Prosecutors Refuse to Drop Charges Against Texas 11-Year-Old Put in Solitary Confinement
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Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
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Pretty sure avoiding "being born from the wrong vagina" is a popular defense of abortion among liberals.
"It just explains so many things" When you're a moron any description of a cause will suffice for the outcome.
I am pretty sure that body autonomy and a women being able to make her own choices about when to start a family are why we support a woman's right to choose.
There is a multitude of reasons why people support abortion. One of the common arguments is that it is better to not exist than to be born poor or to parents that don't want you (I.e literally the "born to the wrong vagina" argument). This is a widely supported belief and I would say that around 20 percent of pro-choice people I've debated (out of hundreds) use it as their primary argument.
Asserting that there is a single reason why people hold a position is absurd.
FYI bodily autonomy arguments have largely been abandoned in academic ethics, because there is just no existing right to bodily autonomy that is sufficiently strong, and we have no basis for arguing that there should be.
Absolutely Parents who do not want to have a baby should not be forced to carry one to term. It ain't some angel that came down and inhabited the womb that should be laminted as lost.
"It ain't some angel"
But it's a human, and we don't find engaging in active killing of humans permissible do we?
I also love that as a pretty open atheist, PC will constantly try to insinuate a religious motivation (even though most PL religious people don't use the ensoulment argument either).
Maybe that's just because it makes sense to not want a massive amount of expenses in a life where they may have trouble taking care of themselves already.
You really act like it's a bad thing to not have children if you can't financially take care of them.
And none of these have to do with targeted killing of human organisms based solely on the circumstances of their conception?
You don't get to play "the conservatives want to kill and imprison poor children" card, when pro-choice liberals celebrate the exact same thing (not pro-life ones like me).
"You really act like it's a bad thing to not have children if you can't financially take care of them"
This argument falls in the same category of logic error that the "abortion is good because it prevents children from being poor" that I am refuting.
The fact that it is bad for people to be poor, does not follow that they should therefore be deprived of existence, because existence is not the cause of suffering but the poverty. When someone says "I wish I wasn't poor", they are NOT saying "I wish I didn't exist" because they could easily make that happen. They are wishing that they had less hardship.
Likewise your argument is also a failure at descriptivism. Not having children for financial reasons, is not immoral. Abortion is not just "not having children", it is an active deprivation of all future experiences of an existing human organism. That's why it's immoral. (And yes trying to argue that fetuses aren't people is insufficient since one can argue from idealized persons {e.g we don't kill mentally ill suicidal people because an idealized person wouldn't want to die, in other words the immediate condition of the human is gladly ignored), or cases of temporary loss of personhood (regardless of how you define it) which would permit killing many if not all adults.
Point is, it's not immoral no matter how much you cry about it now stay out of other peoples lives.
Pretty sure I can rigorously prove that you accept moral principles, empirical facts and a logical system that determines that abortion is infact immoral, you simply never bothered to analyze it.
"Now stay out of other people's lives"
Can you imagine what a horrible (dare I say immoral?) world you would have if immoral actions could not be restricted? Next time someone wrongs you remember that you are the real perpetrator for expecting them to follow your conception of morality.
Not the original poster, but I would enjoy seeing you rigorously prove that pro-choice views are incoherent. My views:
All human beings should have a right to bodily autonomy. This includes the right to deny the use of their body to anyone, even if the person who is using their body is doing so in order to survive, and even if they've previously permitted that person to use their body. If the use can be ended without killing either party, that should be preferred, but if not, then the person being used should still be able to withdraw access.
The real world is messy, obviously, so we have some ambiguity, but in general, this is the guideline.
Easy, define a form of bodily autonomy that permits forcing conscious action upon an individual (this is the basis for many laws^1^ ), but not prohibiting the individual from engaging in an action to override an already occurring unconscious process.
This is necessary because the former is the description of what many morally accepted laws already do, and the latter is a description of what prohibiting abortion is.
In other words this is the exact definition that we need to show is correct to justify abortion on the grounds of bodily control.
Except we can't, and it's obvious why. Saying "you must do X" is clearly stronger than saying "you cannot stop Y from continuing to happen". So we already accept a greater violation of bodily autonomy as good, and the abortion defence is actually contradictory.
We can resolve this by rejecting one of the premises. So which one do you want to reject? The one that is the basis for societal rules, or the one that allows killing humans?
As I already pointed out the bodily autonomy argument is essentially completely rejected in ethics, it's only popular because of Thompson's deeply flawed and overly simplistic paper (primarily because it already assumes that such a form of bodily autonomy already exists).
The first half of what you said is difficult to understand and I'm probably going to need you to simplify it for me.
For the last part- you don't believe that there's any moral difference between:
?
And, follow up question - is a fertilized egg a person in this example? If not, at what point does it become one and have moral weight, in your view?
This is an incorrect phrasing of the situation. The actual question is what moral principles do we already accept? Which ones are more fundamental than others. Instead you are literally affirming the consequent by presupposing that bodily autonomy is morally relevant.(Otherwise,if that's not what you are doing,your phraseology is just bizarre)
Laws force people to use their body regardless of how they feel about it. We agree that it is moral.
Prohibiting abortion is denying the ability to perform an action. We assert that this is immoral.
However, forcing an action is stronger than denying an action. So which premise is wrong? Is it the one that leads societal rules unenforceable, or the one that makes a quarter of the population temporarily unhappy?
There is also the extrinsic teleological argument that pregnancy isn't a violation anymore than your pancreas producing insulin. A belief can be irrational if it contradicts a biological function.
"Would a fertilised egg be human"
As long as it is a separate entity that is living and functional with a probability of future conscious experience. Note, that I don't make the unique DNA distinction because that would render killing clones permissible.
Now unlike some people I don't think that all abortion is immoral, just one's where we have a reasonable expectation of future human experience so long as we do not take action to reduce this expectation. Like how rendering someone brain-dead so you can kill them is just a more elaborate active killing , something like drinking alcohol to render your fetus brain dead is also active killing.
Why?
Do you consider a fertilized egg to have the same moral weight as a person?
Because denying an action is simply requiring that the existing circumstance continue, while forcing an action is to require that the person engage in a conscious action (to specify, it's a stronger control over someone else's body).
"Do you consider a fertilised egg to have the same moral weight as a person"
I already answered this more generally, fertilisation is not the revelant part it is that it is a distinct organism with a reasonable expectation of future conscious experience. Many fertilised eggs do meet this standard, but not all. Likewise fertilised eggs are not the only things that meet this standard. Things like pluripotent stem cells that are being created to form fetuses, also meet this standard.
(I strongly suspect that you are fishing for a specific response, which you find absurd despite ultimately accepting all the premises.)
So is wanking into socks. Get over it.
Empirically false. How are you literally so stupid?
What the fuck is this? Just stop posting.
I already showed that there wasn't if you actually read anything. Nobody seriously contested it.
Funny that the geniuses here haven't been able to do something that has been largely abandoned in ethics.
First, I haven't found any place where you did this. Second, if you did show that "no existing right to bodily autonomy [is] sufficiently strong", I think you probably need to also show why the law isn't in the wrong, rather the moral beliefs of the people in this thread.
I mean, people are. It's a conversation that's still happening.
Gonna need a citation on that one, boss.
Anyone else that comes along can follow along in the main conversation with @jasory@programming.dev and myself over here.
"Show why the law isn't in the wrong, rather than the moral beliefs of the people in the thread"
What law? There is no law in discussion here, and an action being immoral does not necessarily entail that a law must exist to prohibit it. (I've already pointed this out, so the fact that you completely ignored it is just laziness)
"the moral beliefs.."
Because it results in a contradiction with their other beliefs. Essentially nobody will ever claim that a contradictory moral system is good, OR that denying a third party the ability to override bodily control in the interest of others (and often that very person, e.g most people think self-harm is wrong) is good. If neither of these are true then a sufficiently strong bodily autonomy cannot be true either.
"It's a conversation that is still happening"
But there are no actual rebuttals. In fact all you did is go back and assert that bodily autonomy actually is relevant, without even addressing the initial refutation.
This is how every single debate about bodily autonomy goes (or really any bad argument). The person will either reject all criticism without any reasoning, or concede all the arguments and play a pseudo Motte-and-Bailey where they continuously switch between arguments they have already conceded were false. Both are simply instances of a person clinging to a belief that contradicts other beliefs they hold, simply because they think it justifies a result they like.
"Gonna need a citation on that"
Wikipedia says that Judith Thompson is credited with changing the view of abortion to a question of autonomy in the public space. What it does not say is that it changed the view of abortion in ethics. (It didn't, it was basically a phase that was pretty quickly moved on from. I also edit Wikipedia so I would have put in it if it did)
Now this is not argument of Wikipedia's infallibility, but it's absence does show that we have no reason to believe that the public's perception of abortion is the same as academic ethics.
So with just this absence of evidence, it is reasonable (but not proven) to say that bodily autonomy is abandoned when it comes to abortion. It is also reasonable to say the converse.
If you actually search academic literature, for as famous as the bodily autonomy argument is it has surprisingly few defences, even pro-choice/pro-abortion (yes they exist in philosophy) ethicists have criticised it. In fact Boonin is probably the most notable defender of it, but even he concedes that it's not very good, discarding it in favor of a "cortical organisation" argument (which I in turn think is an arbitrary selection of a stage of human development that itself doesn't grant personhood any more than being a human organism).
And again the absence of defences, and presence of criticisms makes it more reasonable to think that it is not well accepted.
As for an actual citation, meta-philosophy isn't that popular of a field and you just have to be familiar with the topic to know what I'm referring to. As someone who does research, I can tell you a huge amount of information you want or need isn't neatly collected and more often than not doesn't exist. It could be that there is a vast swath of pro-choice ethicists who use bodily autonomy arguments, which are awfully silent and don't write papers. But based on the evidence it seems like bodily autonomy is truly not a popular argument outside of motivated reasoning by lay persons.
Is this a bot designed to create an example of disjointed unintelligible thoughts?
Followed by ignorant bollocks about what "those other people" supposedly think.
Ah, it's satire.
Well done!
I said a popular defence, not the only defence. Go to the abortiondebate or pro-choice subreddits and count how many people say that abortion is good on the basis of eliminating unwanted children.
Even better make a post asking if abortion is morally good (not just permissible, good) if the child would be born poor or the parents don't want them. You will receive an overwhelmingly positive response, and you know it.
Nope.
People would at most say that of an embrio, not a child.
Unlike what the "every sperm is sacred" crowd thinks against all scientific evidence, a ball of cells with no brain activity is as much a child as a piece of human intestine, a toe or the cells flaking of your skin every minute of the day are: they're all mindless bundles of cells which happen to have human DNA - organic things, not persons.
The non-morons who support abortion actually set a time limit on how late in the pregnancy it is legal to do an abortion exactly because having thought about it, they're aware that a viable embrio will eventually transit from mindless bundle of cells with human DNA into person (though you need to be seriously undereducated to call a fetus at even that stage a "child") and morality dictates that once it's a person their life is sacred.
This is why in most civilized countries abortion is allowed up to 12 weeks: because before that tne embrio has no brain at all and is as much a person as a human toe or kidney, but once it does have some brain activity, whilst we don't really know if and how much of a person that early in gestation it is, we chose to consider it as person just to be on the safe side hence with the right to live.
Only the ultra-simpleton crowd would think that the ball of indiferentiated human cells the size of a pea which is the embrio earlier in gestation is a child.
PS: The funny bit is that the people you're criticizing have the same moral posture with regards to children as you do, the only difference being that they're informed enough and have thought about it enough to know that an early gestation embrio is nowhere near the same as a child hence it makes no sense for the rights of the woman that carries said embrio to be suspended in favour of that mindless ball of cells.
The arguments of the anti-abort crowd really just boil down to "Because I'm too ignorant to understand that which has been known for over a century, other people must be thrown in jail"
This is ontologically and empirically false. I don't really have time for debunking this incredibly self-masturbatory screed, but holy shit you have no idea about categorisation of beings or an arguments about the wrongness of killing. (You're not exactly talking to someone as mentally deficient as you).
The cortical organisation argument is simply cherry-picking a worse instance that satisfies the criteria of possibility of human experience. The fact that it is already a human organism is sufficient, especially since cortical organisation doesn't grant consciousness and even if it did by definition it would fail to describe the wrongness of killing temporarily unconscious humans.
You clearly don't even understand the meaning of the words you're parroting there, to the point that you ended up making the case for even later than 12 weeks abortion.
It really is a case of your own ignorance justifying that others must go to jail.
"You're making the case for even later abortion"
Well of course, the 12-week limit is pure horseshit. Literally nobody in ethics makes this argument it's merely invented by supremely ignorant lay persons to pander to both sides.
You only feel that it is an argument for later abortion, because you are affirming the consequent (a laughably stupid logic error to make) by assuming that abortion is already permissible.
Either killing humans is permissible period or it's not. Dependency and development arguments fail to provide exceptions that don't also apply to adults.
Your argument works by creating your very own definition of what it is to be "a human" to then say "you can't kill a human".
Redefining the meaning of the words used and then claiming that you're right because there exists widelly accepted moral rules which use those words - but not as you defined it to be - isn't actual logic, it's wordplay.
The foundation of all your arguments on this is a "trust me" definition of "a human", provided as an unchallangeable, undetailed and unsubstantiated axion - change that definition to, for example, "a human is somebody born from a woman" and that entire argumentative structure of yours collapses since in that alternative definition until the moment of birth a fetus is a thing, not "a human".
So you pointedly bypass the actual hard part that matters the most and were the main disagreement is - the whole "when do human cells stop being just cells that happen to have human DNA and become 'a human'" - with an "it is as I say" definition on top of which you made your entire case. That's like going "assume the sun is purple" to make the case for painting the walls of a house with a specific color.
All this would be an absolutelly fine and entertaining intellectual game, if you weren't defending that people should go to Jail when they do not obbey the boundaries derived from your definition of "a human" and treat as "not a human" that which you chose to define as "a human", which is the logic of the madman.
Nope. You are committing a categorical error.
Human is very well defined biological definition, objects within the human set are classified according to material properties that are empirically observable, you are falsely equating it with the philosophical concept of personhood.
"Change that definition..."
Changing the symbol used to represent an object with the same properties as a fetus, does absolutely nothing to the reasoning. Because we are not reasoning about the symbol represented by the string "human", we are reasoning about objects with shared properties (well you aren't, actual philosophers are). Some of those objects have moral value based on these properties, therefore all objects that have these properties also have moral value. What we call it doesn't matter. It seems so ironic that you whine about wordplay, when you literally confused yourself over it.
My argument is that relying on personhood (which you didn't you hilariously relied on bodily autonomy), is still insufficient because personhood membership does not account for wrongness of killing. Remember our moral principle of who is allowed to be killed is derived from determining what categories we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill. This is called analytic descriptivism, and you are trying to use it too, you are just completely incompetent. I did not rigorously prove it to be insufficient, because you never actually made the argument, you simply dropped the bodily autonomy argument like everyone does (unless of course you want to accept the premises, and reasoning and deny the conclusion like your intellectual peers in Bedlam).
"If you weren't defending that people go to jail"
Arguing that an action is immoral, is not the same as arguing that it must be punished. You need a separate argument that immoral actions should be punished or deterred in someway. This is simply a fabrication on your part. In fact if you are such an intelligent logician, can you tell me what logical error you are making here? (Hint: it starts with "affirming", to help you find it since you clearly have no idea).
There is a very large body of philosophical work on this subject, everything you have been arguing is pop philosophy that has been rejected as false for decades to even centuries.
If you were even remotely educated on this topic you would realize that you are intellectually equivalent to a flat-earther. There are so many comical errors I can't address them all.
This discussion however is hilarious to me, next time instead of jerking yourself off over word salad consider that the person you are trying to refute is possibly very knowledgeable on the subject (and possibly has an academic background in it :) ).
I was talking about "A human" not "human" - very different things and the former is definitely not "very well biological definition" (I assume you meant "defined" rather than "definition").
Did you think the quotes were decorative rather than delimitative?
What follows is then mainly bollocks and projecting your misintepretation of my point as somehow a set of inherent personal flaws of mine, always enternaining but not actually making an argument.
You've spent the last several posts saying things like "you do not kill a human" and "it's the same as an unconscious human and you do not kill an uncoscious human" to justify your case but all of the sudden you're saying you haven't relied on the meaning of "a human" which you is inconsistent with the very things you wrote.
Then you delegate the definition of "a human" - aka personhood - to some vague unnamed "philosophers" whilst still failing to provide it and justify it.
Then you restated the same "you don't kill a human" argument this time around using "the wrongness of killing" unless it's "in a category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill", whilst still failing to provide a well defined and justified definition for the threshold between "not a human" and "a human" or, in your knew argumentative structure, being a member of a "category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill" to not a member. Worse "a category we already fundamentally accept are permissible to kill" is an even more ill defined, vaguer definition that "a human" (starting by who is that "we" that "fundamentally accepts" all those categories and their boundary definitions) - again you're delegating to unamed individuals rather than providing a definition and you even massivelly expanded size of the problem space.
(On the upside, I suppose bring in the very definition of "alive" into the argument will trully fire up on both sides veritable legions of virologists)
--
HOWEVER:
I do agree that if as you now say, you're not talking about forcing your moral on others via lawmaking and your take on this is purelly a moral one, then absolutelly whatever ill defined threshold you have in your mind is right for you and absolutellly you're entitled to try and convince others of that - it is indeed a moral choice to believe that, for example, "a human is formed at the time of conception" and from there derive that, morally, what by that definition is a human developing inside a womb is always entitled to the same protections as a human after having been born.
As long as it's about one's moral guidance in one's personal choices, it's all valid and boundary conditions need not be well defined or justified because "I'll know what's right and what's wrong when I see it" thresholds are good enough for personal moral.
The thing is, you've made your case in a post about legal consequences for somebody from anti-abortion law, hence it is implied that your post is justifying the Law (and if it was not your intention to do so, it would've been easy to make that clear) and that's entirelly different because by that point you're not making a case for "this is a moral point of view people should have" (and hence you try to reason people into sharing it) but instead it it's "this is a moral point of view people should behave according to or be harmed if they do not" (quite literally by being deprived of their freedom if they don't) and that's were all the need for clearly defined and justified thresholds arises because in forcing pthers to comply you have two entities with two sets of rights - since the pregnant women is a human, with the right to freedom - and from the definition of when does a piece of organic mater becomes a human also arises the point were some of the rights of the pregnant woman will be denied in favour of the other human: for the purpose of limiting the rights of a human - the pregnant woman - an ill defined threshold of the "I'll know it when I see it" is just an arbitrary threshold to deny that person's rights.
(From the first comment of yours I replied to, I got the impression you totally missed this: the so-called "pro abortion" posture is not in favour of "poor single women having abortions", it's in favour of "poor single women having the choice to have an abortion" - it's not at all about "people should have abortions", it's about people not being forced either way. This is why you often see that position named "pro choice" rather than "pro abortion" - it's not in favour of abortion, rather it's against limiting a woman's choice on that subject.
If indeed there are people out that think "poor single women should have abortions" I'm on the same side as you - I don't think they should: what I do think is that the option to chose to do so or not should be theirs and they should not be punished either way for their choice)
Personally, if indeed your point is a purelly personal moral one were you do not desire that others are forced to comply with your moral then yeah, it's absolutelly valid and needs not even have well defined boundaries between acceptable and not acceptable and I see no harm in tryng to convince individuals to share that moral point of view and act accordingly in their own personal choices.