only slightly, but it ultimately doesn't matter: if Abe Lincoln's only motive for abolishing slavery were to impress some girl he wanted to sleep with, what relevance would that have had to whether or not the abolition of slavery was just and wise? Just as honest and intelligent people can be wrong, dishonest and stupid people can be right. Judging the character of pro-life activists is neither necessary nor sufficient for assessing their views.
In hindsight, my point would probably have been clearer if I had written the third sentence of the fourth paragraph in the second post as "You certainly don't think that the law should fail to prohibit people from sexually molesting children regardless of whether that's unreasonable." The original version misleadingly suggested that I took you to be opposed to laws prohibiting child molestation, where of course the point of the example is that I assume you aren't opposed to such laws, and that your support of them has much or everything to do with the vicious and unreasonable character of molesting children.
djr said...
Should I take the reference to fundamental disagreement to indicate that OneBrow thinks rationality rests on arbitrary foundations?
A rational argument is made using agree-upon conventions or argumentation, chosen arbitrarily, and requires axioms and similar starting positons, also chosen arbitrarily.
Or, to cease this bizarre use of the third person: are you supposing that our disagreement can't be rationally adjudicated?
In the sense that one of us will be found correct and the other incorrect? That will depend upon the standards used to judge what is correct and incorrect.
As for the death of a fetus as an "unfortunate side-effect of a woman exercising her right," I'm not quite sure how the achievement of an agent's intended goal is supposed to be a side-effect.
Is the goal the death of the fetus, or the refusal of parenthood? While we can't know the statistics on this, if given a choice between "we will kil the fetus now" and "we will raise the fetus apart from you, and it will not interfere with your life", do you see the first as being the majority choice among women having abortions?
But let me ask you: do or should people have rights to do things that they simply shouldn't do?
You extend your example below to include rights that P would enact positive harm on Q, but did not include examples where the P was also preventing harm that occured from Q. I certainly don't see your question as having a generic yes answer, it can vary from putative right to putative right, from situation to situation.
So, if you agree that we don't have rights to do things that are always or usually unreasonable, then your continued insistence that women have a right to an abortion whether or not the abortion is reasonable or right begins to sound, well, pretty irrational.
However, here you take a general "no" applied to all situations and apply it to a specific situation as a specific no. Negations don't work that way.
Does a person have the right to cut off one of their own fingers? Is that action almost always unreasonable?
... that the law should not prohibit them from having an abortion whether or not abortion is reasonable. But why?
Because pregnancy is the use of the woman's body by the fetus, and should only be continued with the continuing consent of the woman.
You certainly don't think that the law should fail to prohibit people from sexually molesting children regardless of whether that's unreasonable. What's the difference ...
The unmolested child makes no use of the potential molestor's body to prevent the molestation.
... I don't think it's especially productive or intellectually responsible to focus on the alleged motives of pro-life people.
My understanding of the recent research in the human tendency of choosing positions is that people are generally not persuaded by rational argument. In fact, arguing with someone rationally is more likely to deepen their commitment to their original position than to lessen it. So, I think examining the motives of some people is indeed a good tactic to use, that is from where convictions come. Of course, it's wrong to say that "pro-life people" are such a homozygous group that they have a shared set of motivations, and so it would be wrong for me to attribute any particular motivation to any particular poster unless they reveal it themselves. I have no trouble accepting that you and our host are motivated solely by a desire to preserve the life of the fetus. Other posters reveal motivations by the words they choose. Certainly, if you detect similar motivations in what I say, I encourage you to bring them to my attention, and I will either affirm them or correct my words.
... what relevance would that have had to whether or not the abolition of slavery was just and wise?
None. However, understanding the source of position is the only way to really persuade a person to change it.
Judging the character of pro-life activists is neither necessary nor sufficient for assessing their views.
I don't see that determining motivations and juging character are the same thing, or that one implies the other.
This will be rather long. I do not apologize.
A rational argument is made using agree-upon conventions or argumentation, chosen arbitrarily, and requires axioms and similar starting positons, also chosen arbitrarily.
Combining this with your later comments about the impotence of rational argument, I'm having a hard time figuring out why I should believe that continuing to engage in rational discourse with you could be worthwhile, since you maintain that rationality rests on "arbitrarily chosen" foundations and that you don't think arguments have much effect on people (including yourself?). Nonetheless, I'll give it a try by focusing on these second-order issues.
On what grounds do you assert that rational arguments depend on arbitrarily chosen principles ('principle,' fundamentally, just means 'starting point')? What, come to think of it, do you really mean by that assertion? You might mean one of at least a few things:
(a) when people engage in rational discourse with one another, their particular arguments depend on a set of tacit assumptions, many or perhaps most of which have not been subjected to examination by the participants in the discussion, and which eo ipso have not been adopted for reasons.
(b) all reasoning is founded on a set of more or less expansive basic propositions which cannot be rationally defended by appeal to some more basic propositions; in the end, all arguments rest on beliefs for which no reason can be given.
(c) All arguments ultimately rest on beliefs for which no reason can be given and which are wholly optional; however psychologically difficult or even impossible it may be for some or all of us, the basic beliefs that ground all of our reasoning could be extremely different from what they are.
Notice that each of these is stronger than the last. I doubt that (a) is what you really mean, because what you seem to be maintaining certainly doesn't follow from it. I accept (a), but I deny that anything about the arbitrariness of rationality follows from it, for a few reasons. First, because it is a claim about what is going on when people engage in rational discourse, not about the necessary structure of rationality: in life, our reasoning takes a lot of things for granted, but that doesn't show that we couldn't conceivably consider all of the reasons for and against a certain belief without leaving some set of assumptions unexamined. Second, and more pressingly, the sense in which (a) rightly points out that our arguments depend on assumptions that we have not self-consciously adopted for reasons is too weak to warrant the conclusion that those assumptions are arbitrary. Not only does it leave it open that those assumptions could be supported by good reasons, but it also leaves it open that we embrace those assumptions because our cognitive faculties have been functioning properly and thereby supplying us with true beliefs about features of the world: just as I can have beliefs without realizing that I have them, so too I can make cognitive contact with the world without realizing it or without appreciating just what the content of that contact is. At least, nothing about (a) is inconsistent with these claims or even remotely suggestive of their falsity.
I don't think (a) is what you mean, but I bring it up because something like (a) may be what has led you to adopt the stronger view that you seem to have. If so, seeing that (a) doesn't entail anything stronger might help.
I suspect that your view is rather more like (b) or (c): all reasoning ultimately depends on beliefs for which no reason can be given, and these beliefs may in fact be wholly optional. Now, if you only assert (b), then you haven't shown that there's anything arbitrary about these basic beliefs: for they may just be fundamental beliefs that any rational agent has to have simply by virtue of engaging in rational thought. If so, then while we may not adopt them for reasons, there's nothing rationally arbitrary about them -- quite the contrary, they would then be something like laws of thought. Laws of thought are more like genuine laws than like 'laws of nature': you can break them, but they're still in effect. Presumably you would recognize at least a few things of this sort: you would not, I take it, claim that nothing more than arbitrarily chosen conventions underlie the fact that the following piece of reasoning is formally valid:
1. If P, then Q
2. Not Q.
3. Therefore, not P.
And, likewise, that it would be fallacious and formally irrational to deny 3 given 1 and 2.
Of course, you may be just fine with acknowledging non-arbitrary principles of reasoning so long as they are purely formal. So let's suppose it's just the substantive stuff (the P's and the Q's rather than the structures into which they fit) that you think has to turn out ultimately to be arbitrary and wholly optional.
In that case, my question would be: why should it matter that the beliefs are wholly optional? If a belief is optional if and only if we could continue to engage in reasoning without holding that belief or being committed to it, then probably every substantive belief is optional. But the inference from optionality to arbitrariness is fallacious: the fact that some belief is one that I could consistently reject without ceasing to be able to reason at all does not show or even suggest that there can be no good reasons for holding that belief. If a belief is rationally arbitrary, it must be both optional and unable to be supported by any further reasons.
But what I can't see is why anyone should believe that any beliefs can't be supported by further reasons. So far as I can tell, there are few a priori limits to what can be said for or against any particular belief, regardless of how basic or fundamental it is.
One reason thinking that some beliefs can't be rationally supported is that some of them are so basic that any argument we give will presuppose them. This seems to be the case with formal principles like the canons of validity for deductive arguments, the principle of non-contradiction, and so on. I've already said why, if these beliefs are really so basic that we can't give any arguments that don't presuppose them, that wouldn't make them rationally arbitrary. But I'm not even sure that our inability to give arguments that don't presuppose these principles would entail that we can't give reasons to support them: for surely the very fact that we can't engage in any reasoning at all without presupposing them constitutes an argument in their favor quite distinct from the fact that we just happen to accept them.
In short, I can't find any reason whatsoever to accept the claim that reasoning necessarily depends on rationally arbitrary starting-points.
Of course, your thought is not altogether unfamiliar: many people have been tempted to it, most notably, I think, Protestant fideists and their secular descendants, philosophical pragmatists. But it rests on a view of reason, justification, and knowledge that I consider to be as hopeless as it is unnecessary, namely foundationalism. Foundationalism, broadly construed, is just the view that a belief can count as knowledge or, less ambitiously, a justified belief if and only if it is either a member of or can be inferentially derived from a set of propositions that are self-justifying. To be sure, the view you seem to be putting forth (and which is put forth by fideists and some kinds of pragmatists) is not quite a form of foundationalism. A hard-core foundationalist believes that there are some self-justifying beliefs; the claim that reason rests on rationally arbitrary foundations apparently denies that there are any self-justifying beliefs, substitutes for "arbitrarily chosen" for "self-justified," and concludes that justification is entirely relative to these arbitrarily chosen starting points. The point to appreciate, though, is that this sort of fideist-pragmatist view doesn't really reject foundationalism: in fact it accepts foundationalism's standards for knowledge and justification and merely denies that those standards can genuinely be met.
For what it's worth, I think the fideists and pragmatists are in a better position than the strong foundationalists. But all of them wrongly assume that rational justification and knowledge either require self-justifying beliefs or must be rationally arbitrary. But why should we accept that assumption, particularly once we agree that there are either no self-justifying beliefs or only a very small and purely formal set of them? Why not think instead that a belief is justified when and to the extent that it hangs together together in a consistent and mutually reinforcing way with all the other beliefs that we have some sort of reason to accept? And why think that any belief or kind of belief is uniquely privileged in a way that sets it beyond rational assessment? We can't examine the reasonableness of all of our beliefs at once, because we have to take some other beliefs for granted in order to reason about any of them. But nothing prevents us from assessing each and every belief or candidate for belief.
One might raise all sorts of doubts about this sort of coherentist alternative to foundationalism. I could address those if you like. What I think I've done enough for now to show is that whatever you mean by saying that arguments rest on "arbitrarily chosen starting-points," you haven't given me a single reason to think so.
A final concluding remark: a few of your comments seem to suggest that the point of discussing things like abortion could only be to persuade someone else to change her or his position. Though of course it will be true to say of any argument in which I maintain one position against another that I am trying to persuade my interlocutor to change his position, that description can be misleading in at least two ways. First, because my aim may not be to persuade someone in any way I can, but to persuade someone to adopt what I regard as a true view for what I regard as the right reasons. Second, and more importantly, the aim of persuasion may be entirely subordinated to the aim of truth and its closely related cousin, reasonable or justified belief. For someone with that aim, persuasion is a wholly subordinate goal insofar as he or she will prefer to be persuaded on good grounds rather than to persuade. I do not maintain that it is never appropriate to aim at persuasion per se, even to persuade someone to take a false view or a true view for bad reasons. I do not, however, engage in conversations like these with anything like that kind of an aim. If it were my goal to persuade you, then I would probably have either given up long ago or taken a very different track, because frankly you don’t seem much like the sort of person who is open to changing his mind. But even someone unwilling to change his mind can be a worthwhile partner in rational argument if she or he is willing and able to give good arguments or to receive them. To be quite honest with you, my interest in discussions like these has very little to do with you or anyone else in your position, except insofar as you are a person who is interested in holding reasonable views. If you are — and, sometimes, even if you aren’t — then the conversation can be a worthwhile endeavor because it allows me to test my own beliefs and explore questions and problems. If it also turns out to lead you to abandon an unreasonable view, or some bad reasons for that view, or to adopt a more reasonable one, then I will be glad to have had some role in leading you to that benefit. But I don’t have any illusions that I am some kind of philosophical altruist out to benefit the rest of humanity by showing them the truth, as if I had any claim to knowing what that is independent of the best reasons I can give. So it may be especially helpful for you if I make clear that I am not a pro-life activist of any sort and am far from maintaining that abortion is always ‘wrong’ or ought to be illegal. I am, in fact, not very confident in any of the several different views about abortion that I find myself inclined at different times to take. That’s one reason I like to engage in conversations about it with people who are interested in rational argument rather than ranting in the style of the mightygreekwritingmachine. So, ultimately, when I pick on you, it’s not because I reject your position so much as because I find your reasons for that position terribly weak and at times incoherent.
Hope that helps.
djr,
I think you will find my reasoning even more radical than (c).
Presumably you would recognize at least a few things of this sort: you would not, I take it, claim that nothing more than arbitrarily chosen conventions underlie the fact that the following piece of reasoning is formally valid:
1. If P, then Q
2. Not Q.
3. Therefore, not P.
And, likewise, that it would be fallacious and formally irrational to deny 3 given 1 and 2.
On the contrary, I do find there are arbitrary conventions underlying that bit of reasoning, not the least of which is the convention that every proposition can be assigned a single value of "true" or "false". If you feel otherwise, I will only point to the existence of engtire fields of mathematics that examine the results of allowing more than two truth-values for statements.
However, more generally, reasoning itself is a formal process, and no formal process can justify it's own precepts or axioms. To justify logic, you can not merely use logic, but must use metalogic. To justify metalogic, you must use meta-metalogic. There is no upper bound, although the sequences involved to start to seem repetitive around the third "meta". This is not a bug that can be excised, but an integral part of formal reasoning that can not be removed.
As for why people would engage in discussions when they know the odds of changing the mind of someone else is slight, I personally do it to test my own knowledge, expand my own understanding, broaden my horizons, and on occasion alter my viewpoint, when warranted. Since you don't think I am the sort to change my mind, you may disbelieve the last sentence. I will not try to persuade you in that.
So, in other words, you are a foundationalist and aren't interested in addressing challenges to foundationalism. Or, more charitably, you are a mathematician and have convinced yourself that since some branches of mathematics are rationally arbitrary and metaphysically vacuous, all thought must be, too. But since you're happy to "assign more than two truth-values for statements," you'll be happy to agree that what I say is true and that what you say is false without worrying about contradiction and all that jazz.
djr,
I make a distinction between all thought and all rational argument. Among others, thoughts are instances of brain activity (therefore not physically vacuous, much less metaphysically), while rational arguments are thoughts that fit into pre-defined, arbitrarily chosen patterns. I don't even think the patterns themselves are metaphysically vacuous. I think the preferential value assigned to a pattern has no metaphysical meaning beyond the preference being caused by the thought, there is no intrinsic preference without the thought that makes the preference.
I was not ducking much of what yo said against foundationalism. I agree that we can examine each belief in comparison to the otehr beliefs we have for consistency or coherency. I don't think any such belief is privledged from an examinaiton of it's consequences, sources, etc. I don't pretend to have given you a compelling reason to say all beliefs are chosen arbitrarily, but I am confused why you seem to think your argument that beliefs ca be examined and compared to other beliefs is an indication otherwise.
You seem to have misunderstood what I meant about having multiple logical values. I am not trying to say you could assing more than one truth value to the same proposition (although that could also be done in some fashion by creating a multi-dimensional truth-value construct), but that teh selection of truth values you can choose from to assign to any statement is not necessarily two.
One example is intuitionaist mathematics, where statements can be proven-true, proven-false, or unprovable (can not be shown to be true or false). Then, you could have P => Q (it is provable that if P can be proven true, Q can be proven true), not-Q (it can be proven that Q is false), and yet have not-P be unprovable. There are other interpretations to three-valued logics where modus tollens tollens works.
Intuitionist mathematics is as successful in practical applicaitons as standard mahematics. Do you think there is a non-arbitrary way of saying one should be preferred?
Of course, just because one set of preferences is abitrary does not mean all of them are arbitrary. Do you think there is a non-arbitrary axiom or method of argumentation? How do you identify it as such?
You're just adding more undefended assertions to your already maxed out credit and still haven't addressed any of my points. If you think you can consistently maintain that rationality is radically arbitrary while defending that view with appeals to straightforward empirical evidence and contentious metaphysical views, you're either confused or wrapping the arbitrariness of your own claims in a veil of ironic silence. In either event, I've done my part; if you manage to do yours, I'll consider responding again.
If you think you can consistently maintain that rationality is radically arbitrary while defending that view with appeals to straightforward empirical evidence and contentious metaphysical views,
What should I be appealing to instead?
Also, are there noncontentious metaphysical views?
At any rate, I've already pointed out that you can build a viable, useful system for rational argumentation that does not contain modus tollens tollens. So, I'm nt sure what my further part should be. 'm trying to learn, not teach.
Still, if that was your last word, then thank you. I did learn quite a bit.
Post a Comment