Wendy, iambiguous and [for now] abortion

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.

Sorry Carleas, to repeat the same argument for a fourth time on ILP, I hope others read yours as well!

Walk across the globe and ask people this question:

“Do you love your mother enough to consent to your abortion (time travel) if she wanted one?”

Most humans would answer “yes” to their abortion.

So where does that leave us?

People who don’t give a shit about their mothers (or even fathers)

Now, who do we really want populating the earth?

People who care about their mothers or people who want to be born so desperately that they don’t care about anyone but themselves?

Anti-abortionists are so desperate to consider the fetus a consensual being… if you want to treat them like that, ask them as adults!

Adults will most likely say “I’d sacrifice my life for my mother whom I love”

Do we really WANT anti-abortionists (as adults) on this earth?

No. We don’t.

All the ethics are for pro-choice, not anti-abortion.

Rape and such includes life threatening scenarios for the mother. A women who tried to protect herself from a pregnancy should have to prove it and once proven, the product that failed should pay dearly for her inconveniences. There is no choice in foregoing pregnancy in a rape that causes pregnancy so your argument makes no sense to me. Deny it’s not about an inconvenience and deny it’s not about being too lazy to ensure that you don’t get pregnant. Planned parenthood gives out free condoms and cheap pills so it’s not a cost or access thing since planned parenthood is all over our country.

Who wants a mother who only thinks of herself? It’s the same argument in reverse EC. Also I disagree that most people want to die or be killed.

For the latter I take your point, there the harm on the other side is more than “inconvenience”, so that exception makes sense. Though, there’s still a conflict with the notion that “it’s no longer just her body”. If that’s so, why do her interests trump in the case of life-threatening scenarios? If I have the right to refuse surgery that would save my life, don’t I have the right to deny surgery on a body to which I am co-owner?

And for rape I still don’t see it. Yes, she was raped. Yes, she had no choice. Still, what more than inconvenience motivates her choice (and more particularly, what that can never be found in an unwanted pregnancy resulting from consensual sex)?

Look, I think abortion is bad, in that it’s a social and/or personal failure that everyone involved with would in hindsight prefer to have avoided, and a negative metric by which to measure society. But that doesn’t entail that we should ban it, any more than we should ban nose-blowing to improve health.

It doesn’t really matter how people end up in a situation where they are being asked to incubate an unwanted parasite for the better part of a year. We should do what we can to help people avoid that, but the situation is already very unpleasant and so people are already strongly incentivized to avoid it. The outcomes of forcing someone to go through it are bad for everyone, for the mother (pregnancy is physically costly), the unborn child (moms who are forced to remain pregnant against their will aren’t eating right, avoiding stress, avoiding alcohol and drugs, etc.), the born child (moms who are forced to have kids they don’t want and/or aren’t prepared to care for generally suck at caring for their kids), and the community that picks up the slack.

But still worse is the premise that the government gets to decide who owns your body, and who has a right to say to what use it will be put. Neither the father, nor the parasitic life, nor the state should make that call.

[EDIT: nuanced some language]

I actually question this. I don’t think my mom would want me to say yes. And I know I wouldn’t want my kids to die to save my life, their lives are easily more valuable to me than mine.

So, while I agree with the conclusion, I don’t think the chain of reasoning works. Besides, a person’s stance on the subject depends mostly cultural upbringing, so it’s mostly good and kind people who love their moms who nonetheless oppose abortion.

The chain of reasoning is that if at any point, your mother could go back in time to abort you, would you consent to it ? Your mothers opinion is already factored into this hypothetical scenario.

Wendy made a point that wasn’t factored into the scenario, that a mother who wants an abortion is selfish.

Is she though? People have a good sense of when they are “ready”. Who wants to bring an unwanted child into the world? How many would be potential parents really trust people to raise their own children besides themselves? Not many by my estimation.

What hypothetical adult doesn’t understand this?

I mean fuck! We could throw women in prison for not having 52 children each per lifetime if you want to crawl down the “selfishness” rabbit hole for mothers and hypothetical adults

You have absolutely no idea how many would answer yes absolutely none at all
You are assuming it to support your argument but you have no evidence for it so it does not have to be accepted

I would say that what determines someones answer to the question depends on the type of life they have had
And so someone with a good life would say no to abortion while someone with a bad life would say yes to one

Your argument would only be true if most people had such a bad life that they would want an abortion
But there is zero evidence for this otherwise the global suicide rate would be higher than it actually is

It’s not about a good or bad life.

The thought experiment assumes the mother would abort. What true loss is there if you are aborted? There’s always someone to come along who’s better or smarter. No loss at all. The gain is that you’ve improved your mothers quality of life.

People go through MUCH worse than abortion as a sacrifice for others…

So I put it to you again …

Which type of being do you want on earth … someone who loves their mother, and the reproductive rights of all possible mothers on earth, or someone who doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves?

There is no guarantee that if you are aborted your mothers quality of life will be improved for it could actually be worse
Also human beings dont really conform to binary positions - human nature exists on a spectrum - it is not black and white

So you need to think this through a lot better than you have because unfortunately it is not very realistic as it stands
And also is every woman going to have to keep on having abortions until they produce absolutely perfect children ?

My last question was the most important part and you threw it off as “binary”, apparently a “scare word” for you. You threw some of it off by stating that mothers would only keep perfect children

1.) that’s demonstrably false
2.) there is no perfection except for margin of error

What if the person who doesnt give a fuck about anyone but themselves is also a mother ?
Does she get to live because she is a mother or does she have to die because she is a sociopath ?
What if she has a son who absolutely loves her and so would not want any harm to come to her ?

Are you going multigenerational on me?

The grandmother argument and those implications?

Anyone who loved their grandmother would be the daughter and grandchild that would accept that decision.

I have to reiterate this! People on earth have gone through MUCH greater torture than the couple minutes an abortion takes to non-exist an entire family line to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause.

Like Carleas, don’t get me wrong, abortion is horrific… it is a symptom of societal disease.

Bringing unwanted people to earth is worse.

The thing about the law though is that it is “on the book”. Laws are written down, and presumably enforced. Thus when a particular behavior is chosen, it is either able to be shown as within the law or it is not. Whereas a moral narrative may or may not be in sync with the law. Someone may believe that abortion is immoral and that the law ought to severely punish both those who perform them and those who have them performed on them. But if the law of the land does allow some abortions to be performed, a citizen might protest against it but agree to be a law-abiding citizen.

But, with the killing of the unborn [which many insist on calling babies] there are also any number mitigating and aggravating circumstances. Everything comes back to the unique set of circumstances surrounding the pregnancy and that which can be demonstrated as in fact true for all of us.

Well, it does if your moral narrative construes abortion to in fact be immoral. Whether as a result of the fact that you believe in a God, the God, my God, or as a Humanist, you believe that the unborn have a “natural right” to life.

My point is that, unlike with the law, one’s moral values are predicated on what you believe to be true. An objectivist is not likely to think he or she is obligated to demonstrate that in fact abortion is immoral. On the contrary, it becomes immoral precisely because “in their head” they believe that it is.

Then it just comes down to the extent to which they are willing to accept that democracy and the rules of law is the “best of all possible worlds”.

Unless of course I am not understanding your point.

But, from my frame of mind, this is just one of many different political prejudices that different individuals come to embody in their interactions with others. Out in a particular world historically, culturally and interpersonally. I merely note in turn that, in my opinion, these value judgments are rooted more in the manner in which I construe the “self” as the embodiment of dasein. Rather than in a frame of mind one can acquire through a disciplined study of philosophy or a science.

Yes, but for those who are only concerned with how any particular abortion makes their life better, the law is still on the books. If, in a political jurisdiction where abortion is illegal, they get caught either having an abortion or aiding and abetting someone else in getting one, they get punished no matter their moral assessment. But what’s crucial [for me] is how they are able to rationalize/justify any behavior based solely on their own selfish interest. That a morality of this sort [in a No God world] is not able to be demonstrated by ethicists as necessarily irrational speaks volumes regarding the world that we live in. The global economy itself seems to be the embodiment of this amoral frame of mind.

Though, clearly, in regard to abortion, what’s in it for the pregnant woman and what’s in it for the unborn baby is precisely what sparks the conflicting goods that the law is only able to address either through one or another extant rendition of might, right or moderation, negotiation and compromise.

I merely focus in turn on how any particular individual’s moral assessment here is rooted more firmly in dasein than in philosophy. And that ultimately what counts out in the real world is less what we believe is best and more on who has the actual power to enforce one set of behaviors over another. The part where there are actual rewards and punishments [consequences] for what we do or do not do.

On the other hand, for the God world objectivists, the existence of God simplifies things. They believe that there is in fact a final arbiter – a Judgment Day – that they can turn to in order to obviate conflicting goods. Precisely in subsuming them in the will of God. Then cue the Scriptures and the Ecclesiastics.

And for the No God moral nihilists, the absence of God simplifies things as well. No God, no omniscient and omnipotent point of view. None of that and it only matters if you get caught by yet another mere mortal. They don’t argue that “in the absence of God all things are permitted” for nothing.

Again, back to abortion.

My fractured and fragmented self here revolves around the assumption that both sides can make an argument to the legislators that, given one set of assumptions champions the natural right of the baby to life, or given another, champions the political right of the pregnant woman to choose.

Now, at one point, as a devout Christian I was in one moral/political camp, and, then, as a devout Marxist, I was in the other.

Now I am drawn and quartered in that “I” recognize that the points raised by either camp do not make the points raised by the other camp go away.

Further, I recognize the extent to which my own “I” is derived more from the life experiences that I embodied out in a particular world, than from anything I have learned using the tools of philosophy or science.

My reaction to this is still the same. In other words, that what counts more for you as an objectivist is not what you believe here but that you believe it.

It is not seen by you as a political prejudice derived existentially from an accumulation of experiences – your own rendition of the points I make here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382 – but as the embodiment of the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

As though those objectivists on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum can’t make their own rendition of your argument.

And, besides, just because the pregnancy is as a result of rape, doesn’t make the unborn baby any less innocent.

But, here, for the moral and political objectivists, even the exceptions can only be seen as they do.

Biggie wrote

It does make the woman innocent and that is where the argument stems from, with the woman, her freedom, her body. Her choice not to become pregnant is tantamount for it eliminates this discussion completely when her efforts are effective. When she plays with fire having unprotected sex and doesn’t care to be bothered with the resulting pregnancy is where the problems arise when millions of babies are slaughtered each year.

Carleas wrote

Being a responsible adult doesn’t matter?

But what of the looming freedom and the body of the unborn baby? And if the woman’s freedom in regard to her body is the issue, then why not abortion on demand?

And what of my speculation that your own value judgments here revolve more around the psychological need on your part to believe that there is in fact a real Wendy Darling in sync with the right thing to do. What in the argument I pose in regard to dasein here – viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529 – is not applicable to you?

Okay, so let’s presume that your argument here does in fact reflect the optimal or the only rational manner in which to react to women who have unprotected sex and become pregnant.

What about situations in which a woman chooses to become pregnant but then finds her circumstances totally upended by events beyond her control. Too bad? She is now in a situation where being forced to give birth can have a profoundly adverse impact on either her psychological or physical health. Still too bad? Sans rape, it’s always from the baby’s point of view through those who fight on its behalf to be born?

And suppose the real you in sync with the right thing to do regarding all of these various contexts prevails. How should the woman be punished if she is found guilty of killing her baby? The death penalty? And has the real you in sync with the right thing to do come to a definitive conclusion regarding that too?