Wendy, iambiguous and [for now] abortion

I have no idea what you are asking me here.

Again, focus in on a specific set of circumstances out in a particular world [yours] and describe what you think and feel as it relates to any possible social, political and economic consequences of abortion.

Biggie, so we agree that a fetus is alive? Also that abortion is the murder of a fetus, a baby, a life? Our contention lies in a woman’s second choice, not her first choice?

You still haven’t a clue regarding my frame of mind here, do you?

My point is not what either one of us believes about the morality of abortion. Instead, it revolves around the manner in which I construe points of view like this – yours, mine, ours, theirs – as rooted existentially, subjectively, subjunctively in the lives that we live.

Again, in the points I raise on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

Which is just another way of speculating that, using the tools of philosophy, there does not appear – appear to me – to be a way in which, either rationally or empirically or naturally, to encompass anything in the vicinity of a moral obligation to behave as either a good/rational person would or as a bad/irrational person would. In a No God world, in my view, these are basically social constructs rooted out in a particular world seen from a particular point of view.

This part:

Hence the “psychology of objectivism”.

First choice, second choice…tenth choice. There is still only what we are able to pin down as in fact true for all of us objectively and what is deemed to be true by us “in our head” as the embodiment of conflicting goods down through the ages.

And, with abortion, we don’t even have a way in which to pin down once and for all when the unborn itself becomes a “human being”.

How does this work with respect to abortion? :

What’s the difference if abortion is made illegal(or legal) by a dictatorship or a democracy?

The people who want the illegal option are screwed either way.

Biggie wrote

They are not social constructs and that is in part our debate. Don’t give up so easily Biggie, we both might learn something.

So a woman’s first choice is deciding if she wants to become pregnant.

Well, in a dictatorship rooted to one or another political ideology, or in a theocracy rooted to one or another God, right makes might. Certain behaviors are deemed to be necessarily good or evil. Necessarily rational or irrational. Necessarily legal or illegal.

In a democracy, where different objectivist factions compete for power, there is always the possibility that your side can prevail and the laws changed.

Or you can eschew objectivism altogether and embrace one or another more pragmatic approach to the law. Laws that revolve around the assumption that since there is no objective morality in regard to things like abortion, “moderation, negotiation and compromrise” come to be seen as “the best of all possible worlds.”

Or, sure, there is always the possibility that the “law of the jungle” may prevail.

Unbelievable. How are the views regarding abortion in any particular human community [u]not[/u] constructed in large part out of the historical, cultural and experiential factors that revolve around their own unique set of social, political and economic interactions?

Unless of course there is a God or a philosophy-king able to note the vast and varied moral narratives and political agenda down through the ages and is able to pronounce the optimal or the only manner in which all men and women who wish to be thought of as rational and virtuous are obligated to behave in regard to abortion.

And then this part:

I’m still waiting to assess your own existential trajectory in regard to abortion. The manner in which your experiences and your thinking became intertwined over the years.

My argument here is that you would have to examine the particular reasons that a particular woman chose in regard to pregnancy. How is her choice rooted more in the manner in which I construe human identity as the embodiment of dasein…or more in the manner in which others have come to understand “I” as, instead, the embodiment of the “real me” able to be in sync with “the right thing to do”.

Biggie wrote

Let’s go with a philosopher.

Biggie wrote

You’re moving the goal post. You believe that abortion is murder but also that a woman should be able to abort up until birth with impunity, correct? I am against abortion.

I think there are two major aspects to our disagreement…the pregnancy and the abortion of the pregnancy.

The problem is not in defining abortion as such - for everyone knows what it means - but in determining to what extent it can be described as moral
There is no optimal frame of mind that can do that because anti and pro abortionists cannot fundamentally agree about it from a moral perspective

Abortion actually exists on a moral spectrum ranging from those who think all abortion is immoral to those who think it is perfectly justified at any time
and for any reason and all points of view in between . There is no optimal frame of mind that will find universal consensus across such a diverse spectrum

What I believe is that what I believe about abortion is embodied existentially in this particular sequence in this particular life:

What I then suggest is that this is applicable to you in turn. But you won’t go there.

Unless you can provide me with an argument able to demonstrate that in being against abortion your points are not merely embedded in political prejudices but, instead, in thinking that makes all the points raised by those who are in favor of abortion go away, I just chalk it up to you not getting me more than I’m not getting you.

In being against abortion, what would you do, force all pregnant women to give birth [regardless of the circumstances]? And if they abort the baby instead, arrest them for premeditated first degree murder which if convicted may send them to prison…to death row?

I now recognize the reasoning behind the arguments raised by both sides. I then take my own existential leap to “moderation, negotiation and compromise” in regard to laws that will either reward or punish particular behaviors in particular contexts. But only in recognizing that this part…

…doesn’t go away. I am no less “fractured and fragmented”.

No, from my frame of mind, there is still only one. Your objectivist belief that in regard to aborting the unborn, one can reconfigure one’s political prejudices into just another manifestation of the either/or world; and my belief [no less an existential contraption] that “I” here is the subjective/subjunctive embodiment of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

And, then, historically, culturally and experientially, the intersubjective/intersubjunctive embodiment of dasein out in a particular world.

There are plenty of contexts in which homicide is morally justifiable, so just calling abortion homicide doesn’t close the entailment: why is it the kind of homicide that we should punish?

A similar argument goes for the “life begins at conception” framing. Tadpoles are alive. Skin cells are alive. Why is a fertilized egg the kind of life we care about such that we should that we should treat its destruction as morally significant?

Do all agree that there is no god and no souls? I’d be curious to know the life-begins-at-conception argument against abortion if you don’t believe in an immortal soul and a omniscient god who values souls above all else.

Yes, but most of those on either side of this conflagration are able to convince themselves there is a moral perspective to be had. Their own in particular. They might argue with those who hold an opposite point of view, but they are both of the conviction that they embody one or another rendition of the real me in sync with one or another rendition of the right thing to do.

That’s the part I no longer have access to myself. Instead “I” am fractured and fragmented given the manner in which I have thought myself into believing that value judgments of this sort are derived existentially from daseins confronting conflicting goods out in a No God world where what ultimately counts is who has the actual political power to enforce one rather than another set of behaviors.

Yes, I think the same thing. But I believe this because of how I view human interactions [in the is/ought world] based on my signature thread arguments.

I come here looking for those who think other than I do.

Homicide: “the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another; murder.”

And, in any particular human community, down through the ages historically and culturally, the circumstances around which folks deemed specific situations involving the killing of another unlawful varied considerably. But it would seem that one way or another something was made illegal because it was thought to be the wrong thing to do. And, in particular, by those with the economic and political clout to sustain what they perceived to be in their best-interests.

Abortion as murder or abortion as a woman’s right to choose gets all tangled up in any number of vast and varied sets of circumstances viewed in conflicting ways out in a particular world.

Of course my own rendition of this is well known by many here. And, thus, with respect to my own reaction to abortion [either morally or legally] “I” am “fractured and fragmented” in a way that others are not. All I can do is react to the arguments of those who are not nearly as drawn and quartered as I am.

Exactly. One set of assumptions yields one set of conclusions, another set yields a different set. I merely include in turn such imponderables as a universe either wholly determined or not going back to the comprehensive understanding of existence itself.

And then this part:

A God world or a No God world. And, in a No God world, what of the arguments of narcissists, sociopaths and, yes, particular moral nihilists, who view abortion as they do everything else: what’s in it for me?

I agree, life is full of hard choices, moral dilemmas, trade-offs, ambiguity.
If it weren’t, there’d be no need for philosophy, nor religion, in their differing ways, to attempt to make sense out of what appears to be senseless, or at least beyond our present collective capacity to comprehend, everything would be simple, self-evident, and easy.

Which, from my frame of mind, can only be explored, examined and judged realistically when the philosophical or scientific or theological insights of any particular one of us are embedded in actual situations we experience given the lives that we live.

And, here, what is of interest to me is not that which we can all seem to agree upon in regard to an issue like abortion, but those things that we can’t.

Is this because the most rational manner in which to think about it has not yet pinned down, even though it does exist? Maybe through God, maybe through something else. Or, in a No God world, is it possible that the philosophical and scientific insights of mere mortals are only able to be articulated up to a point. Beyond which none of us can go?

youtu.be/1Nacl6reKis

This is precisely the sort of argument that many atheists will make in order to take down the arguments of religionists in regard to abortion and stem cell research.

But, from my point of view, it is just another intellectual contraption in which conclusions are drawn from a particular set of assumptions.

Here that the three day old embryo is not really a human being at all, but just a small clump of cells.

Okay, but who among us here and now was not in turn just a clump of cells in our mother’s womb? From the moment of conception until the day you are born is all of one continuous biological process. As though here any particular one of us can actually pick a point and say “here not human”, “there human”.

It’s like Ayn Rand making her distinction between the acorn and the mighty oak tree. As though any oak tree on earth was not once an acorn.

This is precisely why to me “I” here is “fractured and fragmented”. A part of me believes that human life begins at conception. So, whether deemed legally to be murder or not, abortion is the taking of an innocent human life. But another part of me believes that in order to attain and then sustain political equality, women must be granted the right to abort their babies.

Thus, ever drawn and quartered in my thinking here.

Now, leaving God out of it entirely how on earth does Sam Harris the scientist demonstrate that only his own narrative here reflects the optimal or the only rational assessmernt of this particular conflicting good?

His is bullshit science to me.

That definition is a little narrower than the one I intended. Wikipedia’s is closer to what I mean:

But I think you get at the same point later on, and I agree with you that, “down through the ages historically and culturally, the circumstances around which folks deemed specific situations involving the killing of another unlawful varied considerably.” Your definition bakes in the notion of “unlawful”, and under that definition I think we all have to agree that most abortion is not homicide, at least not in the United States (where it is beyond lawful, it is a constitutional right).

But my point was that even if we take as a premise that a fetus is a human, and even a human person, it doesn’t follow from that fact alone that abortion is immoral or that it should be illegal. We recognize many cases in which one person may morally or legally kill another.

Any effective defense of abortion should fall into that category, at least legally. And so I find the strongest defense to be as follows: a woman has a right to control her body, and that right trumps whatever right the fetus has. Just as we can’t commandeer a kidney from an unwilling donor to save another person’s life, we cannot commandeer an unwilling woman’s body to incubate a child.

There are really two questions, alluded two above: one is moral, the other is legal. It may be that abortion is immoral but also that it should not be illegal (e.g. immoral because babies are good so the harm outweighs the good, but should be legal because the law should recognize bodily autonomy and personal agency over local harms).

And for the latter question, “what’s in it for me” is a very promising foundation. We can justify quite a lot of law on the basis that it produces outcomes that benefit everyone (or at least most people): a strong presumption of control over ones own body has positive outcomes for everyone, so defending someone else’s bodily autonomy benefits you to the extent you want to use recreational drugs or experimental medical procedures.

But the god/no god question complicates things. The existence of a god (or at least certain common interpretations of that claim) collapses the question, because there’s no greater good to appeal to in finding compromise positions in the law. Even if permitting abortion creates a better society, a god-based morality can make it preferable to break the law and kill abortion doctors if that prevents even a few abortions.

More generally, to your ‘fractured I’, is that compatible with an objective morality that is deeply contingent, so that individual actions have true moral values, but those values may differ based on personal history? It might also be the case that X is objectively moral, and yet simultaneously objectively moral for some person is to argue that X is immoral. That’s a weird outcome, but it no longer seems nihilist.

It may not be as weird as all that… The correspondence is nothing else but the explication with the naturalistic fallacy: what is the ethical basis versus the moral equivalent of an action and visa versa.

The measure of validity - of corresponding weight as regards any configured opinion, per application of such measures, may or may not rise to an objective level , with or without introducing changed areas of logical belief. Areas corresponding to topical, optical modes of opinionated belief structures may require essential modification of unchanged premises that tend to color argument.

Is there two, instead of a single logical argument, one, a theistic, the other , a nihilistic one , in regards to abortion ?

I think a presumption need not conform to either, in absolute terms, contingent arguments may include a god who is inherently responsible for his creation, within perimeters that include , or exclude the one from the other.

I think the addage ‘god works in mysterious ways’ would not necessarily be rejected by any judgement, at least not in the modern sense of interpretation of biblical , or darwinian references.

Such would at least demystify the acts of man, but not that of god.
There appears a convergence that does tend to fill in the prior vacuous image that nihilism has meant heretofore.

If not now, then certainly with the new duplicity coming our way, between the real and the artificial mind of man & god.

Setting aside rape and such, the woman’s autonomy concerning her body was lost when she didn’t protect herself against pregnancy, she surrendered her body to a males sperm so it’s no longer just her body, her DNA, but his DNA and genes too and he should have a say in the life of the child he has created and an inconvenience is not a legitimate reason to kill another being.

The theistic argument seems boring to me, at least for any revealed theism: God said X, so we are limited in our moral search to interpreting X (though David Friedman has interesting thoughts on this in his book, Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, on how governments constrained to apply revealed divine commandments have interpreted them to avoid inconvenient outcomes – and how that also relates to US constitutional law).

Why? If “an inconvenience is not a legitimate reason to kill another being”, that seems to apply in the case of rape as well.

Returning again to my moral/legal distinction, I think this (and the possible rape exception) is already sufficient to justify legal abortion. If it’s the case that a woman can abort an unwanted pregnancy that the woman took steps to avoid, and which steps failed through no fault of her own, then we would have a case where we require the woman to sacrifice bodily autonomy (e.g. to invasive examination) in order to prove that she should be able to keep her bodily autonomy. The effect is to deprive her of bodily autonomy without proof that she has willingly surrendered it.

This is a radical proposition. Can a woman have an ectopic pregnancy removed without her spouse’s consent? I take as a given that 1) the pregnancy was due to the woman not “protect[ing] herself” from male sperm, 2) the ectopic pregnancy includes the man’s DNA, and 3) we can’t force a person to undergo a surgery that they don’t want to undergo. If her body is not her own when it includes male DNA, why doesn’t the man have a say on whether or not she dies from the ectopic pregnancy she failed to protect herself from?

It’s also worth noting that the father’s DNA is permanently incorporated into a woman’s body after a pregnancy; do men own the mothers of their children in perpetuity? After all, the father’s DNA may be affected by a mother going out in the sun, etc. etc. etc. parade-of-horribles.