Another look at philosophy and us

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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in thinking about philosophical matters, I return, quite often,
to questions of how philosophy connects to our daily lives,
if it does at all…

Let us look at one matter that is part of our daily lives, if not
a physical matter, certainly a philosophical matter…

that of Abortion… the bottom line question in Abortion is this:
what is the ‘‘end game’’ of abortion? What is the point of
ending Abortions? my problem with those who advocate ending
Abortions, is that they never finish their conclusions…
in other words, ok, we end Abortions, what does this mean for us
in general? What is the big picture in ending Abortions?

An anti-abortionist will say, we are saving lives… ok, so, the point
of ending Abortions is to save lives? But that is a very narrow picture of
saving lives… what about Capital Punishment? Now, we get the defense
of Capital Punishment being, that the ‘‘state’’ has a right to defend itself…

So, even defenders of ‘‘saving lives’’ will allow the ending of lives if, if
the act of saving lives fits into, or follows some already predetermined belief…
so, in fact, that act of saving lives already has exceptions…
it is not an absolute belief… it has exceptions to the rule…
and it is a rare thing that one who is anti-abortion will also
protest the shooting of a innocent person by the police…
the taking of lives seems, once again, to be ok, when it
is in the defense of someone or something…
this use of exceptions is interesting…
but Abortions are not supposed to have exceptions… no abortion
even in the case of incest or rape… is the mantra of most anti-abortionist…
but we allow exceptions in other cases, why not here? to protect the fetus…
that is not an answer… that is just a statement repeating your first statement…

which reveals the truth about Abortions… it is not a philosophical or
legal or social problem, it is an emotional problem…people feel that
Abortions are wrong, but they can’t lay out why and what is the overall
goal of Abortions…what are you attempting to achieve by banning Abortions?
what is the overall goal of doing so?

the problem with ending Abortions is the fact that it doesn’t end Abortions…
that wealthy women can and do get Abortions… they don’t call it
an Abortion, they call it a procedure… ending Abortions doesn’t end
Abortions, it just limits who can get it… and I argue that is the real
point of Abortions… to limit who get abortions… not to end Abortions…
it is simply another continuation of the war that the wealthy/powerful
has been conducting on the poor/middle class for decades…

the fact is that those Anti-abortionist can’t actually defend
abortions without some recourse to the sanctity of life,
which doesn’t actually exists if, if we still capital punishment
or accept policemen shooting innocent civilians… the idea of
the sanctity of life has to extend to everyone without exceptions,
or it doesn’t mean anything…

that a small group of people can create public policy based on
their own religious precepts, has been rejected in state after state
in voting over the last several months… in which the citizens
of the state, allow in some fashion Abortions, is a clear sign
that in a national plebiscite, the ban on Abortions would be lifted
and made more liberal… which is why that anti-abortionist are
against such a national plebiscite… they would lose…and they
know it…

so, let us return to abortions in a philosophical manner…
that life is sacred is a religious concept, not a political or legal
or economic concept is quite clear… that capitalism as an
economic system has no problem at all with people starving to
death under capitalism… the fact is that people starving to death
is part of the capitalistic system… written into capitalism…
for capitalism to succeed, it must have a large class of people
who are willing to work cheap… for therein that is how capitalism
makes its profits… by stealing the labor of their workers in the
form of paying the workers, far less than their production creates…
so, if the worker creates $10 of goods, for capitalism to work,
it must pay the worker far less than $10… and the difference between
the two, between the pay of the workers and the productivity, is the
profits… which is why efficiency and productivity are pushed
ever harder in our modern world… for that is the only real way today,
to create profits… by increasing the workers productivity…
which is to say, they create more goods with the same amount of pay…

and what does this have anything to do with Abortions?
Everything… for the prime need of businesses is workers,
by preventing Abortions, we create more workers…
I have heard politicians say as much…anything to create more
workers and pay them less and less… that is the agenda of
big business and their salaried employees, congressmen…

that Abortions is in the best interest of big business should not surprise
anyone… and the reason why anti-abortionist are so well funded… it has
nothing at all to do with the sanctity of life, recall if life were actually
sacred, then capital punishment would also be banned, it isn’t…
Abortions have everything to do with creating more workers for big business…

the deeper one looks into anti-abortionist, the worst they look, but
let us continue our deep dive into the end result of the anti-abortionist…

We have seen the attack on public education that the right has conducted
over the last 20 years… the entire IQ45 educational agenda during their
4 years in office was an attempt to destroy all public education…
including colleges and universities… (you destroy higher education
by making it too expensive to go to school… and what has happened?
yep, colleges are disappearing left and right because students
can’t afford them)

and that is the overall goal of big business and their hired employees,
public servants, they aren’t public and they aren’t servants,

why would big business want to destroy public education?
easy, it helps create an entire class of uneducated people that
are in desperate need of jobs…and who are willing to work cheap
to get those jobs… thus Abortions and education are collective
attempts to strengthen big business… and has nothing to do
with the sanctity of life or helping people moving ahead in life…
just creating more profits for big business and that is what big
business is all about, profits, and nothing outside of profits…

So the so called ‘‘Cultural Wars’’ of the last 40 years are really
wars created by big business to increase profits… why else
would big business help fund the ''Cultural Wars" over all those
years?

things don’t happen in isolation or apart from other aspects of the state,
society, system… and that is the mistake of most conservatives,
they take things into isolation, separate and apart from other
considerations… whereas we must think and operate in
the collective mind set… what is the overall goal or point of
any given action?

and that is where we must be… with the collective, and within the historical…
which include the idea of the ‘‘Culture Wars’’ of which Abortions is just a part of…

Kropotkin

2

“Only end a life (consent structure) that is threatening to end life that is not threatening to end a life, & only if ending the threatening life will protect the threatened life.”

That escapes your criticisms.

Always steel man the perspective you are critiquing—failure to do so shows the straw in your own thinking.

Disclaimer: I stopped reading right here:

You kind of went down a lot of rabbit holes, from what I scanned after that.

The why behind its wrongness is that it fails to recognize and acknowledge in thoughts, values, and actions that self=other. The baby’s body is not the mother’s body. If left alone, the baby will develop personhood. No one knows when that happens exactly, so no one should be ending the life of a baby at any stage of gestation. …just like no one should be ending the processes of an AI that passes any competency test you can throw at a human.

Isn’t it funny how some (certainly not all) materialists/physicalists/naturalists equate mind and brain except in the case of abortions? No, it isn’t funny at all.

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Wow PK wrote an essay, well done.

Just so you know, killing people doesn’t create more workers. Abortion lowers the population quite significantly, if not for abortions some 40 million more people would be here today since abortion was federally legalized. Just saying.

Although I am against abortion of course, it does end up having a eugenic effect for society. I’m not a eugenicist but it is simply a fact that less intelligent and more mentally and emotionally screwed up women are more likely to kill their babies in abortions, compared to more intelligent and stable women. A lot of the differences in intelligence and mental/emotional stability trace back to our genes. So abortion is sort of a cleansing filter that helps to keep bad genes from being passed into the next generation. I would still ban abortion if I could, murdering innocent babies is one of the most evil acts imaginable. But since we are stuck with it for now, at least we can recognize one positive benefit it does have.

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Two parts…

  1. Genes have error correction already, and variations in intelligence are not the result of genetics. Epigenetic factors resulting from environmental stressors like malnutrition and early traumatic experiences impact intelligence. And not necessarily permanently.

  2. Where are you getting your data on the intelligence level of those who have abortions? Do they give people intelligence tests before they have abortions these days?

Actually, three parts…

I’d rather have a society of happy-go-lucky kids (intellectually) than a world full of …. people who think intelligence is all that matters.

5

Ichthus77:
The baby’s body is not the mother’s body. If left alone, the baby will develop personhood. No one knows when that happens exactly, so no one should be ending the life of a baby at any stage of gestation. …just like no one should be ending the processes of an AI that passes any competency test you can throw at a human.

K: there are several problems here… one: how do you happen to separate out that
the ''baby’s body is not the mother’s body" without the mother, there is no fetus…
simply fact…and this: ‘‘if left alone, the baby will develop personhood’’
and how do you figure? many such fetuses spontaneously miscarriage…
my mom had 12 miscarriages… and 5 kids…she was basically always
pregnant…which leads us to the second point… the law is quite clear that
a child is the parents until the age of 18…the parent, for all intents and purposes,
owns the child… we know because we tried to throw our daughter out age 16,
and couldn’t… legally, she was ours until 18 and there was no escaping that…
if a child is legally owned by the parents, how is a fetus not, NOT owned by the parent…
and yes, I used the word ‘‘own’’ specifically…
if the child/fetus is owned by the society, then the society should have
legal ownership of a fetus, and it doesn’t…if not the parent and not the
society/state, then who exactly owns a fetus? and by owns, who is accountable,
responsible for that fetus? that what owns means… to be accountable, responsible…
for something…if, if the parent is held accountable, then the parent has
the final say…for that is what accountability means…to speak for the child
because the child can’t…

Kropotkin

6

Well, in that case, the baby’s body is not just the mother’s body, it is also the father’s body. But in fact it is neither. It belongs to whoever made & sustains the entire body of the universe.

7

True ownership of responsibility respects, recognizes, and acknowledges consent. That means it trains (best by example) the child on how to be a responsibly consenting adult. That is all that ownership means. For any person in the universe.

Any law not in alignment with such is no law at all.

8

To me it sounds like your argument is “I own responsibility for this person, therefore it is my right to take its life.”

9

HumAnIze:
I’m not a eugenicist but it is simply a fact that less intelligent and more mentally and emotionally screwed up women are more likely to kill their babies in abortions, compared to more intelligent and stable women. A lot of the differences in intelligence and mental/emotional stability trace back to our genes. So abortion is sort of a cleansing filter that helps to keep bad genes from being passed into the next generation. I would still ban abortion if I could, murdering innocent babies is one of the most evil acts imaginable. But since we are stuck with it for now, at least we can recognize one positive benefit it does have.

K: a whole lot of assumptions in this little piece…for example, give me the evidence that
''less intelligent, mentally and emotionally screwed up woman are more likely to ‘‘kill’’
their babies compared to more intelligent and stable women""
that itself is an emotional statement with no facts to back it up… where is
the evidence? it is an isolated statement with no context…

and another statement without any context…

‘‘Murdering babies is one of most evil act imaginable’’

context please… compared to what exactly? evil compared to the Holocaust,
evil compared to picking daisies? the word ‘‘evil’’ itself is a form of creating
a false context…you have to compare evil to something for it to make sense…
what are you comparing it to? otherwise it is just another statement that
has nothing to do with nothing, because it lacks context…

Kropotkin

10

Ichthus77:
Well, in that case, the baby’s body is not just the mother’s body, it is also the father’s body. But in fact it is neither. It belongs to whoever made & sustains the entire body of the universe.

K: try that in a court of law… this is metaphysical nonsense… trying to say god without
saying god… and if the fetus is god’s problem, then let god feed, clothe, house
and educate the fetus/child…if he owns it, he gets accountability, responsibility
for it… and it becomes his problem…not mine…

Kropotkin

11

How did that work out for you when you tried to boot your 16-year-old daughter?

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For ANY person. Including God.

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Ichthus77:
To me it sounds like your argument is “I own responsibility for this person, therefore it is my right to take its life.”

K: the problem with your statement is the word "person’’ a fetus isn’t a person… it is a collection
of cells with no sense of personhood… it can’t survive outside the mother’s body
until 23 or 24 weeks into a pregnancy… which is roughly 3 months…
but that fetus cannot, cannot survive without the immediate aid
of other people…and that at the earliest, a fetus is not conscious until
roughly the same time period… perhaps a bit later… but that is not
the whole story… there is the outside world aspect… many a child has
been forced to be born into a situation where it will not be loved, under
any circumstances… and a child not given love in the first year of life,
dies… without love, there is no point in even being born… love gives
life its meaning and purpose… does the society/god take responsibility
for a child not receiving love? nah… god is your basic dine and dash
kinda guy… eat and run… that’s his motto…

Kropotkin

14

PK reminds me of another fallacy I need to catalogue, let’s call it the Connection Fallacy: just because one thing is connected to or requires another thing to keep existing isn’t an argument against its own existence, meaning, or independent being. Everything in existence is connected and depends on other things, nothing is totally isolated from anything else. A baby in the womb depends on being inside the environment of its mother for survival, we depend on being inside an environment that has the right balance of oxygen in the air, the right range of temperatures and pressures, etc. So what?

15

None of us can exist outside of the universe. Perhaps the universe should just stop allowing us to exist, since it owns us?

Or perhaps it could teach us by example how to be consent-respecting adults? Perhaps it already has? Perhaps now it’s time for us to do that!

16

Imagine if all the people in the abortion industry re-branded so that planned parenthood was actually about parenthood.

17

If left alone, the baby will develop personhood. No one knows when that happens exactly, so no one should be ending the life of a baby at any stage of gestation. …just like no one should be ending the processes of an AI that passes any competency test you can throw at a human.

Isn’t it funny how some (certainly not all) materialists/physicalists/naturalists equate mind and brain except in the case of abortions? No, it isn’t funny at all.

18

The universe itself cannot own anything, it is not a sentient being. At least as far as we can tell.

Unless by “owns us” you just mean that we live inside the universe. Yeah, of course. But so what? Is here literally any person who would disagree with the statement “we live inside the universe”? I doubt it. No sane person anyway. So that means you are either making a weird claim about the universe being some kind of living being, or you don’t understand what the concept of ownership really implies, or you’re just making an obvious statement of platitude but in a way that you think makes it seem “cooler” or more edgy somehow. Either way, boring.

19

How is the universe not sentient and yet it has sentient beings in it? Are our bodies not sentient? Do our bodies just have sentient beings in them?

Is the universe / our bodies / like a temple or something?

Maybe you should be drinking alcohol.

Let’s hear your very clearheaded answer. Bring us some clarity.

20

You keep saying this, but it is obviously wrong. If left in the mother’s body, she does not miscarry, and the birth is successful, and the baby is cared for, then personhood develops. “Left alone” is not a terminology that describes nurturing.