The Personhood Dodge

I think the most interesting way to view Kevin Williamson’s four-part test–(1) genetically distinct, (2) living, (3) human, (4) not part of a larger organism–is that it immediately gets us into Monty Python “Every Sperm Is Sacred” territory. Every sperm inside a woman’s body is (1) genetically distinct, (2) living, (3) human, (4) not part of a larger organism. Therefore Williamson would say that personhood applies to every sperm–it must be allowed to pursue its destiny unhindered by any means of contraception, and there is probably a moral duty to require the woman to ovulate multiply as many times as possible, because anything else would infringe on the personhood rights of the spermatozoa…

I thought the National Review was perfectly all right with killing people as long as it was in defense of property rights.

Hmm.

A woman’s body is her castle. She has the right to use deadly force to expel genetically distinct invaders and no duty to retreat.

@2,

Also, to further the absurdity, if this is true for sperm inside the womb, why not inside the male? This was probably Yahweh’s thinking when he obliterated Onan. In other words, if women should be hanged for having an abortion, what should be done to men who, well, miss on purpose, thus “killing” the unborn, or practice some form of mono y mono (obviously) non-procreative sex?

If you’re goling to go down that path, few people and no mothers are all genetically identical human cells. Mitocondria vary genetically within the body, making even the cell an odd place to draw the line. Plus obviously no-one consists entirely of genetically identical cells (their gut bacteria alone are an enormous collection of distinct organisms). I’m not sure if that’s a problem for Williamson but it’s definitely an issue for anyone concerned about genetic purity.

The problem for Williamson would presumably be that each human cell that’s distinct has separate personhood. Even the cancer cells.

@6: My understanding of the Old Testament story of Onan is that God smote him not for wasting sperm per se, but because he disregarded the terms of his marriage to his deceased brother’s widow. That is, Tamar was married to Onan with the express purpose of creating a child, who would then be legally considered the son or daughter of the brother, Er. If no child resulted, Onan would be Er’s legal next of kin, and hence inherit his estate. As a result, Onan’s coitus interruptus was a kind of property theft, not a sexual sin.

This whole idea that masturbation is against God’s will is, in this view, a later interpretation grafted onto the story by humorless jerks who dislike anyone else having a good time.

I’ve been a long time reader but I’ve never commented before. I thought I would chime because I think the greatest weakness in Mr. Williamson’s position, that abortion should be treated like intentional homicide, can be reduced to absurdity.

If the intentional “killing” of a human embryo deserves all the punishments of intentional murder, why should we not punish other morally and criminally culpable states of mind i.e. recklessness, gross negligence.

The police state that coherence would require to punish those who proximately cause the deaths of 8 day old humans after fertilization and what not would be incompatible with a free society.

Do we want crime labs examining the waste baskets of sorority houses? Do we want homicide detectives interviewing women who suffer miscarriages? Do we want to consider women who have trouble getting pregnant and try and try only to fail at the expense of a multitude of human embryos as morally repugnant as serial killers?

To me, it’s not really about personhood. It’s about when it makes sense to extend equal protection of the law to the unborn child in a way that is compatible with a free and reasonable society. We cannot do so if we treat a human diploid cell with the same moral consideration as fully sentient human beings.

I rambled out a post on the matter at my blog if anybody is interested.

http://overlappingconsensus.com/2014/09/30/homicide-myopia/

Sorry for the Mankiw-style lack of comment space if anybody were to be interested but I don’t have time to reply and I can’t resist from replying if people ever do comment.

Brad and Moz: Williamson does include “organism” as an essential element of his argument. Is “every sperm” or “each human cell” an organism? I don’t know, but if not, then his argument is unaffected.

I’d say the weak link in his argument is “human.” If it simply means that some organism has human DNA (leaving aside the fact that the vast majority of human genes are common to other animals), then why is it wrong to kill a human? It’s not wrong to kill someone who’s permanently brain dead, assuming her family agrees. Why would it be? What’s wrong, — as the great Bentham first put it, I think — is to cause needless suffering/injury/deprivation, the more the worse, with killing the worst. (Not because it hurts most but because it’s the end of experience, and experiences are what we value.)

For legal purposes, we separate inflicting pain or death on humans from inflicting it on other species, and (for the most part) only punish the former. Why? We say it’s because humans are persons, meaning that we believe the human organism is far more complexly organized — above all neurologically — and capable of vastly greater suffering than other species. Let’s accept that assumption for the moment. Then if a human organism is incapable of suffering, or indeed of any experience at all, why is it wrong to kill him/her/it, especially to avoid the suffering of another?

Does a fetus have experiences? Extremely minimal ones, at best — just tropisms, really. It may react to stimuli, as isolated tissues sometimes do, but it can’t suffer or have any experience; it simply doesn’t have the wiring yet. To pretend that it can, and that its suffering can be meaningfully weighed in the balance against the pain of having an unwanted pregnancy and birth forced on you, is grotesque.

If embryologists discover someday that fetuses have experiences — i.e., that they have vastly more complicated brains and nervous systems than we thought, or that experience has less to do with the brain and nervous system than we thought — then the anti-abortion side will at least have an argument. Until then, they don’t.

@Rich Puchalsky

Brad DeLong doesn’t quote Williamson’s four-part test correctly. The 4th part is not “not part of a larger organism”. It’s “organism at the early stages of development”. Sperm isn’t going to develop into anything unless it merges with another organism.

Technically that would mean that cancerous tumors in Stages I and II are eligible for protection from removal and destruction. After all, they are genetically distinct, human tissue, alive, and in the early stages of development. They are dependent on the host, but so are fetuses until late in uterus.

I tend to side with the “slavery” argument. Forcing a woman to bear a child against her will is enslavement of her body and freedom, and doubly so when a woman is forced to carry a pregnancy conceived from rape. Her right to freedom of bodily autonomy vastly outweighs any right to continued sustenance and dependency that a brainless embryo might have (although it opens up a potential dilemma once the fetus can survive outside the womb – does it then have a right to live provided it is safely removed from the mother’s body?).

If, heaven forbid, Roe was overturned and we ended up with abortion bans in conservative states, I’d love to see someone challenge them on 13th Amendment grounds. Can you imagine the sheer amount of sputtering and anger from anti-choice conservatives?

I guess DNA is supposed to be a proxy for the old notion of a separable soul. If so, treating it as the soul of a genuinely human being with citizen’s rights has the serious disadvantage of making every zygote, if not every sperm sacred. Beyond that inconvenience, there’s another problem: DNA is not the essence of an animal, not the blueprint for a person, not a chemical homunculus. As the biologists will cheerful inform you, it’s perfectly inert stuff by itself; and, even if it could somehow read itself, which of course it can’t, it doesn’t contain remotely enough information to specify an animal or a human being. If nothing else, the DNA version of the personhood dodge is a category mistake.

The obvious facts of human development are very embarrassing to many people. It’s hard to conceptualize a process that begins with a single cell and winds up with a baby. I think of it as the scandal of epigenesis. For better or worse, however, we become persons gradually just as we often depart the scene gradually. Science is simply not going to be able to identify some time t when non person becomes person, and not because of some limitation of science but because the process is intrinsically incremental. It falls to us to make a prudent decision as to where we will draw the legal line since nature is not going to do it for us. Seems to me Roe vs Wade was actually a pretty reasonable way to do just that.

Regarding Williamson’s argument “It is a question about the legal status of an entity that is under any biological interpretation a 1) distinct, 2) living, 3) human 4) organism at the early stages of development. There is no scientific dispute about whether an embryo is genetically distinct from the body in which it resides…”

Note how this moves from “distinct” to “genetically distinct”, as if that is not contestable. In real-world genetics, consider mosaicism and chimerism, which really play havoc with many arguments that rest on the assumption that the cells in a human body are genetically uniform. And arguably between implantation and birth/abortion the developing embryo/fetus is not a biologically distinct organism, being much more similar to an internal organ.

@12 “Go back to my hypothetical standard-issue sf senient species that shares with us pain/pleasure, belief/desire, life plans, love, the lot. But it turns out that their reproductive/development cycle is different from ours. At a late stage of development each of these individuals merges with a different one, metamorphosing into a new organism that is quite different.”

Isaac Asimov describes such a species in The Gods Themselves.

@16 “Do we want crime labs examining the waste baskets of sorority houses? Do we want homicide detectives interviewing women who suffer miscarriages? Do we want to consider women who have trouble getting pregnant and try and try only to fail at the expense of a multitude of human embryos as morally repugnant as serial killers?”

Based on what happens in countries where abortion is illegal, the respective answers are No, Yes, and Yes.

“but of course you can keep going on the slippery slope all the way to ‘every sperm is sacred’”

It’s not slippery: the taboo is on destroying the actually existing organisms; sperm is not an organism.

“better instrumentation has frequently caused scientific revolution ”

In the case of ultra-sound, it had a pretty big impact on the abortion debate; Nobody realized how much the pro-choice movement was benefiting from the womb being a black box, until it suddenly became ‘transparent’.

Ha-ha, funny. In any case, if indeed this is a slippery slope, it’s a strike against Geo’s angle that the taboo is based on the harm caused by deprivation of experiences.

Suppose someone’s in a coma, there is a good chance he’ll come out of it, and a 100% certainty that he’ll have full amnesia. Meanwhile, the society is enslaved by him, having to spend resources to prolong his existence. Would it be okay to destroy this organism?

It’s a classic positivist gambit to say that anything that isn’t strictly scientific is therefore mystical

But when someone at the NR uses it, I tend to assume it’s a rhetoric substitute for “you say you’re purely scientific but you’re using a religious concept without acknowledging where you got it from.” That would somewhat explain

It’s wrong to murder. That’s biology. But there’s no such thing as a person. That’s also biology.

You “mystically” realize the truth even though he didn’t say that (as if thinking were mystical and inexplicable, and religion had a monopoly on thinking rationally): you realize biology is irrelevant and the light dawns on you.

I think the time aspect is very interesting here. Clearly, for a Christian, the appearance of a new person, with an immortal soul, must be a significant event. So when does this happen? Starting from KW’s definition, we’re drawn towards saying that it would be at some exact point of time during the period in which the first string of newly unique DNA is zipped together and installed in a functional cell.

Putting the point of conception earlier than that would mean discarding one or more of KW’s criteria (or so he’d say, but the point about sperm cells is well taken). Putting it later – or worse, being indistinct about the “when” – would require the kind of “personhood” conditions he would like to avoid.

Do we have a solid enough theological basis to put God on a stop watch like this? It seems implausible to me, especially considering the imprecisions of the biological evidence and the above-mentioned short amount of time theologians have had to consider them. Also, some Christians’ objections against the use of contraceptives seem to smudge at least one of the edges of conception, under the claim that events preceding the creation of new DNA are also part of God’s plan for creating new life.

KW might object that this is all beside the point and that he’s just after a clear and unambiguous way to determine the “legal status” of an embryo, free from all sorts of philosophical “mysticism” like this. But that’s no help at all, since we can easily add an age requirement (such as 26 weeks) to his four criteria without making it any harder to determine the legal status of an embryo. All we need to do is treat the age requirement as self-evidently applicable, like KW does with his other four criteria.

I don’t claim to be familiar with the individual or the publication, and I share the misgivings of many others about the particular terms of the argument here. I also agree that in practice very few people take extreme positions: most regard abortion as an unfortunate necessity.
But what worries me is that people who self-identify as progressives or liberals simply refuse to engage with this kind of argument, even if it is better expressed, and essentially pretend it does not exist. (I really don’t think thought experiments about aliens are helpful.) Their preferred vocabulary is the classic liberal one of property rights (in this case over one’s own body) which opponents of abortion likewise refuse to engage with. There is no chance of a genuine dialogue therefore, since the two sides each think the problem is about something different.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the issue is actually quite simple, and that those of liberal views should just be asked: at what point does a foetus become a human being, subject to the protection of the law? Everyone presumably agrees that a child that is actually born is entitled to this protection. Almost everybody believes that sperm, or a non-viable foetus is not. So at what point is the dividing line crossed, and is this a moral or a scientific distinction? (You can bring God in if you must but it’s not compulsory). And what are the consequences?
And the answer is ….

“most regard abortion as an unfortunate necessity.”

Many of us do not.

Williamson is committing a category error here–“At what point in the development of a fetus do we recognize it as entitled to all the rights and protections accorded to a human being” is a legal question, not a biological one. And law is a human artifact–we construct it to suit our needs; we do not deduce it from the nature of the universe–it is not a “brooding omnipresence in the sky”

“Which kind of argument are you talking about here?”
For simplicity, arguments which, whether convincing or not, and even whether honestly intended or not,assert that the issue is about the rights and welfare of the unborn child, rather than the rights of the mother. Such arguments, in my experience, are not seriously engaged with, since liberals etc generally couch the argument in terms of the rights of the mother, reproductive health and similar factors. As I said, the two sides talk past each other. I see there’s a big demonstration planned in Paris this Sunday (the Manif pour Tous), which is partly about opposition to abortion, on the basis that unborn children should have rights as well. Whatever you think of this argument, I would be more comfortable if I felt that liberals had a convincing reply to it, in the terms in which it was posed.

It seems to me the argument in #3 is conclusive and the personhood of the zygote-embryo-fetus is irrelevant (as a legal or political issue), unless of course one believes slavery is all right.

# Plume # 16
Anyone who has read the Old Testament and taken it literally (or not) should be highly skeptical of Yahweh’s good intentions. I am always reminded of Samuel Clemens description of Yahweh as , “a malignant thug”. My person view is more of “the most capricious and arbitrary tyrant in human history”.
# Palindrome #14. That is an expansion of what I understood of the “sin of Onan”.
What I had read was the the tradition of marrying the brother’s widow and fathering
children was based on the idea that those children would provide security in her old age. It had not completely made sense to me why Onan would intentionally violate that unless he had personal animosity toward his sister in law. I had not thought about the inheritance part.

“But what worries me is that people who self-identify as progressives or liberals simply refuse to engage with this kind of argument”

Wasn’t the original written in a U.S. context? Within the U.S., it’s not really an argument or a dispute. Both sides pursue their goals through their traditional means in the U.S.: from the technocratic left, unaccountable legal judgements, from the right, terrorism.

In the case of ultra-sound,

Don’t forget home pregnancy tests. In the old days, the ob/gyn didn’t want to see you for a pregnancy test until you’d missed at least one period by at least, I think, 10-14 days. Now you can know if you’re pregnant (keeping in mind the number of miscarriages that occur between 10 and 40 days) only a few days after conception, well before your first missed period. The problem with @3 is that it assumes a basically viable fetus, where we’re certainty of pregnancy way back before anyone would have done in the past. (I don’t think “My period isn’t due for a week but I can just tell I’m pregnant” would carry a lot of weight, nor should it.) Taken seriously, @3 asks women to agree that there’s a second human life present when (biologically) there isn’t much difference between it and an ovum.

‘@3 asks women to agree that there’s a second human life present when (biologically) there isn’t much difference between it and an ovum.

@3 and @4 are independent of the status of the ovum-zygote-embryo-fetus. Arguments about the personhood of the fetus, while they may be interesting speculations, are politically an attempt to skip over the personhood of the person carrying the fetus.

“Just attribute to people who disagree with you insanely odious beliefs they don’t actually hold, and you don’t have to have a dialogue with them anymore.”

Oh please. You think that someone who thinks women should be HANGED for getting an abortion doesn’t think they should be forced to give birth?

Oops one more thing. “Viability” is indeed a tricky criterion, because one can argue that a newborn is not “viable,” in that if left on its own it will die.

(I wonder if we added up all the energy expended in the abortion debate over time could we power the USA for a few years? I am not saying it is a worthy topic of debate, just wondering if anyone ever tried to calculate the person-years tied up in thinking and arguing about this. Especially given I think the entire debate has probably not moved more than 2-4% of the population one way or the other.)

I disagree. @3 explicitly states that pregnancy is slavery to the fetus. That means the fetus–or embryo, or even zygote–is a person. That means the woman who’s five weeks pregnant and is considering an abortion has to “admit to herself” that the embryo is a person–when it’s not–and reason from there. @3 accepts the right-wing framing of the issue and (if taken as seriously as you’re taking it) says, “yeah, it’s a person, yeah you’re committing murder, but you have a right to, and if you think you don’t, if you’re even bothering me with this ‘not a person’ nonsense which is perfectly irrelevant, you hate women even if you are one.”

So many people seem to want a legal bright line – on one side of the line a group of cells (e.g. sperm and eggs, or a fetus that can’t live independently) has no legal rights, on the other side even the rights of the woman can be superseded. All of the most committed combatants on either side of the war have developed some sharp, binary distinction.

I see no such line in the relevant moral question. Surely there is an accretion of moral respect that a clump of cells gains along with the characteristics of a fully formed adult human. Even after we accord full protection against mistreatment we feel no compunction against restricting the “inalienable rights” of people who do not have adult capacity, and we believe it is the right of the parents to “parent” against the wishes of the child. This is the last phase of a moral-worth slope that begins at zero – at meiosis – and rises monotonically (but not linearly!).

The reason that we fight about where to draw the abortion bright line is that there is no moral basis to have one at all.

David @40 “On the other hand, it can be argued that the issue is actually quite simple, and that those of liberal views should just be asked: at what point does a foetus become a human being, subject to the protection of the law?”

Birth.

(Simple question, simple answer.)

The long answer is that as a practical matter, when a woman wants to abort a pregnancy for non-medical reasons, she wants to do it as early as possible. Waiting periods, driving up the cost of the procedure, and so on, mostly result in abortions being done later in the pregnancy, as opposed to them not happening at all. By the third trimester, abortions for non-medical reasons are rare enough that having the law second-guess the women and doctors involved will not make much of a difference, and is more likely to result in harm than benefit anyone involved. Personhood or lack of it for the zygote/embryo/fetus is a red herring in this.

And since this method of killing still isn’t allowed, then, it seems, this isn’t just about your present experiences, hopes, and anticipations, but about the future ones as well. Where am I wrong?

Right at “anticipations”. The sleeping person may not be anticipating anything, but they did, in the past, anticipate and hope for future experiences. Zygotes not only do not anticipate anything, they have not ever anticipated anything. Note that even the past experiences and anticipations of the deceased are morally relevant, thus people can write documents expressing how they and their property are to be disposed of after death, and those documents may be legally enforceable.

I can think of some other cases that actually are problematic under this framework (infants?) but sleeping persons are in the clear.

bianca steele 10.01.14 at 3:07 pm @ 59:
‘I disagree. @3 explicitly states that pregnancy is slavery to the fetus. That means the fetus–or embryo, or even zygote–is a person. …’

The actual enslaver is the state, which can and does invest even non-existent beings with personhood. In the case of opposing abortion, it then acts coercively on their supposed behalf, privileging the supposed personhood of the zygote etc. over the personhood of the person carrying it. This corresponds to the rightist view of women as subordinate to their role as baby producers, which in turn goes back to their primary use under conditions of slavery.

Anarcissie @ 67: The actual enslaver is the state

Okay. I don’t get that from @3, though.

I still think finding a reasonable dividing line is important. IVF, for instance. I don’t ever want to read another novel where a well-meaning, liberal woman hates herself for the rest of her life because she went mountain climbing and took audacious risks when she was, without knowing it, three weeks pregnant, or some such. Or an SF novel where a woman realizes that her first-trimester abortion is morally equivalent to the headless-clone organ harvesting she’s just discovered (much less that her feminism, since it’s pro-choice, is morally equivalent to that). And saying the state shouldn’t criminalize abortion, of course, isn’t quite going so far as telling women they shouldn’t consider themselves awful people if they consider it.

Palindrome #14 Onan’s coitus interruptus was a kind of property theft, not a sexual sin.

Not so much the property per se, it’s about the lineage; Onan caused Er to be cut off like Esau and Ismael. A sin against Yahweh’s plan for the Chosen People. Recall the promise to Abraham was that his progeny would be numberless as the stars of heaven.

I’m always a bit amused by the spectrum argument that looks at when the baby might be viable and sees that as the primary spectrum that must be addressed in making the abortion no abortion decision.

There’s also a spectrum the woman undergoes in evaluating their own reaction to the fact that they are carrying a life/potential life. There’s considerable support for abortion from nearly all but the farthest right when conception has happened against the womans’s will or when its known that carrying a child would seriously harm the mother. If there was clear moral rigidity about the formation of life as per Williamson, even these exclusions would make no sense, so as most here seem to agree, Williamson makes no sense.

Beyond that point, there’s a tendency to turn the woman’s decision and right to make it into a game of 20 questions. Was it unprotected sex? Does she know the father? Was this the first time? When did she find out? Why did she wait? The list goes on…

While any of these answers might illuminate the views and attitudes of the woman and as such have prurient interest to those that might wish to deny the right to choose, they really have no bearing on the morality or legality of the right to choose itself.

Interestingly the anti-choice crowd only focuses on the instances where the “choice” results in abortion. Children are born all the time where the mother has “chosen” to give birth either to keep the child under potentially challenging circumstances or offer for adoption. Why is “choice” only denigrated when the choice is to terminate? (I know the answer, don’t bother).

In my view Roe has balanced all of these considerations pretty well. It doesn’t mean there won’t be cases either direction where I sort of shake my head and think I wouldn’t have made the same choice…but that’s the way choices are, we have a right to disagree with the choice another has made, but we don’t have a right to make the choice instead of them.

“Oh please. You think that someone who thinks women should be HANGED for getting an abortion doesn’t think they should be forced to give birth?”

This is the statement I was responding to:

“Well of course there isn’t because the forced bithers don’t consider women to be actual people. ”

May I presume you’re opposed to the castle doctrine, believe in a duty to retreat? I guess that means you don’t consider homeowners to be actual people.

“In my view Roe has balanced all of these considerations pretty well. ”

As I said above, I agree that Roe was probably reasonable policy, even if it was lousy constitutional law. A pity they pulled that bait and switch, by perpetrating Doe v Bolton later that day.

Perfectly on topic: You don’t have to think somebody isn’t an actual person, to believe they have a legal obligation not to kill somebody else.

If I invited you into my home, and then decided I didn’t want you there, I couldn’t use the Castle doctrine as an excuse to shoot you dead. I’d have to give you a reasonable opportunity to leave first. I wouldn’t be permitted to cut you into pieces so I could toss you out the mail slot instead of opening the door. Does that mean that I’m not an actual person? Of course not.

In a normal pregnancy, the fetus will leave at about 9 months, and can be safely kicked out somewhat earlier. And people learn they are pregnant well inside the first trimester most of the time. Is it a denial that women are people, to suggest that they make up their mind about aborting reasonably promptly, or wait out the pregnancy?

You’re just resorting to hyperbolic language to make the people who disagree with you seem more offensive in their views, so that you’ve got an excuse for not engaging with them.

David Coombs: +1

“Is it a denial that women are people, to suggest that they make up their mind about aborting reasonably promptly, or wait out the pregnancy?”

I doubt many women need such a suggestion, at least in an educated population.

The passive phrase “wait out the pregnancy” could not, I think, be used by a woman who had given birth. What’s missing from most of this discussion is the real-world awareness of the nature of pregnancy. Belle said once in another thread something about “feeling the movement you did not make.” Breath-taking.

If the state extends its reach to take the choice whether to carry a pregnancy to term from the pregnant woman in order to prevent abortion, it could also use its power force abortion. The state does not belong in these decisions.

@85 “society clearly has decided”

I know that. I’m testing Geo’s explanation/justification for this decision. I don’t think it flies. Unless I’m missing something.

“And what of all the hypothetical persons who could have become zygotes, the eggs and sperm that go unjoined?”

The usual distinction between action and inaction. People starve to death while you keep an equivalent of dozens of dinners on your bank account: that’s acceptable. To lock someone in the basement and starve them do death is not.

I think this is a great post, largely because so far every comment I have read has something interesting to say, including those about whom I don’t usually say that. Well, it had to end somewhere:

“I distinctly remember my biology teacher telling me otherwise!” (Where otherwise = all sperm are genetically identical.) That sounds like a very bad biology teacher. If we then assume sauce for the goose is the same as sauce for the gander (female eggs also genetically identical) then siblings should all look like identical twins; and all be female.

Brett the language you are using proves my point.

The pro “life” movement is entirely about controlling women’s sexuality and forcing them to give birth. If they believed that women were people, actual people with agency, they wouldn’t be part of the pro “life” movement.

“The usual distinction between action and inaction. People starve to death while you keep an equivalent of dozens of dinners on your bank account: that’s acceptable. To lock someone in the basement and starve them do death is not.”

Well Ze Kraggash I hope that you have never masturbated (assuming you are male) as that is an action that resulted in the deaths of millions of potential lives. Truly you are histories greatest monster.

Seems like most people commenting above leaped right to the abortion question rather than what first struck me — Williamson pushing for a return to the conservative movement’s historic roots, i.e., restriction of the franchise.

“the largest abortion provider is nature and/or any author behind nature […] Considerations like these lend some credence to attributing full moral status to the fetus only at some reasonable point post-implantation.”

Why? KW (as represented by Joh Holbo)’s contention that “It’s wrong to murder. That’s biology” is really quite strange. Biologically, creatures murder creatures of their own species quite often. I don’t want to represent humans as being independent of culture, but in most human cultures, it’s normal for there to be accepted methods for people to murder each other, unless you define murder as “killing outside of the laws of whatever culture you’re in” in which case it can’t have any strictly biological meaning.

“Nature, red in tooth and claw” etc. If you’re going to say that biology is what matters, then biology murders.

@82
“Is it a denial that women are people, to suggest that they make up their mind about aborting reasonably promptly, or wait out the pregnancy?”

Quick decisions are generally incompatible with good morality – see Trolley problems.

You make it sound like its an easy decision. Why not issue coins that can be flipped at the last minute for the indecisive.

If a million women wait until the 25th week to make a decision there will be approximately a million reasons why they couldn’t do so earlier….lack of attention to the fact that the clock was ticking won’t have been one of them in any instance.

Just to say, I find the OP and the discussion quite enlightening.

@91 “A chance to become something that can have experiences, at the cost of forcing a woman (often enough, a girl) to undergo unwanted pregnancy, birth, and parenthood? Doesn’t seem quite fair to me.”

In that case, it sounds like this is the straight “violinist” thought experiment logic. Sufferings, experiences don’t matter, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a fetus or adult, or even a famous adult with extremely meaningful and valuable experiences.

Regarding the original quote from Williamson, isn’t his #4 (fetus is a seperate organism, not part of the mother) kind of begging the question? Or, to put it another way, doesn’t it depend how you define “part of the mother”?

I would say that a fetus is like a fingernail or an appendix in some ways, and unlike a fingernail/appendix in some other ways, and which of those ways are most important to you probably depend on how you feel about the issue in the first place.

“So… What you’re saying is that any time, any time at all, that the law doesn’t let a woman do what she wants, it is denying that she’s an actual person with agency? That there’s no status between, “Can do whatever he/she wants” and “unperson”?

Seriously, the law routinely compells me, so I must not be, legally, an actual person.”

Did I have a stroke or are you unable to stay on topic for more than two seconds? This is the classic troll shuffle. We are talking about abortion rights and you bring up guns and then stand your ground laws and now every law about anything ever.

I am saying that requiring a women to carry a fetus to term against her will is using her as a machine. It is not treating her as a person entitled to make decisions about what happens in her own body. Whats more is you KNOW that is what I mean but by darting around trying to change the topic you hope to confuse the issue.

You most know how transparent you are being. So why bother?

So… What you’re saying is that any time, any time at all, that the law doesn’t let a woman do what she wants, it is denying that she’s an actual person with agency?

That’s not what was written, and you don’t know what you’re talking about in any case. I mean, for starters, you write “want” as if it might be pleasurable whimsy to have an abortion. You’re denying women agency because you presume to know how they should make decisions.

For people who aren’t anarchists, this isn’t really an strong an argument as you think it is.

I was writing specifically about Brett, whose libertarian sentiment stretches the width of a dollar.

Ze@104: Sufferings, experiences don’t matter

I don’t follow this. I’m saying that the actual suffering of a woman forced into unwanted pregnancy, birth, and parenthood outweighs the purely hypothetical suffering of a fetus, which almost certainly cannot suffer or experience anything at all and absolutely certainly cannot suffer or experience anything comparable.

“I am saying that requiring a women to carry a fetus to term against her will is using her as a machine. ”

Then I guess juries are made up of machines. Soldiers are sent off to war by people who don’t think they’re actually human beings.

Here’s the point: Telling somebody they have to do something DNE deciding they’re not actually a person. It equals believing there are circumstances under which it is permissible to coerce actual people.

And you’re liberals, you believe there are lots of circumstances under which it’s permissible to coerce people. Are you telling me you don’t think those people are actually human beings?

No, of course you don’t.

What’s going on here is that, for a variety of reasons, liberals like thinking of the people who disagree with them as monsters. And you come up with BS reasoning to justify this belief. But you won’t let the tables be turned, won’t accept that the same sort of reasoning would make YOU monsters on some other subject.

We can all see the logical holes and false equivalencies. He is just intellectually masturbating. Don’t give him a hand job for free. Walk away!

Depends on how late in the pregnancy, would be my answer.

Basically, The Temporary Name, you’re letting Brett be correct in #116 when you really don’t have to let him be. Liberals do generally think that there are lots of circumstances in which it’s permissible for government to coerce whole classes of people. So saying “But you’re treating a whole class of people as if they can’t make their own decisions!” really has no force; our system does that all the time, and we generally celebrate the people who manage to turn their individual moral preferences into societal rules in this way. You can argue that the decision to coerce is wrong in this case because of the particulars involved, but it’s really a bad argument to say that the right-wingers of the world are doing something unusual when they do this. Brett is happy to be self-contradictory all he likes, but other people should be better than that.

“And now you know how conservatives feel when somebody like MPAV unloads.”

I am posting at a left wing website Brett. It is not like I am hanging out at Red State.

If a woman decides to have a late-term abortion, she will indeed be forced to give birth under existing law if the government isn’t satisfied with her reasons, in the U.S. ever since Roe v. Wade. In the U.S., it has never been a decision that is strictly up to her.

And if John Holbo can bring up aliens who need to fuse to create other life stages of aliens, then Brett can bring up the military. The government can draft people and order them to kill people and to go into situations in which they have a very high likelihood of death. Taking critical life decisions away from people is something that our system does all the time.

I don’t really care about Brett. I’m addressing you (well, really I was addressing The Temporary Name initially), not him. I’m saying that the “you’re taking the decision away from a class of people, as if they can’t make decisions for themselves” thing is a bad argument. The reply is “But we do that in cases X,Y,Z.” Then the answer is either “But I oppose that in cases X,Y,Z” (i.e. “I am an anarchist”) or “This case is different from cases X,Y,Z.” If this case is different, then just say why this case is different. Don’t rely on saying that the whole idea is unthinkable or even particularly right-wing, because it isn’t.

Basically, The Temporary Name, you’re letting Brett be correct in #116 when you really don’t have to let him be.

It’s just fun to see Brett twirl from libertarian to authoritarian in an instant. He’s happy to decide for others one minute and then curse CT for closed-mindedness in another.

Yes, I am plenty happy with laws that discriminate against the rich class of people, or tell kids to go to school, while less happy with laws that discriminate on the basis of genitalia and skin colour. What a woman can do with her body seems to me to fall under the latter set of laws. Tweaking Brett about his attitudes towards coercion is what he asks for over and over, and sometimes I’m weak enough to indulge him. If he thinks he’s scored a point because HA, LIBERALS DO THIS! then he can be king of the sandbox if he likes.

““you’re taking the decision away from a class of people, as if they can’t make decisions for themselves” thing is a bad argument.”

No it isn’t. I support people making their own choices in some matters (bodily autonomy) while oppose it in others (speed limits, fire codes and so on).

If this case is different, then just say why this case is different. Don’t rely on saying that the whole idea is unthinkable or even particularly right-wing, because it isn’t.

It’s legitimate to ask why coercion X is compatible with human dignity while coercion Y isn’t. It’s an especially good question if X is incarcerating people for deserting combat.

OTOH, it is definitely very right-wing to claim that all forms of coercion are equivalent, if any kind of coercion is compatible with human dignity then all kinds must be. It’s a propertarian notion of freedom–all coercion is equivalent to tresspass–and while I’m sure some left anarchists believe it, that belief is a mistake.

Plume,

“I want diversity, of course, but under the umbrella of equalized human and civil rights across the board. People shouldn’t receive rotten educations anywhere, because that’s what “freedom” means. They shouldn’t be condemned to horrible medical care, simply because that’s what “freedom” means. There should be certain standards of human and civil rights, access to excellence, access to opportunity, which know no boundaries. Take care of that, and then we can talk divergence.”

Yup! Someone said a society is judged by its worst-off citizens and this seems like truth to me.

“We” have a scanning machine? So the state is going to be monitoring ultrasounds? No, she can’t be forced. Period.

Williamson’s definition of abortion as being about: “the legal status of an entity that is under any biological interpretation a 1) distinct, 2) living, 3) human 4) organism at the early stages of development.”

Williamson states his opinion as if it was fact. But his assertions are opinions, not fact. IS a fetus a living thing? Clearly this is debatable. It cannot live outside of the womb. It has no name. We do not know its gender when it is in the womb. And in our legal system (for the time being), the fetus is defined by law as something that is not yet alive for many weeks into the pregnancy.

In our culture, life is defined with a name, a birth certificate. When we die, there is a death certificate. With abortion, where is the body? How can murder happen to cells with no name, no birth certificate, no death certificate?

When abortion became law, most Christian organizations did not care. It was a “Catholic” issue. Why/when did it become such a noisy issue? WHY? Why do women seek out abortions? Because bringing a baby to adulthood is incredibly challenging – too many women are left without proper support, without a partner, without a good way to make an income. Why don’t the lives of women matter in this debate?

What happened before abortion was legal? Women sought it out anyway, many dying in the attempt. “Leona’s Sister Gerri” is a FANTASTIC documentary about this issue: http://www.pbs.org/pov/leonassistergerri/

What I hate most about the sanctimonious dribble of people like Williamson – their concern for the person in the womb ends when that child draws his/her first breath. My God, the man wants to hang a girl who has an abortion after being impregnated from rape or incest!

Please tell me Kevin Williamson is child-free. Here’s to hoping he’s not passing on that gene pool to the next generation.

Rich 128, your argument is logically flawless although it does overlook a bit of context (namely, everybody understood that MPAV was specifically referring to bodily autonomy and not to just doing as one pleases). What I would like to point out though is that the illogic you are identifying is politically extremely potent. You hear that all the time, more often from right-wingers, that X is bad “because it forces me to do something against my will” or “the government takes a decision away from me”. That this in fact happens all the time, that for better or worse our societal order is based on authorities taking certain decisions away from individuals, and moreover that the very same people who decry the alleged loss of freedom are in practice totally ok with many other instances where other people’s freedoms are in some way taken away, all of this is just overlooked and doesn’t in the least diminish the political appeal of the (illogical) argument.

The whole Tea party, the whole anti-Obamacare hysteria, and so on, rest on that illogical argument. Now the question would be why it works so well.

P.S. One of the strangest examples is the hysteria over the plan to regulate soft drink sizes in New York restaurants. As far as regulations go, that one is rather mild – it wouldn’t prevent anybody from drinking as much of the sweet stuff as they wish, all it would do is prevent suppliers from offering oversized packages. Many instances of product regulation (including but not limited to alcohol regulations) that are far more restrictive than that one yet we don’t hear much complaint about those. I also find Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge” argument perplexing – it is based on the obviously false assumption that “normally”, the government doesn’t tell people what to do.

“what’s sophistical about that”

Well, maybe not sophistry, but a rather polemical articulation of a personal judgement. Which is fine, as far it goes, but it doesn’t explain much. Again, someone on the other side could (also polemically) describe abortion as a very serious matter of deprivation of 80-or-so years of human experiences (hopes, dreams, etc.). How would you respond?

Do feminists actually believe in bodily autonomy? I ask because it gets brought up all the time regarding abortion, but that’s it. They’re either indifferent to other applications (drugs, euthanasia) or mildly opposed (FGM, cosmetic surgery, forced blood testing). I know it’s shitty to suggest insincerity, but the concept doesn’t seem widely or consistently applied.

I read a bunch of early women’s lib material recently and it was really refreshing to see abortion discussed without any of the usual bullshit of personhood or self defence or bodily autonomy justifications. The argument was literally women are oppressed by their reproductive capacities and abortion is needed to free them.

Do feminists actually believe in bodily autonomy? I ask because it gets brought up all the time regarding abortion, but that’s it. They’re either indifferent to other

Which feminist are you pointing at?

No really. Which feminist are you pointing at? Who’s the indifferent one?

Anarcissie @ 67: The actual enslaver is the state
“Okay. I don’t get that from @3, though.”

I appreciate that I tried to cover a lot of points in a tiny post, but yes, what I was getting at was that even if someone agrees with the most extreme fetal personhood argument, the argument against slavery still applies. It doesn’t matter who or what is refusing to allow that choice, the point is that the denial of abortion exists. In the USA it’s usually the state either enforcing the enslavement directly, or passively allowing terrorists to enforce it. So I agree that that is the government enslaving women.

Personally, I would be all for abortion at any time for any reason even if women gave birth to fully dressed college educated white men. It’s not about the thing that’s being born, it’s about the agency and personhood of the pregnant woman.

The argument from nature is just as bad. Saying “but that’s requiring medical intervention”… yes, and so what? If I must, I’m willing to agree that someone living beyond the reach of modern technology and government, in a cave somewhere in a national park, next door to the unibomber or whatever, has no right to an abortion. Or free speech. Or any other of the new-fangled “rights” you naked apes witter on about. You want nature, I’m happy to beat you to death with a rock while you bravely defend my right to do so.

Do feminists actually believe in bodily autonomy? … indifferent to other applications (drugs, euthanasia) or mildly opposed (FGM, cosmetic surgery, forced blood testing).

I suspect you’re seeing specialisation in action. When we’re arguing about whether women should be forced to give birth, that’s typically a feminist argument. So you see a lot of “as a feminist I…” discussion.

But when we talk about drugs, that’s much more general, so you see both liberal/libertarian groups acting on it and also arguments that go “I love freedom, so…” Saying “I’m a feminist…” in that context would be derailing, and also tend to alienate some supporters so it’s something that actual supporters of drug liberalisation are unlikely to do.

You see the same thing in the abortion debate. There are very few people arguing for abortion on demand by saying “as an NRA member I want the right to choose” or “I vote Republican and I want the government out of abortion law”. Even those who genuinely are in those groups know that saying it is just going to start a fight, both with other NRA/Repub members who are appalled at their beliefs, and with fellow pro-choice people who are used to those being false flag arguments.

But if you actually look at the groups fighting for the other stuff, you’ll see a lot of feminists on board. Starhawk, for example, is active in prison reform and scathing about the “War on Drugs”. Like this:

The prison industrial complex has become a profit-making industry, a new form of slavery. Instead of rehabilitating and reintegrating offenders, it creates a permanent underclass. Draconian sentencing laws, the ‘War on Drugs’ which is really a war on poor people who use drugs, especially people of color, the whole punitive orientation of our society means we in the U.S. imprison more people than any other country in the world. (from http://starhawksblog.org/?p=472)

@158,

This is true. Ironically, despite Rand’s famous atheism, many of her fans seem very sympathetic to the religious right, if not being an outright part of it. Dominionists and the libertarian right are kissing cousins on several fronts, as this article from Julie Ingersoll shows.

“You could say the same of people who rape and murder”

Oh Brett. I truly, truly wish rapist were as rare as people who choose late pregnancy abortions for kicks and giggles. You are so male, middle class and white, you have no idea of your privilege.

Ze @146: someone on the other side could … describe abortion as a very serious matter of deprivation of 80-or-so years of human experiences (hopes, dreams, etc.). How would you respond?

I guess I’d say who is being deprived and how do they feel about it? Assuming they can feel.

Just a guess, but I doubt Williamson would take much account of the embryo as hostile invader of the woman’s body in his biology=morality equation. Or that most fertilized eggs do not result in a live birth. Or that, prior to ~12 days post-fertilization, the “genetically unique” embryo is capable of cleaving into multiple genetically identical embryos.

There is no intention or calculation involved in any of this—it just happens (or not). And outside of tech-assisted reproduction, there is neither intention nor calculation in the joining of the sperm and the egg: the best a couple can do is try to make it more likely that their gametes will meet, but they cannot will fertilization or implantation. And while the woman certainly can influence the development of the embryo/fetus thru her willed behavior, if it’s going to miscarry, even the most perfect behavior (whatever that would be) won’t stop it.

So, yeah, the only way to get from all of these (and other) biological is’s to one single ought is to collapse the distinction between the two. Which, come to think of it, might lead to some verrrry interesting moralities. . . .

The right has built in its own kind of “get out of jail free card,” for many reasons. One of the biggest, I think, is low standards. Very, very low standards. We’re so used to reading or hearing righties say the most disgusting, vile, despicable or ridiculous things, it seems like just another day at the office. And because they pump the airwaves with this garbage 24/7, the ability to be outraged is more and more difficult with each passing day. From Limbaugh to Coulter and to umpteen religious nutcases, to the politicians who pander to them, to the neocons and their chickenhawkery, to the Cliven Bundies et al, no one is really surprised by rightwing idiots, racists, homophobes, xenophobes, etc. etc. It’s what’s for breakfast.

So they don’t lose their jobs. They actually get more job offers, go on book tours, or find their way to Reality TV. It’s almost impossible to say something or do something, if you’re a righty, that gets you finally and irrevocably blacklisted.

This has never been the case for folks on the left, who are frequently purged from public life for so much as a sneeze. The Dixie Chicks being a great example. They said they were embarrassed to be from the same state as Bush and they received death threats and were blackballed from the music industry for years.

America, in so many ways, is one twisted nation.

It wasn’t so much the article on Lena Dunham I had in mind but the series of tweets that included these
“I have hanging more in mind”
“Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.”
etc

However in being cautious about being ‘anti-American’ I’m not just being polite or “anthropologically correct” (I don’t even know what that is!), I’m also worried about hubris. After all we recently elected a dinosaur as Prime Minister!

Plume @ 170 – our politics in general have also shifted to the right in many ways over the last 20 years or so also. Plus I am being a bit Melbourne centric – we don’t get so much right wing garbage here, but it does happen more in other parts of the country.

One thing that has happened here is the right doesn’t debate the left any more – left ideas are either too “juvenile” (that seems to have replaced crazy, and also I notice KW uses it a lot about Dunham) to debate, or – if widely accepted – they are “Nanny State”. (I haven’t yet seen “juvenile Nanny State ideas” as a meme, too illogical even for the right I guess).

Geo, 164 “I guess I’d say who is being deprived and how do they feel about it? Assuming they can feel.”

The fetus, that’s who. I already tried to address the aspect of temporary unconsciousness, up the thread, but you ignored it (unless I missed a comment).

…been thinking about it some more, and I guess it’s just that I feel annoyed when rationalistic calculations are applied, wham-bam, to organic social phenomena. Which, I guess, is the point of the OP. But there’s no pushback against your rationalistic calculations (alas, Roy isn’t here).

Very true, much to the annoyance of pro-choicers, who argue as though this weren’t the case. The right to life movement being a ‘patriarchal conspiracy’ being run almost entirely by women seems to be a contradiction they find easier to ignore than explain.

Brett Bellmore 10.02.14 at 10:27 am @ 176:
‘Very true, much to the annoyance of pro-choicers, who argue as though this weren’t the case. The right to life movement being a ‘patriarchal conspiracy’ being run almost entirely by women seems to be a contradiction they find easier to ignore than explain.’

It’s hardly contradictory if one believe that the source of anti-abortionism is patriarchy or male supremacy.

@Plume #89
Barney Frank made that same point more more succinctly.
“To the conservative, life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

“Pure patriarchy, deciding for someone else what they should do.”

I think this requires a definition of “patriarchy” too disconnected with the origins of the term. You should be using some more general term for women bossing other women around, than a term that explicity refers to men ruling.

“Patriarchy” isn’t a content free epithet, it has a meaning.

David @175: “Interestingly, a very large number of the leaders of anti-abortion campaigns are women…”

This does not appear to be the case in my neck of the European woods.

In another part of Europe there has also been an interesting development: a conservative government is voted in to fix the economy, and proceeds to do so by banning abortion. This turns out to be so immensely unpopular that the government withdraws the proposed legislation and one of the ministers resigns. But of course a catholic country like Spain may not be the best indicator of the strength of anti-abortion sentiment in Europe.

As Lynne mentions, no one is “pro-abortion.” Well, to clarify. There are exceptions to the “no one.” But rare. Very, very rare. Rare to the point of being almost non-existent. So anyone starting off using that term is suspect. It’s not that much different from calling X policy “anti-American” right off the bat. It kind of loads the dice for a certain kind of bet.

And the term “pro-life” is pretty silly, misleading and ultimately meaningless. On one level, it’s like saying you’re “pro-breathing.” But when used by the people who generally use it, it really means “pro-zygote” or “pro-fetus.” It almost never means “I will support policies which help improve the quality of life for American citizens throughout their journey on this planet.”

Brett @182,

In pretty much all systems of oppression, you’ll often get the oppressed working for their masters, doing their masters’ bidding, playing their own role in subjugating their fellows. You find that in slavery, in prisons, in capitalism.

There is no reason to find a different word to explain the situation of women bossing around women, as you put it. They’re a part of the system, too, socialized just like men to play a certain role. Some break free. Some men, too. But many do not, and they end up aiding and abetting. Conservative women, especially (with exceptions), seem more likely than those on the left to be willing cogs in the machine.

Changes in society have impacted even conservatives, of course, though it almost always happens later for them. But if they also happen to hold religious fundamentalist views, then their entrance into the 21st century is tougher, because they all too often buy into the idea that their “place” is to be submissive to man, that the bible tells them so.

It’s never really a surprise to see women of the religious right work against their own best interests. They’re indoctrinated, just like the men, to do this. It’s a tragedy, but it’s not surprising.

I suppose I’m an idiot, trying to argue to someone on the left that a word actually has a meaning. You guys have been Humpty Dumpty with a no limit credit card for at least a generation.

You didn’t take it apart well.

Wow, I really disagree with you, Rich. I think this is one of John’s best posts. I don’t understand how you’re thinking at all.

What’s fascinating about this (I mean the bits quoted in the OP here, I haven’t clicked through and haven’t thought about the other stuff he wrote recently, which may well be wrong, and in fact I didn’t remember this was the “too dumb to vote” guy) is that if this is positivism, it’s a really weird kind. You make a distinction between “positivism” and being “sciency,” but I would say that what’s wrong with positivism is that it’s sciency, and scienciness is a little like truthiness. On the other hand, you’re saying that positivism is a very weak moral accusation, and it’s always seemed to me to be used as a quite strong moral accusation (I may have to dig out my master’s thesis on this: does positivism lead straight to Hitler?, to put it a little bluntly). But what’s fascinating is that you can’t put both of those facts together.

“On the other hand, you’re saying that positivism is a very weak moral accusation”

I didn’t mean that. I think it’s a very weak philosophical or argumentative accusation when applied to a subject that science has so much to say about. “Trolling” was what I characterized as a very weak moral accusation when applied to the serious desire to see people hanged.

Basically, this could have been a post that really digs into why KW chose the 4 words or phrases that he chose, and why, scientifically, they don’t imply what he thinks that they imply. But that would require a knowledge of science that John doesn’t have. Or it could have been a post that just goes back over why is isn’t ought, and positivism. But that doesn’t even do justice to KW’s argument, such as it is. KW says that our ideas about what’s permissible have changed as the science / technology behind when we can treat a fetus as viable has changed. Sure, a post that says positivism = Hitler (and there’s Godwin) could be made, but it doesn’t really say anything about why people start talking in sciency phrases on this topic.

Brett @192,

Yes, words have meaning, and context. Always context. Look up “myopia,” for instance.

Ze @174: The fetus, that’s who

My point was, the fetus is not a who. It has no experiences and no consciousness and never has had any. It is not part of any relationships (except with its mother), so no one else has any feelings about it either. It is not a person, moral subject, or whatever you like. The idea that someone is not a person, moral subject, etc. while sleeping seemed so daffy that I was (am) flummoxed and didn’t (don’t) know exactly what to say. If you really want an answer to the “argument” from temporary unconsciousness, I suppose one could say that sleep is only partial unconsciousness; dreams are a form of consciousness, and there is plenty of brain activity short of dreaming during sleep. And then there are all the people involved, the people who have feelings about the sleeping person, whereas (again) there are no people except the mother who have (personal, not ideological) feelings about the fetus.

I feel annoyed when rationalistic calculations are applied, wham-bam, to organic social phenomena

Now I’m annoyed, in turn. What’s “rationalistic” about saying that killing a fetus, a clump of cells that no one except its mother has any reason to have any feelings about, and who fears her life may capsize if she continues the pregnancy, is prima facie more justifiable than killing a full-grown person, full of feelings and the focus of other people’s feelings? It seems to me that I’m asking: “Really, what can justify imposing all that suffering on an already conflicted woman?” while you’re trying to answer that question with far-fetched analogies between the fetus and temporarily unconscious adults. Are you sure you’re not the one who’s being rationalistic?

temp: ““Organism” is not a well-defined concept in science. I think any reasonable person would agree that Henrietta Lacks is dead, and has been for over six decades, but cells from her tumor live on in thousands of labs across the world.”

The ability to keep cells alive in a lab doesn’t change a cell into an organism. And in any case (unless the science has changed since I looked at this) a cancer tumor isn’t a multicellular organism: it’s a collection of cells, all with the same DNA but possible differences in expression.

I agree that “organism” is not a well-defined concept, which is why KW chose it. One counterargument is to just point that out, complete with examples of why the biological world doesn’t separate out into neatly identifiable organisms. (And there are some weird cases out there, if you go to nonhuman organisms). But you can’t both do that *and* say that none of this matters because of positivism. Or, you can, but both arguments make the other weaker because they are simultaneous.

Rich, first:

“Trolling” was what I characterized as a very weak moral accusation when applied to the serious desire to see people hanged.

Like I said, I didn’t read the worst of it, so I wasn’t aware (and still am not certain) of the fact that there was stuff in there that was too bad to permit the linked post to be engaged with. I would call that exactly trolling, though: terrible stuff, combined with something that would engage serious people across the spectrum, who would then give extra prominence to the terrible stuff that was probably the real point.

But also: I think it’s a very weak philosophical or argumentative accusation when applied to a subject that science has so much to say about.

I think the point (and the accusation of positivism) is that science, in particular biology (and I assume this is some evo-devo stuff the guy has in mind), doesn’t actually say anything, actually, about personhood or the immorality of murder. The objection is that “personhood can’t be reduced to physical science” doesn’t mean “when you start talking about personhood, you’re talking about religious mysticism.” It doesn’t mean biologists can say something about personhood while using only biological concepts, or that non-biologists can discover “scientific” truth about personhood by picking and choosing sentences out of biology texts. Again, though, KW doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would say this–and there are some on the left who say something similar–which suggests he is “trolling,” though maybe he’s not.

I’m really not seeing why you’re suggesting John should instead have written a post explaining a basic concept like “is/ought.”

KW says that our ideas about what’s permissible have changed as the science / technology behind when we can treat a fetus as viable has changed.

I don’t see this (though I haven’t clicked through and don’t want to). As far as I can tell, he’s treating words like “organism” as things anyone can understand no matter when (or whether) they learned biology. That’s part of the problem.

positivism = Hitler (and there’s Godwin)

I think you should be the first comment on Corey Robin’s next Arendt post and write “Godwin!” Seriously, outside a philosophical context (where the definition of positivism is a bit different, it seems to me), to me (others’ mileage may vary, if they’ve been reading different things) someone using the word “positivism” always suggests a certain critique of science, especially social science, as racist, eliminationist, and so on. I didn’t think that was quite what John had in mind, but in comments it seems to be pulled more and more to a different context.

geo @ 201

Leaving aside the possibility that BB is a) paid for his trouble, or b) a sadomasochist with too much time on his hands, he’s interesting insofar as he appears willing to defend the indefensible with something other than a club. I’ve wondered myself why, given how consistently he’s tried the patience of the CT posters, he hasn’t manage to get himself banned by one or more of them.

I admit I still have no explanation for our hosts’ tolerance — they can speak for themselves in any event — but it may be that they find, as I do, that the spectacle of someone sorely afflicted with the libertarian mysticism of the individual, and willing to pursue it indefatigably wherever it leads, is useful as an object lesson. Here’s how tangled up you can get if you take this nonsense seriously may be enough justification to allow him the freedom of the stage, even if he never quite drops the ostrich feather fans until well after the lights have gone out.

Why the hemming-and-hawing about not being “pro-abortion,” how no one is “pro-abortion?”

The status of a fetus is irrelevant and the power to control when and how one has children is an amazing thing. I don’t see any reason to shy away from being “pro-abortion.” The world would be a clearly more horrible place, and was clearly a more horrible place, when women had little control over pregnancy. When has an increased ability to control one’s own reproductive process been bad, ever?

I for one am not going to buy into the bullshit that reproductive control is something that one should first of all be ashamed and regretful about.

GiT,

It’s not hemming and hawing. It’s framing. In politics, framing is (unfortunately) everything. Framing it as “pro-abortion” gives the right a serious edge in the discussion, and we know this from countless surveys. When people are asked if they are for a woman’s right to choose, or for a woman’s personal autonomy, or for a woman’s control over her reproductive system, they support that at a much, much higher rate than if asked about abortion specifically.

Fair or not, this is a battle for hearts and minds. Yes, there are principles well beyond that. But in a diverse nation, especially one where the right is granted so many advantages, politically, by the Establishment (which is itself conservative) . . . . . it’s smart to use the best frame.

For many Americans, the idea of an abortion is still very problematic. If you allow the right to determine the context, that won’t change.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/new-challenge-alabama-law-puts-pregnant-teens-trial

Who cares about the lives of women anyway?

“Unless genuinely medically necessary, sure. I also favor hanging women who beat their children to death.”

Again, the number of women who have late term abortions for reasons other then medical necessity is so small as to be irrelevant.

/Of course you apparently think that rape rarely happens….

Brett,

A zygote isn’t an infant.

Plume, a ‘zygote’ is a cell resulting from the fusion of an egg and a sperm. The developing fetus is only a zygote for hours. Calling an infant capable of survival if delivered a “zygote” is just a way of depersonalizing a person, so you can justify their death.

“Unless that number is ‘zero’, it is significant.”

It isn’t to me. At least not in terms of setting public policy. What is monstrous is the idea of hanging desperate women.

“It’s not hemming and hawing. It’s framing”

Yes, and you’re buying in to regressive, right wing framing by talking about how regretful and unfortunate abortion is.

While looking through the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, I came upon an anonymous poem of 1740, “Epitaph on a Child Killed by Procured Abortion.” I quote the first several lines because they reflect the uncanny ontological status of an embryo that I wrote about above:

O thou, whose eyes were closed in death’s pale night,
Ere fate revealed thee to my aching sight,
Ambiguous something, by no standard fixed,
Frail span, of naught and of existence mixed,
Embryo, imperfect as my tort’ring though,
Sad outcast of existence and of nought…

GiT @222,

No. I’m not buying into their framing. I’m trying to counter it. It’s playing right into their hands to suggest it’s not a serious matter. The association then becomes “These women don’t take life seriously. They don’t care about life.” And as Rich suggests @223, this can lead to an eye for an eye scenario. There are dangerous kooks out there, whipped up into a frenzy by comments like KW’s, who will think, “She doesn’t care about the life inside her, so why should we care about hers?”

It’s not a good strategy.

IMO, the better strategy is to promote family planning and the prevention of unwanted pregnancies, along with personal autonomy for women. Choice. The “safe, legal and rare” idea, basically.

“What is monstrous is the idea of hanging desperate women.”

Desperate murderers. Women can be as desperate as they like, and if it doesn’t lead them to commit murder, I would not suggest executing them.

” I’m trying to counter it.”

Saying, ‘no one is pro-abortion’ doesn’t counter, it reaffirms. Women’s autonomy is a serious matter, and how children and pregnancy affect and either affirm or constrain a woman’s autonomy are serious matters. Fertilized eggs not coming to fruition because a woman would prefer it didn’t, in contrast, is pretty trivial.

“If the right in America is legitimately Manichean black and white evil, then the Left is morally lax for tolerating their freedom of political action.”

Yes, I’ve been saying from the beginning that dismissing these statements is morally lax. It’s not lax to “tolerat[e] their freedom of political action” — I value our freedoms, and I don’t support throwing them away just because terrorists exist. But the last person who these terrorists shot was Dr. George Tiller, as he was serving as an usher at his church in 2009. By going on about how women who get abortions should be hanged in front of an audience of extreme right-wingers, Williamson is making the next assassination more likely. Yet people here just can’t seem to believe that he’d actually, seriously, do such a thing and treat his statements with moral seriousness.

“I wish all Israeli settlers would go missing” from a person with no power to inspire that this might actually happen -> fire that professor. “Women who get abortions should be hanged” in front of an audience that includes demonstrated killers -> oh he must be trolling. I should really just stop commenting on CT again.

There’s three comments that I think are linked, so I’m going to do that:

Brett Bellmore 10.02.14 at 7:48 pm: The developing fetus is only a zygote for hours. Calling an infant capable of survival if delivered…

Jeff R. 10.02.14 at 7:49 pm: It’s difficult to imagine a difference in the moral standing of an 8-month baby in a NICU ward and and equally developed fetus still in the womb.

But also this:

Rich Puchalsky 10.02.14 at 5:28 pm: The ability to keep cells alive in a lab doesn’t change a cell into an organism.

I get the feeling that these are fairly consistent views across the anti-abortion crowd. Rich makes a reasonable point in response, that just because a fetus *can* survive in the lab, doesn’t mean that it should be considered morally equivalent to a person. I realise I’m mis-characteristing an anti-abortion point to say that, but I find it hard not to see it that way. The fetus can survive, if the mother doesn’t want it let the anti-abortion people take care of it.

The problem with “it can survive outside the womb, therefore it’s a person” is that it invites the pro-abortion crowd to say “yes, exactly, make it so!”, and support removal of the unborn person from the womb when the womb-owner wishes. And the anti-abortion people know that, so they try to avoid the argument and instead switch from “8 month fetus” to “zygote” abruptly in the middle of the discussion.

FWIW, I am absolutely pro-abortion. Happily, joyously so. Abortion has repeatedly proved to be one of the key factors that liberates people from slavery, so I think it’s a great thing. Ideally it would be one of those transition technologies that’s only really useful for a couple of decades until contraception and sex education bring the unwanted pregancy rate down, but if that’s the contraception favoured by a significant portion of society let them keep using it. And lets not pretend that denying sex education and contraception to young people is anything other than a pro-abortion or pro-slavery stance. You can’t have young people acting freely but without effective access to contraception and not end up with a lot of pregnant young people. Extreme repression, forced pregnancy or sex education… you have to choose one. And even in the USA, the level of repression required to keep young people from having sex isn’t available.

GiT @230,

Believe what you want. Just don’t accuse me of falling for right wing anything. I despise the right too much on moral, ethical, philosophical and every which way grounds for that.

The thing is, you and I are saying the same thing, at least with your second sentence. But the last sentence strikes me as being closely linked to the second, and I don’t see much of a contrast between the two — and definitely not enough to go from “serious” to “trivial.” In short, I’m not seeing that you’ve supported your premise. I think you’re supporting mine.

All right, one more:

“Also, I think it’s a mistake to think we can only do one thing: either discuss science or object to positivism, but not both. Why not both?”

Right-wingers often argue that we should not do anything about global warming because it doesn’t exist, and because it’s harmless or even beneficial, and because it’s harmful but it would be too costly to do anything about it. You don’t think that arguing all three of these at once makes the reader think that these arguments must not be individually well founded? If positivism invalidates the argument, there’s no need to get into whether he’s treating “organism” correctly. Doing so just makes it clear that you don’t really think the positivism bit is convincing. And vice versa.

I’m not going to get into the science in detail, and I’m not trying to “gotcha” for a mistake. But you aren’t (for example) PZ Myers, and he would be capable of writing a kind of post that you aren’t.

“On the one hand, you are right: in an environment where abortion providers are killed, this is inflammatory. But calling for changes to the law is well within free speech limits. As to whether he’s ‘serious’? I suppose yes and no. I don’t suppose even he himself really knows, so I doubt you know, Rich. A lot of trolls are sort of ‘serious’, in their crazy way.”

He’s not a troll! This is the bait-and-switch that annoys me the most. He’s a named writer for a well-known political publication, with every expectation of being read — an expectation that you have helped to make true, in a small way. If he was librulssuck461, you wouldn’t write a post about it. I’m not calling for his free speech to be infringed on. His internal mental state, whether he is “serious” or not, is unknowable and kind of beside the point. His speech, because of content and audience, should be condemned, and part of that is presuming that he’s serious about what he claims to be serious about.

I should say I think that you’re right on the not-a-troll thing, I was just contesting that one point I quoted, not your entire post.

Sebastion H. @243,

You misquoted me. I didn’t say that. Not in any way, shape or form. Please be more careful next time with your attributions.

” Torture is intrinsically wrong, dangerous for the rule of law, and a shitty way of gathering reliable information. ”

Note that this isn’t analogous to the climate change argument triad because these reasons aren’t contradictory, while the GW arguments are.

You can believe that torture is wrong, that it erodes the rule of law, and that it’s ineffective, because all three could be true. But you can’t reasonably believe climate change isn’t happening, while you believe that it is happening but it’s harmless, while you believe it is happening and it’s harmful but it can’t be stopped.

If you use those three arguments interchangeably when they suit you, you’re not serious or you’re unhinged or you’re dishonest. Not serious seems the kindest assumption.

“Obviously these aren’t my opinions in this world, but in some hypothetical world it’s entirely possible that global warming might not be happening,that it’s unfortunate that global warming is not happening, and that people depend so strongly on a particular energy source that switching to a different one is infeasible.”

It’s possible, but irrelevant. If you argue both that it isn’t happening, and that it is happening but it’s good, then at least one of your arguments is a sham. You can’t believe both of them because they are directly contradictory. Mustering a list of arguments that contradict each other is not the same as mustering a list of arguments which are consistent.

One last time: what are the cogent arguments for full moral standing for the preimplantation zygote/embryo as an individual–as opposed to a sperm-like pretender to moral individuality–that can be murdered? I’ve tried to say that is the issue for the ultraconservative, and given that there are no final objective biological facts that underlie claims for moral posit of that standing given the biological vicissitudes of what can happen (twinning, fused twinning that can result in one or conjoined individuals, heterozygotes) post-fertilization until at least the point of implantation, then there is no point of assigning full moral status to anything prior to what can develop after implantation on the uterine wall. There can be no one fact of the matter of what constitutes the morally significant individual in all cases prior to implantation. To claim otherwise as ultraconservatives do is irrational and in defiance of those facts.

Here’s why I think these arguments conflict with each other in particular: the positivism one is categorical, while the science one is not. If you want to tell someone that morality can not be derived from science — that is does not imply ought, however you’d like to put it — then whether they’ve gotten a particular item of science right or not doesn’t matter. If you’re arguing about the science, then of course it does matter whether it’s correct. So to do both, you’re either saying “Your science is wrong, and by the way that doesn’t matter” or in the reverse order “The science doesn’t matter, and by the way yours is wrong.”

Maybe the real point is the positivism and the science notes in the original (e.g. pointing out that twins have the same DNA, saying that it’s at least theoretically possible to gestate a clone of oneself which would not be genetically distinct) are just sort of there. I don’t think this is convincing. The moral conflicts around in vitro fertilization, “snowflake children”, and viability (i.e. what happens when a woman does not want to bear a child, but the fetus is viable if an operation is done to remove it from the woman’s body) are not determined by, but are highly informed by, getting the science right. The idea that no one can write about this unless they’re the most knowledgeable person on the planet is, of course, wrong, but there’s a basic standard of knowledgeability required so write about it in a useful way that I think applies.

With regard to whether KW is a troll — from your description, you clearly have a theory about why he writes what he does. (“I take a troll to be someone who publishes patently poor quality stuff, who is probably (but not necessarily) aware that they aren’t bothering to write or argue at all well, with the main intent of angering the other side and riling up their own side. The goal (conscious or unconscious) is enjoyment of malicious glee.”) It’s a theory that to a large extent excuses him from any serious moral responsibility for what he writes — he’s doing it largely for personal enjoyment, doesn’t really know what he’s doing, intends only to make people feel various emotions, etc.

At the same time, the right wing in America keeps on having political successes of a sort. They have a strategy to make abortions harder to get by making them geographically unavailable in many places. And the campaign of terrorism that I described upthread assisted dramatically in this. How sure are you that your explanation is correct? I’m not positing a conspiracy theory in which some political operative told KW what to say. But KW doesn’t care if his words are inflammatory, and may indeed positively welcome that. KW is saying “Women who get abortions should be killed, and I really mean that seriously”, which presumably means that he has to take responsibility for all the consequences of his words. But you’re saying that he doesn’t really mean it, doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Who do we believe, him or you?

Well — given that we can’t know what’s in his heart, etc — *why* should we believe you rather than him? I suggest that the real reason is that it’s too upsetting to think that there’s a writer for a well-known political publication who really wants to see millions of women killed. So even though he says it’s true, it can’t be true.

Sorry plume, it appears it was MPA Who said that. I’d like to know her sources.

@200 “Are you sure you’re not the one who’s being rationalistic?”

I was merely trying to demonstrate that your approach could easily lead to the opposite conclusion; sorry if it wasn’t clear. Anyway, my concern is that this sort of rationalizations runs into the usual trouble with things like eugenics and euthanasia (or worse). It gets creepy. We could, instead, approach it as a subject of cultural anthropology or sociology; look for explanations, rather than rationalizations. All I’m saying.

“At the same time, the right wing in America keeps on having political successes of a sort.”

That’s to be expected in a democracy where the public consensus is well to the pro-life side of the judicially imposed status quo. I think the pro-choice movement’s members sometimes forget, in light of their victories in court, how badly they do in the court of public opinion. (Two thirds in favor of outlawing abortion in the second trimester, 80+% in the third.)

Which is not to say that the pro-life movement would not, if given all it wants, impose rules far to the other side of public opinion. (Less than a third think it should be illegal in that first trimester.) Both movements are run by extremists, and fueled by people who are not nearly so extreme as their leaders.

But the simple fact is that, by virtue of having the judiciary on your side, the pro-choice movement HAS managed to push public police far out of disconnect with popular opinion on the subject. Which is a political advantage for your foes, even if the courts limit the consequences of that advantage.

“You seem to be making some sort of ‘well OBVIOUSLY we can’t chew gum and walk at the same time’ argument. But why can’t we?”

I can only repeat: “So to do both, you’re either saying “Your science is wrong, and by the way that doesn’t matter” or in the reverse order “The science doesn’t matter, and by the way yours is wrong.”” It’s like saying “It’s impossible for you to fly in your proposed heavier-than-air aircraft because if God had meant people to fly, he would have given us wings, and you won’t be able to fly in your proposed aircraft because you’ve gotten the wing curvature wrong but if you’d gotten it right it might work.” If you don’t get this, you don’t get it and we should move on.

“Acting irresponsibly doesn’t excuse you from responsibility.”

Of course it does, to some extent. Manslaughter is not murder. Carelessly having your brakes fail in your car because you didn’t maintain them and hitting someone is not the same as setting out to run them over. Trolling is not the same as using dog-whistle politics to try to get people killed because (as you say) someone who believes that abortion is murder should want it to be punished like homicide, and the state isn’t doing that.

To recap the known facts in the case: there’s a terrorist campaign in the U.S. to restrict abortion through acts of violence. Thousands of violent acts (murders, attempted murders, bombings, arson) have been committed. Everyone agrees that when an ideologue tells their right-wing audience that certain people should be killed, it increases the chance that another such act will be committed.

So you’re telling us that KW doesn’t know what he’s doing. Because of your personal incredulity, as far as I can make out.

I don’t know whether he knows what he’s doing either. This is called “plausible deniability”. The point is, he should be treated as if he does, since we’re not in a court of law and he claims to be a serious writer who has thought this through. At minimum, you agree that “he is creating a climate in which more criminal violence might happen”.

I’d say that using your position in the mass media to create a climate in which more criminal violence might happen is an evil act. It’s not “trolling” by any definition of trolling that I’ve seen. If you can’t confront this evil when you write about it, then I really do think it’s better for you to be silent about it and pretend it didn’t happen, because National Review is only mass media because people talk about it. You don’t go to Stormfront, find something, and post here “Wow, this skinhead who says that the state should execute all black people is really trolling.”

‘… the public consensus is well to the pro-life side….’

A casual scan of my memory and Google suggest that when abortion bans are the subjects of referendums, they are generally defeated, sometimes in surprisingly conservative jurisdictions (South Dakota, Mississippi). Anti-abortionism seems to have better luck with polls which have no legal consequences.

To proceed anecdotally, I recall being at a dinner party several years ago populated mostly by persons of Italian descent, Roman Catholic faith, and a fair spread of ideological coloration. One woman delivered a brief harangue about the evil of abortion. One of her daughters then asked, ‘How many abortions have you had, Ma? Was it three, or four?’ The party passed thankfully on to other subjects. I gather from instances like this that there are many people who think that abortions are not nice and people should not get themselves into a situation where they have to have them. These people will answer opinion polls one way and vote another, at least if they think their votes may have any practical effect on their lives.

To some extent the Supreme Court has relieved the public of any responsibility to discuss and make decisions about the issue seriously. One can rant freely about banning abortions knowing well that such a ban is very unlikely to take place. This does allow a sort of ‘politics’ to froth up, especially along right-wing channels, as a form of entertainment and exploitation. The non-Left Left (Democrats) get their turn in this game at national election time when they can run abject servants of the money and war machines for high office, declaring that failure to vote for their monster will let the other side win and take reproductive freedom away.

In fact, I doubt if the ruling class wants an overt, effective ban on abortion to be instituted, other than in backwoods locales, because it might lead to political agitation, radicalism. and massive organized disobedience, especially among the now mostly quiet young. Better to sneak up on them with other chains.

“That’s to be expected in a democracy where the public consensus is well to the pro-life side of the judicially imposed status quo. I think the pro-choice movement’s members sometimes forget, in light of their victories in court, how badly they do in the court of public opinion. (Two thirds in favor of outlawing abortion in the second trimester, 80+% in the third.)”

The poll data you cite show a strong majority opposed to any reversal of “the judicially imposed status quo”. Did you notice that?

It also shows very strong opposition to a total ban on abortions. Given that a total ban is the stated objective of the anti-abortion industry, and of the Republican Party, I don’t think you can characterize it as showing support for that movement or party on this issue.

That aside, it highlights that many people see this as a morally murky area. A majority of people say abortions are immoral, while a majority also say they should be legal. Given the numbers, a very large portion of those in the former group are also in the latter group.

‘Sources of riboflavin [vitamin B2] are milk, cheese, leaf vegetables, liver, kidneys, legumes, yeast, mushrooms, and almonds.’ (Wikipedia) B2 is unlikely to be a vegetarian problem.

Maybe B12 was meant. Although B12 is produced by bacteria, it usually gets to humans via animal-derived foods (meat and dairy products) and can therefore be a problem for vegans.

The laws of nature require me to think about Brett’s tasty tasty flesh.

Sigh…

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/10/03/abortion_in_texas_court_upholds_restrictions_shutting_down_all_but_eight.html

In Washington state we legalized abortion in 1970 by popular referendum. In 1991 the voters reaffirmed access, and rejected a late term abortion ban in 1998. Low income women have access to state funded abortions. This means that even though I live in a pretty conservative eastern county, there is a nearby clinic and a number of hospitals that will handle abortion, and the poor are not left behind.

We also legalized cannabis, gay marriage, and assisted suicide for the terminally ill by popular referendum. The states actually do differ in significant ways. The socially conservative wing isn’t winning-while-losing everywhere. Some places they are just plain losing. And I’d be willing to bet that in a generation the rest of the nation has shifted closer to present day Washington than present day Texas on social issues.

Eh. IMPO, I’d say he trolled Marcotte pretty good. She ended up, maybe because of the forum, treating him as basically proposing a policy, and associated him by proximity with more reasonable anti-abortion activists, who “only” want to “protect women’s health.”

By comparison, Holbo only associated his scholarship with Jonah Goldberg’s.

I agree that Mr. Williamson is not trolling (stirring up trouble for the sake of stirring up trouble). He may be, but my experience with committed, dedicated anti-abortionists is that they regard abortion as the moral equivalent of the Holocaust (and they use that language). Acts of terrorism, threats of mass executions, other forms of violence, all are justified forms of opposition. All these involved arguments about the personhood of the zygote-embryo-fetus are irrelevant to them, because they already have the one true truth and they know it. Involved, complex, nuanced arguments are for liberals. The only thing that keeps anti-abortionists in check at the moment is force — at present mostly the force of the law, along with their inability to achieve political power. Mr. Williamson is simply being honest and consistent.

Brett @ 262
To save you the trouble of looking for the elusive evidence, I did a quick google
http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/R-D/Vegetarians-have-significantly-lower-mortality-rates-reveals-new-study

I apologise to author for going off topic and will now stop posting about this here, though happy to proselytise for vegetarian/ low meat lifestyles on any suitable occasion.

A large majority of US citizens seem to want something more like what is available in France or Germany or Sweden–abortions easily available early in pregnancy, and very sharply limited to reviewable and provable medical complications starting somewhere toward the middle of the second trimester.

But you can’t do this. Laws which require weighing-of-factors to determine the appropriate outcome don’t work in the US, because huge swathes of your population think “judgement” means “carte blanche to insert your prejudices and preferences”

Same reason you’ve got your stupid first amendment rather than any sort of sane free-speech policy, say.

“Eh. IMPO, I’d say he trolled Marcotte pretty good. She ended up, maybe because of the forum, treating him as basically proposing a policy, and associated him by proximity with more reasonable anti-abortion activists, who “only” want to “protect women’s health.””

What?

John Holbo and I were debating rhetorical strategies, basically. He wrote that assuming that KW was serious would be “assuming something doubtful for the sake of putting yourself at a tactical disadvantage, rhetorically.” And… no, I don’t think so. Instead, what her article points what he think, and then associates every supposedly more reasonable anti-abortion advocate with him, because he is only bringing what they say to its logical conclusion — the judicial execution of millions of people. He didn’t troll Amanda Marcotte. She used his evil statements to make people think about this for the upcoming election, in an article in USA Today.

Rich,

I’m not surprised we disagree about her article. But there’s a whole section in there, three or four paragraphs, that consists almost entirely of saying nice things about those she calls “mainstream anti-abortion” people. Literally, there are about five words that would have to be removed to fit it into a PR peace about the anti-abortion movement. That’s too long to expect readers to remember the point. From one of the most vociferous defenders of abortion rights in the US, I expect more. Maybe USA Today couldn’t handle that.

@ 287

“Most people aren’t lawyers and don’t know what the ‘judicially imposed status quo’ is in each state. It would be like if you asked people who believed that vaccines caused autism “Do you believe in science?” and then wanted to use an 80% “yes” rate to prove that they didn’t believe vaccines caused autism. The problem is that the judicially imposed status quo is much more pro-choice than about 65-75% of the US public. ”

Perhaps, but isn’t it a problem to first note that the public, when polled, generally supports existing law; then say the public is ignorant of existing law; and then say existing law should be changed to better suit the desires of the public? If public opinion is relevant, why ignore and denigrate it? If the public is an ass, why change the law to confirm with their views.

(Setting aside, of course, the problem of understanding what the public wants, once you’ve decided polls don’t accurately reflect it. You’ll be left inventing statistics.)

Rich, do you mean in Google+ or something? I’m not getting any results on this piece appearing elsewhere?

Here is the part of the piece that discusses the “mainstream”:

The recent rash of anti-abortion laws has been justified mostly as attempts to protect women’s health. In justifying the signing of a bill designed to shut down nearly all abortion clinics in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry said his intention was to “support the health of Texas women.”

Testifying in favor of laws that hold abortion clinics to much stiffer regulatory protocols than similar health clinics, Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn. said she had women’s best interests at heart, claiming falsely that abortion “imposes many serious medical risks to the mother,” and that “we must do everything in our power to protect any woman who decides to have an abortion.” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., agrees.

That’s a lot of concern for people who, from the anti-abortion point of view, are child murderers. After all, it’s not as if abortion happens by accident.

(Quote ends here, if blockquote doesn’t work.)

Here’s the central point of her own argument: “It seems to be an effort to punt accusations from feminists that the anti-abortion movement has nothing to do with protecting “life” but is instead an anti-sex movement that wants to punish women for having non-procreative sex.” (“Punt” is the nastiest word she uses about the anti-abortion movement in the whole piece.) So you’re right that she says KW shows up the anti-abortion movement as what abortion rights activists have been claiming about them all along. But this part of her argument is squashed in at the end, and undermined by the rhetoric of the rest. She’s asking a lot of readers who disagree with her to untangle it all, ignore the rhetoric that matches their current preferences, and pick up on a claim you and I already believe.

John, politically overall I think your take on this is near impeccable. But (ultra)conservatives do play the abortion-is-murder card on placards outside clinics, and the Rick Perry “women’s health” card in keeping with the language of Roe itself on later-term regulation when it comes to actual legislation. One side of the mouth touts Roe, the other the Vatican or the Southern Baptist Convention, and in due proportion to getting the job done. Awful and awfully effective.

“If the complaint is that therefore I should have written (something like) her article about his tweet, rather than my post about his bizarre argument about the personhood dodge, I plead bafflement, to the nth degree. Even if her article is alright – which I think it mostly is – why does it follow that there is anything wrong with my post?”

It’s morally lax. If someone says “I really think lots of people should be hanged” and you say “He doesn’t mean it, he’s just trolling, don’t take it seriously” then what are you doing, really?

And what’s the point of doing things like analyzing his bizarre argument about the personhood dodge if it’s all a troll? Trolls write anything that gets a reaction, and logical analysis of what they write is valueless. If that’s really what it is, then don’t feed the trolls.

I have no doubt that you could write something interesting if you started with something interesting. But even assuming that this guy is just trolling, and that you were just having fun applying the tools of philosophy to his argument, I don’t think you did a good job. I’m actually kind of surprised that you didn’t get (if only to refute) my point about how a categorical argument and a contingent argument are mutually contradictory: the contingent argument (“your argument doesn’t work because your science is wrong”) implies that his argument could work if his science was right, while the categorical argument (“your argument doesn’t work because is doesn’t imply ought”) says that any concern with the science is misdirected. Basically, I think that reading these people is making you more careless, because there’s no serious pushback possible from them, intellectually.

John, I have a very small statistical window on my town, Manitowoc, WI, on this issue of early-term abortions, because I have conducted anonymous surveys of my ethics/bioethics classes on cases of abortion since the later 1980s (collectively about 50 classes; around 1000+ students collectively). Here’s one basic scenario I pose (of 4), where I ask if the outcome is morally acceptable (the question has not changed since I introduced it):

a. A young single teenage woman aborts her pregnancy at eight weeks in part because it interferes with college and career plans.
YES NO ??

Please note the phraseology. The “in part” allows students to mentally fill in assumptions about why she is pregnant; they may assume nonchalant “choice” or date-rape or whatever. Few of course ever think of more insidious scenarios and accompanying comments (I require that) are telling.

What I can tell you is this. In the 80s into the early 90s the YES answers (assumptions nevertheless) were about 2:1 over the others. Through the 90s they began to balance. By the early 2000s till now they trended in the reverse direction and the YES response is now about 1:2.

My conclusion is that so-called pro-life forces have won over the under-informed opinion of my students (especially given the chance that the question allows background assumptions about “choice” to operate).

This is one small data point. But one I suspect has been replicated across the good-old-US of A. FWIW.

I am thinking about cloning, but for a different reason — it isn’t because a human clone would be genetically identical to the human from whom he or she was cloned. The very special thing about zygotes (and biologists now know a few generations of daughter cells of zygotes) is that in the right conditions (AKA a womb) their daughter cells will be around for decades and definitely become human beings. So (II understand C) Williamson concludes they are human beings already.

But in cloning some other human cell is taken, the nucleous removed and put in an enucliated zygote. under the right conditions, the nucleous has descendents forever and some collections of them (with cytoplasm) are human beings. Why is allowing the white blood cells in a drop of blood to die not murder ? We can save them with a zygote cytoplasm transplant and the assistance of a womb. By Williamson’s logic, it appears that human cloning is not only morally acceptable but morally required rescue of every drop of blood.

The (very limited) logic of the Roe v Wade viability standard is that we as a society can’t force people to sacrifice parts of their bodies for others — we can’t requisition and transplant kidneys and we can’t requisition and invade with a placenta and tear uteruses. If the aborted embryo or fetus can make it on its own, then it is a he or a she a human being just like a naturally born child. So why is cloning white blood cells not as mandatory as not-aborting embryos ?

1) cloning isn’t natural. How can this matter morally ? It is something we can do for the poor nucleous at risk of imminent death.

2) the clone is a mixture of cells — some of the cloned organism will come from the donor of the cytoplasm not of the nucleous. Does this mean that people who have had organ transplants aren’t human and can be killed ?

3) cloning is a very heroic measure. Bearing a child is nothing much. We can demand that people bear a zygote to embryo to fetus to child, but it is unreasonable to demand the huge effort of cloning to save an nucleous to zygote to embryo to fetus to child. This is crazy — people are not forced to donate life saving bone marrow (really there is a precedent) and that is nothing nothing compared to pregnancy (I have personally never donated marrow or been pregnant I am relying on an source who I won’t name).

This is too long, but there is another kind of cloning taking a morula or blastocyst and making identical twins by cutting it in two. (a morula is a stage even before blastocyst).

So the argument is
1) if there are twins we aren’t allowed to kill one (as noted in the post)
2) if embryos are people then once a very early embryo splits in two (becoming identical twins) we can’t selectively abort one of them.
Both of the two clumps of cells are individual human beings as soon as they physically seperate in the not observed but inferred process by which identical twins are formed.
3) when do they become two people not one ? It presumably has something to do with some cells moving further from others so they aren’t stuck together anymore. How can this be the difference between murder and the (unethical but not murderous) experiment of removing some cells from a morulla not killing it and implanting the still viable embryo ? Or if removing some cells without killing is morally unacceptable then how do we morally take blood etc.

Finally, If physical separation is key is it OK to kill one of two siamese twins ?

It is undeniably true that biologists can take one viable extremely early stage embryo and make it into two viable extremely early stage embryos (by separating the cells into two clumps). This has been done with mammals. In any case, for ethical reasoning, we could and should imagine the possibility even if it doesn’t work with animals on earth (it”s done all the time with plants as in “cuttings”).

If refraining from doing this like killing one of two identical twins ?

I wanted to reply to bianca steele, who went to the trouble of quoting part of the Marcotte article: I don’t think that the rhetoric involved is as mis-executed as you do. In particular, there’s a “falsely” there in the middle and a “That a lot of concern for people who, from the anti-abortion point of view, are child murderers”. It’s not perfect writing, but I think it works well enough as an example of rhetoric that takes what KW wrote seriously.

For the rest, I agree with Layman above. The anti-abortionists have three things: a desired policy outcome, a moral / logical justification, and a psychological disgust at “ladysex”. I don’t see these three things as contradictory: they support each other. In particular, if they get their policy outcome, then the machinery of the state goes into play and starts to punish people. Are they really going to say “Oh, wait — I guess that I was really just disgusted at sex, I didn’t mean for people to be really executed”. No. They’re authoritarians. They’re not going to have a revolution because they really care about moral concerns: that’s a leftist thing. They will, though, happily participate in killing the people who they are disgusted by.

“If half the country are pro-lifers, and if ‘scratch a pro-lifer, find a would-be murderer’ is true, half the country is poised to murder (or execute) a substantial subset of the other half (for having, or helping facilitate, abortion). I doubt that is true. ”

I think you’re ignoring the fact that most people who would do violence are deterred by consequences. A person who isn’t ready to kill an abortion recipient today might well be willing to have the state do it for them tomorrow. Doesn’t history clearly demonstrate that?

It would be helpful if you described the regulatory regime you think they seek, if they could have all they want. Are all abortions illegal? Are all parties liable? What are the consequences of violation? Is the law preventative – that is, will we physically prevent acts of abortion, by securing those who seek them?

John

I think Rich has a point. The KWs of this world want to stuff the genie of female equality back into the bottle, an inherently more difficult and violent process than just letting it stay there. They can’t return to a world where abortion is not mentioned, happens under the table and is occasionally prosecuted, because that world is gone, along with the world where sex (and birth) out of wedlock were commonplace, but not socially sanctioned and therefore unevenly persecuted. Once the full power of the state comes into play, then meeting resistance with greater and greater force in the holy cause of reaction becomes practically obligatory. KW’s rhetoric is an instance of this.

John, re 311: I think one of the things that Williamson’s kind of posturing aims to do is to normalize talking about killing Doers Of Bad Deeds. Just as right-wing Protestant Christianity in the US includes enough Catholic elements to horrify any psychic evangelical from the ’70s, so the Dominionist strain seems to keep wiggling around.

I would bet that by the end of Obama’s term, we’ll see both of these:

* Young men like Michael Brown routinely described as suicide bombers just like those crazy Muslims, out to discredit America’s fine white police officers.

* A new, very public wave of Christian militias, building on open-carry successes, carefully not talking about anyone unpleasant like McVeigh, probably lionizing decent Christian martyrs like the Weavers and the Koresh group.

Williamson helps to make that a comfortable reassuring thought for the constituency.

BTW, a blogger a Orcinus (?) coined the term ‘transmission beLt’ for the phenomenon of mainstreaming extreme views.

JH: “I think there is a wide range. ”

Does that wide range include or exclude incarceration of women who have or want abortions? If so, then the machinery of state violence is engaged.

I’ll certainly grant that not every abortion opponent is someone who would hang women for it, but some of them are, and a good many more (perhaps most) would jail them. That’s a prospect I think we should take seriously. It already leads to violence even when that violence is illegal, so I don’t think it’s wise to bet that it won’t lead to more violence when that violence carries the sanction of law. As an analogy, consider how draconian the anti-drug regime has become. In my misspent youth, in the 70’s, I don’t think many people imagined the level of state coercion and sanctioned violence that would result from the public desire to do something about casual drug use. I will not bet that ant-abortion extremists are only kidding.

“What is less clear is that they will be pushing, successfully, to execute women and medical professionals en masse; and what is still less clear is that there will – or is likely to be – a wave of extra-judicial vigilante murders.”

Wait, the “successfully” makes this more of a consequentialist argument than I think it should be. I think that the chances of them achieving their maximal goals are very small. If a right-winger says that he’d seriously like to see millions killed, do I have to estimate his chances of actually being able to do that before saying that’s evil?

Obviously there’s some kind of consequentialism involved here. If he was librulssuck461, no one would bother condemning him, and “he’s trolling” dismissive as it is would look pretty adequate. But I think it’s bad enough that he’s encouraging the extremists that do exist without also having to come up with some kind of estimation of probabilities that the U.S. will turn into The Handmaid’s Tale.

You keep coming back to “But is that really what they want?” I think it’s highly suggestive that KW insisted on hanging. (As did good old Brett here too.) As I mentioned upthread, there have only been 3 judicial executions by hanging in the 1000+ since the 70s in America. Hangings are, on the other hand, traditionally how lynch mobs in America killed people who they were disgusted by, as a means of social control. I don’t think that they have a plan to form lynch mobs tomorrow and start stringing people up, but would they like to? Sure.

I have come to realize that I view capitalists and capitalism the way that many (most?) conservatives view women’s sexuality. ie., that it is basically corrupt and corrupting, should be closely regulated and variance from established norms be punished.

All this talk about hanging… What if they settled for some measure of social ostracism; would it satisfy anyone on the pro-choice side? I don’t think so.

You mean, literally the skarlet letter?

Ah. Disturbing.

I think I hit an unexpected keyword moderation.

“Ah. Disturbing”

More disturbing than hanging or less? I’m not sure myself, which is why all that talk about hanging and terrorism seems missing the point.

“Each time a girlfriend told me she was pregnant (roughly once per girlfriend) I offered to do what she wanted — I would pay for abortion or marry her and raise the child, whichever she was OK with.”

But that’s exactly the same thing: ‘if you refuse to have an abortion, then OK, I’ll marry you’. A way of saying: ‘I don’t want to marry you, please go have an abortion’. And your girlfriend may have wanted to get married, but not after this kind of proposal: ‘if you choose to blackmail me, I’ll do it’. And if abortion wasn’t an option, the first time your girlfriend told you she was pregnant, you’d go to buy the rings, end of story.

Good Lord, J. Thomas, haven’t you ever heard of birth control?

Both partners have an equal responsibility for using birth control, needless to say. Men who do not are unbelievably feckless. Not to say ignorant. Boasting about it takes the cake.

Brett,

So, to you, death is a matter of semantics? That, of course, is a double-edged (s)word, which can be used against your “side” as well.

“So, to you, death is a matter of semantics? ”

For me, language is a matter of semantics. It is a tool for communication, and we cannot communicate if words don’t have fairly fixed meanings.

The meaning of “murder” is not the same as “kill”.

You are engaging in the fallacy of equivocation. You want the outrage of “murder” and the generality of “kill”, and you want to achieve this without having to defend the notion that all killing should cause outrage, so you pretend that “murder” already means just “kill”, and not a specific subset of that word’s meaning.

And there you are again, pretending that the words “murder” and “kill” have the same meaning.

Here’s the logic: It isn’t alright to kill the innocent, it can be alright to kill the guilty, provided they are guilty of something sufficiently bad. And killing the innocent can be sufficiently bad.

Guilty of what? Choosing whether or not to give birth? It’s up to the woman. It’s her body. People who seek to force her to give birth against her will are the guilty ones. And they are guilty of something “sufficiently bad.” Using your logic, the forced birth crowd should be hung.

And that zygote/fetus? It didn’t ask to be born, either. It’s being forced into the world against its will, too. All just-borns demonstrate this quite clearly with their wails upon leaving the womb . . . and after that time, they scream and cry for months on end. Some babies do so for years. They had no say in the matter. To assume that forcing them to come into this world is an automatic good, and that anyone who chooses not to go through this process should be hung . . . . there are no moral supports for those beliefs. Nor logical ones.

“But this isn’t consistent with the right’s oft-stated view ”

Brett is the librulssuck461 that I keep referring to as the person who really can be dismissed, and I don’t recommend actually engaging with him. I just wanted to write a stainless garment / seamless garment joke.

But yes, KW in the second linked post above writes some stuff about Gandhi. That Gandhi, he would have been able to really set you straight about the difference between murder and judicial execution. If I remember rightly, he would often scream “I am the law!” before gunning someone down. Or maybe that was Judge Dredd.

Anecdote time: this time from the woman’s side. My two abortions took place , like most abortions, when I already had children. Three under three, actually. Two different forms of birth control failed me and my partner, there was no question of proceeding with the pregnancies — we were already stretched beyond capacity, mentally, physically and financially, and our existing kids’ welfare was the major motivation. I was lucky to live in a country with civilised laws, but the memory of the desperation I felt looking at those test sticks has never left me. I would have risked a lot. I was, and should have been my decision, as a woman and a mother. No one else’s.

*It was my decision.

If someone truly had an “instinct to protect children” – they make contraception a part of their lovemaking.

Harold, it doesn’t always work. For some more than others. Of my 8 pregnancies, 3 happened while conscientiously using contraception. One on the pill ( with the help of gastro) one through a diaphragm, one through a condom which broke. Two of these ended in abortion, one in miscarriage. Contraception is never going to be the whole answer to reproductive freedom .

I am having trouble remaining civil on this topic so will step away.

The CDC defines failure rates of contraceptives as the percentage of women who will experience an unintended pregnancy within a year of typical use. The failure rate is 0.05% for an implant, 0.2% for the LNG IUD, and 0.8% for a normal IUD. The other methods have extremely high failure rates. “The pill”: 9%, diaphragm: 12%, condoms: 18%.

There are 43 million women in the U.S. who are at risk of unintended pregnancy: i.e. they are sexually active, in their childbearing years, and do not want to become pregnant. (And, I guess, have sex with men — the source I used didn’t specify.) If they all used condoms, then every year there would be 7.7 million unintended pregnancies. So, Harold, telling people about the wonders of contraceptive use is not going to make this go away.

If only the most effective contraceptive methods were used, and everyone did everything “exactly right”, the number of unintended pregnancies would drop to the tens of thousands. So KW and his friends would still be mass murderers, excuse me, advocates of a legal justice system that punishes crimes against the unborn with hanging.

“In this thread, we are not talking about a women’s right to choose; we are talking about whether or not a woman who so chooses abortion is a murderer who deserves to be hung.”

Williamson also specified in other tweets that doctors and other medical staff who do abortions procedures should be hanged, as should politicians who vote in favor of legalized abortion. So it’s a seamless garment, really.

That last one might need a little bit of extra commentary. The right wing in America is doing its best to legitimize misogyny, but hanging politicians who vote in ways that you don’t like? Are you really sure that he’s dutifully respecting the distinction between legal execution and extralegal killing? Because he seems to have some difficulty with the basics going on.

It’s not logical to oppose “murder” but murder as a response to it. On a different level, obviously, it’s like saying you are against punching someone in the nose as you punch someone in the nose.

Or, it’s like sending Americans overseas to die because you say don’t want Americans to die here. A la one of the ever changing rationales for the invasion of Iraq. Or blowing up people there because you find it outrageous that someone blew up people here. Blowing up people being the supposed object of one’s moral outrage.

The old “two wrongs don’t make a right” is woefully inadequate in the above cases, but it does apply. It’s just not logical to engage in the very act one condemns, and the more fervent the condemnation, the more bizarre it becomes.

Self-defense brings in another variable. But there is no issue of self-defense in the issue discussed in the OP. Nor was there with regard to Iraq, etc.

While I don’t for a second connect Emma with this . . . . it is true that the right loves to exaggerate the failure rate of contraception in order to peddle “abstinence” programs. It’s a scare tactic for them, and yet one more way to push for sex within the confines of marriage, only. And, for some, even within those confines, for procreation only.

They don’t want anyone, especially young people, to think of contraception as potentially liberating, or even as a method of preventing STDs. Europe has a much more advanced way of looking at this, and its much lower rates for unwanted pregnancies and STDs reflect that advanced perspective.

Each time it turned out to be a false alarm, and I attributed it to them wanting to know how I felt about the topic.

Right.

I take gun controllers seriously, myself. The government has literally burnt people alive in this cause, it treats paperwork violations as though they were violent felonies, and enforces the laws with the usual level of violence one has come to expect of such felonies. Typos can land you in prison.

So, to advocate gun control is to advocate killing. Clearly. But I don’t want gun controllers gone from the internet. Perhaps this is because I have more confidence in the ability of truth to win out over falsehood in a free and open debate, than you do.

I’m not particularly dangerous, unless maybe you’re planning on breaking into my home. I don’t tackle hecklers, (Like a US Senator I can think of.) or attack protesters because I don’t like their signs, like some college professors. I just disagree with you.

All the danger from that comes from the possibility that I might persuade people to agree with me. Isn’t being more persuasive yourselves the appropriate response to such danger?

“Isn’t being more persuasive yourselves the appropriate response to such danger?”

To be clear, I’m not calling for you to be banned.

J Thomas @ 369

So on the one hand, above in the thread, someone says women should be prompter to take action than he thinks they too often are. On the other hand, we’ve got you suggesting that a woman who’s late (and may feel pregnant) on Friday should wait until Monday before she starts worrying about it.

You prefer the old days. In those days, you went to the doctor for the first time at three or four weeks (a week or two late). You got a urine test, which sometimes gets false negatives. A month later, you could get another urine test. A month after that, you could get a blood test if necessary. At that point you would be twelve weeks pregnant. (For all I know this is how it still works.)

It’s entirely possible that a woman could be pregnant and miscarry in the third or fourth week and not know she’d been pregnant. It’s entirely possible she could miscarry in the ninth week and never know. She might just consider it a “false alarm.”

But it’s also possible, now, she could get a positive result from a home pregnancy test at two and a half weeks or so (last I checked, the box said “as early as five days before your period’s due). And still miscarry in the fourth week.

My only miscarriage, that I know about, happened while I was in fertility treatment and having blood tests every couple of days. I would have otherwise just assumed I skipped a period. If I’d taken a urine test at the wrong point in that time, it might even have come back negative. (It was obvious from about the fifth day that something was wrong, but no visual confirmation for a few weeks, and not until weeks after that that “medically” I was considered not pregnant.)

But I’ll add to my list of movies I don’t want to see, movies about men who really care about women, so want them to become more rational (or more traditional, or whatever). Though I might never watch movies anymore in that case.

“there really is no sense in which people who are against abortion but pro-death penalty are hypocrites. I also don’t think there is any sense to your suggestion that people who really care about the value of life can’t also take obeying the law to be morally important.”

I should do a series like yours, in which I make up new names for new variants of argumentative fallacies. This one is the fallacy of Too Generous Abstraction, or perhaps “Aliens Have Two Heads So Decapitation Isn’t Always Murder”.

In the second article that you linked to, KW’s “Abortion After Texas”, he writes:

There are many who understand the movement against abortion as part of a broader nonviolence movement, and that has some merit. It has substantive merit in that answering the fundamental question about abortion must to some extent inform our views about other kinds of killing. And it certainly has rhetorical value: In a meme culture, it is good to be on the same side of an issue as Mohandas Gandhi and Susan B. Anthony.

You can not be “on the same side of an issue as Mohandas Gandhi” and also not be a hypocrite for saying that lots of people should be judicially hanged. “Gandhi” is not an empty signifier. The “consistent pro-life ethic” is supposedly consistent in exactly the way that makes Williamson a hypocrite. Sure, abstractly, it is possible that there can be people who are against abortion and pro death-penalty and are not hypocrites. But they can not describe themselves as influenced by “consistently pro-life ethics” or by Gandhi and avoid being hypocrites. KW wants the name Gandhi to be a meme, with no binding moral force beyond that, and you’re cooperating with him.

The “lots of people believe” isn’t an argument for or against logic. Lots of people can be logical or illogical. It’s not a basis for proof one way or another. Gallup recently did a survey, for instance in which 42% of Americans said they believe in the Creationist view of human origins. That’s “lots of people” believing in myths and fairy tales. Nor is the establishment of certain laws in most states. Prior to 1980, most states had laws on the books granting a husband the right to have his way with his wife, regardless of her consent.

And, we shouldn’t have to mention the laws on the books regarding slavery, the return of slaves, etc. etc. dominating the American landscape. Read The Fiery Trial, by the always excellent Eric Foner, to get a snapshot on American beliefs/laws regarding blacks, slavery, where the emancipated slaves should go, etc. etc. even among the supposedly enlightened in the mid-19th century.

It’s not a good argument.

John,

I can see the connection, too. Because it’s been that way for so long. What I’m saying is that if we could step back, remove ourselves to some “god’s eye view” for a moment, take away our current political realities . . . . yes, it’s hypocritical.

PoMods would say, of course, this can’t be done. We can never fully escape our circumstances, etc. etc. But if we do a mind-meld with objective alien life, perhaps from Vulcan . . . . I think we could safely say the position is illogical and hypocritical. That is far, far from saying it isn’t widely held, or doesn’t have strong backing, or isn’t a part of the furniture of our lives.

I can see I’m pretty much alone on this one, and that’s kewl with me, as the young folks used to say. Thanks for the response.

because I agree with Bianca Steele that there really is no sense in which people who are against abortion but pro-death penalty are hypocrites

Did I say that? If so, I was unclear. I agree that people who are against abortion and pro death penalty, because they’re claiming to want to “protect life” in all cases, are hypocrites. But people who are against abortion and pro death penalty, for other reasons, maybe because they think both positions help maintain public order, aren’t necessarily hypocrites. Just wrong. (People who have the second position but claim the first? I’m not sure that’s exactly hypocrisy.)

I also would prefer not to be lumped with BB, because I think innocent/guilty is unhelpful in this case, and worse, at the moment would raise questions about Eichmann’s claim that he was innocent because his actions fit into a social structure in a certain way, which it really shouldn’t raise. (And if we’re bringing religious considerations in, then why aren’t persons in the form of ten-week embryos subject to original sin? Can we discuss innocent/guilty without bringing religious considerations in?)

Bianca,

You raise all kinds of good questions.

What, exactly does “innocent” mean, outside the context of a certain country’s laws of the moment? Which can and do change over time. Which have always changed.

And, to me, the sense of morality, guilt or innocence as depicted in the bible is no guide for the sane, for a host of reasons. The book is filled with contradictions, and filled with odious ideas of “morality” from on high. Boiled down, “morality” or “immorality” means obedience or disobedience to Yahweh at any given moment in time, subject to wild fits and changes.

He condemns all humanity, except for Noah and his family, for instance, and slaughters them. For what? It’s all very vague. He condemns women to eternal pain and misery when giving birth because Eve eats an apple. Think about it. Those poor saps had no parents, Yahweh pretty much never talks to them, they grow up without teachers, moral guidance, previous examples of “proper” conduct, but are expected to know right from wrong. It’s all quite absurd.

And the folks in Jericho? What were they “guilty” of? The failure to worship Yahweh. So he had Joshua butcher them, too. That’s one very insecure god, perhaps the most Woody Allenish of all father-gods in the world.

To me, it’s no wonder that the religious right has this completely irrational idea of right and wrong, innocence and guilt. Their main source is beyond absurd on the subject. Morality and immorality by executive fiat, always subject to sudden change — and never truly, carefully, rationally thought out.

John,

I can see what you’re saying. And I may be waaay off on this one. Wouldn’t be the first time, admittedly. But can’t they be assholes and hypocrites at the same time?

Ze,

But you don’t derive “hypocrisy” through accepting their form of “logic”. That’s the entire point. You seem to be ceding that to them. That you understand why they put 2 and 2 together to equal 4 in their system of belief, even though outside that system it equals 5.

It makes no sense to judge one’s “hypocrisy” based on their own system of logic. One would never be able to call anyone a hypocrite in that case. There would always be the tautology that they believe what they believe, so that’s perfectly alright and logical.

Hypocrisy and logic don’t work that way.

John,

Very true. And I don’t believe that is the case. There are definitely non-insane ideas about guilt and innocence. But wouldn’t you admit that the bible isn’t the place to find them? There is much too much insanity depicted there, and waaay too much Do as I say, not as I do.

Yahweh commits genocide against the City on the Plain, basically, because the rather vague story says that two angels may have been “compromised.” But prior to that, Lot tries to offer up his own daughters to the angels for sex, and Yahweh apparently has no problem with that. Then Lot and his wife escape, but because she looks back on the horror of the genocide, Yahweh kills her. For looking back.

(The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seems to make more sense along those lines. If memory serves, he’s warned not to look back lest Eurydice won’t be able to leave Hades. He can’t help himself, and she fades back into the depths).

I don’t know. I’m just not seeing much in the way of logical standards anywhere in play. Not in much of our laws and certainly not in the bible. It’s actually quite depressing, IMO.

“accepting their form of “logic”.”

It’s present in everyone’s logic. It’s a human thing. I think dualism probably precedes religion, and it’s not left or right.

John @ 387: How so?

Because if you start granting people “innocence” because they’re only doing what everyone else does–given that their way of life is basically moral–it’s then more moral to oppose abortion and contraception strenuously, but have abortions yourself (because you didn’t use contraception but also didn’t push hard against nature and male power and so on), than to defend abortion rights. And it’s more moral to engage in physical assault, because you just got really angry, and they weren’t innocent anyway, as long as you do it for “morally correct” reasons.

And that denies their ability to govern themselves and gives them the “gift” of irresponsibility at the price of having to live around violent people who don’t exercise foresight.

And the reverse side of accepting that is believing there are some people who have the responsibility to live differently from everybody else, because public order. But then they consider themselves innocent (like Eichmann) because they’re only doing what the system requires of them.

How does the bare employment of the opposition between guilt and innocence drive us to this sort of Eichman defense position? You seem to be arguing that because you can think of a bad theory of innocence, therefore we should abandon the very notions of guilt and innocence.

I think that, in fact, when the question of guilt and innocence is raised in abortion debates, a significant number of the people on the anti-abortion side think in those terms. Especially when issues like “protecting the health of women,” who are supposedly endangered by doing this unacceptable and terrible-to-contemplate thing, also get raised. Or in situations like the one Rich cited @337 (which bothered me a little because I’ve had friends who would have found it difficult not to start babbling about believing they were murderers at that point).

So I think when someone like BB starts accusing opponents of pretending not to understand that we treat the innocent and the guilty differently, we should wonder if he’s raising this idea of innocence/guilt.

And believing guilt is possible doesn’t mean anything like that it’s okay to kill guilty people but innocent people are sacred and should be protected at all costs. In fact, I don’t see what relevance innocent/guilty has outside a person’s being judged in a courtroom for a specific crime. You can’t just say all who’ve never committed crimes (or sins) are Innocent, and all who’ve committed at least one crime (or sin) is Guilty, and now they’re two different kinds of person. (And how is KW getting off with any kind of idea like this, or BB with attributing it to him, anyway, on sheerly biological grounds?)

So (without going back and editing the above), I don’t think a concept of “Guilty Person” or “Innocent Person” is meaningful. We can say a shoplifter is “guilty,” meaning “guilty of shoplifting,” without having to decide whether she is essentially Guilty or essentially Innocent. (To use my understanding of Jewish belief, incidentally, we have to start from the idea that every person has both a good impulse and an evil impulse, which shifts things a little.)

Guilt and innocence. The debate so far seems perfectly reasonable, if a bit dull. And yet….

I’m reminded of the tumult in previous CT threads over deontological and consequentialist theories of how one determines what’s right and wrong, what’s just and unjust. Here, it seems to me, is the perfect ground zero for such conflicts. As troll/not troll Brett Bellmore observes, if we truly grasp what abortion requires in all except the very earliest interventions, we can’t avoid some serious reflection vis $agrave; vis the consistency of our judgments about the sacredness/fundamental inviolability of human life.

It’s tempting to take the Roman view — which is to say a cold-bloodedly pragmatic one: if forbidding abortion confirms a temptation to treat women as chattel, we ought to be wary of it. However desperately society-in-general wishes to counsel a pregnant woman about what’s really at issue in terminating her pregnancy, it should not, in the end, forbid her anything. Otherwise, the rest of us — male as well as female — might find that our own lives are even less ours to dispose of as we see fit than we’d imagined. In this view, which I admit I generally share, laws which favor one person’s squeamishness over another’s necessity are a corrupting influence on the law itself, and ought to be avoided wherever possible.

“How so? I mean: how am I cooperating with him? (Just out of curiosity. We’ve come this far.)”

Don’t you have a degree in analytic philosophy, or something like that? Why do you write in this style if you can’t decode it yourself when other people write that way?

KW claimed that he was influenced by Gandhi and by a consistently pro-life ethic. He didn’t have to do that. He could have just wrote that people guilty of murder should suffer the death penalty. *If* he had just wrote that people guilty of murder should suffer the death penalty, and that abortion is murder, then he isn’t a hypocrite.

But that’s not what he wrote. He wanted to get the moral cachet of being associated with Gandhi and with a “consistently pro-life ethic”. Well, that ethic demands that he oppose the death penalty, or he is a hypocrite. He can’t say that he is “on the same side of the issue as Gandhi” and also that people who get abortions are murderers and should hang.

And you’re helping him to confuse the issue by persistently failing to understand an obvious point, and therefore saying he’s not a hypocrite. Did you actually read the article that you linked to?

You say that you don’t want to really analyze what he’s saying because he’s trolling: you just want to pick out this one amusing bit of argumentative fallacy in the middle. And that’s a mistake. As I’ve said X times, you should either treat this seriously or ignore it.

A nine month pregnancy which begins with a zygote and ends with a newborn is the quintessential “gray area.” It’s an area where black-and-white rules are difficult to apply. And acceptance of a degree of ambiguity, I think, tends to make us better people. Granted, many folks aren’t big fans of ambiguity.

I find the Dalai Lama’s words helpful:

Of course,
abortion, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is an act of killing and is negative,
generally speaking. But it depends on the circumstances. If the unborn child
will be retarded or if the birth will create serious problems for the
parent, these are cases where there can be an exception. I think abortion
should be approved or disapproved according to each circumstance.

Source.

I have not seen anyone try to integrate the idea that we do not have obligations to a foetus in utero with the idea we must have obligations to the young and to as yet physically unconceived future generations with regard to climate change and sustainability.

Are the two reconcilable ?

I can not think of an abstract moral way of reconciling them in terms of principles and logic relationships.

But, if you move away from abstract moral principles and logical deductions – since we have such extensive medical knowledge and healthcare now , and because also contraception fails – then if abortions were outlawed and everyone followed this law we would look at even higher human population growth than we have now – which is not very sustainable. This is a very messy sort of reasoning (maybe if you were inclined to be categorical you could invoke notions of hierarchies of morals?) – and I am fairly sure it is not very good on abstract moral principles , but I guess that is what happens when you upset the normal equilibrium of births and deaths to such an extent by developing advanced healthcare. I have read even Amish people often use healthcare now – and their populations have grown so they cannot just work in Amish communities but have to go and work with the English in non-Amish occupations where they have to go against their Amish morals by using technology invented after zips , or else they are fired.

Mattski,

Thanks for the Dalai Lama quote. I respect and admire the guy greatly. A Buddhist Marxist. To me, that’s a wonderful combination.

I need to return to my Zen practice after letting it lapse for way too long. In so many ways, I diverge from the Eightfold Path when I post online . . .

ZM @412

“I have not seen anyone try to integrate the idea that we do not have obligations to a foetus in utero with the idea we must have obligations to the young and to as yet physically unconceived future generations with regard to climate change and sustainability.

Are the two reconcilable ?”

Yes.

The presumed aborted will not be born.

Future children who are not aborted will, presumably, actually be born, and will, therefore, have actual lives in an actual world.

Actual children in an actual future are what we call “posterity”.

I definitely closed the italics after “reconcilable”. WTF?

On CT you have to use a pair of open and close tags for each paragraph.

JanieM, I got excited seeing you had commented on this thread but alas, it turned out, about italics only.

Brett,

Please put your cards on the table. All of them. Do you think that the state should kill a woman who elects to have an abortion? Or the doctor who performs it?

And:

Do you think a private citizen is justified in killing a woman who elects to have an abortion, or the doctor who performs it?

Please avoid hedging.

Lynne, thanks for the kind words and also for your efforts in this conversation.

For me, it’s hard to say only a little (esp. on a thread like this), and I don’t have time, nor probably energy, to say more than a little.

bianca steele: “Rich @ 371: The thing is, though, it’s also possible, from a religious point of view, to feel really, really bad about what a terrible thing a woman who has an abortion feels she had to do, while at the same time being really serious about feeling charitable about it. It’s not hypocrisy, exactly.””

Yes, but… Let me go all the way back to KW’s claim that he’s on the same side of this issue as Gandhi, since I think people may be more familiar with Gandhi than with the “seamless garment” concept. Gandhi was against abortions, and KW is against abortions. Does that mean that they are “on the same side of this issue”? No, not in any meaningful way. Because Gandhi was against all kinds of acts that he saw as violence, he opposed abortion as one of them. Needless to say, KW does not categorically oppose violence in this way, because he’s fine with acts of violence such as hanging murderers. They arguably come out in favor of the same narrowly drawn policy prescription (“no abortions”), but Gandhi would be just as opposed to execution for abortion as he would be to abortion itself. (Perhaps more so, I’m not sure. I remember that Gandhi’s sons opposed the execution of the man who killed Gandhi because they said that Gandhi would not have wanted him to be executed). Since part of KW’s policy prescription is “no abortions, or we execute you” then no, he and Gandhi are not on the same side.

This really doesn’t have much to do with the hypocrisy of ordinary people, or whether it’s prevalent to hold a moral view that the guilty should be punished. It has to do with what agreeing with Gandhi means. It doesn’t matter if lots of people believe that legality makes violence more acceptable, or that the guilty should be punished, or have conflicting feelings about disliking sins and being charitable about forgiving sinners. If you want to say that you agree with Gandhi or Gandhi agrees with you, your next sentence can not be “String up women who have abortions”.

ZM @423

A lot of words. Didn’t bother to read the whole thing, as I am not interested in getting into a debate with a logorrheic “logician”.

Anyway, I see what you’re doing.

It’s called begging the question. Or, perhaps taking KW’s premise at face value. Either way, I’m not interested.

BTW, the English spelling is “fetus”.

William Berry,

I said already I could not think of a logical moral principles way to reconcile the two conclusions – just unfortunate messy reasoning due to advances in healthcare meaning the population keeps growing , and is projected to still keep growing despite our inaction on climate change and other sustainability issues – which shows not many people care all that much about posterity these days – so as well as not being logical your posterity argument is moot as far as popular morality goes at the moment as well.

Val,
Of course I think it contemptible that he states women who have abortions should be hanged and Brett Bellmore should be thoroughly ashamed of himself as well, and I would not argue that abortion should be outlawed. But I think more for the messy health advances and population growth reasons than a woman’s body and life reasons. And I think it does present a difficulty in the moral principles area particularly with regard to future generations. As you would know it is very prominent in public discourse that we should not have to make undesired changes to our lifestyles – such as changing over energy infrastructure, or giving up animal product eating or air travel or too much motoring or extravagant consumption or artificial fertilisers, etc for the sake of unborn future generations. I think this is very similar to arguments why couples should not have to follow through with a pregnancy if it will have unwanted effects on their lifestyles or desired future path. I doubt that the similarity is a coincidence – it seems to me quite difficult to argue moral obligations to future generations if the individual’s body and life argument is the chosen morality. William Berry’s argument of moral obligations to posterity (descendants/future generations) is not at the forefront of our culture’s teachings to the young or to anyone else.

Williamson is an idiot. What he calls for is disgusting. I don’t think we have to dance around that. It’s okay to just come out and say it. He did. Fight fire with fire.

Next: Women get to choose. That should be the underlying foundation for all of this. It’s their body, their choice. All the way through the pregnancy. Forcing them to continue their pregnancy, or to give birth, is barbaric. Flat out. It’s barbaric.

And I say that while believing that we should do everything we can to reduce or eliminate abortions to the extent possible. Preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place is the best way to reduce abortions, and anyone who is against abortions should hop on the old contraception train.

The state shouldn’t have a role in this. It’s between the woman and her doctor. And guys should be equal partners in the business of preventing unwanted pregnancies. The onus shouldn’t be on the woman.

In general, America is ab0ut a century behind on this topic, and I think that’s because far too many Americans are in the thrall of a barbaric interpretation of a potentially barbaric religion. If taken literally, the texts from 2000 years and more ago are barbaric in so many ways. If we leave them unfiltered and believe in them literally, there is no escape from barbarism. The antidote is in not taking them literally, and not staying in their time or context. Too many Americans won’t take the antidote.

Actually my last was too brief a summary. There are several points in KW’s position: women should not be allowed to make the decision to have an abortion; if a woman has an abortion she should be punished; death penalty by hanging is an appropriate punishment.

This is the position that deserves condemnation.

(It is appropriate to note that this is being said in a country that is going to war on ISIS, but I don’t want to make that the main point.)

Val, I agree with you. Thanks for stepping in. The conversation was sounding quite weird at times, though there are some recurrent sane voices (Rich, Plume—Plume, I’m glad you stuck around this place.)

Thanks to you for writing that, Val, and Lynne as well.

There’s the competing dangers of desensitization (“Oh, 3rd time this week a right winger has called for mass deaths of women, yawn”) and unsustainable outrage (“3rd time this week a right winger called for mass deaths! That’s 3 interventions we need to do!”). The Overton Window moves by making us used to some set of statements as “normal”. But this isn’t “normal” trolling, not now, not from this source. It’s too outrageous and from someone too high-up in the media pyramid.

Lynne,
“ZM, you seem to be slipping back and forth between what should be legal and what you consider moral (which reasons are good enough for a woman to have an abortion.) As far as I’m concerned, people are entitled to their opinions, but they are not important: what is important is that abortion should be legal and the decision should be the woman’s own. Unless you propose to legislate your opinions?
It often happens when abortion is discussed that these two things are not kept distinct, the ethical and the legal, but to merge them is not helpful, it just ends up sounding like everyone should get a vote when a woman is considering abortion.”

I stated already abortion should not be outlawed because there is already a great number of people and growing, and we are already ruining the climate and causing extinctions and toxicity and soil erosion etc etc through over consumption by many people even though others live in great poverty and are usually the one’s who suffer the greatest environmental burdens – especially with globalisation.

The idea of ethics and law being separate is quite immoral – law is supposed to be for justice which is an ethical idea/personification.

Until such advances in healthcare we did not have the moral problem of abortion because 1. it was very dangerous to have an abortion before advanced healthcare so probably it was quite rare ; and 2. the population only got to such high problematic levels with the event of advanced healthcare .

The issue I specifically raised – which you did not bother to engage with – was how to reconcile not having moral obligations to existing foetuses , with having positive moral obligations to future generations.

At the moment we seem to have reconciled these two things by having decided in practice we have neither obligations to foetuses nor obligations to future generations (despite some motherhood statements about how we so much value posterity (descendants/future generations)).

“Oh, ok, I actually thought you meant that. I thought it was very strange.”

What I wrote was this:
“And you’re helping him to confuse the issue by persistently failing to understand an obvious point, and therefore saying he’s not a hypocrite.”

Which is to say that now that we’re discussing it, I expected you to write “Of course he’s a hypocrite about Gandhiism, no one can meaningfully say they’re influenced by Gandhi and then say that women who have abortions should be executed.” But you didn’t say that, and aren’t saying that — you seemed to be going into something about “there is no contradiction or hypocrisy in people who have great moral differences with Gandhi admiring him”. Really? They can say, without contradiction or hypocrisy, “I admire Gandhi — and I want millions of people to die”?

That seems to me to be muddling up the issue well enough so that you’d be inadvertently helping to excuse KW, yes, if anyone was actually reading this.

John Holbo @ 448
sorry my last comment crossed with yours where you are saying you think KW doesn’t actually mean it when he calls for hanging – which would make a difference to my response but not probably a huge difference.

“You could say the same of people who rape and murder”

Oh Brett. I truly, truly wish rapists were as rare as people who choose late pregnancy abortions for kicks and giggles.

Uh, no. People who choose late pregnancy abortions “for kicks and giggles” are non-existent. Now there may be one person somewhere in the world who can be dragged forth as an example, but for all intents and purposes, frivolous late term abortions are not a thing.
That statement by Williamson that “we put one in five [foetuses] to death for such excellent reasons as the desire to fit nicely into a prom dress” is popular myth (try “finishing school”, “not becoming homeless”, “being able to work” and so on), and the idea that women would choose to have a third trimester abortion for such reasons is just infantile fantasy. If anyone here is tempted to believe this, just think it through. Your concern for your abs and Jimmy Choos is overriding, yet you wait until you are irretrievably stretched and puffy for… for what reason?
It just doesn’t happen and the popular myth is a slap in the face to anyone who requires a third trimester abortion, for which the reasons are never happy.

Oh thanks Rich, I didn’t realise that about Nation Review (lack cultural context again), that’s interesting – and depressing. Shows again how inequality can distort the polity.

Yes I have been following the Salaita affair and I’m sure it would have influenced my reaction in this case – disproportionate punishment to him followed by apparently nothing to Williamson.

Val,

I know you didn’t ask me. But my take is this. Hate sells really well on the right. It pays to hate. Some of these idiots really mean what they say, but others are just opportunists. They know the right wing base has an insatiable appetite for hate and they feed them as much as possible. Day after day after day. There is no equivalent for this on the left, at least not in America.

I haven’t yet decided whether or not KW is actually filled with hate, or just plays it up to make more money. Either way, what he said is despicable. And potentially dangerous.

“why do you think that Williamson uses the language of violence”

I can’t read Mr. Williamson’s mind, but one REAL obvious explanation would be that it’s because he and others of the same persuasion feel that abortion itself as an egregious act of violence. I’m surprised this explanation didn’t immediately pop-up into your mind.

“I think if half of all Americans thought all abortions were murder – just plain murder – so America has had four or five Holocausts since Roe v. Wade (or whatever it is) they would rise up and make it stop. Since they don’t, I infer that they actually have a somewhat more nuanced view of what is going on. Whatever they say to the contrary.”

Yes, “nuanced”. Few people think first term abortions are murder, about as few as think driving scissors into the brain of a baby in the birth canal isn’t murder. Both extremes are seriously minority opinions. Both extremes are also in control of the respective lobbies. But public opinion is very much in the middle.

And we’ve got the Roe v Wade rule, that seems to permit the state to prohibit elective late term abortion. Which reassures those who don’t understand that laws against elective late term abortion are, thanks to later court rulings, full of more holes than a piece of good Swiss cheese.

And, of course, we’ve got Roe v Wade, still, despite two generations of Americans voting for politicians who promise to fill the Court with justices who’d overturn it, only to find the politicians were lying. Making it clear that the political system won’t permit that ruling to be overturned short of maybe a revolution, so people who are outraged over abortion concentrate on plugging the holes mentioned above.

And even those who think John Brown was fully justified almost all know that ‘going John Brown’ might be personally satisfying, but is such a PR disaster that sets back the cause, that nobody who really hates abortion ought to do it.

So, yes, there’s nuance all over the place. On both sides. After all, Planned Parenthood might go out of it’s way to site clinics in minority neighborhoods, in keeping with it’s Eugenics movement origins, but they don’t “go John Brown”, either, do they? And Kermit Gosnell might have been fed customers from those clinics, but once exposed, he’s not defended.

But it’s fun pretending that people who oppose you are caricatures, and the left loves that particular vice.

John, actually, I was replying to commenter Val. I have no doubt whatsoever that you did entertain the possibility that ‘pro-life’ violent rhetoric and actions are directly related to their attitude towards abortion (plain murder, or aggravated murder, or almost murder – whatever). That’s just too basic a thing to miss. But Val did miss it, apparently.

Ze Kraggash
Thought you might mean me. As I’ve said a number of times, we don’t have the death penalty here. So the logic of people saying a woman should be hanged because they believe she murdered her foetus doesn’t seem as “basic” to me as it apparently does to you. I don’t actually think that’s why KW suggests it though. I think he wants to make the point that women ought to be punished for acting as if they have autonomy in this area.

If l may add – just on the point of someone ‘murdering’ her foetus – the foetus (or embryo) is not entirely distinct from one’s body until birth. It increasingly feels more distinct, especially as she/he begins to move, but is not entirely. The concept of murder, especially in the first trimester, doesn’t experientially make sense, although I am sure some women may see it that way because of religious belief that tells them that is what it is.

#465

Don’t want another kid, AND don’t want to put the kid up for adoption. Inconvenience. Don’t want somebody to find out they got pregnant. Had a vacation already scheduled, and want to get into bikini shape in time for it.

I hate to respond to stupid posts just because they’re so incredibly stupid they leave giant openings. But — somebody who gets a third-trimester abortion because they don’t want somebody to find out they’re pregnant, has missed a clue. Similarly somebody who has had a vacation scheduled for more than 6 months and waits til the last minute to get into bikini shape.

There may be people like this. Eugenics has a bad name just now, but do you really want to force these people to have more children than they otherwise would? Couldn’t we just let them alone, and think of it as evolution in action?

That was for Ze Kraggash @473 obviously.

#475

Oops, clearly I was wrong about what you intended with Ze Kraggash. Now it appears you only wanted to state your own position, and were not particularly inviting him to do anything.

I apologize for reading that in.

J, there you go: Doubt about the diversity of human motivation, AND support for abortion as a form of eugenics. Thanks for playing the straight man.

You have to seriously decide whether KW is willing to go full John Brown, just plain killing lots of women and medical professionals, or whether he is merely advocating changing the laws, to bring about mass executions of women and medical professionals.

The thread has moved on, but are you just replying to Rich, above, or are you connecting it to positivism? I could be persuaded that there’s some kind of connection, though I’m not sure. That is, is the positivism thing interesting because he’s more or less likely to “go John Brown” (kind of a repellent analogy, I think) because he claims to base his ideas on science? (That’s not what I thought you were saying, earlier, I thought you were suggesting it was interesting that, like Goldberg, he was shifting arguments historically found on the left, to the right, maybe indicating the success of the left of getting them into the mainstream?) Or, is it just that he’s less or more likely to “go John Brown” because he spends so much time tweeting hostile things about Lena Dunham?

ZM,

“The idea of ethics and law being separate is quite immoral – law is supposed to be for justice which is an ethical idea/personification.”

Ethics and law should not be entirely separate, of course. But we do not always legislate our ethics and this is one area where we should not beyond saying it is the woman’s decision to make. Which is an ethical stand. I’m sorry I missed that you said abortion should be legal—it’s a long thread now.

“The issue I specifically raised – which you did not bother to engage with – was how to reconcile not having moral obligations to existing foetuses , with having positive moral obligations to future generations.

At the moment we seem to have reconciled these two things by having decided in practice we have neither obligations to foetuses nor obligations to future generations (despite some motherhood statements about how we so much value posterity (descendants/future generations)).”

Yet I don’t understand this. It doesn’t require reconciliation for me. Of course “we” owe the future generations. This obligation fuels much of my dismay over my (Canadian) government inaction over the environment. But as for fetuses, unless they are mine, they are not my business.

I became more firmly pro-choice when I was pregnant with my husband’s and my first (wanted, planned) child.

@483, but every time you hear ‘I have the right to control my own [whatever], no matter what’, inevitably it’s some libertarian pronouncement (“should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea? I say, let the world go to hell but I should always have my tea”), inevitably ridiculed by the same people who choose to employ it in this case. It’s remarkably anti-utilitarian.

@486 “but every time you hear ‘I have the right to control my own [whatever]”

To control the interior of one’s own body is just not the same as other things you could insert in those square brackets. It is, as Anarcissie says, a matter of privacy, and of the limits of the state’s power.

That’s why so much of this conversation sounds futile.

Ronan(rf) @ 479: “Why would anyone on the left want to adopt the rights tactics vis a vis Salaita? This isnt a sign of the rights ‘power’,[…]”

Power doesn’t mean the ability to do only wise things. It means the ability to do things. They decided that a tenured professor who’d accepted a job at another school should be de-tenured on a technicality. That may show “their pettiness, and their pure vindictiveness”, but it also shows that they have the ability to do this if they want to. It’s not a sign of our moral superiority that we don’t have the power to do this, because moral choices are only meaningful when you actually have the ability to make a choice.

The default liberal position on any matter of practical politics is that we shouldn’t even try to do anything. I linked to a good John Emerson article on this a while back but the link from CT only resulted in somebody from here being kind of incoherent over there, so I’ve thought better of it.

John writes:
“There’s obviously a split here in our sense of what is an effective response. Since you bring up talk shows, let me flip it around. Do you have the same reaction to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, when they make fun of people, like KW, who are really obnoxious? That is, does the often almost whimsical tone, which focuses on the sheer absurdity of what the crazy people have said, rather than on the human harm it might do, bother you? I tend to think this sort of comedic approach is quite effective. But I can see that it might seem like whistling past the graveyard.”

This was directed to Val, I think, but basically I think that this is an American Gen X syndrome. “You said that irony was the shackles of youth” to quote R.E.M. I’m a Gen X-er, and Jon Stewart is, and I think John Holbo is. I don’t think that the whimsical tone and the focus on absurdity is really a choice any more — there no longer is any real possibility of sincerely saying “That person said that women who get abortions should be hanged, and that’s outrageous.” People have rationalized it as a good rhetorical strategy because it’s the only rhetorical strategy that our culture will bear.

#480 BB

Thanks for playing the straight man.

You’re welcome, your black comedy shtick clearly needs one.

You are attempting comedy, right? Usually you argue that random idiots should have guns in case they suddenly feel the need to shoot somebody. And if there is only one survivor and no reliable witnesses, we should take the survivor’s word what happened.

Now it sounds like you’re arguing that women don’t have the right to kill their own children. But at least for early abortions, why would you or anyone else have the right to know whether she’s pregnant or that she has had is will have an abortion at all? It takes government intervention to get past that privacy. All of a sudden you have been replaced by Bizarro-World Brett.

Rich P – what was that link ? (if you don’t mind posting it again ..)

I’ve already had to apologize once for posting it. But, OK, here.

“You are attempting comedy, right? Usually you argue that random idiots should have guns in case they suddenly feel the need to shoot somebody.”

And this is your own attempt at comedy? Or do you genuinely think I’ve ever argued that?

“But at least for early abortions, why would you or anyone else have the right to know whether she’s pregnant or that she has had is will have an abortion at all? ”

And where have I argued for a law against early abortions?

471. I agree that having children is a good thing. Also, I hope you agree that abortion is an undesirable form of contraception (though it was routinely used as such, I understand, in the former Soviet Union and several other countries that might surprise you).

I think men and women would be more optimistic about having children if they thought they could look forward to steady jobs with some sort of financial security, defined benefits, and time off; not to mention affordable housing, child-care, education, and healthcare.

“Can you please clarify?”

I said I thought Roe v Wade reasonable policy, even if it was terrible constitutional law. The early fetus lacks a functioning nervous system, and early in pregnancy it is genuinely impossible to terminate a pregnancy without killing the fetus. But the fetus develops a working nervous system well before birth, and well prior to natural birth becomes viable outside the womb, meaning that it is possible to terminate the pregnancy by delivering a live child, rather than just by killing it.

And this renders the choice to abort, at that point, entirely a decision to kill, not a decision about whether to remain pregnant.

Fetal development is a continuous process, why should getting rights be a binary one? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that early in pregnancy, abortion should be subject to no more than minor restrictions intended to ensure safety, and that as the fetus develops, restrictions should increase.

Kind of ironic that the same kind of people who are always urging the US to become more like Europe, and praising the way medicine is practiced and regulated there, avert their gaze from the fact that abortion is much more restricted in most of Europe than in the US. And this IS by judicial fiat, public opinion in the US would support a regulatory regime similar to Europe.

“To control the interior of one’s own body is just not the same as other things you could insert in those square brackets.”

Bingo.

“But the fetus develops a working nervous system well before birth, and well prior to natural birth becomes viable outside the womb, meaning that it is possible to terminate the pregnancy by delivering a live child, rather than just by killing it.”

I understand this as an attempt to define some point beyond which elective, not-medically-necessary-abortions may not occur, but it leads to some hard questions. Consider that your so-called ‘viable’ infants sometimes require massive medical intervention, suffer health problems, and die at much higher rates than full-term infants.

At the point in question, can a woman opt for early birth rather than continue to term, knowing that a premature child has much greater health risks? Why or why not? After all, if the non-person has become a person, why can’t the women evict it from her body, and let medical technology take over? Or is a woman who does this guilty of some form of child abuse?

As medical capabilities advance, this ‘viability point’ will surely come earlier, perhaps even to the point where a just-fertilized egg is ‘viable’, i.e. can be transferred to medical devices and grown to term. Would you move the point of legal abortion back to accommodate this medical advancement? In other words, once you’re pregnant, your only choices are to carry the baby to term or turn it over to the machines?

Ze Kraggash 10.06.14 at 4:34 pm @ 494 — Mussolini, because his dictum has admirable clarity and economy. Most ordinary states seem to acknowledge some sort of private realm for their constituents, if only informally, so they don’t fulfill Mussolini’s ideal, but it is useful as a kind of polar absolute.

In regard to amputations, some people do pursue rather extreme body modifications (such as sex change operations), some wish to give away or sell parts of their bodies, and some get rid of or at least try to get rid of their entire bodies, and there is some debate as to whether some or any of them should be permitted to do what they want, if they seem to be in their right minds, and whether others should be allowed to assist them. It’s not at all a closed issue where I live, although one would think it would be, given the oft-professed strong belief in privacy and personal liberty.

I don’t know what you mean by anti-utilitarianism. Utilitarianism doesn’t make any sense to me, because its objects and operations are so poorly defined, but I’m not ‘against’ it.

Rich @496 – thanks

Anarcissie 508, let me try to phrase it this way: my only point was that in a perfectly liberal-democratic society, due to its paternalistic nature generally supported by the ‘pro-choice’ side, there is no such thing as the right ‘to control your own body’. Yes, some uses/modifications of one’s body are allowed, but some require authorization, some are forbidden, and for some, wishing them is deemed a symptom of a mental illness. Asserting, in all seriousness, this absolute right would have huge consequences, well beyond the abortion controversy. And if this is not the absolute right, then the argument doesn’t fly: yes you can do things to your body, but only the things the society find acceptable.

Ze Kraggash 10.07.14 at 8:05 am @ 514 &
J Thomas 10.07.14 at 9:38 am @ 515 —
So rights talk is really wishful thinking. But it is a wish, which I think pushes the social order in a certain direction, just as respect for authority and obedience push it in another direction. I don’t see the a priori invalidity you seem to be suggesting.

not ‘pro-life’, ‘pro-choice’, clearly. Pro-this, pro-that, it’s confusing. It should be pro-something and anti-something.

“Pro-choice” is kind of vague, too, when it’s with regards to people who only favor free choice in one incredibly narrow area of life.

J Thomas, I’m currently reading a new book that talks about how the Patriot Act came to be passed. Fascinating. It’s called The Anthrax Deception, by Graeme MacQueen. I had forgotten the timing of the events of September-October, 2001.

J Thomas 10.07.14 at 1:25 pm @ 521:
“I don’t see the a priori invalidity you seem to be suggesting.”
‘I personally don’t see that it has anything to do with validity.’

What I meant by ‘valid’ was ‘sort of reasonable even if you don’t agree with
it.’ I thought it was reasonable to desire that the social order of the community
in which one lives respect certain forms of privacy, like the interior of one’s
body, as well as other more external rights or freedoms.

But I agree there is a lot of contradiction going on. I was just reading yet
again about Dr. Milgram’s (in)famous experiments in Aeon (an online magazine). It seems many people feel submissive to authority and community in spite of all the talk about freedom, and desire that others act as if they feel the same way — or else. If the authorities command terror, torture, or killing, so be it. Maybe this is supposed to be a necessary feature of social life.

“I do not think Rich Puchalsky was suggesting this KW person had schizophrenia – he was rather suggesting that you yourself were like Michael Stipe in how you treat a potentially dangerous person*/event as an absurdity.”

Yes, exactly.

“Further he was saying this is a posture common to generation xers , as they perform an ironic detachment towards wrongs they code as ‘absurd’ – rather than being outraged or deeply concerned by the wrongs .”

Well, I do think that they actually are outraged or deeply concerned, it can just never be expressed except as ironic detachment.

You said he’s trolling, unserious, etc. That’s close enough.

From upthread:
“Since you bring up talk shows, let me flip it around. Do you have the same reaction to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, when they make fun of people, like KW, who are really obnoxious? That is, does the often almost whimsical tone, which focuses on the sheer absurdity of what the crazy people have said, rather than on the human harm it might do, bother you? I tend to think this sort of comedic approach is quite effective. But I can see that it might seem like whistling past the graveyard.”

The original guy who Michael Stipe referred to wasn’t an absurdist. He beat Dan Rather up. Similarly the people who Jon Stewart, Stephan Colbert etc. make fun of generally aren’t trying to be absurd, they’re saying sincerely hateful things.

js, thanks for the kind words. I agree with highlighting that comment of Val’s.

I think what trips up even well-meaning people on this issue is that pregnancy is unique in human experiences. There really isn’t anything like it. Therefore there’s nothing men experience that is like it. Comparisons to things like limb removal and suicide are of very limited value.

I think what trips up even well-meaning people on this issue is that pregnancy is unique in human experiences. There really isn’t anything like it. Therefore there’s nothing men experience that is like it.

As a male with a strong biology background I think you’re probably right, though I have no way to know for sure.

A man who carries some pounds of tapeworms with vomiting, intestinal distress, “eating for two”, etc and who then expels them suddenly and in an undignified manner might be slightly similar, but I expect a woman who has done both would say there isn’t much similarity.

A man who develops a fast-growing abdominal tumor and then gets it surgically removed at 20 pounds or so might be a little similar to a woman who gets a caesarian. But only a little.

I think you’re right. It’s an incommensurable experience.

J Thomas @ 536: Are you joking? I hope so, but I can’t tell.

js.: “I’m not sure why it matters so much whether or not Williamson is a hypocrite.”

In my opinion, it doesn’t matter much whether or not he’s a hypocrite. I made a joke about it, JH thought that the joke contained a bad argument, I had to explain why I thought he was a hypocrite, and so on, so there ended up being a number of comments about it. But I don’t really care much that he’s a hypocrite: I care that he wrote that women who have abortions should be hanged.