Mason keeps talking about how thomas jefferson expanded the contemporaneous notion of personhood. He then compared this to expanding the definition of person to include fetuses. Granted he didn't really spell out any arguments, but to whatever extent his discussion on jefferson is supposed to bolster his views on abortion, I don't think they hold for the reasons mentioned. The extension to other beings with effectively identical characteristics doesn't apply for beings with completely different characteristics.

Sure. The point was that the extending things like religious freedom to different religions is substantially different from extending personhood it to fetuses. If someone wants to say "well we also consider 1 year olds people, so shouldn't we consider fetuses too" that would be a better argument, in my view, but wasn't the one I was opposing.

I have little problem with arbitrary laws like late-term abortion laws, at least not just because they are arbitrary (I might of course disagree with the law on its merits). But this is substantially different for moral proclamations. So if someone says "After x weeks abortion is immoral" that seem more or less impossible to justify. But for pragmatic reasons if you want to make a law somewhere between conception and pregnancy, you more or less have to draw a somewhat arbitrary line. As for "right", some people think of them very legalistically, some very morally. Like for me, rights (and morality, for that matter) are often more legal codifications of social norms, not fundamental properties of the universe. So whether I disagree or not on the concept or rights depends more on how you think of rights. There are pragmatic reasons to accept "X weeks but not X+1 weeks" as a time to set a legal "right", but hard to imagine many good arguments with the strong more moralistic notions. Some people have tried to sort of cherry pick what the key factor (some level of cognitive development, say), but often the arbitrariness is pushed to the level of "choose the key factor you like".

Incidentally, this problem also manifests itself at the "birthed" line. One important difference is that there is no longer any impetus on the mother to be involved in any way, it can left entirely to society to raise.



Interesting. My gut reaction is that I don't have a good way to measure the value of a fetus independently. I'm not even sure it is "better" if society adds one more person to the mix. It gets into all sorts of sort of "macro" society wide considerations. But I can say there is a very obvious "micro" effect, namely the mental state of the parent and local community. For instance, if a woman is beaten and loses the baby, this loss to her may well be as significant as the murder of a born child. A huge sense of grief and loss. If the woman decides to abort her fetus, these feels may (and may not) be entirely absent. For me, abortion is about as meaningful as a condom and I have no compunction against using it as birth control of last resort, not everyone agrees, but for me it would be substantially different if my wife, say, miscarried a baby we were hoping to have.

The "conception" line is itself just one of those arbitrary lines. Certain types of birth control become morally fine, others become morally equivalent to murder, and so forth.

Okay. I think there is no way a doctor should be required to take an oath which disallows the taking of a life as in euthanasia. Clearly we have a disagreement here in that I think end of life assisted suicide, under stringent conditions, is fine, and you do not. Just as I think abortions are fine and you, presumably, do not.

Now how to resolve our disagreements? Not saying I should convince you, or you should convince me, but if we have a deep seated moral disagreement (and there are millions agreeing with both our sides) how do we as a society come to consensus on this?

Generally when there are these big clashes, we should not act in a way where one side "wins" by default of the laws, such as through political laws. Take abortion. By having it legal, those who find it morally repulsive don't have to do it. And those who disagree can do it. Ditto gay marriage. If swearing an oath rejecting assisted suicide is made a prerequisite of being a doctor, one side in this very deep seated debate automatically wins.

The role of the doctor is to heal and when he's run out of options to heal further. If he's gone as far as he can go he knows that the patient will probably die because he's earned and has the insight that goes with 'doctordom". This in no way allows someone to say "the doctor killed the patient" because he saw terminality and stopped therapy.

Now, the compassion and knowledge that goes with the work cannot be gainsaid but there's more and to allow you and me to decide that Henry needs to die because of a law, decided by you and me for others is egregious. I repeat, we are doing this for others and you and I cannot waive off responsibility in this because we are a thousand miles away.

The laws of government, the world of Caesar, are, in our times, feeble and self serving and if the "masters of nothingness or anything goes" wish to legislate then let them hire people , like yourself, to do the deeds. You don't need a doctor to execute another but the politicians are clever enough to do their deeds by using the good name of doctors to implement their works.

And so, you wish to have euthanasia, abortion and whatever in your life and like you said there are others that don't have to do this but the stakes are much bigger than you and I. I say that education is necessary and this type of decision , which at present a fait accompli, should be comprehended with a perspective of for instance; prior to birth a soul/spiritual being was awaiting to incarnate within that very body to which an abortion is to be accomplished. the stuff about the scientific imprimatur on this decision within the science of our time is only destructive. This is reality which does more than consider convenience of the earth and only the earth. Nobody is a materialist, so we say, but this is the materialist ethos which denies the moral tone where man is a moral tone poem, the center of a cosmic spirituality.

Euthanasia likewise, can be understood when considerations of death are studied. There is work to be done and the doctor healing, to the very end, is the great boon to be brought to the patient. To take a life, again another convenience, is far too easy when the work to be done is karmic to which the patient and doctor never lose for it will be brought forth in another life and will be much more difficult. You can't escape it as whether you believe it or not, this suffering is brought forth in Love. We really do have to learn about death and not see ourselves as particulate pieces of the table of the elements without life love and understanding.

Birth and death, the education of the patient and doctor and even the politico, can only bring forth the best in the human being, a Noble Man, the work of human grace.

by the way, read the "modern oath" referred in the Wikipedia text " brings forth the ability to take a life " but of course considers it as if one of the options open to the doctor. Don't kid yourself, this "modern oath" sounds like something put together by that other mountebank of a nothingness society, Daniel Dennett, who happens to be a Tufts professor. LOL

Under this type of framework, it seems more or less impossible to justify ANY moral claim, which makes me wonder if you're not just throwing morality out the window for the sake of this type of argument.

This doesn't really account for laws pertaining to double homicide when BOTH the mother and child are killed. It's also not clear that the "local community" argument really makes any sense unless you also grant the local community to have a say on whether abortion should be allowed for any particular abortion case. This type of reasoning seems far more arbitrary than the "birth" reasoning.

If the definition is clear and the morality is clear, and if you assume that some laws pertaining to justice and protection of those who cannot protect themselves are permissible, it seems that the decisions are not particularly arbitrary.

Firstly, I tend to throw most of morality out the window regardless. Certainly the more deontological kinds are almost always terrible; consequentialist approaches are a bit better, but I usually take a pretty minor "morality are just social conventions" sort of descriptive approach and when I want to argue normatively it is in a "X will have consequences Y and Z which seem bad" type approach.

Anyways, be that as it may, for the deontological moral absolutionist, I think the argument still works. When people make big sweeping moral claims like "killing people is wrong" they are usually predicated in substantially different properties of the universe. Like a person being alive and not alive is a huge binary change and gets a correspondingly big moral change. Part of the problem with deontological approach is the abundance of fringe examples where it is nowhere near as stark a contrast as the moral change would imply.

So returning to late term abortion, it is pretty hard to imagine what is significant about the passage of a week of gestation that makes the binary flip from "morally acceptable" to "morally equivalent to murder". Legally, for pragmatic reasons, if we want to make the law somewhere in between conception in birth we are sort of forced to impose an artificial number of weeks. But morally it would be very strange I think if we had the same strength over such arbitrary lines.

This is particularly challenging for those who argue on religious grounds, namely that God has bequeathed the fetus with a soul. The binary moral claim makes sense because you have this binary change of soul or no soul. Unless one happens to believe this happens precisely at the X weeks of a late term abortion law, the acceptance of X weeks for moral reasons is going to contradict one side or the other of the imbued with a soul property. There are some secular arguments like specifying a level of cognitive function where it is immoral afterwards...but as suggested I usually find this more a matter of choosing the metric to buy your argument.

I added the local community as an answer to double homicide type charges. In this scenario you still have the father and parents of the mother and so forth who are going to experience the grief at the loss of the baby in addition to the loss of the mother. There is a very clear "micro" level of harm being done here.

Of course there can be all sorts of complicated situations where local community views are not perfect; for instance, suppose a father is devastated and grieving the loss of, to him, his child, while the mother flippantly disregards a fetus as meaningful and aborts it. Such is the difficulty of passing pragmatic laws that apply to everyone. Mother-centric abortion decision making has better consequences than others, but it causes harm in various situations absolutely.

At the end of the day, I don't have a good way to measure the value of a fetus independently of the parents. I don't have a good "for the benefit of society" argument or a good "it is intrinsically valuable" type argument. So the thing that sort of is left standing is whether the parents want a child (in which case it has incredibly value to them) or don't want a child (in which case it doesn't have value to them). And with diminishing returns to other members of the community beyond the parents.

Sorry not following, what exactly is the birth reasoning you are talking about?

That a definition and moral claim is clear is not a defence against the charge of it being arbitrary. We have at least a dozen fairly clear and objective lines at or between the lines of conception and birth that can be clearly specified. The question is, how do we choose between these numerous lines? This is the question that I find most attempts to answer it on moral grounds fairly arbitrary.

As for "those who cannot protect themselves"...you are using a lot of pronouns normally reserved for people, which rather begs the question.

Anyways, what are your moral views on abortion? What is your justification for these views?

Firstly, note that assissted suicide of suffering terminally ill patients can be present as a form of HEALING consistent with the the doctors imperative to heal patients.

I suspect you may be unfamiliar with these arguments so let me try and construct them. Healing involves at least two goals. Firstly, we try to save people's lives. Secondly, we try to minimize suffering, to increase the quality of life, and so forth. The former dominates the latter. As in, we will cause pain (through, say, surgery) to save a life. But after having saved the life, we will give pain medication, try for rehabilitation, and a wide range of other measures to help ameliate suffering.

In terminally ill cases, the near certainty of death eliminates the first goal as a relevant metric. They are going to die. We now have to turn to the question of how do we minimize suffering. So while the "don't die" measure normally dominates, it is made irrelevant here.

When people are suffering, when they are stuck in debilitating untreatable pain with no hope and certainty of continued and prolonged suffering until death, increasing the speed of that death is a way to remove the level of suffering. It is a form of healing, of taking the pain and agony away.

Even stepping away from assisted suicide, it is very often not the case that we don't take the maximal life saving steps. My granny had a DNR when she passed at 99, for instance. This shows again how the second aspect of medicine can sometimes trump the first, even if it is usually the other way around.




Okay. Well I think this is pseudo spiritual gobbledegook. I don't mean it as an insult, I mean you and I undoubtably have substantially different worldviews. My question to you is this: do you think it is right in this case to impose - through the legal system and the power of government fiat - your view on mine? That I can not act how I and millions of others think is right and moral in this case because you have decided that doctors must act a certain way? I would not do that to you in this case.

As far as abortion is concerned, IMHO a woman should have first priority, natural, legal individual rights over her own body tissue. Whether that body tissue she is carrying is deemed a "fetus", a "baby" or a "person" is irrelevant. Since it is her body part it should rightfully belong to her to do what she wants without government interference until it leaves her body. People tend to ignore the fact that it is a health risk for her to be pregnant. Without modern medical treatment , pregnancy is a significant risk factor for death or long term illness. So coercing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy is a form of criminal endangerment. Also, remember that US law does not always consider human life to be sacrosanct. Consider the recent demonstrated fact that police officers in the USA are legally allowed to kill citizens who are unarmed but who have some minimal suspicion of being a danger. Surely then a pregnant woman woman has full rights over something that is made of her own tissue that is growing inside of her body that could cause her harm. IMHO, she can destroy it if she wants and no government should have say in it.

I'm not commenting on whether abortion is religiously immoral or not. Just saying that human law should not enter into it.

This is highly problematic. How people behave towards each other usually ends up as have some moral bearing. I suspect that you're being selective in the times that you do throw out morality and that you would implicitly use it in arguments in which you find it convenient.


It's starting to sound like you have the argument backwards. In fact, I have no idea what you're trying to argue "the same strength" about. It's not even clear to me what argument you're arguing against or what position you're trying to take.

Yeah, I'm not sure if you actually understand the argument being put forth. The claim is not that the law defining a consequence that's equivalent to murder if the death occurs after a specific number of weeks also defines the morality of the situation to be in the same place.

The acceptance of X weeks is because X weeks at least protects a certain percentage of unborn children, and that this percentage is better than not accepting X weeks.

There are also secular arguments that specify viability, not cognitive function.

Your claim about this being a matter of selecting a metric doesn't really move anything in the conversation. It seems you're just claiming moral relativism.

As you open this line of reasoning, you're rejecting the fundamental basis upon which most pro-abortion arguments are built. The idea is that it's the woman's body, and it's her decision to do what she wants with her body. The right is not even built around the concept of harm. As soon as you start framing it in terms of harm (incidentally, this is you presenting a moral argument while trying to say you're throwing morality out the window), you deny that foundational piece of logic that is being used to make the abortion argument.

Again, this is an explicit rejection of this being a right to one's own body.

You said:

I said:

The "birth" reasoning is that the moment of birth is somehow an indicator in the logic of abortion morality. Your position seems to basically assert "no fetus = fetus." This seems very arbitrary and a level of denial about reality.

Maybe you're using the word "arbitrary" differently than I am. Again, it sounds like you're just establishing moral relativism and saying that everyone's sense of morality is arbitrary.

I'm saying that given a moral position, there are conclusions that are reasonable and conclusions that are less reasonable. The less reasonable conclusions are arbitrary.

Fair enough.

It depends on when it happens and how. My justification is grounded in the same types of moral claims that make it wrong to cause harm to children.

At what point does is it no longer her body tissue? For example, if her hand gets cut off, is it no longer her hand because it's not attached to the rest of her? Or less dramatically, are hairs that have disconnected from her head not her hair?

If you accept that those things are still her body tissue, then in what sense does cutting the umbilical cord make it not her body tissue? You can make the argument that after a certain amount of time, the body tissue is replaced by enough cells through the natural biological cycle of making new cells and replacing old ones so that it becomes an independent creature. But at that very moment, that child is still 100% the mother's body tissue.

The rest of what you wrote is pretty meaningless political jibber-jabber.

Rejecting moral absolutism isn't particularly problematic, nor is moral nihilism for that matter. Nor even something like solipsism. Those philosophical views don't really affect day to day life. I can get more into how I think about morality if it is needed, but for the purpose of this conversation thread it is just to say that I probably think less of morality, particularly those more in the deontological persuasion, so if a statement makes it sound like i'm throwing out much of morality, that is probably close to what I think!

Sure. If I recall there is polling data on this. There are some people who think any form of abortion if bad, and accept late term abortion bans as a political compromise that is better than nothing. There are some people who think abortion is fine in almost all circumstances (usually people start drawing exception at or before formaldehyde injections of crowning babies). And there is a meaningful third group who believes first trimester abortions are acceptable but late term ones are not. For the first two, this legal line has nothing to do with their morality.




The point here is that there doesn't seem (to me) to be any good arguments for pick this line over that line. One way that people argue for a specific line is to argue there is some property held like viability or cognitive function or whatever. I see this as just pushing down a level. As in there aren't good arguments for which particular metric you prioritize. This has nothing to do with moral relativism.



Correct. If you know one thing about me, it should be that I'm not the standard liberal In particular, I don't think "rights" are anything more than codifications of social norms. They aren't fundamental properties of the universe or whatever. So it isn't just body rights I'm rejecting. Besides, even among the rights we codify they often come in conflict with each other so just asserting a right to a women's body doesn't automatically win the argument if, say, we had accepted that fetuses also have rights not to be harmed. The classic liberal argument for abortion isn't even an argument, it is just an assertion. When I support abortion being legal I do it because of utilitarian type arguments opposed to the more deontological liberal classic.




I don't follow your second sentence. As for the first, um yes I do think there are meaningful qualitative differences between fetuses who have not been born and children who have that are relevant to the discussion.

I'm happy with this. In this case, I don't think one can reasonably conclude that one of the lines is morally correct and the others are not. Most attempts to argue this way are just bad. Doesn't have anything to do with whether the lines are or are not clearly defined which is what you were talking about earlier.




Okay. When and how, then? Your justification also needs a lot of an elaboration for this to be a meaningful explanation of your views.

Hi Pokerlogist:

But isn't this just the point? When Jefferson started with "all men are created equal," he was really only talking about a small group by our modern day standards, and as time went on, other groups got added in so that today, "We the People" does include a large population. But since Jefferson did divide the population up into groups, are there still any groups that are still not part of the "We the People" equation? and from a religious point of view, is this something that religion should push to change the Rowe v Wade ruling? But does it also run the risk of only partly winning and the unborn baby thus only becomes a person after a certain amount of time?

Best wishes,
Mason

They impact one's decision-making when it comes to moral matters.

Well, your position makes it sound like you're approaching it as if this is an amoral discussion. But then you keep pulling back to moral concepts like harm. So it's not at all clear to me that you're taking a particularly consistent viewpoint. So perhaps you should expand on this a bit.

This seems to be a mis-statement. Both of the first two populations are large enough so that if they were to have a different moral perspective, they could potentially shift the legal landscape. Their sense of morality is driving their political positions, which is in turn driving public sentiment (or at least contributing to it in a meaningful way).

Pretending like "pushing down a level" isn't just claiming a form of "moral relativism" seems to be an error on your part.

So, you're explicitly adopting a specific moral perspective and arguing from that. It's not as if there's a problem with this, but then you can't claim that you're basically rejecting moral argumentation. And then it becomes a fair description of your position that you're taking up a form of moral relativism.

The second sentence is just pointing out the obvious statement that "condom" = "Prevent fetus from forming" and "abortion" = "Prevent fetus from continuing development" and that these two are not the same types of processes, so saying that saying "abortion is about as meaningful as a condom" seems pretty dumb.

Your position draws as arbitrary line in the exact same ways that you're criticizing. Under your position, there's no particular logic against infanticide, so that a child that was born 10 seconds ago should not be morally distinct from the fetus in the womb 20 seconds ago. The argument based on harm doesn't really do anything for you here.

For some lines, yes. However, you're creating the same type of error that I was criticizing earlier. The fact that you can challenge the exact location of the line being drawn does not imply that there's a reason to think the line doesn't exist at all.

Yes, my position does require elaboration, but I'm not going to give it because of time. Instead, I'll ask you this: What is the justification that beating up a baby is wrong? What changes in your logic if the fetus is full term in the womb, but the mother is dilated and mere moments from giving birth?

If it is right for abortion to be legal it can only be so if the two main arguments in its favor COMBINE to carry the day. The fact that a fetus is (temporarily) not conscious and the fact that a fetus is (temporarily) attached to a woman's body and can't live otherwise. Few people would condone killing a being who will soon become conscious and few people would condone killing a conscious being who was temporarily attached to someone else.

Hi Mason,

So the myth of Jefferson could rival the Pope of Rome. I have explained previously how Jefferson wasn't exactly a Presbyterian but believed strongly in NT philosophy and Francis Hutcheson - i.e. all equal under law. Jefferson also believed slavery to be contrary to the laws of nature, which he believed granted everyone the right to personal liberty.

The situation on the ground required further pragmatism - while Jefferson at times lived with and had intimate relations with non-whites, he didn't physically attempt to remove the barriers to their integration. Jefferson believed that anger and fear between white and slave meant they couldn't live together in a stable society - something that looks almost prophetic today as the white concentration in certain geographic areas in America gets stronger than ever, as the overall demographic picture of the country tends towards non-white.

Any groups not counted in, "We the People"? Clearly Muslims. Can you imagine the furore if Muslims in the US burned down Christian churches or objected to a church in NY, near Ground Zero, or anywhere else?

Rowe vs Wade*:

1. Do abortion laws (outside medical reasons) violate the Constitution?

YES - State criminal abortion laws that except from criminality only life-saving procedures on the mother’s behalf, and that do not take into consideration the stage of pregnancy and other interests, are unconstitutional for violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

2. Does the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution protect the right to privacy, including the right to obtain an abortion?

YES - The Due Process Clause protects the right to privacy, including a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, against state action.

3. Are there any circumstances where a state may enact laws prohibiting abortion?

YES - Though a state cannot completely deny a woman the right to terminate her pregnancy, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life at various stages of pregnancy.

* Andrew Blackmun, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Somewhat of a contradictory ruling - states may deny abortions but it's generally unconstitutional to do so - meaning citizens may abort inside or outside the US without consequence, except in states in which it is a criminal offense to terminate fetuses at various stages of development.

I'm sure you won't find a single religious group with a unanimous opinion, however, in my congregation (Evangelical) the rules are as following:

1) Abortion is generally frowned upon regardless of circumstance, but is not "outlawed" like blatant racism or infidelity with other church members (things which may, but not always, see you excommunicated)
2) Abortions after 4 weeks for non-medical reasons are seriously frowned upon
3) Abortions after 27 weeks are seen as manslaughter/murder

The above will eventually become the framework in most western countries - the brain starts to develop at 3-4 weeks, before this a sentient being does not exist. After 27 weeks, there is a 90% chance a normal fetus will survive outside the womb, therefore termination at this stage may be viewed as manslaughter/murder.

Might I add that it's strange to entitle the thread, "Jefferson and Abortion", when Jefferson is known to have avoided moral judgement on abortion and his thoughts on abortion within the Native American community are well documented. For those who would like the quote:

"They [Native Americans] raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after."

The perception is that this statement is a dispassionate, scientific assessment, although it's entirely possible we merely lost the uncensored version or that Jefferson never wrote it down.

Babies don't really display signs of consciousness until at least a few months after birth. So saying something about "soon become conscious" when that's a separation of months is really quite weak.

For one point of view and discussion: Link below to Scientific American article on infant consciousness

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ousness-arise/

From above link:

But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin? Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester. By this time, preterm infants can survive outside the womb under proper medical care.......................

......What is fascinating is the discovery that the fetus is actively sedated by the low oxygen pressure (equivalent to that at the top of Mount Everest), the warm and cushioned uterine environment and a range of neuroinhibitory and sleep-inducing substances produced by the placenta and the fetus itself: adenosine; two steroidal anesthetics, allopregnanolone and pregnanolone; one potent hormone, prostaglandin D2; and others. The role of the placenta in maintaining sedation is revealed when the umbilical cord is closed off while keeping the fetus adequately supplied with oxygen. The lamb embryo now moves and breathes continuously. From all this evidence, neonatologists conclude that the fetus is asleep while its brain matures.

**************************************

If I can only survive with a blood donation, a skin graft, a kidney transplant, and a living donor liver donation, and I am a "person," and you, Mason, are a compatible donor, do you interpret the constitution to mean that you are compelled to give me your blood, skin, kidney, and a chunk of liver?

If the answer is no, I think we can apply the same reasoning to the woman/fetus paradigm and agree that even if the fetus is a person, it does not give it the right to take up residency in the woman, to use her blood, other resources, risk her life, etc.

I remember reading that article. But if I remember right, that one was about the development of the neurological networks that are required for consciousness, not that consciousness actually develops. (Also, in the second paragraph, the "fetus" at the top of the paragraph is a lamb fetus, not a human fetus.)

Here's a more recent article:

http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/04/w...come-conscious

Study Reveals Babies are Stupid--- (Please ignore if you are devoid of humor.)

http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonio...upidbabies.htm

Just a tension reliever for those that may need it.

There are so many issues brought up here. First I'm not sure I understand your premise that Jefferson divided people into person and non-person groups. For example, from historical accounts that I have read he was an abolitionist who worked to end slavery in the US. So I think he thought Blacks should be free men with full person rights. There were practical and financial reasons why did didn't free his own slaves. It has been discussed before in 2+2. Second even if you make the fetus a person, it doesn't necessarily mean it can't legally be killed. The state legally executes people, the police legally kill unarmed citizens, and ordinary citizens kill others when they can claim self-defense. If artificially created state can morally and legally kill an adult citizen, then a woman can surely have that power over something growing inside her own body. So making a the fetus a person doesn't necessarily legally protect it from death by abortion. Also religious groups are not 100% anti-abortion. For example from what I understand abortion in Israel, a highly religious country, is usually legal. Also AFAIK there is no specific admonition in the Bible against abortion even though abortion was commonly practiced in Biblical times. In fact most US Jews and US Catholics are pro-choice. So, except for zealots, there is not a clear imperative from religion on making abortion illegal. So if you you talk to one religious group you get one idea and talk to another and you get the opposite. One could make a case that if anybody is not being considered a full "person" in the US it is the pregnant woman. She is having her natural individual rights over her own body taken away from her.
Sorry if I still missed your point.

+ 1 Zeno and Aaron

If one parallels fetal consciousness with a developing fruit-bearing plant:

*germination represents conception
*all plant structures except the fruit represent the human body
*the fruit-set or initial showing of fruit represents first consciousness
*the ripened fruit represents an adult brain

At which points in the chain can we kill the fruit?

IMO the configuration of the brain contains all the prerequisites for high-level consciousness from birth (working memory) or even before, just as the root, stem and leaf contain all the prerequisites for bearing fruit. If we nurture the young plant or a 27 week-old fetus with the best of modern technology, more than 90% of the time we will get fruit.

So we can kill the fruit in the moments leading up to fruit-set, by influencing conditions within plant structure we know make fruit-set imminent

Can I just take your approach and say it would take too much time? Perhaps the simplest thing to say here is something like that I am a practising utilitarian. So for most practical purposes you can just assume that, assume that I reject deontological approaches, and leave it at that. If you want to dig deeper, I usually tend towards an expressive non-cognitivist view on meta ethics where consequentialist approaches merely serve to inform the feelings I'm expressing. But I don't think one needs to dig further to address this topic.

Keeping the above in mind, no not really. It isn't like moral nihilists can't make statements that aren't superficially normative, that don't borrow the typical english language for normative statements like "you should do X". They just conceive of them a bit differently. I think the set of statements I would utter would be more or less the same regardless of these sort of larger meta ethical issues of the truth value of moral statements and the like.



The point here was that for those choosing the conception line or the birth line, the late term abortion line is far from where they think it should be and only accepted for pragmatic political purposes. Where the legal line is is far removed from where their moral line is, if you will. These people don't think this legal line is defensible on its merits, but only as a political compromise since they can't get what they really want.




Um....I don't know what to say, this isn't remotely like moral relativism. Well firstly, moral relativism is at least three different things, so you might need to be more precise here. But the statement "There is no good arguments to distinguish line A and line B" certainly isn't normative or descriptive moral relativism and while it would be compatible with a meta ethical moral relativism, it is also compatible with a wide range of other theories, including moral absolutists who at times make absolute moral statements but on this particular case can't distinguish between A and B. When I "pushed it down a level" it is just that we argue for A because it has property A' and argue for B because it has property B', so then I say "there is no good arguments to distinguish between A' and B'" which is a statement structurally idential but with primes and is, again, not moral relativism.







I see what you are saying now. Well consider this from a consequentialist approach. Person A has sex and uses a condom for birth control and Person B has sex and uses abortion as birth control. What are the differences in the consequences. Well neither ends in born baby (ignoring condom breaking etc). The latter is a more painful, medically risky and costly experience and can sometimes cause emotional distress. And....I think i've covered all of them? On these factors the difficulties in the second sentence are good reasons to advocate using condoms for practical purposes, but the fact that there isn't a baby either way means the consequences of both are more or less the same and the consequentialist in some sense can't tell the difference between them for the purpose of moral statements. Unless, of course, one feels that killing a fetus is intrinsically wrong in some way, that one has violated this deontological claim here.

This is only partially true. I do agree that as you shrink the timeline down to vanishingly small amounts of time, the difference between the consequences likewise diminish. Here, the "cost" of the pregnancy is now vanishingly small. It is one more push after 9 months of gestation and hours of labour...a push that still has to occur if you somehow kill the baby at 20 second before delivery. But at the same time, the consequences for born and not born babies is different. In particular, a born baby can be dealt with by society with no cost to the mother. A fetus requires the mother to go through pregnancy and the various risks and costs associated to that. For small times, as I say, the "going through pregnancy" consequence is very small, but for longer times, say start of third trimester or whenever late term abortion laws are at, there are still meaningfully different consequences. And of course there are many consequences to be discussed like sex selective late abortions in China or whatever else. Plenty of room to debate the topic, but the basic framing is fine I think, even if it seems odd to a deontologist.



Sure. I just find most of the arguments for most of the lines proposed to be very bad.



Can you at least just give the when and how? If we are going to talk about abortion, and lines, and late term abortion laws, it is good to know whether you are a "not after conception" guy or what.

Meh. That's good enough.

What is the content of those statements if the language is merely being borrowed? In what sense would the moral nihilist be able to say that one *should* do something? My understanding of moral nihilism is that it's a rejection that one state is morally preferred over another one. In this sense, there is not really a clear understanding of what *should* actually represents. If you mean it to express a preference (that you *prefer* X over Y) then it seems that the borrowed language is more of a mutilation of language given that the language of preference is already accessible as common language.

It's one thing to say that arguments A and B are indistinguishable or (perhaps more precisely) that you cannot distinguish the MERITS of one argument over the other. This is an understandable position.

However, the act of "pushing it down" is essentially denying one's ability to claim meaning of central concepts. This acts much like moral relativism because you're denying any attempt to claim anything like a universal morally relevant property.

Statements that you give that try to measure the "value" (at some level) of a fetus by the perceived value of the mother first, followed by immediate family at a lower level, and the broader community at a lower level seems to me to be precisely a statement of moral relativism.

This type of consequentialist argument falls hard on its face because in this framework, there's no consequential difference between an abortion and throwing the baby in the dumpster immediately after giving birth in the bathroom. What's the distinction between these situations to the consequentialist?

I disagree. I do not see how your consequential approach is really that clear.

For example, the difference in risk between a late-term abortion and pregnancy is not clearly favorable to late-term abortions. For example, I would expect a C-section to be much safer than a late-term abortion. (I don't know what types of search terms could be found to find a meaningful comparison between the risks of the two given that late-term abortions are illegal in many places.)

I think viability is a good starting point. At that point, there seems to be a sufficient number of reasons to allow life that is capable of being independent to not be stopped based on the mental state of the mother.

On the front end, failure of a fertilized egg to implant seems inconsequential and there is no moral culpability in doing things that take that action. It seems to fit well within a collection of several natural body processes which prevent life from forming.

In between the two, things get much more arbitrary. Generally, I believe that natural body processes reign over active interference. Actively taking steps to destroy life that is progressing seems to point towards moral culpability.

Sure, this is fair. As I understand it, the moral nihilist rejects that normative claims of the form "X is moral" are true or false in the way that descriptive claims can be true or false. But most nihilists are then faced with the fact that they don't think murder is, in general, a good thing. So how to resolve that tension, that you want to make normative claims but ultimately don't think they can true? For the expressivists, they say that normative claims they choose to utter are nothing more than, as you say, expressions of preference (motivated by however they may choose to motivate them). It is true they could just always say "I prefer we don't commit murder" opposed to "we should not commit murder". Practically this would pose difficulties if we banned the word "should" from our language requiring many conversations delving into expressivist non cognitivism And it doesn't really matter. The view is an interpretation of the meaning of "should" that, admittedly, differs from standard meanings, but allows one to express stuff in standard ethical language and the meta ethical considerations usually don't need to come up.

For instance, here my ethical views on abortion are what they are regardless of what my meta ethical views are. I could use the same sort consequentialist justifications - good or bad though you may find them - and believe that those justifications were yielded moral truths of the universe, but the set of normative statements would in principle be the same.

There is actually a separate "resolution" of this tension that just sort of chooses not to resolve it. It says that well we are going to keep trying to make moral statements, even though we think they must by definition be erroneous, so sue us.




I'm not sure I quite understand what you are saying with the bolded, so let me expand and see if you agree. People argue for positions by reducing to more basic positions, positions that we share for the argument to be accepted. When I say "pushed down a level" I mean we are now comparing different "basic positions" instead of comparing the original positions. Sometimes there are long hierarchies of positions depending on previous positions. Initially we were comparing the positions A and B and I thought they were indistinguishable on relevant metrics. So someone then pushes it down and argues that A follows from the position A' and B follows from the position B'. Sometimes this argument is successful and I would agree that A' and B' are meaningfully different for the relevant metrics and thus I should likewise conclude A and B are. Sometimes this argument is not successful and I likewise find that A' and B' are not meaningfully different for the relevant metrics. But this isn't a rejection of anyones ability to claim meaning of central concepts or anything like this.

This isn't true. It is absolutely compatible with moral relativist. But it is also compatible with any number of other views. The basis for the "family value" argument here is that there is an immediate harm we can identify when a mother is beaten and loses her fetus. She has very real feelings of loss and grief. We can point at those. We can all those harmful. The idea that different people can experience different emotional reactions to stimulus and thus have different levels of harm done isn't moral relativism. I can be absolutely steadfast in the view that "emotional harm" is the single determiner of ethical considerations, for instance. Or to put it more succinctly, just because a moral theory holds that what is moral is relative to various properties (in this case the emotional harm) does not mean the theory is moral relativism. Meta ethical moral relativism (which I am assuming is what you are getting at?) at least is the view that if two people disagree on what is moral, neither is objectively right. I can claim absolute certainty in my toy moral theory here and reject whatever moral views you have.



One major difference between abortion and immediate killing after birth is that in our societies babies can be raised without any involvement or further harm placed on the mother, a fact not true for abortion.

Don't get me wrong, the my approach DOES fall hard on its face, just not quite at the place you identified. For instance, I have no good way of valuing human life full stop, or excluding fetuses from that valuation. Oh I can say things like "if you permit murder, these various consequences happen in society, and they seem bad" or what have you. I can say things like "people are going to get lots of unsafe abortions if you don't make it legal". But these have nothing to do with moral claims about the value of fetuses or people.

And I can claim that other people have a lot of really bad arguments for both sides on abortion, but i'll readily admit I more or less don't even have an argument. Notice where I stopped in the first paragraph here, I just said "hey there is this difference". They are qualitatively different. But I don't really have any good way of measuring the value of a fetus, of a baby, of comparing the harm mentioned by pregnancies to these unspecified values, and so forth.



This seems very unlikely to be true. It seems to me that if a C-section was much safer than a late-term abortion, they would use a method analogous to a C-section (ie surgery through abdomen opposed to the vaginal methods that late-term abortions typically are). I guess I can't immediately disprove this claim without likewise trying to guess at good search terms. If it was true, I would likely counsel a pregnant women to go through with the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. Of course, risk of physical harm is not the only burden placed on a pregnant women, a wide range of social, economic, emotional, and the like are placed with quite a range of variability. As I mentioned earlier, as the time difference gets smaller (ie later and later term abortions) the consequences shrink to roughly zero at the 20 second before time you mentioned. So it is a sliding scale.




Does your final statement not imply you should be opposed at, say, a week (to get over the implementation issue)? Life is certainly progressing. The second sentence is a bit naturalistic...in a world where we can control various "natural" body processes, is there any meaningful reason to care what it naturally does? In some sense is not a condom "active interference" on a "natural body process (sex)"?

So my sister in law to be works at a very high level nicu at a hospital that basically takes all the hardest neonatal cases the rest of the province's hospitals can't manage. They consistently deal with extreme edge of medical viability cases. So these are pregnancies where it is very morally grey whether or not sustaining life is an appropriate course of action. As in, babies who are likely going to either die very young or have terrible quality of life because they are born so premature and/or with such extreme defects. It is a challenging job, because often the medical team is likely to believe that the babies should be killed (or at least life sustaining medical support removed for those that see this as different), but our medical system is of predicated around parental choice so if the parents chose to continue it will be continued.