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I’d say this is a pretty uncharitable way of describing the pro-abortion position.
More importantly, there’s a symmetry. Why shouldn’t pro-lifers have to defend their beliefs? Why is it obvious that conception is the important point, and not implantation, heartbeat, brain activity, premature viability, birth, sexual maturity, or first tax return?
You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.
Some of these positions are frankly pretty insane. Others are just unreasonable. I’d say both “conception” and “birth” are in the latter category. Not coincidentally, policy tends to fall somewhere in between, because it’s not actually an obvious question.
I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.
A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.
You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.
So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.
It’s the same reasoning that makes the “but for” test so common in law. Lots of normal intuitions about causation and liability are covered, but you can still get to some pretty perverse results.
Something like 30-50% of eggs fail to implant. That probably compares favorably to acorns, but the fact remains: those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg. Are they immoral for taking the action?
Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?
Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?
A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action. Demanding she let the mechanical process continue looks unjust. But so does killing the child for the sins of the literal father. Hence the disaster that is “victim blaming” discourse.
Combine the two, and you end up with something like the Violinist argument, where the victim had no expectation of being used to support another human. Pulling the plug is framed as a return to the last state she expected.
Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?
Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?
Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.
Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".
I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.
Hey, somebody in the other thread pointed me to search.pullpush.io! I wanted to share the existence of a working search tool.
I found my previous conversation on the violinist here. Not sure if you're any of the other participants.
Thanks for being a good sport about this discussion.
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I do remember our previous discussion regarding the rope. With Reddit’s decisions to cripple search tools, I can’t find it either. I remember having some objections to the metaphor, but I’ll agree that it avoids the main pitfall of the violinist.
That said, the only reason I mentioned the violinist was to point out that a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything. Especially if one wants to account for expected outcomes. But at the same time, expected outcomes are really important.
In the case of a couple genuinely trying to conceive, they can still expect a >30% chance of failure to implant. They’re increasing the chance of a dead embryo from 0% to 30%. The only way to avoid that outcome is abstinence. But it’d be outrageous to assign blame based on that reasoning. Why?
Is it because they’re trying their best? We don’t have any way to create children without that 30% rate. A necessary evil. I am very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, which still doesn’t provide a good way to decide which ends merit such a gamble.
I think it’s worth considering whether those embryos really are as valuable as their implanted—or born—cousins. Or that intentionality isn’t enough to settle the argument.
Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.
Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.
You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.
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Catholic doctrine isn’t opposed to masturbation as murder, but as disordered. The only permissible sex is the kind that occurs between a married man and woman and that is open to life.
See CCC 2352.
Right. I was suggesting that someone with the murder-position would find the Catholic stance too weak.
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Pro-lifers do have to defend our beliefs, it’s pro-choicers that usually don’t and aren’t asked to. Red state governors who’ve banned abortion get asked about this all the time. Politicians who go out of their way to defend the legality of partial birth abortion virtually never are. Yes, partial birth abortion doesn’t happen very often, but that’s not actually an argument against banning it.
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100% agree. The Republicans are being forced to defend their most insane beliefs while the Democrats are not being forced to defend theirs. Neither should be exempt.
Personally I'd say the Democratic beliefs (killing a baby t-minus 5 minutes) is the most insane, but that's just me.
On the flip side, I agree that "life begins at conception" doesn't seem to be supported by common sense. We certainly don't mourn a first-trimester miscarriage as we would a child. And, of course, IVF polls positively despite its destruction of embryos. Forcing a woman to carry a child with serious birth defects to term also seems incredibly cruel.
Trump's position here is actually considerably more reasonable than the mainstream Democratic and Republican positions, and is closer to what the average person actually thinks. First time for everything I guess, amirite?
"Every sperm is sacred".
I mean, any smart pro-choice person can make the late term abortion argument - "Almost all late term abortions are tragic situations where there is no other choice, and it's sad religious extremists want to make these women jump through hoops to appease their own doctrines. Like most American's, I trust women and their doctor to make the right choice for them, as opposed to thinking they need to fulfill whatever those who have already openly said they want to ban all abortions want them to do."
Then, depending on the audience, maybe throwing in a crack that Republican's want it to be more difficult for a woman and a doctor to come to a conclusion about an abortion than for a teenager to get an assault rifle.
I think the Democrat argument is a good one, but would fall flat in the face of the actual realities of a late-term abortion. I don't know what late-term abortions look like, but I imagine it's a lot like killing a baby.
If those images were seen by people, I doubt many would actually countenance it.
But why stop at late-term abortions? In early Roman times, a man had the right to kill his wife and children. Even in later Roman times, infanticide was widely practiced. Why should the state get between man, the gods, and his right to kill his family? It's downright un-Roman.
The reality is that the state already controls all areas of our life. Personally, I think this is wrong. But I find it bewildering that you can't cut hair without a license but terminating a 8.99 months pregnancy is totally fine. If you're going to allow unlimited abortion on libertarian grounds, fine. But only if you also want to dismantle like 99% of existing laws and regulation. Otherwise it just feels like an unprincipled argument.
I mean, the pro-life side has tried the whole "show pictures of fetuses after abortions" in ads and such, and it hasn't seemed to work. Even low-info people understand that medical procedures are messy. Hell, if I was an enterprising liberal media type, I'd take a video of some perfectly benign medical procedure, chop it in a way it could be seen as possibly a late term abortion, then go to a pro-life rally, and see what reactions I could get.
Because once a baby is born, the rest of society can step in, not while it's still in the mother's womb, and we've decided it's bad to force a woman to go through a pregnancy when it might affect her mentally or physically, only for a child to barely survive or only survive for hours or days.
Well, I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian, but neither are most American's, but most Americans have an undercurrent of 'don't tell me what to do', which makes life difficult for both lefties like me and social conservatives. But, I'm happy to use the libertarian-style argument when it's to my advantage.
Ironically, though, government licensure is why people both want the government to make sure a hairdresser isn't a fly by night operator (especially for more complicated things a guy like me with short hair doesn't understand) and why they think it's OK for a doctor, who has been licensed by the government to make a decision, with a woman when it comes to reproductive choice, instead of getting the OK from a panel of conservative politicians who were formerly used car salesmen, dentists, and McDonald franchise owners.
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There is a license for terminating pregnancies - the medical license.
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