I don't know what the contradiction is that you are referring too. Surely you would agree that a woman's uterus is a place in this world and not some supernatural landscape.

Prolifers are not supporting helpless fetuses(is it feti?). They are merely insisting that it be illegal for a mother to purposely kill her unborn offspring.

I think my Nike/ethopian post explains what it means to value individual humanity different from individual happiness.

So you force people who have no means of supporting them to have children, but you and everyone else can go about their business ignoring the troubles and hardships you are responsible in the first place.

So you are saying humanity encompasses happiness....that they aren't really distinct?

Whenever someone says "I've already answered that" I'm suspicious. It obviously didnt make sense to me, so why not spell it out? Also, I didnt ask you to contrast between the two differing types of valuation. I'm asking purely about 'valuing humanity' since you think it's independent from happiness (or presumably any other quality) whereas I think it's an empty concept. Suppose I value person X's happiness equal to person Y. Same with every other quality except for their humanity. I don't value person X's humanity at all whereas person Y is the most valuable human I can imagine. How can you tell? How can I tell? What's the difference in my treatment of the two?

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No. I'm trying to ask you to spell out your position and you keep asking me questions which appear to presuppose some framework which I still don't understand rather than spelling out what you mean (or alternatively you invent various hypotheticals which aren't related to the questions I ask).

I think 'value' is something subjective - we ascribe it to whatever we want. Those things we value higher than others are the things we will treat preferentially (act to further their interests, devote resources to, consider in our decision-making, etcetera). If we discriminate against one thing we are valuing it lower. You can invent some complicated metric involving many of a person's qualities: <happiness, economic worth, what football team they support, how they are related to you,...> at the end of the day you'll either treat them more favourably or less favourably than other people. Your treatment of them is not able to be disentangled (or if it is - the slaver is as morally safe as the nike-buyer).

Again though, I'm just answering your questions without knowing what you're talking about. When I ask you to clarify you tell me you already have or you invent some new story.

Try explaining (or clarifying if I've got it wrong) this, as it's the heart of my objection to your stated claim:

1. A pro-lifer is valuing the humanity of the mother desiring an abortion over the humanity of the fetus.

2. A slaver is valuing the humanity of those he doesnt enslave over the humanity of those he does.

3. A person buying Nike's for a rich American isnt valuing the humanity of the rich kid over the humanity of the starving Africans he is choosing not to feed.


You alluded to doing something vs refraining from acting, but that doesnt seem related to valuation at all (or at least you havent explained why it is). Also, this raises the problem of those living off slave labour but not actually wielding the whips.

No they don't

It's fetuses.

Yes, they do. Show me a dictionary definition and I'll agree with you though.

Explain to me how they do? And definition of what?

First, it is nitpicking on my part, I have this tendency when it comes to language.

Still, as phrased, the first bolded part does mean by default the birth, not the conception, as the second bolded part says. But if you show a credible definition that states that "to bring into this/the world" means "to get pregnant/impregnate" and not " to give birth to", please do.

Bear in mind that I'm trying to wrap my head around your way of thinking about this stuff and I'm not really getting it. Consequently, my analogies are likely to misfire. Nonetheless, I can imagine myself deciding I need to get rid of one of my two cars:

Car One - Environmentally friendly, looks good, reliable, two doors, prestigious (unfortunately somewhat important in my line of work)

Car Two - Sentimentally important, slightly newer than Car One, four doors, my wife's favorite brand

Suppose I'm offered the same price for either. I will er and um for a while then pick one (I suspect I'd get rid of Car Two) - my claim is that the one I choose to dispose of is of lower value, overall. You seem to be trying to 'target' that valuation to one or two specific qualities and it's true that each has some things I prefer over the other. Nonetheless, my claim is that the relative valuation is all going to boil down to which one I prefer when it ultimately comes down to it. Sure I can say I value Car One's environmental credentials over Car Two's higher pollution. I can say I value Car Two's four doors over Car One's two doors. Ultimately though - there is a relative, overall ranking which determines which one I prefer when push comes to shove.

I think the way we treat people is the same - me preferring my wife doesnt mean I value every aspect of her above other people. I recognise she has flaws. I recognise there are certain rights she has which are shared by all people. Nonetheless, in some unspecified 'weighted average' kind of way - she's more important to me than anyone else. Declaring some 'humanity' quality which is shared between all people isnt really a practical concept it seems to me to just be a way of feeling good about the fact that one actually values some people more than others - when push comes to shove and you are forced into making a choice (by saving a life or spending a dollar).

My ultimate position is that who is more important to you and who you treat preferentially and who you value more are all the same.

A better way to force the question of value is to put pro lifers on a desert island with only enough food and water to sustain the already born. If they had to would they abort a pregnancy or one of the already born.

I think in the bolded you meant pro-choicer? Of course I don't agree with Stu's characterization here, but since he is unwilling to discuss this topic with me, I would hope he would have the courtesy to finally address the substance of your posts, as you have done with his many scattershot responses to you. Though whether he does or not, your posts here are much appreciated.

Yeah pro-choicer, of course. Kind of you to appreciate posts which don't actually make sense!

I'm genuinely curious about Stu Pidasso's perspective here. I can't work out if he's adopting a view which makes him feel better about the arbitrary moral choices he makes. If he has some deeper understanding which I'm almost, but not quite, grasping. Or if he's just running a controversial line of argument to see how far he can push it as an intellectual exercise.

Going back to your car comparison bunny I think Stu may be valuing fetuses at the traditional rate versus the modern rate that has recently been arrived at since man managed to come up with a safer method to dispose of fetuses and legalized it. He probably doesn't agree with the "new and improved valuation substitution". I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong. But some people just view life as having sanctity and behaviors as something more worthy of being manipulated and controlled than life being erased on increasingly less substantitive pretexts or just because it has become an inconvenience or nuisance.

Scroll down for teen pregnancy abortion rates chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_pregnancy

Now that getting an abortion is easy some people are now selecting for cultural gender preferences. I heard the other day that India now has people going to countries where abortion is legal to have sex testing done to abort girl fetuses so they can avoid paying dowrys. China with their one child policy has been coming up short in producing girls for a while and nowadays in China its not uncommon for a girl to make materialistic matchmaking statements like she will only date or consider proposals from men who own cars and she can get away with it as their is a shortage of women when you compare their birth ratio to males.

Yeah, I think he's clearly adopting the view that a fetus is a person and therefore as deserving of consideration as any other. I haven't really got to the abortion issue yet, since I still don't really understand how he can claim that an aborter is following the same ideological path as a slaver but that a rich parent indulging their kid rather than feeding an African village isn't.

It seems to me that if he's consistent he should also rail against the prevailing 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality since Africans are just as much entitled to consideration as those we can see. In one response he declared that the difference is one of commission vs omission but this sidesteps the issue of valuation - I don't see how such a difference implies we are or aren't valuing people equally. In another he drew a distinction between 'valuing humanity' vs 'valuing happiness' but here I think his distinction is spurious.

It's probably unsurprising that I'm in favor of legalised abortion, but ultimately I haven't even got to arguing about that, since I'm still trying to understand how Stu Pidasso feels justified in lumping pro-choicers in with genocidists but not with indulgent, selfish westerners.

He'll have to explain himself but there could be a trust issue he feels intuitively that is hard to logically articulate.

He might have an intuition that suggests to him that people are moving too fast. I often think people move forward too quickly on scientific discoveries (especially with all the people being spurred on by profit motives) and then have trouble taking back their actions or adjusting to the consequences.

Without being too coy, I'll beg off on answering this as the notion of the "intrinsic value of human life" is too sophisticated for me to just grant. I'll stick with my original statement: leaving philosophical arguments aside, I don't see a strong Biblical case for condemning abortion. There's a general prohibition against murder (hardly uncommon), but not anything specific about where the boundaries of life are.

If you disagree with this claim, feel free to present such a case.

It's pretty simple...if God thought killing fetuses was some great injustice, he would have put it in the bible. I mean, he goes into excruciating detail about what kinds of things you can and can't eat, how you eateth the cow because it cloven the hoof and cheweth the cud, but not the pig, because it cheweth the cud but doesn't have a cloven hoof. Example:

I am mean, how ****ing absurd this?

He goes into the minutaie of eating/not eating crickets and hands it down as an absolute proclamation, but nowhere mentions anything about infanticide or eating abortifactant herbs? He makes proclamations about honoring your parents, but not about causing a miscarriage deliberately?

Case closed. There is no biblical case for abortion being wrong and a strong one (by its glaring omission) that it's nowhere near as important as murder in God's eyes. If important at all.

I wish all of us made as little sense as you.

At the risk of further warnings, I would say that in most threads, I would go with the third, but in this one, the tone and the unusual weakness of the argument raise some questions. I still think it's mostly three - call it 60%. The rest I'd put on one, but if it is your second reason, that would be very cool to read about.

The reason that end of the day one is treated more favorably than another is because there is a quality which encompasses all the other. The quality I am speaking of is the quality of being. Suppose there is door and behind it you are told there is a being. You do not know if the being is human, klingon, bovine, or any species. If the being is human then it is a human being. If it is Klingon then it is a Klingon being, etc.

Now the being behind the door can have other qualities other than membership in a specific species. It can be happy or sad, well or unwell, etc. If the being is happy then it is a happy being. If it is sad then it a sad being. Now qualities like being happy have nothing to do with the qualities like being human. The existence of a sad human being is just as sensical has the existence of a happy human being. This is true because the quality of being happy is completely distinct from the quality of being human.

Now Oprah hires a gourmet chef to come in and cook for her dog. I would say she is showing preference to the being that is her dog, over the being that is you. Now does the fact that Oprah favors the happiness and well being of her dog over you in anyway diminish your humanity? I don't think it does. I don't think buying my child a luxury item because I value his happiness dimishes the humanity of some random ethopian. However you seem to think it does and I don't understand how you can arrive at the conclusion without conflating the quality of being human with the quality of being happy.

When I say we should value all human beings the same. I am saying we should value their humanity the same. The abortion crowd simply claim the unborn is not a human being and that allows them to treat the unborn as useless tissue. I don't see this as being any different from the Nazis declaring Jews as subhuman or the Americans from declaring the Indians savages. All those actions are attacks on the humanity of beings of the species human.

Do human beings have greater intrinsic value than animals? If not, do you eat meat? If yes, why?

Also. You would be okay if it was illegal for the girl to get an abortion even if she wanted to?

But your actions dont show that you value their humanity the same. On lives like a king (running water, ample food/shelter/clothing, entertainment of various forms) while the other is going to die next week due to lack of nourishment. The fact that you prefer the entertainment of the one who already has more than any one human needs to be happy says alot more than your words itt do. You can't just say, "no, no, no..i do value the soon to die human just as much as my son" and not expect a lot of rolling eyes. You really can't see that?