daddy1gringo wrote:First of all, let me agree with what some others have said: I like the turn that the tone of this discussion has taken. Everybody is being very reasonable and respectful (even BBS!) on a usually pyrotechnic subject. I will try to maintain this, and I hope everyone else will too.
Metsfanmax wrote:Choosing a dividing line may be hard, but that is no excuse for picking a bad one.
Agreed, though I naturally think that sword cuts the other way.
The argument of the beard doesn't actually address any of the important ethical questions involved in determining whether abortion or infanticide can be justified. The important determination is not whether a new organism exists, but whether that organism has any of the qualities that deserve protection. Simply being a member of the species Homo sapiens is not qualification for ultimate ethical protection. This thought process is what has allowed us to mistreat non-human animals for so long, and similar reasoning has fueled events like the Holocaust -- dehumanize your opponents, and their lives are no longer worth protecting. We can solve these problems by making it not special to be human but special to be an organism that is self-aware.
But how is the standard that you have chosen any less arbitrary and convenient to your way of thinking than any of the others?
Furthermore, part of the reason you appeal to the argument of the beard is because you assert without proof that it's bad that the pro-choice side logically leads to infanticide. But I hope I have demonstrated that not everyone on our side of the issue sees that as an absurd conclusion (in fact, it is a problem with the standard pro-choice argument).
Now here you bring up an interesting point. You are absolutely right: I made no attempt to prove that infanticide is wrong, and for good reason. At least up until the time that I posted that, a couple of years ago, even the staunchest pro-choice advocate would have agreed that it goes without saying. Pro-life people were saying for years that the kind of reasoning pro-choice folks were doing would lead to advocating infanticide, to which the pro-choice would answer something like, “Don’t be ridiculous; that’s ‘chicken little’ alarmism. Of course it will never lead to that.”
What that tells me is that one of two things is true: either, as you seem to be indicating, there is a significant and growing number of adherents to ideas like those you are giving here, or there is not.
If there is not, well, hey, the majority is not always right, and sometimes the lone “crazy” person is actually the herald of progress, but the fact that even the pro-choice people, who are not hindered by obsolete superstitions as people like me are, still agree that killing a born infant is unthinkable, might be reason for you to reconsider your position.
If there is a significant and growing group who hold with your ideas, then the rest of the pro-choice camp needs to reconsider their position, because what their opponents predicted is coming true: their type of thinking is indeed moving into what they agree is unthinkable.
In particular, the argument from the beard does not apply when we're talking about personhood, because there is surely some period of time until significantly {after} birth {fixed, I think}where an infant shares none of the qualities of a fully developed person.
Once again, those standards that you choose, how are they any less arbitrary and convenient, any more logically ethical, than the ones you reject? They still have all kinds of grey areas and “slippery beard” problems. Also it doesn’t answer the question that all of the other standards have to answer: “Who will decide?” In this case that question is particularly haunting in that they will have to judge whose cognitive function, whose thinking, is good enough to qualify for having the right to live. All kinds of room for abuse here.
Even if we accept WestWind's standard of when the fetus can start to feel pain, that still justifies most of the abortions that take place today.
Right, which is part of why I don’t use standards like that. The one I use is actually the most logical and clear-cut. Remember also that I said there would still be room for dialogue concerning conflicting circumstances, like rape and the life of the mother; it would just mean recognizing that this is indeed a human life.
I urge you not to skirt the real, ethical issue by choosing a standard that is convenient for you to think about. Serious issues require serious solutions.
Obviously, I don’t believe that I am. Let me end with a real-life example that I have mentioned before. I know of a doctor who became pro-life one day when he performed an abortion in the afternoon, when that same morning he had performed life-saving surgery (heart, or spine, I can’t remember) on a fetus no further along than the other. He had to ask himself, “If I didn’t just take a life, then whose life did I save this morning?” What would you say to that doctor?