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I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out
We should allow parents to kill their severely disabled children - e.g. more than light mental retardation, the bad cases of autism, very severe health issues. Not have them euthanised, have to do it themselves.
It greatly saddens me to see parents caring about practical vegetables with devotion for decades, forgoing having healthy children. It's sad and infuriating see people caring for such beg for charity on social media. Heartbreaking dysfunction of instincts, enabled by bad cultural attitudes.
Children are precious because they represent future human potential, continuation of our families. Our emotions make us care about them for that reason. Our emotions are functional, yet most people don't care to think about that for even a smidgeon of a time. Every major emotion exists for some reason, they're something like control variables.
A mentally retarded cripple who's never not going to slobber represents nothing but a resource sink. A violent, non-verbal autistic who is a physical danger to his carers, to the point that in 'enlightened' countries like the US they inject such with hormone blockers iirc or growth retardants.. .. what is the purpose of such a life ?
Call me a monster, call me a high decoupler, I don't really care. Not like any of this matters, as we're probably all going to be biodiesel within a couple of generations.
Or having healthy children who are severely neglected because all the care and attention goes to the vegetable sibling.
Seeing people ask for donations for someone who isn't even there is almost as psychologically damaging to me as watching those dating tiktok video compilations.
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What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn? Neither can survive independently and neither has a sense of self. Killing one is like killing another.
There is some fuzzy boundary when a zygote becomes a "person", but I would argue it happens far enough after birth for it not to make a difference here.
One is strictly dependent from a specific, non-replaceable (with current technology) human body, the other is not. You can agree or disagree that this is morally relevant, but this is a significant difference between a fetus and a newborn. At the very least, it implies a very different distribution of costs.
Plus, birth as a Schelling point -- the development from a single cell to basically-a-newborn and from a newborn to a fully sapient human are both gradual, hazy, and complex, while birth is an unambiguous, easily observable discontinuity.
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Bravo, this is my position too, all the way up to being pro-murder. After all, what is a full grown adult except an especially large fetus? So if you accept abortion as morally permissable for the convenience of the mother you must accept straight-up murder of adults as morally permissable for the convenience of... the people who might find that adult inconvenient.
I don't think there's a substantial moral difference between killing a fetus and killing a full-grown adult that cannot survive independently and does not have a sense of self (e.g. unplugging the life-support of someone brain-dead). If anything, I think the moral case for allowing someone to pull the plug on a brain-dead adult is stronger than the moral case for allowing abortion.
I basically think of abortion as morally equivalent to pulling the plug on someone who is currently comatose, but has a good chance of becoming functional if given expensive life support until they awaken, and then a decade or two of rehabilitation (for the sake of the analogy, said comatose adult will never regain their past memories).
I unironically am pro "murder" in the case of the "pull-the-plug-murder" scenario above -- I genuinely think that killing someone in that situation because it is convenient is justifiable (though note that the "they will never regain any past memories" is a load-bearing part of that judgement for me).
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That's called death penalty.
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Ironically your/Singer's position makes more sense to me than the ones claiming a baby is just a morally valueless "clump of cells" until it magically becomes fully human the second it's out of the womb. Like either of us could be wrong, but at least both positions are coherent.
I agree with your view of coherence, but not completely: why stop at children?
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I am absolutely not pro-infanticide, but the killing, or at least exposure of crippled or deformed infants is extremely common throughout history. In ancient Rome it was considered something you kept quiet, but by no means a crime or a horrific crime as it might be considered today. Oftentimes people were not considered 'full' humans until they had lived a few years already, partially because mortality rates among infants and young children were so high. The idea infanticide is a heinous moral abomination seems to be a product of the slow christianization of western morality.
Technically illegal but socially tolerated infanticide was a thing in a society as rich and Christian as Victorian England. Very quickly after the practice is stopped, we get a change in the law to make infanticide a relatively minor crime (which it still is in most of the Commonwealth).
Society can't make women raise unwanted children (it can barely make deadbeat dads pay child support, and collecting cash under threat of violence is something states are good at) and generally doesn't try. The real-world feasibility of a pro-life regime depends on the availability of loving adoptive parents (which is currently not an issue, at least if you are willing to see large-scale interracial adoption).
I mean, you could also have orphanages, which is strictly worse than adoption, but it does do the same job.
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You could say that about a lot of things. Institutionalised rape, slavery and child brides were pretty common and accepted throughout the ancient world as well, but it would be unusual for a person to defend those things today.
Ancient world? A lot of the things were popular at most 200 years ago.
Some forms of institutionalized rape I think I could still argue for in an anonymous format. I think a reasonable argument can be made of a husband having sexual rights in a marriage presupposing he’s being a good husband and it’s part of the marriage compact. And Russian serfdom (which was supposedly quite harsh) and Chattel slavery was less than 200 hundred years.
That's the marriage debt, it applies to both spouses (wives too have a right to sex) and it's not rape, since in marriage you are presumed to give consent to sexual activity with your spouse. There was a fine-grained legal distinction that rape was sex without consent, and since married couples consented to have sex, the crime of rape could not be committed within marriage (which is not to say that the act of rape could not be committed).
Forcing someone unwilling, by threats, violence, or other coercion, is wrong. That's not what marriage is supposed to be. So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).
Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?
I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.
This reminds me of many of Vox Day's blog posts back in the day. He'd say "Marital rape doesn't exist" and "Getting married implicitly gives permanent consent." People would ask him "Does that mean if your wife says 'Not tonight, I have a headache' you can just smack her around until she submits?" He would always dodge or just sneer at the question.
I thought he was being disingenuous then, and I think your "Chesterston's fence" here is a bit disingenuous.
Well, first of all, no, I think it's ridiculous to think that we should just accept the received wisdom of ten thousand generations of savages. There are a whole lot of things our ancestors believed for ten thousand generations and we only realized in the last few hundred years were stupid.
So legally, yes, a husband in most societies historically had the right to literally rape his wife (by which I mean "rape rape", not just threats, pressure, and cajoling), but even the most misogynistic cultures generally didn't think highly of a man who physically abused his wife and had to force her to have sex with him. I strongly suspect that even back in caveman days, couples with genuine affection for each other were looked on with much more respect than couples where the man was literally having to knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair to get laid.
On to the present day, which you seem to think is missing a little something something because a man can't knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair anymore. But presumably you didn't mean literally that. But then I would ask you the same question put to Vox Day: what did you mean? If your wife says "Not tonight, I have a headache," are you claiming that you should literally have the right to say "Tough shit, on your back," backed up by force if necessary?
So presuming the actual question is not "What if she's not in the mood sometimes?" but "What if she refuses to sleep with me, ever?" Well, obviously, your marriage is dysfunctional, and you have a range of options from counseling to divorce. Even if you're a tradcon who believes divorce should be off the table, I would think you would want to find out why your wife is refusing to have sex with you, and try to fix that. If it's a physical ailment, well, you did promise "in sickness or in health," right? If it's depression, she needs help, not being compelled to put out because it's her "wifely duty." If it's none of these things, and it's genuinely not your fault for being a jerk husband - if you're stuck with a woman who pretended to like sex until you got married and then turned it off afterwards, like in those horrible old Playboy cartoons, well, I guess if you won't divorce her, then it kind of sucks to have made a poor life choice. But seriously, what do you think should be your options in that case?
(And yes, I've made the assumption above that we are talking about the woman being the one who refuses sex, because realistically, if it's the man refusing to have sex, it's very rare that his wife has any ability to force him. But I'd say the same thing to a woman whose husband rejects her and the situation doesn't appear fixable: if you won't consider divorce, then I guess you're trapped in an unhappy marriage. Which is why I don't think divorce should be off the table.)
That's a little bit... antagonistic. These are the people who built Classical Greece, the Pyramids, the University of Sankore. And even hunter-gatherers had enough civilization to care for their wounded and infirm, as the archaeological evidence of bone healing suggests. "Savages" is kinda harsh.
I strongly suspect that in caveman days "couples" didn't exist, because you lived fast and died young. Seems kind of a waste of time, and deleterious to the tribe's survival chances, to become particularly emotionally attached to a partner who has a ~40% chance of dying in childbirth every 9 months. If the sabre-tooth tigers don't get her in the interim (a big if).
Well, if you insist on this line of inquiry...
Rape fantasies are the #1 female fantasy, remember. And it turns out that accomodating to your partner's bedroom fantasies - shock! - improves your sex life, who'd'a thunk it?
So, observe my biting down hard on this bullet: yes, I do mean "Tough shit, on your back, by force if necessary", and I can tell you from the practical application of this principal in my own life that it is salutary to a relationship. I don't know whether it's a general principle of female psychology or just a peculiarly of my own girlfriends, but a few seconds of complaining is followed by years of her being smugly happy that her partner finds her attractive enough to be compelled to run roughshod over her consent. Acting like a troglodyte caveman is, it turns out, more attractive to the opposite sex than acting like a Title IX lawyer at a risk-averse university campus.
If we're going back literally ten thousand generations, I'll stand by "savages." Doesn't mean they weren't human, but I do not think we should credit the "wisdom" of people from the stone age just because they did things a certain way for a very long time.
And yes, I was being a little tongue-in-cheek about cavemen, but I still assume they had relationships (if not necessarily lifetime monogamous partnerships) which did not typically consist of a man grabbing the nearest available woman and raping her. (And if they did, then, well, "savages.")
Granting that a lot of women do get turned on by being dominated, I don't doubt there are times when that works for you. But do you recognize the difference between a partner who generally wants to have sex with you, might not be in the mood at this particular moment, but finds it hot when you make her, and a partner who genuinely, seriously does not want to have sex and whose partner forces her anyway?
If you want to take issue with contemporary notions of "consent," yes, I recognize the problem here in that what you've described with your partner is in fact technically rape and you probably realize she could have you prosecuted for it if she got it into her mind to do so, which is another reason why we should pick our partners very carefully and have very good communication. (I also assume that as a decent human being, you wouldn't pull the "tough shit, on your back" routine if you knew she really, truly did not want to have sex right now and was not going to like it if you forced her.) I don't know exactly how the law can differentiate between "We like to do caveman stuff in the bedroom sometimes" and "My husband is an abusive rapist" other than with a lot of fallible subjectivity, but if we have to choose between "You can 'rape' your wife but take the risk of her someday actually treating it like rape" or "Your wife literally has no legal recourse if you start brutalizing her," I'll go with the first option.
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Well, what if your wife starts stroking you, and you say ‘ No, I have a headache’, will she start beating you? Obviously not, beatings are a different matter. But if she feels your will is not her primary concern right now, she will keep stroking despite the clear lack of consent. So is it rape? Letting your spouse do his or her thing with your body seemed for the ancients to be part of the marriage deal. We’ve altered it, but the old one seems just as legitimate. No great wrong was rectified by ‘recognizing’ marital rape. In the future, they might require written, enthusiastic consent from spouses for every touch, and that too, will be legitimate. Just as long as people understand the contract.
Of course, as a man, you could almost certainly stop her from doing the thing you don't want, whereas she probably can't stop you from doing a thing she doesn't want. Even the ancients considered marital harmony and mutual desire to be the ideal, if not always the pragmatic reality, and arguing that today your spouse should be able to "do his or her thing with your body" like it's a fleshlight or a dildo, without your participation beyond a lack of physical resistance, sounds, frankly, pretty disgusting.
When you say "No great wrong was rectified by ‘recognizing’ marital rape," do you believe that it should be legal to hold your wife down, over her screaming protests, and force your penis inside her?
If the answer is yes, then all I can say that we have very different morals.
If the answer is no, then you are admitting that laws against marital rape serve a purpose, since without them, your wife would have no legal recourse against such treatment.
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The solution was to consider it being a bad wife, and still not grant license for forcible rape.
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That's always going to happen occasionally. The idea that any religious authority would approve of forcing it in all cases is silly, so I won't address that, instead I'll assume you're saying something like Partner B has been refusing sex for an extended period of time, say six months at a time.
While I'm a big Chesterton guy, you also have to consider that the thousands of generations before you lived in different circumstances. Particularly, I don't think you can keep the "forced sex is ok if you're married" fence up if you've torn down the "living within a community of people who you can talk to about it" fence. Maybe a Benedict option argument at some level? The idea of Marital Debt comes largely from ecclesiastical court cases where spouses literally went to a formal tribunal to determine the answers to these questions! At a less formal level, you and your spouse go to your mutual priest and confessor, alone or together, and seek guidance. Today, we call this practice marital counseling, the only difference is the training of the counselor changing from theological to psychological, from one brand of nonsense to another more cynically.
We've also lost the kind of family honor-bonds that protected both parties to a marriage. A woman in an abusive marriage might count on pressure from her father, brothers, uncles, male cousins, and general social opprobrium to prevent overly vicious abuse. A husband who was too violent with his wife risked social outcast status, or revenge, even if divorce was impossible. Today, that kind of thing is unthinkable: we don't live in close knit families, private violence is anathema, and there is no sense of honor that would lead a would-be-Sonny to defend his sister.
Catholicism, of course, absolutely forbids divorce. Other religious traditions, nonetheless quite strict on their own views, take different attitudes:
So what does a solution look like? Compromise, talk to each other, talk to spiritual/moral counselors you respect, reach a place where things work for both of you. Just like you would for literally any other marital issue.
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Don't marry someone who doesn't feel like it for longer periods than you can tolerate?
How would you know, before you get arranged-married at 16 (this ALSO being the Chestertonian wisdom-of-the-ancestors advice)?
I suppose this is where I run into irreconcilable differences with the Chestertonian wisdoms of the ancestors.
How far back are we digging for those wisdoms, anyway? If longer time period == better, then we should source from caveman animism, not Christianity.
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