ix192@sdccs6.UUCP (03/29/84)
[] This is mostly direct responces to Laura Creighton's reply to one of my articles, so the "you" here mainly means Laura. I'm feeling slighly flamely today, so please bear with my semi-worn patience. From: ...utzoo!laura (Laura Creighton) > This business about the "take the baby or take the 14 year old" is > precisely what I find frightening about abortion. The idea is that > the 14 year old is more valuable than the baby precisely because it > has lived longer. What I find so frightening about abortion is that someone will actually choose a fetus's life over mine. > (Generally though, grandmothers are less valuable > than the 14 year olds because they have lived longer, though, so > the issue isn't as cut and dried.) The difficulty is that it presumes > that it is possible to measure the value of a human being, and really > compare one against the other. If you examine the boundary conditions > (say a 14 year old and a 13 year old for instance) you will see that > most people do not think that age is sufficient criteria of value. Goodie! I sincerely doubt a 14-year-old mother will have a 13-year-old fetus. Do you have *any* idea what the phrase "abstract thinking" means? Do you know what thinking means? Please stop acting like a moron! If I fight back at your present intellectual level I'm worried I'd insult the rest of the readers of this net. I'm not here to debate the value of a human being in regards to its age, I was just using it as an example. If you really want to debate it, please send me personal mail so we won't bore to deat most of the people here. Back to my baby&14'er example, please ignore it's evil connotations, and see what it's trying to do -- illustrate a point. If you decide to stumble at the beginning of a hallway, you'll never see what light lies at it's end!! > I do not think that an objective standard can be found. For instance, > I might decide that if the abortion was being considered for the > purpose of birth control then the pregnant adult has just demonstated > that she is horribly irresponsible. "Horribly irresponsible." It seems like I've heard that before. Can you be a little more creative Laura? That one is wearing a little thin, and shows you're doing nothing with our articles except essentially typing 'n'. If you'd read them, perhaps you'd learn a little something. And use more realist phrases. Just because someone gets pregnant, she doesn't have to be "horribly irresponsible". You can even get pregnant using the diaphram, condom, pill and spermicide all at once!!! All the presently available birth-control methods are not perfect. None. I don't know how many times I've already said that!! Go back and actually read one of my articles, Laura. You'll notice it's be said before. How many time do I have to repeat it? No one is going to use abortion as their sole method of birth control! Abortion, like birth-control, is not perfect and can result in internal damage, sterilty, even death. Not even those filthy rich you mentioned would use this as their form of birth control, because it puts their lives in danger. And no one is as important to the rich as themselves. > The fetus, at any rate, has not > demonstated such irresponsibility. Given that I value responsibility > more than age, the logical thing seems to be to execute the failed > mother and keep the fetus... I flatly refuse to comment on this because I don't agree with your opinions of "irresponsibility." If you try me again without more justified opinions I will respond with the same lack of intellectual ability as you show here. > Hmm. there is clearly something wrong here. Any position which leaves > you thinking that it is logical to execute people wholesale is flawed. > Let us see where the flaw is. Hmm. The pregnant woman, though irresponsible, > has the potential to not behave in such a bad manner. And, whatever her > irresponsibility, it is not justified to kill her for it. Her activities don't even justify her to be called irresponsibly! Even if she and her husband decided to fuck for three months straight without using any birth control -- people fooling around tend to know they can get pregnant!! They knew they were taking a risk, they accepted it. That's not being irresponsible. It's not their responsiblity not to have children. It's their choice. > Now go back to the fetus. If it is not a human being, then there is no > problem with abortion. If it is a human being, then for exactly the same > reasons you should not kill it. I disagree. If a human being threatens the life of another human being, and no other soluntion remains at hand, occasionally it is enough justification to kill that threatening human. True, a fetus will not kill either of its parents. But it threatens their present lives, and darkens their futures. Something threating to drastically ruin my life is the same as threatening to take it directly. > (Existence does not justify killing, and > despite all the talk of unwanted children turning into criminals, there > have always existed unwanted children who have turned out rather well.) Whee! I love this way we can bring up the most unrelated topics and make them fit. Who said anything about crime? Let me teach you something Laura: thinking in absolute. Abstract thinking. Isolating the matter being discussed, and avoiding tainting it with your own little details. We are discussion abortion, matter 'x'. And just 'x'. We don't care what x+y equals. Or what 'x' means to the rest of the abstract world. 'X' in itself is all that is needed to exist in this discussion. It's effects on crime, on adoptions, on the price of Cuban Zukinnis, they are merely technical details, something that you shouldn't have to use to win an arguement. They won't work in absolute thinking, because they are certain, specific cases, not in relation to a "the abortion". It helps a lot to learn to think in this respect -- at the worst it keeps you from boring people with petty details, and at best, if you can win an arguement for abortion in general, it will work for an abortion in particular. > But, if you start saying presenting platforms where it is presumed necessary > to sacrifice a baby for the sake of a 14 year old, a lot of questions > emerge out from the wordwork. If you do not protect life because it is > intrinsically valuable then how is one to make a decision between > the baby and the 14 year old? If I decided that I had done a rather bad > job of being a parent with the 14 year old (my first child) should I > dispose of him on the grounds that I believe that I will do a better > job with the baby? Should I keep the 14 year old because I know him better and > have invested more in his upbringing? What if I feel that I love the baby > more? Details, Laura, details. Try to keep in abstract thinking. The example I used didn't give any more details than the ages. No details more were necessary. Don't add your own - they probably won't fit in the with the flow of the example so you'll be changing the conclusion to suit your opinions. > This is the classic utilitarian problem. For all the talk of ``objectively > measuring the greatest good for the greatest number'' I am left wondering > how on earth they do it! "They" use abstract thinking, so that one example will work for most examples. > It seems a much more difficult problem of > measuring than (say) measuring the results of various strategies in > chess. And most people play lousy chess. Great chess players seem to > work on intuition, and aren't involved in brute-force computational > searches. Suppose utilitarians work the same way. If this is the case > then this is tantemount to saying that the utilitarians are acting on > *whim* or *desires* which are hardly rational. Your desires will have > a great effect on the outcome. Perhaps you have a problem of going too far and too often out on tangents. Chess is a game where there are more than one yes/no decisions. You can't think of chess in abstract, because there are too many possibilities to form a basic arguement structure around. In abortion, there is only one: Yes or no; the parents want it, the fetus doesn't. > If this is the case, then it boils down to ``the woman wants an abortion > so let her have one''. All of this talk about *why* a person might > want an abortion may be specious, since the very desire to have one > will be what is most reflected in the decision, given this premise > on how utilitarians make decisions. You sound like you could make a lot of money writing small print. > but ``it is right because I want it'' only is reasonable in the majority > of cases, and killing another human being is one of the exceptions. So > we are back to ``is the fetus a human being''? The fetus is a human being, but so are it's parents. Don't forget that. > This can get stretched to ``is a baby a human being'' if you like. > Most people think that babies are human beings. If they are wrong, it > must be because there is an objective definition of human being which > is not satisfied by a baby. I sure don't know what it is. If it comes from a human, it's human. We have human babies, human fetuses, human sweat. I consider myself somewhat human. I consider the people I meet the same (so far anyway!!). I don't think we really need to worry about definitions until we start creating life-like androids. > Suppose, for the purpose of argument, we decide to define a human being > as a conscious entity with DNA structured in such-and-such a fashion, > and organised in such and such a way. A lot of people would be > pleased with this definition. (Some would want to say ``such-and-such > a level of consciousness'' as well, let us give them that) By this definition, > birth control pills are okay (since it is pretty well agreed that there > has to be a brain before there is consciousness) and killing babies isn't. Sounds good so far. > However, there are a whole collection of problems with the whole > thing. It may be obvious that there is no brain in the first week > after conception, and obvious that there *is* one the last week before > birth, but where does one draw the line? Abortion is fine in > the first month and not-fine after the 6th month and nobody knows > about months 2-4? You have only pared teh question down a little. Not really. I saw we give the little sucker the human definiton from day one. And abort him anyway. I'd sacrifice one human to save two other, and the nitty-gritty details of age and potential suffering and change only make the matters easier. For me, anyway. For all of you, that will have to be a decision you come to yourself. > What do we do about the people who want to have an abortion who are in > months 2-4? This is when the bulk of people who want to have abortions > finally discover that they are pregnant, so this decision is the one that > will effect them. Give them their choice! The age of the fetus should not have any matter in the decision, except that it will be more dangerous for the mother as time goes by. And that, again, is her decision. Not our, not the governments. Hers. > What about fetuses with congenital problems. Often, their DNA is > structured in a way different from others. Does this mean that they > are not human by our definition? There are going to be a lot of > opposition to that premise if that is the case. No, I don't think it even matters. If we can abort perfectly fine fetuses with perfectly fine DNA, why should we even worry about one with deviations? > The end answer is that at some time a fetus becomes a human being. No. The end answer is that we should not have to worry about when it is one. That's petty and technical, and nothing will ever get done about making a decision that the entire world will accept. > You run into Zeno's paradox if you try to pin it down much further than > that. Paradoxes are tricky things. It is usually best to avoid them > whenever possible. Actually, if we keep on trying and trying and trying to pin it down, all we'll do is burn up time. And that's OK too, because birth-control is getting better every day. Eventually, hopefully, it will be perfected and fool-proof, and then the only abortions that will have to be dealt with will be those in rape cases or DNA imperfections. > But then you have all heard me say this bit before... Definitly! You seem so good at taking other people discussions as your own, Laura. You'd make a nice parrot. Parrot's don't think much. If we wanted to read past discussions, we could look them up for ourselves. It was nice of you to rehash everything, but it would be so much simpler if you could just post your conclusions and their justifications. Kenn the Kenf ...!sdcsvax!kenn ...!sdcsvax!sdccs6!ix192 ...!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!kenn P.S. Could you please get rid of that quote in your signature? It really is obnoxious.
laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (03/31/84)
Kenn, I know lots about abstract thinking. I am arguing from the classic Objectivist opinion. My bottom postulates are that ``humn life is good'' and ``a fetus may be a human being''. The conclusion that follows is that you do not kill a fetus unless you can demonstrate that it is not a human being. This is purely logical. Whatever basic premises you have include ``even if the fetus is human then one should be allowed to kill it''. Therefore you believe that something other than ``human life is good'' as a bottom premise. You believe that the woman's right to live for 9 months in the way that she chooses takes precedence over the fetus' right to life, even if the fetus is human. The question is, where do these rights to of the mother come from? The Objectivist answer is as follows: First -- the right to life Second -- Property rights (since it is necessary to posess the means to maintain one's life) all otehr rights are derived from Property rights. Therfore you can not kill me (deprive me of my life) or rob from me (take away my property), or a whole lot of other things which most people find morally wrong. You, however, cannot be arguing from this position because you do not think that the fetus (which I am going to call a human fetus since typing ``which may be a human being'' is getting boring and you have already said that the humanity of the fetus is not important) has a fundamental right to life. Therfore, rights to life must be decided on some other objective basis than being human (and I am waiting to see what that one is) or cannot be decided objectively at all. If they cannot be decided objectively then there is no point in logic, since they will all be subjective decision based on what one *wants* rather than what is objectively right. * * * Utilitarianism does not wash. Suppose there is no objective right to human life. Therefore a pregnant woman can abort a human fetus because she does not want to go through a pegnancy for 8-9 months. Okay, suppose Gary Samuelson and I decide that your existence really pisses us off. Indeed, we think that we are going to be miserable for the next 8 or 9 months just because we are aware that you exist. Do we have the right to go down and kill you? Note -- this is not the same thing as saying that we do not have the choice to kill you. I can always choose to kill you. Currently, however, if I kill you I will be commiting a crime. What shall you do to justify your existence? You cannot claim as I would that human existence is justification enough because that would be justification enough for the human fetus. Suppose you say ``but I matter to me.'' Okay. There are still 2 of us and one of you. Does that make it morally justifiable for us to kill you? Suppose you got 40 people who would be upset that you were killed to testify on your behalf. Would you then be safe unless I got 50 people to testify that we would get a lot of pleasure out of knowing htat you were dead and a lot of anguish out of knowing that you are alive? How are you going to measure the anguish that you will feel over being killed against the happiness I claim to experience through killing you? the whole idea of measuring them is absurd. You can not sum up happiness and misery this way. Utilitarianism is thus fundamentally flawed. You can not do what you are claiming to do because there is no way a) that you can see all the consequences of every action and b) that you can calculate the happiness/misery produced by these actions. Therefore I accuse you (and all utilitarians) of sloppy thinking. You can not do what you are claiming to do with the happiness-equation. This implies that whatever reason you have for making you decision is in no way constrained to be logical, because your methods are not logical. If you arrive at a logical conclusion it will be by chance, and not through any virtue of your method. It is likely that you will end up concluding whatever you wanted to conclude under such a condition. I believe that any ethical system which is not based on the premise of the innate value of human life will be a subjective ethics based on whim rather than objective truths, and that any subjective system is not logical. I would be interested in seeing any other logical system, but I have not found any yet despite looking. * * * * I talked about criminals because somebody (Scott Anderson?) claimed that most adopted children will have a rotten life which will lead to delinquancy. The facts I have bear this out. * * * * You parsed at least one sentence incorrectly. It was not that the 14 year old had a 13 year old fetus, but that if you were going to sacrifice the baby rather than the fetus on the basis of age then to be consistent you must sacrifice a 13 year old rather than a 14 year old. If this is not your conclusion then other things enter into your decision which you are not mentioning and they are relavant to whether you should decide to abort a fetus as well. * * * * Incidentally, it is generally considered that the tactic of insulting those who disagree with you (such as calling them a moron) is the illogical man's way to argue. There is an excellent article about this called ``the argument from inimidation'' in *The Virtue of Selfishness*. I am exceedingly angry with you, but you notice that I have not called you a moron. The worst I did was to hypotheticallly propose to kill you. As far as logic goes, I'd say that I am at least one up. -- Laura Creighton utzoo!laura "Capitalism is a lot of fun. If you aren't having fun, then you're not doing it right." -- toad terrific