Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
quote:Apparently! Well, if you understood it, maybe you could clarify for me.
Originally posted by rivka:
You really, really missed Darth's point.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
quote:Yeah, remind me after Shabbos and I'll try to work up an example with actual numbers.
Originally posted by Dan_Frank:
quote:Apparently! Well, if you understood it, maybe you could clarify for me.
Originally posted by rivka:
You really, really missed Darth's point.
quote:I'd be interested in listening if you'd like to argue how this might apply. We do have a legal history of applying different standards depending on the circumstances, and I can see calling it a justifiable homicide if the life of the mother is in danger, but I'm not sure how traditional legal nuance is going to cover causing an intentional death under these circumstances. Did you have something specific in mind?
Well if you start out, by default, with the stance that abortion is murder, then no amount of circumstance will change anything except perhaps degree. But again, we and most human societies recognize the possibility of context changing a given killing, whether to raise it (so to speak) to murder, or lower it to manslaughter or even a negligent death, or even ennoble it by deeming it an act of defense.
quote:As I've said before, I waffle on that point because, as you say, there's no way to know for sure. But I err on the side of caution. When you're talking about something as valuable as human life, I don't think it's moral to spin the roulette wheel and hope after you've done the deed that you didn't just actually kill something. I also find something bizarre and just plain wrong about the "quick, let's kill it before it comes alive!" thought process. I'm not sure I can put it into words, but it's just wrong to me.
The trouble is, you don't know it's murder-bear with me while I explain that remark. You don't know it's a human, so how can you then claim it's murder? It seems to me, and I hope you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that you're starting from not one but two positions that cannot be argued or even reasoned with. One, that the life at any point in the pregnancy is human, a human child in fact; two, that any killing of that child under any circumstances is murder, short of a clear threat to the mother's life.
quote:I'm sure you'd be able to come up with all manner of specific hypotheticals that create a grey area. I'm sure on a case by case basis some things would fall under the "health of the mother" rubric, but just because there are grey areas doesn't mean the whole endeavor is flaws. You don't, pardon the expression, throw the baby out with the bath water.
Is it still, for example, to be murder if the mother was raped, impregnated, and then her doctors inform her that carrying the pregnancy to term will likely result in lifelong serious health risks and problems for the mother? Suppose for example this mother is 14, and because of the usual tragedies attending rape, she doesn't get prenatal care. When the pregnancy become impossible to hide, it's clear she suffers from, I don't know, preeclampsia. Others can talk about that better than I, along with some of the other heavy hitters.
quote:Before I can argue whether or not it's any different, you're going to have to explain why it's the same. At first blush, it doesn't appear to be the same at all.
Suppose I'm a doctor fresh out of medical school. My child needs a type of rare blood or even an organ quickly, and it is unlikely or even impossible that one can be found before the child dies. But I'm a doctor. I could conceivably take the blood or even an organ, from a complete stranger to save my child's life.
Would the person thus deprived of blood or organ(s) not then be able to demand justice and punishment of this doctor? Why is this any different?
quote:I'm pretty sure I used all the appropriate qualifiers. I've only ever been talking about my opinion.
The hypothetical scenario game can go indefinitely, and the only reason I offer it now is because of the way you offered, as mentioned above, what I perceived as two positions that you state as fact but that are actually hugely questionable.
quote:I'm not Rakeesh (obviously), but I thought I'd give my take on these two points in particular if you don't mind. You may ignore my comment, of course, being as I wasn't the intended audience. A lot of my opinion is derived from the essay I posted in the other thread.
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Rakeesh -
quote:I'd be interested in listening if you'd like to argue how this might apply. We do have a legal history of applying different standards depending on the circumstances, and I can see calling it a justifiable homicide if the life of the mother is in danger, but I'm not sure how traditional legal nuance is going to cover causing an intentional death under these circumstances. Did you have something specific in mind?
Well if you start out, by default, with the stance that abortion is murder, then no amount of circumstance will change anything except perhaps degree. But again, we and most human societies recognize the possibility of context changing a given killing, whether to raise it (so to speak) to murder, or lower it to manslaughter or even a negligent death, or even ennoble it by deeming it an act of defense.
quote:As I've said before, I waffle on that point because, as you say, there's no way to know for sure. But I err on the side of caution. When you're talking about something as valuable as human life, I don't think it's moral to spin the roulette wheel and hope after you've done the deed that you didn't just actually kill something. I also find something bizarre and just plain wrong about the "quick, let's kill it before it comes alive!" thought process. I'm not sure I can put it into words, but it's just wrong to me.
The trouble is, you don't know it's murder-bear with me while I explain that remark. You don't know it's a human, so how can you then claim it's murder? It seems to me, and I hope you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that you're starting from not one but two positions that cannot be argued or even reasoned with. One, that the life at any point in the pregnancy is human, a human child in fact; two, that any killing of that child under any circumstances is murder, short of a clear threat to the mother's life.
quote:In short, let's imagine that a woman terminates her pregnancy in a way which results in the child living and the child is capable of living a fully-functional life given incubation or some other medical intervention. Saying that a woman has the right to the abortion does not entail that she has the right to kill the child. She cannot go to the child and smother it, should it live.
while I am arguing for the permissibility of abortion in some cases, I am not arguing for the right to secure the death of the unborn child. It is easy to confuse these two things in that up to a certain point in the life of the fetus it is not able to survive outside the mother's body; hence removing it from her body guarantees its death. But they are importantly different. I have argued that you are not morally required to spend nine months in bed, sustaining the life of that violinist, but to say this is by no means to say that if, when you unplug yourself, there is a miracle and he survives, you then have a right to turn round and slit his throat. You may detach yourself even if this costs him his life; you have no right to be guaranteed his death, by some other means, if unplugging yourself does not kill him. Source
quote:Lyrhawn, this seems to me to be the weak point in the view you're expressing--the rest of it I can agree with, in some moods.
I also find something bizarre and just plain wrong about the "quick, let's kill it before it comes alive!" thought process. I'm not sure I can put it into words, but it's just wrong to me.
quote:That's a perfectly respectable way to look at it.
Originally posted by Destineer:
quote:Lyrhawn, this seems to me to be the weak point in the view you're expressing--the rest of it I can agree with, in some moods.
I also find something bizarre and just plain wrong about the "quick, let's kill it before it comes alive!" thought process. I'm not sure I can put it into words, but it's just wrong to me.
Some analogies:
Think about a machine that creates a human infant out of thin air every hour. Obviously it's not wrong to turn the machine off.
Now think of a machine that instantly transforms a rock into a human infant every ten minutes. Clearly there's no moral difference between destroying the rock and turning the machine off. So it's OK to destroy the rock.
Now replace the rock in the new example with a small, non-sentient organism like a pile of slime mold or something. Again, it's clearly not wrong to destroy the slime mold before the machine turns it into a baby.
Now replace the slime mold with a zygote or early-term fetus...
quote:How are you defining human? Genetically, it's human from the point of conception. I think you mean, more specifically, at what point is it sentient? At what point is it aware?
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
I have to agree. 'Kill it before it's human!' *could* be morally foul, if it was a sliding scale so to speak. That is, say at a week it's 2% human, at a month it's 15% human, at four it's 45% human, or something like that, with the value to be placed on that life taken as a percentage of the value of the whole human infant-so suddenly 2% of 'priceless' is a rather serious consideration.
But that assumes that's how it works. Maybe it does, but then maybe it doesn't. What that leaves us with is a contest between two serious needs. On the one hand, there's the possibility of 2% of this priceless value (in this example, that's just the number I made up). On the other, though, there is 100% of a person who didn't invite and certainly didn't want this possibility of 2% of a priceless value to be a part of their lives.
If we value the possibility of the 2% as absolutely ascendent over the other, does that mean we devalue tue other?
quote:I'll have to admit I'm not sure how I feel about your 22 week point. It seems plausible that when we think of abortions in terms of terminating the pregnancy, the means by which a woman may permissibly terminate the pregnancy would be such that if the fetus has a reasonable chance of survival, then that must be the approach taken. But I don't know how I feel about if. It's a fair point.
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Vadon -
Trying to massage the issue to create a distinction between terminating a pregnancy and killing the fetus doesn't change the equation. If anything I'd say it makes the process incredibly more complicated for women in some ways, and morally questionable in others.
Let's play the theory out. So, you don't have a right to kill a fetus that is viable outside the womb, but you have a right to end the pregnancy.
You'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe federal law bans late term abortions after 24 weeks. Yet science has advanced to the point where a baby as early as 22 weeks has been kept alive outside the womb. Does it not then follow that every woman after a certain point would be forced to undergo a C-Section with an attempt to save the life of the baby instead of undergoing a more destructive procedure?
Separating the two just strikes me as a little odd. It's sort of like saying that shooting someone and them dying are unrelated. When abortion a pregnancy also causes the fetus to die, then separating the two is a pretty artificial and meaningless distinction. Creating the distinction for the purposes of what to do with a fetus successfully removed alive from a mother makes sense, but it makes no sense outside that very specific circumstance. I don't believe it alleviates the moral burden involved.
quote:I think it might apply-personally I'm really on the fence whether morally it should, but I think it needs to be part of the discussion-because we allow killing not only in cases where the subject's life is clearly, unmistakably in danger. Do we require, for example, all strong swimmers to head out into a riptide to save a stranger who is drowning? If they do so, and the drowner's frantic struggles threaten, but don't guarantee, that the would-be rescuer will drown as well, do we insist that they not attempt to kick off the drowner, so to speak?
I'd be interested in listening if you'd like to argue how this might apply. We do have a legal history of applying different standards depending on the circumstances, and I can see calling it a justifiable homicide if the life of the mother is in danger, but I'm not sure how traditional legal nuance is going to cover causing an intentional death under these circumstances. Did you have something specific in mind?
quote:Others have touched on the question of pre-emptive killing (pre-emptive as in literally before it's human), so I'll focus on the first part. I want to err on the side of caution, too. I even think we probably should, but what I try to keep in mind is that there are actually competing needs here. Shall we treat the possibility of the serious, priceless need (a human child)-that is, the possibility that a cluster of cells is human-exactly as though it weren't a possibility at all, but a reality?
As I've said before, I waffle on that point because, as you say, there's no way to know for sure. But I err on the side of caution. When you're talking about something as valuable as human life, I don't think it's moral to spin the roulette wheel and hope after you've done the deed that you didn't just actually kill something. I also find something bizarre and just plain wrong about the "quick, let's kill it before it comes alive!" thought process. I'm not sure I can put it into words, but it's just wrong to me.
quote:Well, I mean this particular discussion started specifically about exceptions, so I don't think it's unreasonable in this context to talk about them. And I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but if we're going to be talking about questions of the value of human life, I think we ought to remember that the presence of the possibility of a human baby doesn't instantly push all other considerations aside.
I'm sure you'd be able to come up with all manner of specific hypotheticals that create a grey area. I'm sure on a case by case basis some things would fall under the "health of the mother" rubric, but just because there are grey areas doesn't mean the whole endeavor is flaws. You don't, pardon the expression, throw the baby out with the bath water.
quote:Well, in the case of a pregnancy by rape we have a woman who did nothing except exist as a fertile human female who was raped to become pregnant. She had no intent or negligence or anything in the event that caused her to be pregnant. In my doctor example, we have a human being whose relationship to the doctor's child is the same as that of the woman's to her pregnancy: that is, none whatsoever. In the example I gave, the person has done nothing to owe any sort of obligation to that ill child. This would-be blood or organ donor cannot be said to have a moral obligation to care for that child. In the case of a blood donation, it's of course much less onerous than a pregnancy, by a huge degree. That person will regenerate their blood in short order, and not long after it happened will physically be no different than had it never happened to begin with.
Before I can argue whether or not it's any different, you're going to have to explain why it's the same. At first blush, it doesn't appear to be the same at all.
quote:This is where the line is for me as well. I certainly think that one has a strong moral obligation to stay hooked up to the violinist. I find the idea of forcing someone to remain hooked up to the violinist to be more reprehensible and dangerous especially since we are (beyond the analogy talking about women who have not {and are by some still not}) considered fully people rather than property.
Originally posted by scholarette:
Destineer, do you believe the government should force someone to stay hooked up to the violinist? For me, that is where the issue comes in- not what is right but at what level I believe the government should intervene.
quote:I'll go ahead and answer this, then: if we knew for a fact-and in this scenario if it was something that wouldn't be disproven later-that the fetus became aware, or rather became human at 140 days and not before, then yes. It would be morally acceptable to destroy it at 139 days. It wasn't human at 139 days. I mean, where is the line to be drawn if the reverence for life isn't just a reverence for life but also a reverence for potential life?
What if we knew for a fact that a fetus becomes aware at 20 weeks. Would it be morally acceptable to destroy it at 19 weeks 6 days?
quote:Because nobody believes a gamete is alive, or ever will be.
Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
If someone were to make the argument, that it is morally wrong to destroy a fetus prior to it becoming aware; how does this argument not continue in that direction to state that birth control, masturbation and condoms are also murder for destroying sperm?
quote:Precisely, which is why the attribute of "[becoming something] on its own" isn't a good way of dividing up the three entities. They aren't actually divided up by it.
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Neither will a baby. It would starve to death.
quote:I think you make a reasonable argument in here that I find troublesome, but it hinges entirely on the basis of what sort of threat a pregnancy imposes on a woman. What's the statistical likelihood that any given pregnancy will kill a woman? It comes down to, as you say, a reasonable fear of death. This is one of the few aspects of this where I think serious scientific data could sway my opinion, but what are the numbers that make such a fear reasonable? After all, just because YOU think it's reasonable to shoot someone doesn't mean a jury would, so clearly there's more to it than just how you feel. In that instance, there's a subjective nature to it.
I think it might apply-personally I'm really on the fence whether morally it should, but I think it needs to be part of the discussion-because we allow killing not only in cases where the subject's life is clearly, unmistakably in danger. Do we require, for example, all strong swimmers to head out into a riptide to save a stranger who is drowning? If they do so, and the drowner's frantic struggles threaten, but don't guarantee, that the would-be rescuer will drown as well, do we insist that they not attempt to kick off the drowner, so to speak?
It's an ugly scenario, I admit, but I think you'll have to agree that we don't say 'people may only use lethal force if they know their life is in danger' but rather 'people may use lethal force if they reasonably fear their life might be in danger, or even that they may suffer serious physical harm'. That's not universal, but it seems to be generally where we as a society try and set the bar. I'm not sure how pregnancy couldn't be considered a condition which someone might reasonably fear would endanger their life or cause them serious physical harm. I mean, it might and that's simply all there is to it. How the pregnant person views that risk has a lot to do with how it came to be, of course. Someone who has tried to get pregnant for years and has looked forward to having a child all that time would probably not view the pregnancy as a serious physical harm much less a threat to their lives, and we would call that outlook reasonable. Is it then to be considered unreasonable that someone who didn't do those things to view it differently?
quote:And I agree with that, as I have before.
I think we ought to remember that the presence of the possibility of a human baby doesn't instantly push all other considerations aside.
quote:I see what you're saying and I'm not sure. If pressed, and I'm not entirely sure how much I believe this, I think my argument would sort of be this: The child with the organ problem had a chance, but nature dealt him a bad hand and it didn't work out so well. If you're harvesting organs from innocent people you're probably killing that person, unless you want to use the violinist example or maybe something like a kidney where you can survive with out it. But those people have a chance to live, for whatever amount of time. The fetus who is killed before ever being born never gets that chance. Maybe it would have died at 100 years old surrounded by family, maybe there would have been a natural miscarriage. Maybe it would have died young of leukemia, but we'll never know, because it never got the chance to live.
I'm not sure if I've explained myself well here or not, but to me the comparison seems fairly apt. In the case of a rape pregnancy, the victim has bodily resources the fetus needs to survive, but she has done nothing to earn a responsibility to yield up those resources. In the case of the involuntary organ donation for the sick child, the victim possesses bodily resources that the child needs to survive, but has also done nothing to earn a responsibility for the health of that child.
quote:For me the line is drawn well before that. I would find it highly morally objectionable to destroy something literally hours away from becoming conscious. I will say that if push came to shove, I value present life over potential life. It's a troublesome choice, but if that's the ONLY criteria I was forced to make a decision on, it's how I would decide. But in cases where it's not a zero sum game (and really that's the crux of this isn't it, whether or not it IS in fact a zero sum game or not), I give potential life a great deal of value.
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:I'll go ahead and answer this, then: if we knew for a fact-and in this scenario if it was something that wouldn't be disproven later-that the fetus became aware, or rather became human at 140 days and not before, then yes. It would be morally acceptable to destroy it at 139 days. It wasn't human at 139 days. I mean, where is the line to be drawn if the reverence for life isn't just a reverence for life but also a reverence for potential life?
What if we knew for a fact that a fetus becomes aware at 20 weeks. Would it be morally acceptable to destroy it at 19 weeks 6 days?
I think you see where I'm going with this. There is also a potential for human life in sexual intercourse, and even-in this example-the same way. Prior to the sex-no (well, no additional) human life. After the sex, given the right conditions, an additional human life. Why is it acceptable to prevent the existence of a human being 270 days before it happens, but not 1 day before it happens?
quote:Not necessarily. There's a difference between natural and artificial cultivation. Nature obviously didn't intend for newborn babies to fend for themselves. Human infants have some of the longest development times of any known species on earth and require years of care before they become anything close to self-sufficient. So you can't call it interference in a natural process for a mother to care for her child. Neither can you call it interference in a natural process when a zygote, unhindered is allowed to become an embryo, fetus and eventually a baby, because that's nature's intended process. The body naturally cultivates the zygote and shepherds it to its natural end.
Wait a minute, isn't 'cultivation' specifically the interference in 'what would happen' to achieve a different outcome?
quote:Yes I suppose it is. But lots of things are just a matter of degrees, and those degrees often matter a great deal, as I believe it does here. This is why I wanted to answer your other points first, since I think they (hopefully) explain the moral framework I'm operating with. The whole conversation is really a matter of degrees.
I mean, if a person decides to stop cultivating a completely non-human (in your example) fetus at 139 days, isn't the difference between that and the example of the sperm and the egg only one of degree, not type?
quote:And to answer this most specifically...I won't deny that, but I don't think that's really as problematic as you seem to be implying. I feel this is right. Perhaps "right" and "true" have different meanings before because I can't prove, with scientific accuracy, that what I believe is true, but I feel that it is right. I've had it out on Hatrack on abortion once or twice before over the last eight years, and it's forced me to build up a sort of framework of explanations and fine tuning around how to explain why I believe what I do, but I'll admit it's still a work in progress. I think I could take that same problem "this is true, but why?" and apply it to a great many things that both of us believe, because there are simply too many questions in this world that don't have scientific answers. And we don't come born with the explanations for why we believe what we believe, we have to figure them out as we go along, as I've been doing with this topic for many years.
This isn't something I say lightly to you, Lyrhawn, because I've got quite a lot of respect for you, but it *really* feels as though you're approaching this from the 'this is what is true, now to figure out why' approach.
quote:There's another related point here, though. Why should feeding a child, or leaving a zygote in the uterus, count as "natural cultivation," but bringing a sperm into contact with an egg not count as such?
Not necessarily. There's a difference between natural and artificial cultivation. Nature obviously didn't intend for newborn babies to fend for themselves. Human infants have some of the longest development times of any known species on earth and require years of care before they become anything close to self-sufficient. So you can't call it interference in a natural process for a mother to care for her child. Neither can you call it interference in a natural process when a zygote, unhindered is allowed to become an embryo, fetus and eventually a baby, because that's nature's intended process. The body naturally cultivates the zygote and shepherds it to its natural end.
quote:Somewhere in my monster post I explained why I draw the line here. I do think there's a distinction.
Originally posted by Destineer:
quote:There's another related point here, though. Why should feeding a child, or leaving a zygote in the uterus, count as "natural cultivation," but bringing a sperm into contact with an egg not count as such?
Not necessarily. There's a difference between natural and artificial cultivation. Nature obviously didn't intend for newborn babies to fend for themselves. Human infants have some of the longest development times of any known species on earth and require years of care before they become anything close to self-sufficient. So you can't call it interference in a natural process for a mother to care for her child. Neither can you call it interference in a natural process when a zygote, unhindered is allowed to become an embryo, fetus and eventually a baby, because that's nature's intended process. The body naturally cultivates the zygote and shepherds it to its natural end.
You need it not to count as cultivation, I think, to maintain your view. Because otherwise we once again have no distinction between aborting a fetus which isn't yet a person (not OK according to you) and letting a sperm or unfertilized egg go to waste (OK according to you).
quote:Here, you mean?
Somewhere in my monster post I explained why I draw the line here. I do think there's a distinction.
quote:Since sperm and egg cells are also little balls of life, it seems like it's the "own DNA" part that must be making the difference here. But that can't be right. If it were, the embryo of a clone, which shares the parent's DNA rather than having its own, wouldn't deserve the same protection. But clearly clones are people with equal rights, and cloned fetuses should have the same rights as ordinary ones (whatever those rights may be).
Ultimately for me it comes down to the moment of conception. Once you have that little ball of life in there, with its own individual totally unique DNA, it's something new, distinct and separate from anything else, and deserves a chance to become a person. To argue that stopping the process from happening, via protected sex or abstinence takes the argument to a point of absurdity, for we'd have to constantly have unprotected sex all the time at every potential moment in order to ensure no wasted reproductive material. So that's where I draw the line.
quote:That's a perfectly respectable point of view.
Originally posted by scholarette:
I feel very uncomfortable with the whole since we don't know, be safe and side with life. I hate beig pregnant beyond belief and so for me, picking the cautious side isn't the one where a woman suffers horribly. Making it through my mostly normal pregnancies made me much more pro choice. I was before, but pregnancy is for me just so awful that I can't force any one else to do it. I know just how bad pregnancy is, so if I have to pick a side without full knowledge of life, I have to side with the woman.
quote:In a sense, this has to be right--the same standards of whether a human is "alive" in the morally relevant sense should apply at the beginning of life as well as the end. But I would hesitate to apply the existing legal definition of the end of life to the beginning of life. "Brain death" is a useful notion for most practical purposes, but there are many cases where I think someone can be dead, for all morally important purposes, without being brain dead. This is a controversial example, but I would count Terry Schiavo as one such case.
Originally posted by Hobbes:
Many years ago, someone here linked to an article that talked about using the same standard for start of life that we do for end of life. Basically, brain-activity used as the metric. That still leaves some questions as to what consitutes brain activity since begining life is hardly a perfect mirror of ending life, but it makes a lot of sense to me to use that standard.