YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
Isn't Peter Magyar jewish? Some friends in my right-wing group chat shared a photo of him in a yamaka with a star of david on it. I personally don't know anything about him. But I imagine if he is a practicing jew that might be a better model to explain his reluctance to sanctioning israel.
EDIT: Nice this comment earned me my first block for something so innocuous, is this a motte rite of passage?
EDIT 2: Wrong kind of Right, very pratchet-onian of me
YoungAchamian
8d ago
Not once have I seen from you an argument that a fetus isn’t a human being in any way wouldn’t be difficult for you. I said as much earlier and received no direct response to it.
This was me being charitable to you.
If you don’t think people should walk about the streets with a sense of vigilante justice about them and decide to act on their liberty to murder other people for transgressions real or imagined
This is not you returning that charity. This is you taking my gift horse to the glue factory.
What I’m asking you is to do is define all these terms in a way that circumscribes only a fetus
How about you do it first? You've spilt a lot ink not describing any of those terms and wanting me to do all the works so you can attempt to knock them down.
I can define all these terms
Then fucking do so and stop telling me you can.
my moral framework isn’t only accurate (naturally, as I’d argue), it’s universal
Again, prove it, show me the deets.
Well good luck trying to eat your cake and have it too
You are literally doing what you accuse me of.
Then per the Socratic method, you’re being irrational.
Asking you to actually define your terms is not irrational. Accusing me of being an idiot or irrational because I am holding you to any normal debate standard is insane.
Now give me your morally coherent framework for how “none of this,” supposedly counts.
How about you stop bloviating and do it first. You are claiming this grand universal moral theory that perfectly encapsulates everything but evade any attempt to actually explain what that is. I am not claiming some grand perfect moral theory, I'm just claiming that yours is not universal. Your response to that is hate and ad hominins...
The reason this “clump of cells,” (which also captures you and I incidentally)
It also captures sperm cells and eggs. Does jacking off into a cup count as murder?
a human is because it possesses a unique genetic blueprint that is distinct from both parents and is placed on a developmental trajectory towards a fully actualized human being.
"Will become X" is not the same as "already is X" in the full morally relevant sense. You are smuggling in the assertion that because something has an endpoint it must already possess the moral status of that endpoint at all points in time.
In Catholicism innocence is defined as the state of being unburdened by deliberate malice or evil. Children are innocent because they lack the rational maturity and understanding to commit mortal sin.
Cool, now define innocence without appealing to Catholicism or sin. I'm not catholic and neither is 84% of the world.
This is what having a discussion requires. You need to leave your frame just as I leave mine, and you define your arguments in ways I can understand and agree with and vice versa. It is not a "I'm going to dictate to you what is right or wrong from my castle and you can accept it or be wrong" Considering we don't live in a theocracy, as much as apparently you'd like to (see I can be uncharitable too), Christian morals are not auto-includes in government because we have separation of church an state.
Ahh yes the Quokka effect. The innocent belief that if you just show people the error in their ways then they will correct because the only reason they made that error is because they were unaware they were making it in the first place.
I do think the parent comment is touching on something in regards to an extreme sense of fairness being inherent to Autists, and the violations of that fairness being very triggering. But you also have a good point here in the inability of Autists to model uncharitable behaviors online and assume a base level of "something". I'd say its probably a level of development, as Autists are forced to reckon with the wider outside world, I think an anger at the unfairness develops including a souring of the "Quokka effect"
I'm not sure I understand the connection between your first and last points?
EDIT: my brain moves faster than I type and I forget to type out important words
Last time I checked, getting into an accident and having your passenger die is not vehicular manslaughter. You'd have to be driving criminally negligent, reckless, or otherwise unlawful. unprotected/protected Sex is not unlawful, criminally negligent, or reckless.
But you are pretty much granting that you don't have a duty to preserving the life. You are just hoping to punish the driver for something else. In this hypothetical you can just leave scott-free. The whole point is whether you have a duty to save the passenger or not.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
isn’t a debate whether or not you have to liberty to have an abortion, the question is whether or not it’s moral for you to do so.
That would be relevant if it weren't for the fact that people who view abortion as immoral are absolutely trying to ban it. That makes this as much a debate about the liberty to have an abortion AND whether or not its moral to do so. Maybe don't try to legislate your morality into law if you don't want to have to fight others trying to keep their liberty.
You and I aren’t having the same conversation.
Apparently because you are unwilling to actually address any ideas around it. You pretty much refuse to accept even a neutral frame around this. It's your moral framework is the only moral framework.
murder an innocent human being.
I'm going to tap the sign again. Christianity is NOT the universal moral framework. Define innocent, and Define why children are innocent, and then why don't you define why a clump of cells is considered human. Why isn't a sperm cell human or an egg? You just assume your worldview is the default and its not.
To others you’re committing murder.
And if I fail to recognize this as murder? What evidence do you have that I am murdering another human being? Murder has meaning, as does human being. I've been very charitable granting you the basic frame to define human, and you've taken that charity and repaid none of it back, and taken it a fucking mile instead. So I retract that charity, prove all these terms you've so carelessly thrown around actually mean what you believe they mean.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Oh please, there are two relevant bodies involved in abortion and hundreds of relevant bodies involved in a vaccine + plague. Just because abortion opponents lack actual consistent moral principles doesn't make calling it out a gotcha.
I feel like this a convenient bias, because it also looks like anti-forced vacc supporters don't extend bodily autonomy to abortion. Looks like world is full of political hypocrites
You had me nodding along on the first paragraph around fairness and genuinely confused on the next one about seething. Revenge is such a base human feeling that isolating it to "Autists" is misattribution. Human's live for watching their outgroup suffer. We go watch mal-doers get tortured in the square and sell popcorn for it. It isn't "Autists" watching trashy reality TV or feud porn. Blood-feuds and honor killings are not Autist-coded. The jews cheering on Jesus's crucifixion weren't just the local gaggle of "Autists"
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Only in the short term. In the long term, non-zero-sum values are more resilient and stable. zero-sum values burn through legitimacy because they demand unlimited sacrifice for the cause, they provoke counter-movements, they can't negotiate, they are brittle and they are socially corrosive.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
I think that pushing the cost Z of a foreseeably risk Y of taking action X to a third party is such an observably common phenomenon that anyone objecting to it in all cases is either a saint, a hermit, or a hypocrite.
Examples:
- Medical treatment for self-caused conditions: smoking, obesity, drinking, driving recklessly, engaging in known dangerous activities -> cost shifted to: taxpayers, insurers, family members, overburdened hospital staff, and patients whose care is delayed
- Divorce after voluntary marriage: Marriage has known risks: emotional entanglement, children, economic dependency, shared property. -> imposes severe costs on an unwilling spouse and on children
- Bankruptcy after voluntary financial risk
- Resigning from caregiving roles
- Floodplain or hurricane-zone living
- Politicians starting wars they personally don't have to fight in
- People voting for policies that they are protected from the negative effects of
The list just goes on an on.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
To be clear, you think is not a zero duty and I think its not a 100% duty.
The problem is that this is not continuous spectrum, its pretty binary at least from a consequence mitigation action standpoint.
I'll change the violinist argument to conform to your objections:
- You get into a car, you have a passenger in the car with you, they are a stranger.
- You get into a car accident.
- The passenger is badly injured, and requires 9 months hooked up you to survive (The back half of the violinist argument from here on out)
- You still have no duty to preserve this life via agreeing to be hooked up.
There you now aren't an uninvolved bystander, you engaged in a risk-filled situation, the risk occurred.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Was there any demographic or economic information attached? I will say "one or more" is not really the boundary I'd like. I intuit (maybe biasedly) that the amount/psyche/profile of people who get 1 is different than the amount who get 2+
YoungAchamian
9d ago
As a comment upthread suggested. The policy positions can be downstream of the same values. There is a very clear tension in this debate between the right to bodily autonomy vs how much of that right you have when it concerns another person's life. Both the left and right have been on different sides of that equation in different policies. That would imply that they both value it. The compromise is in applying it universally across the board.
Example:
-
Forced covid vaccination (or other plague vaccination) vs the right to bodily autonomy. The right maintains that the government should not be able to tell them when medications they must inject into their body (clear bodily autonomy) vs the left believing that the lives of 100s of people outweigh that right in order to stop a pandemic.
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Abortion vs the life of a child. The bodily autonomy of one person vs the life of 1 child. Now the right is on the side of life vs the left on the side of bodily autonomy.
They both clearly believe in the right to bodily autonomy, they share the same value, they just disagree on downstream policy prescriptions. Which means compromise is possible.
Do I have a choice? Life is full of risks. You minimize the ones you can only manage and eliminate the rest that aren’t acceptable
But that's not the question, the question is that if you mitigate the consequences of your actions. If you do then you are just engaging in special pleading around people mitigating the consequences of their actions, specifically around abortion.
This is quite a backpedal from your position earlier and not a very good one either.
I've been very consistent. My stance is unequivocally bodily autonomy + "taking a known risk does not automatically creates an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk".
A risk of sex is pregnancy. Just because I had sex does not mean I have an unlimited duty endure all the risks of sex. If I am afflicted by one of those risks, I am allowed to mitigate or even solve it. I can get treated for STDs, I can get therapy, and I can get an abortion. Common mitigation solutions for risks of sex.
happening you have two basic options
Ok I took a risk, a bad thing happened. I now am going to mitigate the consequences of that risk to the best of my ability. Looks like an abortion maximally mitigates that consequence. I'm getting an abortion. Very straight forward. You are the one who is ignoring this logical flow, because you want to mitigate your consequences but control how other people are allowed to mitigate theirs, which is hypocritical.
Likewise, a baby has a right to its body.
Cool, it can enjoy that right outside of my body.
Accept this risk as a possibility and engage in the act or don’t.
I accept the risk, and then choose to mitigate the consequences as EVERYONE is allowed to do.
You pretty much want to force me to accept this risk. To you having sex -> pregnancy, and if I get pregnancy, "that sucks but you need to endure it". I, in your view, am required to endure 100% of the risks for actions I take with no allowed mitigations. However, you don't apply that across the board, to every action. Just this one. Hence special pleading around abortion.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Except by your own words: you calculated and risk and took it. Now deal with the consequences.
Do you apply this to every other risk? Does taking a known risk automatically creates an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk? No? Then this is special pleading around abortion specifically
you don’t really deny that you’re terminating a baby’s right to life.
Correct, it could be a baby, an adult, a violinist. My right to my body enables me the freedom from arbitrary dominion over it. I have the right to dictate how it is used. If there was a moral imperative to preserve life don't you'd think we'd see more evidence of it through the world and history?
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Considering it take two people to engage in reproduction, the correct formulation would be 1/1 (male) * 1/6 (female) = 1/3 of sex is about reproduction. (Formula simplification is intuitive and left to the reader as an exercise) From a purely mathematical standpoint.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Why not? That sounds reckless and/or defeatist.
Because the entire argument around risk of pregnancy -> you need to carry it to term is this argument: Taking a known risk automatically creates an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk.
Mitigating risks or minimizing the consequences is getting an abortion...
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Hmmm I got that you are pro-abortion but I think I disagree on the perceived weakness of the risk/responsibility argument.
If Y is a possible and foreseeable consequence of X, and you know that Y is a potential risk of X (i.e. you are informed when you make your decision), then voluntarily consenting to X does not entail voluntary consent to Y or require a duty to endure Y without mitigation.
I'd say that abortion is the only case where people have a special pleading that this is not the case. I think there a great many arguments where people would get significantly up in arms at the insinuation that by doing X you need to endure all the consequences of Y even if Y is a very known and common risk associated with X.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
#Libertarians. Ask 10 Libertarians for an opinion and get 13 answers.
The body of human is being enslaved for another -> this is anathema.
YoungAchamian
9d ago
Only if you think values are zero-sum.
You generally can't remove a baby without violating their bodily autonomy. Most abortions involve essentially blending the baby up and scraping them out.
In the hypothetical future where we do a C-section to remove the clump of cells that will be come a baby, or the partially formed baby without killing it in the uterus, you are then ok with abortion? Regardless of the baby's viability outside the womb?
That's just straight up weird, children have been almost universally considered to be of greater moral worth than adults for all of human history.
I feel like we don't even live in the same reality if you think this is remotely true. The revealed preference of pretty much all civilizations, cultures, creeds, and faiths is that children as a class are not given any special consideration. Individuals love their children and the children of friends and family (aka the tribe) but the children of the other tribe? Absolutely not. Anyone with even a basic understanding of history should know this.
- Infant exposure in ancient Rome and Greece: unwanted newborns were abandoned or killed; this was a recognized social practice.
- Medieval and early modern European infanticide and abandonment
- The Children’s Crusade (1212)
- Massacre at Béziers (1209) during the Albigensian Crusade, women, children, and the elderly were massacred.
- Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) a major Christian sectarian massacre in France; children were not spared in the broader slaughter.
- European transatlantic slave trade: children were trafficked with adults, and many died in transport and enslavement.
- Industrial child labor in Britain children were heavily exploited in factories and mines under brutal conditions.
- Great Irish Famine / workhouse regime: mass death and child suffering occurred under British rule, including harsh workhouse conditions.
- Congo Free State under Leopold II mass atrocities under a European Christian monarchy; children were among the victims of forced labor and terror.
- German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904–07) women and children were imprisoned and worked under lethal conditions.
- U.S. American Indian boarding schools: Native children were forcibly removed, abused, and many died in the system.
- Canadian Indian residential schools: church-administered schools subjected Indigenous children to abuse, malnutrition, disease, and death.
- Holocaust: Jewish children: Nazi Germany and collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children.
- Holocaust: Romani children: tens of thousands of Romani children were murdered.
- Nazi “euthanasia” program / Aktion T4: disabled children in institutions were systematically killed.
- Armenian Genocide (1915–16): children were deported and killed along with the wider Armenian population.
- Holodomor (1932–33) a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that starved civilians, including huge numbers of children.
- Bengal famine of 1943: mass death from famine under British wartime rule, with children among the dead and malnourished.
- Great Leap Forward famine: Chinese state policies caused catastrophic famine; children were among the millions who died.
- Khmer Rouge Cambodia: mass death through starvation, forced labor, torture, and execution affected children on a huge scale.
- Rwandan genocide (1994): children were murdered along with the broader Tutsi population and other targets.
- Biafra / Nigerian Civil War starvation crisis: mass starvation devastated civilians, especially children, becoming a global symbol of famine.
- Carthaginian child sacrifice: thousands of urns with burned child remains have been found at Carthage’s tofet.
- Aztec and related Mesoamerican sacrificial systems: large-scale human sacrifice included children in some rites tied to rain and fertility cults.
Do I need to keep going?
If children occupied a universally elevated moral status in human societies. Then history should show near-taboo protection. It does not. It shows repeated infanticide, sacrifice, enslavement, starvation, institutional abuse, and massacre of children across civilizations, including Christian and Western ones. You may believe children deserve special moral protection, but history does not support the claim that humans have generally treated them as a uniquely sacred class.
Only utilitarian ethics (and similar deranged branches of ethics) would reach the conclusions you're suggesting.
Incorrect, a deontologist could easily reach the same conclusion, or a consequentialist. It just requires different values.
YoungAchamian
10d ago
Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.
I think this analogy smuggles in a bunch of separate elements that actually break is usefulness as an abortion comparison.
- First, Alice wrongfully harms Bob. Bob is an already existing, independent person with his own standing in the world. Alice’s act is a rights-violating aggression against another person’s body. That is why criminal responsibility attaches so cleanly.
- Secondly, the analogy smuggles in illegal and negligent conduct. Drunk driving is already wrongful because it unjustifiably endangers others. Consensual sex is not wrongful in that way.
A better analogy would be something were you voluntarily did something that carried a known risk of creating a needy dependent condition and in that analogy whether you had a duty sustain it's life. I think that is why organ donation is common analogy. We usually do not infer from “you knowingly took a risk” to “you must surrender bodily autonomy for months to sustain another life.” Even if I cause someone to need my kidney, the law generally does not force me to donate my kidney.
And to be clear consent to sex is not identical to consent to gestation.
Regardless I think my general argument here is: Taking a known risk does not automatically create an unlimited duty to endure every consequence of that risk.
YoungAchamian
10d ago
which, by the way, violates their bodily autonomy
I made a response to this same argument: here. The baby is violating my bodily autonomy, me removing them from MY body does not violate their bodily autonomy. Their inability to survive outside of MY body is not my problem. Pro-lifer's want to assign more moral weight to a baby than to a human, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for it.
To be clear you are asking me to unpack a very complex and complicated topic that only marginally relates to the abortion topic in that they affect similar values. For similar levels of effort I'd like you to address how you can be pro-life yet not immediately donate your body and all your organs to help everyone who needs organ transplants. After all if bodily autonomy is not sacrosanct, and some humans have more moral worth than others, shouldn't we forcibly remove organs to help those of more moral virtue?
Or we can stay on the topic at hand...
pro-life absolutist
At least you are honest and consistent. I can respect that. I am near enough to a pro-choice absolutist, so I doubt we'll ever agree. Furthermore since I think humans are of equal moral worth (barring edge cases) and I am not religious, I don't see how I will ever consider a "child" (even granting a clump of cells is a child) of more moral worth than an existing human being. And thus be willing to abrogate the rights of one to support the rights of the other.
The simple answer here is to make sure you marry a woman with comparable assets and a career so you can divorce rape her. There are a bunch of famous female celebrities recently that have gotten divorce raped by their lower-earning male ex-partner. I imagine the DR happens more when you marry some woman who becomes a stay at home mom who you have kids with.
The courts see woman + kids and "balance" the income for the woman and then "balance" it again for the kids. ie: 100% income (male) 0% income (woman) -> divorce: 50% M and 50% F -> each give half to the kids, 25% M & 75% F as women are assumed to be primary caretakers.
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