It's hard to care about legalistic arguments when what it boils down to is that we're losing some freedoms that we have enjoyed for the past 50 years.
This isn't a privacy issue any more than the legality of anything else is a privacy issue. Things don't become legal just because they're done in secret. It's not even a controlling-women issue.
The abortion debate is, and has always been, a question of whether fetuses are alive enough for the term "murder" to apply to them. The longer we refuse to meet the opponent on those grounds, the longer every single thing we say will continue to sound like "it's okay to murder people because I'm doing so privately".
This isn't to say the loss of those rights is okay. But our side did just get called out on some obvious bullshit, and if we want to get those rights back, we really need to do better than tenuous strawman arguments.
Unless, of course, our goal isn't to win, but to just be eternally aggrieved. I am increasingly convinced that is the case.
It's worked pretty well for the conservatives the past couple decades.
It's true that good argument's rarely change people's mind about the issue. But a good argument, one that shows you are capable of seeing things from the other side, can change another person's mind about you.
The whole abortion debate is a political tool to rally people behind. It is irrational precisely for this too work. Abortion proponents are not interested in debate and a reasonable outcome.
The way I see internet debates is like this: am I going to change this person's mind? Probably not. But this is a public forum, and there are many other people watching. Some are young people poking their heads into politics for the first time. Those people are the ones dragging the Overton window around.
I do not want their first impression of my side of an issue to be "wow, these people are just incoherently mad about everything, but the other side has a bunch of well-reasoned arguments". Regardless of my opinion on the premises of those arguments - and that's all this is, you're starting from different premises than me and you reached the only reasonable conclusion from there - that is going to affect their perceptions of my side and push them toward the people I disagree with.
They're not people. Lots of things are alive - spiders, bacteria, grass, mushrooms, there are even cogent arguments for saying viruses may be alive. The use of the term "murder" for non-people is merely an attempt at emotional manipulation.
Now, I don't think newborn babies are people either, but the nice thing about a newborn baby is that you can just give it to somebody else which simplifies the ethics considerably, it's no more difficult to decide what we should do about a newborn whose mother can't or won't keep it than for a puppy.
What is it, exactly, about newborn babies (for now, I'll ask about embryos later) that makes you think they are "not people"? Is it something they do, or something they don't/can't do? Something else?
Full disclosure: i don't think the debate is on these grounds, i think the violinist or the seed-people are better ways to think about abortion right now (and at least until unwanted children are completely taken care of by the society and not the mother, and until a pregnancy gives you a white year/have no influence on your career prospects).
But I did some research last year about consciousness in animals (i was always a functionalist, Chamets made me an illusionnist, i wanted to understand what it meant for animals and for AI). I was quite shocked to learn that a baby in his first weeks had a worse sense than any newborn mammal, and than most birds.
What does that mean? For functionalists (probably GP is one), going full moral utilitarist, killing a litter (to avoid getting overwhelmed by kittens) is probably ten time worse than killing a three weeks old baby. Luckily, while i think utilitarist moral intuitions are probably the most accurate, I'm not fully utilitarist, and this kind of intuition repulse me.
All of this to say that thinking logically, being pro-life to avoid 'murder' should push people to go full vegan (or eating only insects and seafood), and aborting a cat or killing a litter should be prosecuted as well.
The argument seems to be made in defense of allowing abortion because, ostensibly, who wouldn't want to say "get this violinist off of me" in that situation, and of course if one were raped and found out pregnant wouldn't you definitely want to be able to get that violinist out of your uterus.
But, it's not the same thing at all, because if you were to separate yourself from the violinist, they would die from their disease / from not being given very extraordinary aid, but if you were to separate yourself from the fetus, it would die from not being given very ordinary means of sustenance.
... and then something about saying that tialaramex is a functionalist (? I can't say whether I agree here). I am also repulsed by any thought that some calculus would allow us to say that N kittens are "worth" M human babies (for whatever M,N).
> being pro-life to avoid 'murder' should push people to go full vegan
Murder is a particular word we only use when a person kills another person. We wouldn't use it for killing animals, ... or for an animal killing a hum-- wait, here:
|--------------------+--------+--------|
| perp | victim | result |
|--------------------+--------+--------|
| human | human | murder |
|--------------------+--------+--------|
| human | horse | kill |
| lion | human | kill |
| cat | bird | kill |
| dog | dog | kill |
| bacteria | ape | kill |
|--------------------+--------+--------|
| thinking rocks [0] | human | kill |
|--------------------+--------+--------|
Killing animals for food is perfectly fine, but killing them for sport is very much not.
> full vegan (or eating only insects and seafood)
Because they have lower consciousness or something?
Why does whether it's a common (pregancy) or uncommon (violinist hooked up to sleeper) occurrence alter the moral status of disconnecting the person who is reliant on their connection to another for their continued existence?
If instead of being sewn up with a violinist, the person in the thought experiment woke up with an embryo implanted in their uterus, then separating themselves from the embryo would be removing ordinary aid and the embryo would die from being deprived of basic nutrition.
This latter case is what happens in e.g. date rape, which is, I think, the whole purpose of the "violinist" thought experiment to begin with.
But specifically, they don't seem to be aware of themselves as distinct from everything else, which is a prerequisite.
Are they no longer people? The machines keeping them alive are taking up resources, maybe it would be fine to disconnect them since there seems to longer by anybody home.
The thing is, some of those people actually recover: https://www.macleans.ca/society/health/the-story-behind-a-ve... .
What about the mentally handicapped? How are we to assess the internal state of a non-verbal person to determine whether they are aware of anything?
Making judgements about a person's quality of life and using those to justify killing them is inhumane.
Is it possible to get it wrong? Sure. Over history we've got this wrong lots of times, and as you showed the most dramatic examples make news. I don't see how the fact that people are capable of error justifies a pretence that newborns are people.
> I don't see how the fact that people are capable of error justifies a pretense that newborns are people.
Well, you're the one proposing this radical idea that newborns aren't people (and suggesting, I believe, that it's okay to kill them because they're "not people"); you justify it.
At what age or stage of development do newborns turn from not-people to people? We can't check with you on a case-by-case basis.
Such patients weren't in fact dead. They were, it turns out, very much alive and still forming memories. Resurrection is not a thing.
> suggesting, I believe, that it's okay to kill them because they're "not people"
Why on Earth would it be OK to kill newborns just because they aren't people? People's pet dogs aren't people either. Have you got it into your head that it's OK to just kill somebody's pet dog if you want to? It isn't.
As I think I already said, the nice thing about a newborn baby from an ethical point of view is that it's not biologically dependent on the mother for life support, so you can just find somebody to adopt it. Turns out there are in fact plenty of would-be adoptive parents.
> At what age or stage of development do newborns turn from not-people to people?
This appears to be a gradual process. Parents will be able to tell you it really sneaks up on you. Fortunately it will almost never matter exactly when and so there's no reason to expend thought on drawing a line in the sand for something you're never going to need to care about.
> Why on Earth would it be OK to kill newborns just because they aren't people? People's pet dogs aren't people either. Have you got it into your head that it's OK to just kill somebody's pet dog if you want to? It isn't.
It wouldn't be, but what I'm driving at is that killing a newborn (or fetus) is categorically worse than killing anybody's dog.
There is no calculus whereby one can say that some number of animals is "worth more" than some number of humans who may be deficient in some way (too young, unaware of their surroundings, apparently mentally handicapped, severely physically handicapped, whatever), or that killing the latter is "more okay" than killing the former.
Notice how rather than offer any rationale for why you believe this, you just state it - as if astonished that most people don't agree. You've gone from supposed "curiosity" to just re-starting your beliefs and asserting that everybody else is wrong.
Most people who get there do so via dogmatic belief, that is, an insistence that there is no rationale, they don't need one because there are just some things which are correct and everyone will "obviously" believe those things. This can run into a pretty nasty problem beyond just being obviously wrong, which is that it's contrary to Freedom of Conscience and thus if you have power to "enforce" it you've got a UDHR violation...
I think a lot of people would agree, though, if left alone with nothing to do except think about whether it's okay to kill a helpless person because we think they can't feel it, or are unaware of what's happening.
I looked at the language in the UDHR and right there in Article 1, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." French naissant, Spanish nacen, Russian рождаются, etc. That's unfortunate.
The UDHR builds on such documents as the Convention on the Rights of the Child which reads "Parties shall respect and ensure the rights set forth in the present Convention to each child within their jurisdiction without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child’s [...] disability, birth or other status." [0] (emphasis added), and the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child which reads "The child must be given the means requisite for its normal development" [1] (emphasis added).
The UDHR text should read "All human beings are conceived free and equal in dignity and rights."
[0] Article 2, https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-te... [1] http://www.un-documents.net/gdrc1924.htm
I think it should say "people" or perhaps "persons" but that didn't happen for a different reason that I'm sure you likewise have dogmatic beliefs about.
The Declaration isn't supplied with teeth, but even without them it seems especially nonsensical to insist upon denying facts. Pregnancies are aborted spontaneously all the time, merely "conceiving" a human being means almost nothing.
I'm well aware pregnancies are commonly spontaneously aborted, but the key word there is spontaneously, "without apparent cause or stimulus", i.e. not through the choice or neglect of the mother.
See, you didn't need any help. Given that some were insistent that humans are not animals, and others were insistent that some ethnic or religious groups of humans aren't people, the resolution was to highlight that the latter claim is wrong, and give up on the other claim for the time being.
This means that status of other species (e.g. octopuses) is not recognised in the UDHR. Arguably a realistic setting of priorities, but still unfortunate in my view of course.
> the key word there is spontaneously
So how is your intuition for other spontaneous events? If your child is spontaneously struck down by Influenza, too bad - they live or die and you're not bothered either way? If a work colleague falls down the stairs, and others present just leave them there, a motionless heap, stepping over the body - does that seem right to you?
yes
> and you're not bothered either way?
of course I'd be bothered. elsewhere in this thread I mentioned grieving the loss of the two miscarriages that my wife and I knew about.
> If a work colleague falls down the stairs, and others present just leave them there, a motionless heap, stepping over the body - does that seem right to you?
Either you or I or both of us have really lost the thread here... I guess the falling down the stairs might be considered spontaneous but the others stepping over him instead of helping him is deliberate and probably reprehensible.
> it's not easy standing up for what you believe is the truth when it's inconvenient
From what I can tell, it sure doesn't seem like what you "believe is the truth" is inconvenient for you at all. For somebody who just had about 1% of their lifespan re-assigned as human incubator it seems pretty damn inconvenient.
Your use of the passive voice here makes it seem like the woman wasn't involved in the decision. Choosing to rely on contraception, which has a low but nonzero failure rate, means accepting the low but nonzero possibility of conceiving a child. Having sex without the willingness to bear possible children is tacitly accepting a possibility of needing to kill that child.
The only acceptable choice is to only have sex when you're willing to keep the natural products of sex. This applies to men and women alike. It might be difficult or hard to imagine for some, but it's simple.
I would absolutely support the government easing the burden of women impregnated by rape, including free ultrasounds, pregnancy-related physician visits, a stipend to make it easier for them to order food when they're nauseated and don't want to cook, hell even massages by pregnancy-certified masseuses. Until the government provides those services, I do what I can by donating to life centers.
Let's try again, "For somebody who just had 1% of their lifespan re-assigned by Phil Snowberger here". Does that make it clear where the problem is now?
> The abortion debate is, and has always been, a question of whether fetuses are alive enough for the term "murder" to apply to them. The longer we refuse to meet the opponent on those grounds, the longer every single thing we say will continue to sound like "it's okay to murder people because I'm doing so privately".
I don't see how the abortion debate ever was about whether murder applies to fetuses. That's just been a figleaf. The self-proclaimed "pro-life" movement also strongly supports the death penalty, strongly oppose any sort of financial aid for poor children, are typically strong supporters of the military and violent intervention, unconditionally support the police in police violence cases, support corporal punishment of children etc.. "Pro-life" supporters have shown absolute disregard for born life, so I can not take serious a claim that they care about unborn life. Moreover, they oppose the measure which has been shown to be the most effective of reducing abortions, sexual education and availability of contraception. Make no mistake, the abortion debate has always been about forcing a specific belief system on everyone, once abortion rights have been taken away, they will move to the next part of their belief system to force on others.
> The self-proclaimed "pro-life" movement also strongly supports the death penalty, strongly oppose any sort of financial aid for poor children, are typically strong supporters of the military and violent intervention, unconditionally support the police in police violence cases, support corporal punishment of children etc..
This is an incoherent straw man caricature of "the right". Unfortunately for us all, there are tons of people in every side of politics who hold incoherent sets of positions. They're the "sound of a potato rotating" [0] kind of folks.
By "incoherent" I mean that I agree with you that it doesn't make sense for somebody to both be "pro-life" and also support the death penalty. But there are people who hold positions that are at least internally consistent.
Why bother crafting arguments against the former (where you'll gain little if anything from winning) when you could against the latter (where you have a chance of changing the minds of a lot of people, if you make a strong argument)?
[0] https://twitter.com/onlinegrapes/status/970945537435303936
I actually very much dislike labels such as "the right" and "the left", that said the "pro-life" movement as in the political movement that is trying to overturn Roe are very much exactly how I portrait them above. Name any prominent figure in the pro-life movement who also strongly opposes the death penalty.
> By "incoherent" I mean that I agree with you that it doesn't make sense for somebody to both be "pro-life" and also support the death penalty. But there are people who hold positions that are at least internally consistent.
> Why bother crafting arguments against the former (where you'll gain little if anything from winning) when you could against the latter (where you have a chance of changing the minds of a lot of people, if you make a strong argument)?
The issue is that the debate is not about convincing the fundamentalists, they can not be convinced, this is about pointing out the motivations of the fundamentalists to others. There is a very good book in German (unfortunately I do not believe there is an English translation): "Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren: Anleitung zum subversiven Denken" which analyses forms of argumentation and historical debates and their philosophical underpinnings. One of the central concluding arguments is that in fighting totalitarism and fundamentalism the debate with a fundamentalist can will never convince them, because fundamentally their belief trumps rational arguments (something that fundamentalists on all sides of the spectrum consistently repeat), the debate should be to convince/warn the observers, to point out the inconsistencies, the real motivations.
I do as well, because they conflate too many unrelated things together, and it's impossible to pin down something as amorphous as "the [direction]".
> the "pro-life" movement as in the political movement that is trying to overturn Roe are very much exactly how I portray them above
So are you against this "movement" or the position? I'm in the pro-life movement and I don't support the death penalty.
> Name any prominent figure in the pro-life movement who also strongly opposes the death penalty.
Oh, I'm not prominent though.
Archbishop Gomez, president of the USCCB and board member of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, is pro-life and against the death penalty.
> The issue is that the debate is not about convincing the fundamentalists, they can not be convinced
I referred to "people who hold positions that are at least internally consistent", and then you started talking about fundamentalism? What does it mean to be "fundamentalist"? It sounds like it's one whose "belief trumps rational arguments". Those people are the worst. I don't think that they're the same people as who I was referring to, though.
Anyway, I think we both agree on the nit I was trying to pick initially which is that broad labels aren't generally helpful to anybody trying to reach the truth, but they sure do get used a lot in our modern discourse.
Yes I agree with you, and I should have been more specific that by fundamentalist I don't necessarily mean religion either. Your characterisation of "someone whose belief trumps rational arguments" hits it quite well on the head.
> Anyway, I think we both agree on the nit I was trying to pick initially which is that broad labels aren't generally helpful to anybody trying to reach the truth, but they sure do get used a lot in our modern discourse.
I generally agree, but what I tried to say with referring to the book above, was that there are different types of debates.
That said, I accept the criticism, we should try to keep the debates here on HN more about exchanging views in an "honest" (for lack of a better word) discourse, and use less labels. I will try to do better in the future.
Those words were a quotation from your post :)
It seems to me like a good definition of a certain kind of person who I don't like to argue with, but I don't like abdicating the term "fundamentalist" to them because I consider myself a fundamentalist / because it just doesn't seem to really fit.
I enjoyed this exchange, thanks and cheers to you.
The death penalty is done to a tiny portion of criminals, is subject to very strict procedures and rules, has plenty of time to appeal, and is generally not "murder" by any description necessary. It can be misused of course, and there's plenty of arguments it is unnecessary, but we abort 800k alone per year in the USA and there's significant debate about the humanity of what the procedure is inflicted on. We have killed 1550 people this year for the death penalty.
They are two different things. You might as well say all prolife people should be anti-war and all prochoice people be pro-war for that rationale. I never see why people think this is a gotcha of hypocrisy.
You're considerably off with that. In America, 6 people have been executed so far in 2022 and 11 people were executed for the whole of 2021.
Substitute any [X] you like in the above and it still applies. Who is forcing a belief system on whom? That's politics.
1. Same sex marriage: One side: "nobody should be able to marry the same sex", i.e. I forbid you from marrying your gay partner. The other side, "everyone should be able to marry no matter what the sex", i.e. you are free to marry only other sex partners, as long as I can marry a partner of any sex. One side is forcing the other side to adhere to their belief system, the other isn't.
2. Eating Pork. One side: "We believe eating pork is dirty, so selling pork meat should be illegal" the other side "Everyone should be able to eat the meat they want"
That's the crux of the debate, whether pregnant people have as much bodily autonomy as everyone else. If anti-choice people were to also concede that people should be forced to give up bodily autonomy in other areas like the ones I listed above, I would take them more seriously and we could discuss whether a fetus is a person. Until then it doesn't matter, it's just about restricting rights of others and almost always based in religious arguments and sexism.
... well, if they are, then abortion is murder, right? I don't see why you wouldn't care whether they "are people" or not. It seems crucial, at least if you think, like I do, that murder is just about the worst thing a person could do.
> The fact is that bodily autonomy is never restricted so much [...] I'm not forced to donate organs, to donate blood, or even to do something so simple as get a vaccine.
These are not in the same category. All of these might give another person a chance at living longer (and yes, some of them like organ donation in particular carry some risk of death for the donor). Abortion definitely takes away any possibility of living from another person.
I don't buy the bodily autonomy argument. Yes, ~half the human population bears the burden of carrying children, and no, that's not fair. Everybody (men and women, of all generations) should be invested in living in a society where we don't create incentives for anybody to kill anybody else, up to and including not having sex outside of some setup/framework where any children produced will be loved and cared for.
If we can't agree to something like that, then it seems like we would have to collectively accept that murder isn't all that bad.
Just like carrying a pregnancy to term. Especially in the US which has a very high maternal mortality rate.
> if they are, then abortion is murder, right?
If I'm giving someone a blood transfusion because their kidneys are failing and they'll die within minutes/hours if I stop, is it murder to disconnect us? Maybe so but I should still have the right to choose. I can only recommend this video which makes the point much better than I ever could https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2PAajlHbnU
> Abortion definitely takes away any possibility of living from another person.
This seems to contradict your idea that a fetus is already living in the first place? And if it is already living than just like organ donation, carrying the pregnancy to term "_might_ give another person a chance at living longer" just like organ donation. Remember miscarriages are common, stillbirths are common, dying in infancy is common. Organ/blood donation is extremely comparable to being pregnant if a fetus is alive: they are alive at the grace of and only because of your body.
No, similar to how it's not murder to disconnect somebody in a coma from life support or other extraordinary medical means. If the person dies, it's from their loss of blood, not from you refusing/failing to give them your blood.
I admit I didn't watch more than 60 seconds here and there of the video; it's almost 40 minutes long and it's late here.
> This seems to contradict your idea that a fetus is already living in the first place
Hm, I should have added "any longer" to clarify: "Abortion definitely takes away any possibility of living any longer from another person".
> just like organ donation
Organ donation is extraordinary; pregnancy is the most ordinary thing in the world.
it's actually 19 per 100k, which UNICEF considers to be "Very Low" [0].
> If I'm giving someone a blood transfusion because their kidneys are failing and they'll die within minutes/hours if I stop, is it murder to disconnect us?
Except in this case we're talking about your child, towards whom you have legal obligations that you would not have towards anybody else. It's legal to let the homeless man down the street starve to death, but it's not legal to let your child starve to death.
So the only situation in which it wouldn't be murder is if you don't consider the fetus to be a real human yet, which is a very difficult question to answer.
[0] https://data.unicef.org/topic/maternal-health/maternal-morta...
Even with your child you're not obligated to donate blood or organs, which is more analogous than giving food since giving someone food doesn't impact your health or body in any direct way. In some places in the US you don't even have to provide a child with health care if it goes against your religion, I don't see why you should be forced to give up your body for 9 months and then also possibly suffer various conditions afterwards or death.
I don't really understand the legal framework for it but definitely a lot of abortions that are performed here are technically illegal, it's just not enforced.
And France has a lot of problems with right-wing ideologies. All but the furthest left parties in France are violently islamaphobic, for instance. In their recent elections they almost elected Le Pen (again) who wants to leave the EU, has close ties to Russia, is extremely LGBTQ-phobic, etc...
Europe has a rising alt-right problem in every country that I have any knowledge of their politics. Of course some of it is not new either, like Poland has never had legal abortions, many (if not most countries) still make changing your legal name and gender very difficult and/or humiliating, and many countries still don't even have same-sex marriage. Far from the liberal paradise I see US republicans online make it out to be
If you only have a penny and I have a nickel, I am 5x richer than you. But am I terrifyingly rich?
0.00019 is certainly bigger than 0.00006, but they're both quite small.
Speaking of things that are frustrating, it’s incredibly frustrating how many people who claim to be pro-abortion seem to be mollified by the legal arguments that are being used to dismantle it. Sometimes I think the real genius of the US Constitution is the seemingly magical ability it has to appeal to men’s innate desire to feel like very smart, very rational beings through nitpicking, pedantic debate. Who cares whether Alito’s argument makes sense? Who cares whether RBG thought Roe was built on a solid legal foundation? The thing that actually matters is that a very important right - the right to not be forced to risk your own wellbeing for the sake of another - is being taken away.
Whatever Constitutional interpretation got us there is about as meaningful and impressive as Joseph Smith putting on his stone glasses to interpret the word of God. The rationalization was reverse engineered from the conservative justice’s political viewpoint, not the other way around. Whatever the Supreme Court was intended to be, it is absolutely a political body now. Unfortunately only one side - the ones who successfully ramrodded this change into effect against the wishes of most Americans - seems to recognize it. The other side is so caught up in the childish fantasy of Smart People Openly Debating the Tough Issues With Logic and Reason™, so enamored of this Aaron Sorkin inspired belief that the right soaring speech with a well thought out argument will always win the day, that they are and will continue to be thoroughly trounced by the other side, who at least realize that politics is a dirty game now where anything goes.
> Unless, of course, our goal isn't to win, but to just be eternally aggrieved. I am increasingly convinced that is the case
Where there is smoke, there is fire.
Both the draft (or any form of compulsory service) and taxes are counter-examples.
You're probably going to object to taxes, but it's reasonably well established that wealth is health. (It's also true that taxes are spent on things that don't save or preserve the life of another human.) More to the point, taxes take my time, which I can't possibly get back.
Interesting enough, so does prison.
Framing this as "privacy" makes no sense.
Framing it as "choice" can be coherent if you express it this well, but most people don't.
(I think I weakened my own argument here by including that sentence, but too late to edit it now. What I was trying to express is that this isn't actually a sexism thing: I have no trouble imagining these people applying the same standard to men in a world where any human could get pregnant.)
In many countries, if a mother kills her baby in the first few months after birth, this is illegal, the liveliness of the baby is not in doubt, and yet the killing is not considered murder, but rather the lesser homicide of infanticide.
Likewise, while the Old Testament prescribes severe penalities for violence that causes a woman to miscarry, it has nothing to say about expectant mothers pursuing abortions. The illegalisation of abortion seems to date back to the Emperor Constantine.
It is a false dichotmoy, that either the fetus is not considered yet alive, or the state should treat the mother as a murderer.
"It's hard to care about foundation repair when you're lying in the rubble with broken bones." Well sure! You had decades to care!