Christian terrorist arrested in Planned Parenthood bomb plot

[loomer]

Killing ten or twenty people to save the lives of a hundred or a thousand is justified. Raising the population beyond sustainable levels is murder; I would support the death penalty being applied to breeders, or, failing that, I would support vigilante actions to bring them to justice.

[Chaotic Neutral]

Killing ten or twenty people to save the lives of a hundred or a thousand is justified. Raising the population beyond sustainable levels is murder; I would support the death penalty being applied to breeders, or, failing that, I would support vigilante actions to bring them to justice.

Wouldn't it be better just to sterilize them?

[Liberty]

Killing ten or twenty people to save the lives of a hundred or a thousand is justified. Raising the population beyond sustainable levels is murder; I would support the death penalty being applied to breeders, or, failing that, I would support vigilante actions to bring them to justice.

You do not appear to be against murder. You are okay with murdering abortion doctors (who are in the business to help people), and you are okay with murdering people who have too many children (apparently). So you do not have a problem with "murder" as such. So I'm confused. Even if abortion were murder, you haven't actually shown yourself to be against murder.

[Jaevric]

Killing ten or twenty people to save the lives of a hundred or a thousand is justified. Raising the population beyond sustainable levels is murder; I would support the death penalty being applied to breeders, or, failing that, I would support vigilante actions to bring them to justice.

Is this quote from a different thread or are you "fixing" his statement about abortion doctors? Because I don't see him say this anywhere in the thread, and while it deeply pains me to say anything that might seem to support the dumbass, he should get verbally abused for stupid shit he actually said rather than a joke someone else made.

[PeZook]

That quote was altered to show how ridiculous it is, but he did say he'd support "vigilante actions to bring them to justice", therefore he's not against murder and/or kidnapping, assault, arson and any other illegal actions vigilantes take to "punish" their victims.

[Edi]

All right, no dogpiling on the moron.

If he wants to reference some earlier discussions on abortion, he can check the following threads:

secular humanism- abortion
What gives something a Right to life?
Abortion - been bothering me

Those are just some of the threads on that subject along the way. Most of them are pretty ancient, but the substance of the issue hasn't changed all that much.

If he wants to keep on discussing the issue in this thread, no more than two or three people at once against him.

[Edi]

Designated responders to LionElJohnson: PeZook, Serafina, Liberty.

If he wants to take Shroomie on, we'll all no doubt enjoy the show, but he doesn't seem to respond too well to the kind of mockery and I'd rather this thread had an actual debate in the old style instead of a pileup.

[Channel72]

Given his (faulty) premise, LionElJohnson's argument is sound. If abortion is equivalent to murder, then essentially a large-scale Holocaust is underway (claiming approximately 1.37 million "victims" per year), with abortion clinics acting as death camps. I've always suspected that many anti-abortion advocates secretly don't buy into their own bullshit; if they really believed that this country was currently involved in mass murder on the level of Nazi Germany, they'd be obligated to do a lot more than just vote Republican or stand around picketing outside abortion clinics. But most of them probably don't really believe that a fetus is equivalent to a human being. This LionElJohnson guy is just being surprisingly consistent. (Either that or he's just a troll.)

[PeZook]

I don't think anybody doubts the argument is sound given the premise, hence why everybody attacks the premise

Well, okay, I just asked him for clarification, mostly to ascertain just how consistent he is: after all, if abortion is murder and murderers should be executed, then deliberate or negligent miscarriage is also murder and/or manslaughter, and thus the law of the land should punish the offender accordingly.

[Twoyboy]

But most of them probably don't really believe that a fetus is equivalent to a human being.

Which is why you should always test them with the old "save 200 fertilised embryos ready for implantation or one newborn baby" test. It's fun to see them get all uncomfortable when they realise that to follow their own logic they have to let the baby die while they save a bunch of vials.

[Shroom Man 777]

Designated responders to LionElJohnson: PeZook, Serafina, Liberty.

If he wants to take Shroomie on, we'll all no doubt enjoy the show, but he doesn't seem to respond too well to the kind of mockery and I'd rather this thread had an actual debate in the old style instead of a pileup.

But I got in first (or at least before Liberty)!

I do see your point. Yeah, heckling him won't be conducive or useful for any argument or debate (actual argument and debate with him won't be conducive or useful for anything either, as such is the extent of his armamentation). So yeah, LEJ gets the benefit of actually having civilized people engage him.

Have fun guise.

[Molyneux]

Given his (faulty) premise, LionElJohnson's argument is sound. If abortion is equivalent to murder, then essentially a large-scale Holocaust is underway (claiming approximately 1.37 million "victims" per year), with abortion clinics acting as death camps. I've always suspected that many anti-abortion advocates secretly don't buy into their own bullshit; if they really believed that this country was currently involved in mass murder on the level of Nazi Germany, they'd be obligated to do a lot more than just vote Republican or stand around picketing outside abortion clinics. But most of them probably don't really believe that a fetus is equivalent to a human being. This LionElJohnson guy is just being surprisingly consistent. (Either that or he's just a troll.)

There is a quick and easy test for this.
You're in a burning building; on your right is a table with, say, ten frozen embryos on it.
On your left is a five-year-old child.

For whatever reason, you can choose to save one of the two, but only one. Which do you save - the child, or the embryos?

If the frozen embryos really are people, then of course saving ten lives (even if most of them would probably be spontaneously miscarried after implantation) must outweigh saving one. For added efficacy, up the numbers; how about a hundred frozen embryos, each of them fully capable of developing into a person, versus one crying child?

Hell, which would you rather save: a dozen (human) embryos, or a single adorable puppy?

[Kanastrous]

What's 10 people if you are saving 1000?

An invitation to endless, slowly-swirling-backed-up-toilet-style beards-above-or-below-the-covers moralistic debate?

[Serafina]

Hey, LionElDipshit - did you run away? Are you going to defend your religion-fueled homicidal desire? Are you going to answer the questions put towards you (especially those from PeZook and the "save the child or the embryos"-one)?

And a question to the moderators: If he actually runs away now, is it against the vendetta-rule (or another one) if i insult him with "would-be murderer" when he does something stupid again? After all, from his statement that's clearly his position.

[General Mung Beans]

How about this: fetuses do have a right to life but not on a level equal to that of other humans?

[LionElJonson]

Hey, LionElDipshit - did you run away? Are you going to defend your religion-fueled homicidal desire? Are you going to answer the questions put towards you (especially those from PeZook and the "save the child or the embryos"-one)?

No, I just have other things to do with my time than spend twenty-four hours a day on here.

Given his (faulty) premise, LionElJohnson's argument is sound. If abortion is equivalent to murder, then essentially a large-scale Holocaust is underway (claiming approximately 1.37 million "victims" per year), with abortion clinics acting as death camps. I've always suspected that many anti-abortion advocates secretly don't buy into their own bullshit; if they really believed that this country was currently involved in mass murder on the level of Nazi Germany, they'd be obligated to do a lot more than just vote Republican or stand around picketing outside abortion clinics. But most of them probably don't really believe that a fetus is equivalent to a human being. This LionElJohnson guy is just being surprisingly consistent. (Either that or he's just a troll.)

Yes, exactly. I'm not actually out bombing clinics, though, since given the choice between bombing clinics and trying to save a tens of millions to a few hundred million people, or building rockets and potentially saving humanity and technological civilisation from existential risks like continent-killing asteroids, well, the decision is obvious.

That quote was altered to show how ridiculous it is, but he did say he'd support "vigilante actions to bring them to justice", therefore he's not against murder and/or kidnapping, assault, arson and any other illegal actions vigilantes take to "punish" their victims.

Nope. I'm not. However, fighting a campaign like this, like any other war, would be justified based on how much sorrow, death, and destruction it creates as opposed to how much it prevents. World War Two was justified; the Nazis were killing millions of people, and would have killed millions more if they weren't stopped. The Japanese were no slouches, either. World War One, on the other hand, by and large was not; it was just jingoism-fueled senseless butchery.

You do not appear to be against murder. You are okay with murdering abortion doctors (who are in the business to help people), and you are okay with murdering people who have too many children (apparently). So you do not have a problem with "murder" as such. So I'm confused. Even if abortion were murder, you haven't actually shown yourself to be against murder.

I never said that, and in any case, fears of overpopulation are by and large alarmist tripe, usually purveyed by leftist environmentalists. Modern technology is capable of supporting a much larger population than we currently possess, the growth rate of Western nations is, if anything, too low, and even if we were to begin experiencing overpopulation somehow, we could always expand into space. An endlessly expanding space empire is probably the ideal solution, overall; it allows for endlessly growing populations and economies without needing to worry about devaluing currencies or Malthusian collapses. It also improves our hardiness against a number of existential risks.

Again, if abortion = murder, and murder should be punished by death, do we execute a woman who lost a fetus because of drinking while pregnant?

Probably not; we don't have the death penalty for Manslaughter. Well, not unless she got drunk with the intention of inducing a miscarriage, anyway.

How about if she causes a fender-bender but the stress makes her miscarry, do we prosecute her for manslaughter? Or if someone pushes her and she miscarries, is the guy guilty of manslaughter?

Yes, in both cases. In the future, though, the risks of this happening will hopefully be reduced; we are already developing exo-womb technology for an endangered species of sharks that engages in in-womb cannibalism in order to prevent said in-womb cannibalism, and thereby increase the number of baby sharks born.

What about side effects: my wife, for example, got an infection in her fourth week ; The doctor said that he won't give her anything because there'd be a serious risk of miscarriage, but checked on her weekly to see if the infection wasn't getting worse. If it got really bad, she'd have gotten a round of antibiotics.

If my wife got the antibiotics and miscarried, the doctor would be guilty of homicide, right? What's the term, ten years or so? Unless the judge decided it was murder one, then off with his head!

This sort of case is the rare case where it would be justified; the only time abortion is acceptable is when the life of the mother is on the line. That said, if it's possible, due to advancing medical technology, to extract the embryo/fetus and grow it to birth inside an exo-womb, and the doctor deliberately chose not to due so, he would be guilty of homicide, yes. Or maybe murder; I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the fine legal differences between them.

What about spontaneous miscarriages (yes, they happen): theoretically, the woman's bathroom/kitchen/bedroom is now a crime scene. Should she be arrested, charges pending (innocent until proven guilty, yeah, but it's a POTENTIAL MURDER SCENE)?

Innocent until proven guilty; the coroner determines it was natural causes, and the lady goes free. An analogous situation would be a young person with no indications of psychological problems tripping and falling out of a high window. They don't seem the sort for suicide, and someone might have pushed them, but it was really just an accident.

First of all, abortion is NOT murder. A fetus is in no way comparable to a human being. It can not sustain itself and it doesn't even have a nervous system or brain. And in case you want to argue about a soul or anything - you have absolutely no proof for it's existance, but even if we leave that aside then you have no proof that the soul is there from the moment of conception - other than you saying so. But then again, i am not surprised that you want to murder people in order to impose your religious bigotry on them.

Yes, it is. Unless something (like a spontaneous miscarriage, or complications surrounding childbirth) happens to intervene, that fetus will grow up into a person, even if they might not be one at that stage. In America, there's an infant mortality rate of .63%, and a child mortality rate of .6%. Therefore, you can think of a fetus as having the moral weight of about 98.7% of a five-year-old child.

All right, no dogpiling on the moron.

If he wants to reference some earlier discussions on abortion, he can check the following threads:

*links*

Those are just some of the threads on that subject along the way. Most of them are pretty ancient, but the substance of the issue hasn't changed all that much.

If he wants to keep on discussing the issue in this thread, no more than two or three people at once against him.

I'll check the links out later; I have a class to get to in another fifteen minutes or so.

There is a quick and easy test for this.
You're in a burning building; on your right is a table with, say, ten frozen embryos on it.
On your left is a five-year-old child.

For whatever reason, you can choose to save one of the two, but only one. Which do you save - the child, or the embryos?

Well, first, I'd need to know whether or not the embryos are already dead from the heat of the fire defrosting them. Then I'd need to know whether or not the embryos are likely to survive me removing them from their storage location. Then I'd need to know the probability of them being implanted, as well as the probability of the embryos surviving that implantation; the vast majority of frozen embryos are never used, and the vast majority of those don't survive the implantation process. If, after those fractional multipliers are taken into account, the expected number of children developing to a five-year-old child is greater than one, then I'd choose the embryos, every time.

I'd also tell the kid to follow me; I might not be able to save him or her myself, but nothing says the kid can't save himself/herself.

Hell, which would you rather save: a dozen (human) embryos, or a single adorable puppy?

The embryos.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Why is it that terrorists are so fucking stupid? I can support his desire to save the lives of babies by destroying abortion clinics, but, by God, I can't support the idiotic way he carried it out.

You can SUPPORT IT?!
Okay, either you are an idiot unable to choose the right word, or you are a assholish would-be murderer.

Perhaps you meant to say that you can comprehend/reconstruct their desire. You know, trying to understand someones actions without actually agreeing with them.
But given your previous behavior, i doubt that you merely misspoke.

Killing ten or twenty people to save the lives of a hundred or a thousand is justified. Abortion is murder; I would support the death penalty being applied to abortion doctors, or, failing that, I would support vigilante actions to bring them to justice.

As a cop I see the result of those children who grow up in families that don't want them, because the parents weren't able to get abortions. Those kids become criminals. Raising a child involves a lot more than simply allowing that child to be born...you can't force someone to be a good parent no matter how many laws you pass.

DISREGARD THIS POST. (sorry, I didn't see Edi's directive to avoid dog piling)

[Molyneux]

There is a quick and easy test for this.
You're in a burning building; on your right is a table with, say, ten frozen embryos on it.
On your left is a five-year-old child.

For whatever reason, you can choose to save one of the two, but only one. Which do you save - the child, or the embryos?

Well, first, I'd need to know whether or not the embryos are already dead from the heat of the fire defrosting them. Then I'd need to know whether or not the embryos are likely to survive me removing them from their storage location. Then I'd need to know the probability of them being implanted, as well as the probability of the embryos surviving that implantation; the vast majority of frozen embryos are never used, and the vast majority of those don't survive the implantation process. If, after those fractional multipliers are taken into account, the expected number of children developing to a five-year-old child is greater than one, then I'd choose the embryos, every time.

I'd also tell the kid to follow me; I might not be able to save him or her myself, but nothing says the kid can't save himself/herself.

Hell, which would you rather save: a dozen (human) embryos, or a single adorable puppy?

The embryos.

You're nitpicking a hypothetical question. I'm not sure why.

If you really, truly would save a group of embryos rather than a thinking child, then as far as I'm concerned you do not share a one-to-one relationship with reality; the frozen embryos could become human beings if they were implanted and brought to term, but the exact same argument applies to every nucleated cell in your body. The kid has a mind; the embryos do not. For that matter, the puppy has more of a mind than all of the frozen embryos put together.

[Serafina]

Hey, shithead: STOP DODGING THE QUESTONS!
Namely, the "save embryos or child" one.
Let me ask it again:
In a hypothetical , you can save either a container with 100 unharmed embyros who will all be born in the future, or you can save a single 8-year old girl. Neither will be saved by someone else, neither can save itself - it's your decision. Stop dodging it.


Now into the pit of your amorality-

Nope. I'm not. However, fighting a campaign like this, like any other war, would be justified based on how much sorrow, death, and destruction it creates as opposed to how much it prevents. World War Two was justified; the Nazis were killing millions of people, and would have killed millions more if they weren't stopped. The Japanese were no slouches, either. World War One, on the other hand, by and large was not; it was just jingoism-fueled senseless butchery.

You do not prevent any of those. Abortion does not cause the death of human beings, for embryos are not human beings. It does not cause more sorrow than unwanted children suffer and cause. And it certainly does not cause any destruction.

I never said that, and in any case, fears of overpopulation are by and large alarmist tripe, usually purveyed by leftist environmentalists. Modern technology is capable of supporting a much larger population than we currently possess, the growth rate of Western nations is, if anything, too low, and even if we were to begin experiencing overpopulation somehow, we could always expand into space. An endlessly expanding space empire is probably the ideal solution, overall; it allows for endlessly growing populations and economies without needing to worry about devaluing currencies or Malthusian collapses. It also improves our hardiness against a number of existential risks.

"We will just expand into space". Stop dreaming, shithead. Get your feet on the ground and out of your asteroid fields.

Yes, in both cases. In the future, though, the risks of this happening will hopefully be reduced; we are already developing exo-womb technology for an endangered species of sharks that engages in in-womb cannibalism in order to prevent said in-womb cannibalism, and thereby increase the number of baby sharks born.

First, you are dreaming again - a red herring. Second, you just admitted that you would ruin a womans life who harmed NO ONE but possibly herself. You are a morally abhorrent shithead.

Innocent until proven guilty; the coroner determines it was natural causes, and the lady goes free. An analogous situation would be a young person with no indications of psychological problems tripping and falling out of a high window. They don't seem the sort for suicide, and someone might have pushed them, but it was really just an accident.

In other words, it HAS to be treated as a criminal case. Congratulations, shithead - you just criminalized a large percentage of women.

Yes, it is. Unless something (like a spontaneous miscarriage, or complications surrounding childbirth) happens to intervene, that fetus will grow up into a person, even if they might not be one at that stage. In America, there's an infant mortality rate of .63%, and a child mortality rate of .6%. Therefore, you can think of a fetus as having the moral weight of about 98.7% of a five-year-old child.

Hey, moron: Morals and math do not mix like that. Yes, that includes utiliarism.




But most importantly, you INGORED the actual point:
By what measure are embryos human beings?
Because the only thing they have in common with human beings is their DNA. By that logic, cutting my skin is also murder. They can not survive without the most extensive life support. They have no brain and therefore personality that could be killed. They do not even have a nervous system, so they can not even feel pain on a rudimentary level. There is NOTHING that makes abortion comparable to murder, except religious concepts like a soul. In other words, you want to force women to adhere to your religious beliefs and punish them if they don't.


Now, a personal note that has nothing to do with the debate. Ignoring the debate in favor of this will show that you are incapable of debating and conceede your points:
To me, you are a immoral bigoted moronic shithead who has no idea about reality, dreams about futuristic solutions instead of tackling actual problems and who can not understand the consequences of his proposed policies.
You are immoral because you advocate immoral policies that would greatly increase our problems and suffering. You are bigoted because you do so out of personal conviction and religion instead of logic or morality. You are a hithead because you are full of it. You have demonstrated multiple times that you do not understand reality, i think your Orion-thread was the biggest example. You have demonstrated here with "we will go to space anyway" that you ignore actual problems in favor of babbling about solutions that might appear in 100, 200 years or never. And you have also demonstrated that you can not understand the consequences of your own actions.
You can theoretically prove me wrong, but i doubt it - unless you give a really, really good reason for forbidding abortion.


Now answer the questions and defend your "policy".

[PeZook]

That quote was altered to show how ridiculous it is, but he did say he'd support "vigilante actions to bring them to justice", therefore he's not against murder and/or kidnapping, assault, arson and any other illegal actions vigilantes take to "punish" their victims.

Nope. I'm not. However, fighting a campaign like this, like any other war, would be justified based on how much sorrow, death, and destruction it creates as opposed to how much it prevents. World War Two was justified; the Nazis were killing millions of people, and would have killed millions more if they weren't stopped. The Japanese were no slouches, either. World War One, on the other hand, by and large was not; it was just jingoism-fueled senseless butchery.

So you support the death penalty for abortion or "failing that, vigilante actions to bring [the abortion doctors] to justice", yet you somehow do not support murder?

Killing someone not accused of any crime (or even someone who was accused and sentenced!) is murder. It's strictly a legal definition: a soldier killing an insurgent is not murder. The same soldier shooting an unarmed insurgent is. The difference is a legal one. Therefore, you do support murder: you just think it's justified.

Probably not; we don't have the death penalty for Manslaughter. Well, not unless she got drunk with the intention of inducing a miscarriage, anyway.

So every drunk woman picked up by the police would have to be forced to have a pregnancy test, then if it was positive, the DA would need to start an investigation, and then it would probably go to court. Is this correct?

Yes, in both cases. In the future, though, the risks of this happening will hopefully be reduced; we are already developing exo-womb technology for an endangered species of sharks that engages in in-womb cannibalism in order to prevent said in-womb cannibalism, and thereby increase the number of baby sharks born.

That's nice ; Essentially, you advocate harshly punishing pregnant women for getting into any stressful or harmful situation (manslaughter charges for a fender-bender). Do you see now why society doesn't consider fetuses to have the same rights as born people? Even aside from your premise, it's massively impractical to implement the logical consequences of equating a fetus with a developed human, since the police are already having problems solving actual murders.

Also, outlawing abortion by targeting the mothers has proved the be completely unenforceable. How do you prove the mother had an abortion, and not a spontaneous miscarriage?

This sort of case is the rare case where it would be justified; the only time abortion is acceptable is when the life of the mother is on the line. That said, if it's possible, due to advancing medical technology, to extract the embryo/fetus and grow it to birth inside an exo-womb, and the doctor deliberately chose not to due so, he would be guilty of homicide, yes. Or maybe murder; I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the fine legal differences between them.

Wait, so the fetus is equal to a full grown person, yet abortion is acceptable if the mother's life is in danger? What measure do you use to conclude the mother's life is worth more than the fetus? You need to include potential for the fetus to become, say, the next Norman Borlaugh, or just being more succesful than its parents.

If we can expect the fetus to earn, say, 5 times the taxes during its lifetime, shouldn't we logically let the mother die?

Innocent until proven guilty; the coroner determines it was natural causes, and the lady goes free. An analogous situation would be a young person with no indications of psychological problems tripping and falling out of a high window. They don't seem the sort for suicide, and someone might have pushed them, but it was really just an accident.

That's interesting ; Seeing as 30% of all pregnancies end with a spontaneous miscarriage, that means 30% of all pregnant women would need to be arrested, investigated, tried and released to make sure they didn't induce the miscarriage themselves. Did you include the harm of this in your simplistic utilitarian analysis of the situation? Legal fees are not small. You can expect families to go bankrupt from that, especially if they try to get pregnant several times and miscarry. For an average American family, a bankrupcy means destroying the lives of two adults and two children, increasing the probability of the children turning to crime in the future. Since you say future potential matters, you have to include the chance a child from a bankrupt family turns into a criminal and eventually commits murder, or gets killed itself - then pit that chance against the potential prevention of murder.

Same reason why we don't just jail everybody and provide work for them through the state ; Crime would be eradicated, but society would collapse, and that's just not acceptable.

[Shroom Man 777]

Edi, please pardon my intrusion, but I must give input here. My meager knowledge of scienticianology is angered at the babblings of that person who is a mockery of stupid people.

This is stupid. Exo-wombs? Those sharks gestational processes are different from human beings. Exo-wombs for them work because the shark embryos gestate in eggs - except instead of laying them outside like other species, the sharks that give birth just incubate the eggs inside of them. This is why inside the sharks' uterine cavities are countless eggs and hatchlings, and why the biggest hatchling shark gets to eat the smaller hatchlings and eggs (the newly hatched sharks swim inside the mommy shark).

This gestational process is different from humans or mammals. The human fetus is not inside an egg, and in order for the fetus to develop it has to have a link to the mother's body via the umbilical cord and placenta that connects it to the maternal bloodstream. This is different from the gestational process of the sharks that "give birth". In these sharks, there are simply eggs inside of them that hatch - with no physical connection to the mother shark's body, save for the fact that the mother shark's body serves as protection and incubation and growth environment. A human fetus on the other hand is connected to the mother's body via the umbilical cord and placenta, and the mother's body system actually does bodily processes that the undeveloped fetuses are not capable of (like, say, breathing - the umbilical cord gives the baby oxygenated blood, and the baby sends the deoxygenated blood back to the maternal bloodstream. I also think, IIRC, that hepatic function is also done by the mother's body instead of the fetus's, not sure though. forgot).

So the exo-womb thing is pure bullshit. Maybe he intends the exo-womb to use Indian nuclear energy to gestate human fetuses. Maybe his brain was bred in an exo-womb, explaining the many congenital abnormalities it has due to being deprived of having an umbilical cord connected to his mother's uterus.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Not to Dogpile... I will be Judicious.

Killing ten or twenty people to save the lives of a hundred or a thousand is justified. Abortion is murder; I would support the death penalty being applied to abortion doctors, or, failing that, I would support vigilante actions to bring them to justice.

Why is it you think that Abortion is Murder exactly?

This is pure Utilitarian ethics. The abortion doctor has killed people, and will go on to kill more people. Killing the abortion doctor will kill one person. Therefore, killing the abortion doctor is justified, since fewer people will wind up dead. Any innocent victims who get caught in the crossfire simply raise the threshold to which it becomes justified.

Ah, you think they are people. Alright. There are multiple ways that can bring you to the conclusion that an entity is a person. I will go over them, and why none of these ways work to show that a fetus is a person.

1) A soul
If a soul exists at the moment of conception you have several difficulties. The first is that of identical twins. An embryo that splits and becomes two people. If the soul exists at conception, does each twin possess half a soul? What about chimeras? When two simultaneously fertilized eggs (that would become dizygotic twins) fuse together and become one person. Does this person have two souls?

2) Human DNA
Human DNA is not special. It is the same deoxyribonucleic acid that the DNA of every other creature is made of. Nothing special about it, save that is has a different sequence.

3) Intellectual qualities of a person. Higher reasoning, interpersonal relationships, capacity to suffer.

A fetus has none of these things.

As a matter of fact, if a being cannot suffer no Utilitarian ethics can apply to it. You do not know what Utilitarian ethics are. Utilitarian ethics are fundamentally grounded on the concept that suffering and pleasure can be quantified (or at least qualified) and weighed against eachother, with the only morally permissible (and in fact, obligatory) action being that which has the highest net benefit in terms of pleasure. There are a few variants such as Preference utilitarianism, where the strength of held interests are weighed against eachother.

There is no Utilitarian ethical system by which having an abortion is morally blameworthy.

I never said that, and in any case, fears of overpopulation are by and large alarmist tripe, usually purveyed by leftist environmentalists.

Or actual ecologists who know in intricate detail what a population larger than an ecosystem can support does to a population. Sorry numbnuts, but significant numbers of people are not getting off planet to mine asteroids before we reach the 9 billionish upper limit for the earth's carrying capacity. When we get over that (and we will because of the lag in human generation times and momentum in population growth) in 40 years or so you get to start seeing mass water shortages and famine. This should have happened at 4 Billion, but the green revolution occurred. This increased the cap, at the cost of long-term environmental degradation which if not countered very very soon (and prospects are not looking up), will bring the cap BELOW the original 4 Billion.

Kind of like deer populations that overshoot carrying capacity due to a lack of predators. The forage can support them above the carrying capacity for a while, but then it crashes and takes a while to regrow, in the mean time the deer starve to death.

Modern technology is capable of supporting a much larger population than we currently possess, the growth rate of Western nations is, if anything, too low, and even if we were to begin experiencing overpopulation somehow, we could always expand into space.

Are you fucking nuts? (trick question).

We are already seeing the effects of our agricultural practices. Soil degradation and water table depletion on a massive scale. Overfishing, massive permanent dead-zones in our oceans thanks to eutrophication caused by agricultural runoff, deforestation, shifts in global climate that will not be favorable to agriculture. Do I need to go into this farther? There are no long term plans to get significant portions of our population into space, there is no infrastructure to shift food production on the scale required to hydroponics. None. Unless that gets in the works soon... as in yesterday, we are fucked.

Yes, in both cases. In the future, though, the risks of this happening will hopefully be reduced; we are already developing exo-womb technology for an endangered species of sharks that engages in in-womb cannibalism in order to prevent said in-womb cannibalism, and thereby increase the number of baby sharks born.

God you are a dumbfuck. Those species of sharks retain their eggs inside the oviduct. It is not particularly hard to maintain a thin shelled and fragile egg outside mama shark. It just could not survive in the open sea.

Oh, and I reviewed Shroom's post for accuracy. He is correct.

Innocent until proven guilty; the coroner determines it was natural causes, and the lady goes free.

You would need to investigate 20% of all known pregnancies. Up to 80% of all fertilizations if you can detect pregnancy REAL fast. Ever known a woman to have a slightly late but VERY heavy period? That is a miscarriage from an unknown pregnancy.

Yes, it is. Unless something (like a spontaneous miscarriage, or complications surrounding childbirth) happens to intervene, that fetus will grow up into a person, even if they might not be one at that stage.

You know what else can grow into a person if I take the time and energy to care for it properly? A skin cell.

Do you treat an acorn as you would a tree? No. Every sperm you possess has the potential to grow into a person. Are you morally obligated to engage in every mating opportunity to bring them to term? No.

You have obligations toward people who do exist, and you owe obligation to the consequences of an action which will impact someone at birth.

If I am a women who is pregnant and has already made the decision to abort (for the sake of argument, lets say I am 8 weeks in, there is no chance of miscarriage, and my decision will not be revoked) it does not matter what I do. I can drink, smoke, snort meth, go stair-diving. None of those things will impact the child that will never exist. Those are of course the direct considerations. The moral obligations held (or not held) toward the soon to be aborted fetus, and the child it may have become. The child will never be born, and nothing suffers as a result (except for me if I snort meth and go stair-diving). Therefore there is no obligation to the individual. This is because of an infinite regress. If we accept that we have a duty to Bring Someone Into the World, then we must accept that we are obligated to bring all possible people into the world, and as a result must never refuse sex for any reason.

If however it is pre-determined that the child will be born (say I am 8 weeks in, no chance of miscarriage, and am a raving fundie who thinks that the fate of all pregnancies should be strictly in the hands of god, and this decision is irrevocable) then I have moral responsibilities toward the child, as the consequences of my actions will have an impact on a being that exists later. If however the being never does exist... No obligation.

Therefore, you can think of a fetus as having the moral weight of about 98.7% of a five-year-old child.

Even if I were to use your math... with an 80% miscarriage rate for all fertilizations you are looking at an embryo having 19.74% of the moral worth of a fetus. However the two are not comparable in those terms. It is not until sometime in the third trimester that a fetus is capable of suffering in any meaningful way. Therefore it has 0% of the utilitarian moral weight of a 5 year old until that point.

How about this: fetuses do have a right to life but not on a level equal to that of other humans?

Only if you think that the sperm you ejaculated into your boxer shorts last night has a right to join with an egg and thus the right to life. Arguments from potential like this are subject to an infinite regress.

[LionElJonson]

Hey, shithead: STOP DODGING THE QUESTONS!
Namely, the "save embryos or child" one.
Let me ask it again:
In a hypothetical , you can save either a container with 100 unharmed embyros who will all be born in the future, or you can save a single 8-year old girl. Neither will be saved by someone else, neither can save itself - it's your decision. Stop dodging it.

I didn't dodge the question; if the expected value of the number of embryos is greater than the number of children saved, I'd save the embryos. If not, I'd save the children. I don't have a yes-or-no answer; this gives some probabilities, but it's lacking the percent of women that get a second batch frozen after their treatment failed, so I'm not sure if I can arrive at a figure for "total percent of embryos used", and I can't find the original paper. I also can't find anything that says anything regarding the proportion of embryos that fail to properly develop when implanted into the mother.

Now into the pit of your amorality-

Nope. I'm not. However, fighting a campaign like this, like any other war, would be justified based on how much sorrow, death, and destruction it creates as opposed to how much it prevents. World War Two was justified; the Nazis were killing millions of people, and would have killed millions more if they weren't stopped. The Japanese were no slouches, either. World War One, on the other hand, by and large was not; it was just jingoism-fueled senseless butchery.

You do not prevent any of those. Abortion does not cause the death of human beings, for embryos are not human beings. It does not cause more sorrow than unwanted children suffer and cause. And it certainly does not cause any destruction.

An embryo is 98.7% of a human being; the 99.37% chance of surviving birth multiplied by the 99.4% chance of surviving to five years old given that they were born gives roughly a 98.7% chance of surviving to five years old, and I think we can all agree that five-year-olds are human beings. Unwanted children suffer, but that suffering is a less negative result than that of never existing in the first place, and they would also have good bits in their lives that would cancel that out. Even someone who grew up in the slums can work hard, go to university, start a company, get an MBA, and work their way up to the highest ranks of our society; it's just not terribly likely. Also, abortion does cause destruction; the destruction of human life. You can put a price tag on human life through an assortment of economic methods; the most simple is something along the lines of "I am willing to spend $50 to prevent something that has a 1/100,000 chance of killing me, therefore my life has a value of $5,000,000." There are more complicated ones out there that involve pay scales and the money invested by parents and whatnot, but I think that's sufficient for my point.

I never said that, and in any case, fears of overpopulation are by and large alarmist tripe, usually purveyed by leftist environmentalists. Modern technology is capable of supporting a much larger population than we currently possess, the growth rate of Western nations is, if anything, too low, and even if we were to begin experiencing overpopulation somehow, we could always expand into space. An endlessly expanding space empire is probably the ideal solution, overall; it allows for endlessly growing populations and economies without needing to worry about devaluing currencies or Malthusian collapses. It also improves our hardiness against a number of existential risks.

"We will just expand into space". Stop dreaming, shithead. Get your feet on the ground and out of your asteroid fields.

Says the woman on a science fiction board dedicated to debating Star Wars vs Star Trek. More seriously, human expansion into space is inevitable, as well as highly desirable, and I don't know what rational thinker would deny this. There is no reason not to do so other than politics and short-term economics.

Yes, in both cases. In the future, though, the risks of this happening will hopefully be reduced; we are already developing exo-womb technology for an endangered species of sharks that engages in in-womb cannibalism in order to prevent said in-womb cannibalism, and thereby increase the number of baby sharks born.

First, you are dreaming again - a red herring. Second, you just admitted that you would ruin a womans life who harmed NO ONE but possibly herself. You are a morally abhorrent shithead.

She killed the baby, and she very possibly harmed the father, if he wanted to have the baby. Also, I'm not dreaming; scientists really are building artificial wombs for sharks.

Innocent until proven guilty; the coroner determines it was natural causes, and the lady goes free. An analogous situation would be a young person with no indications of psychological problems tripping and falling out of a high window. They don't seem the sort for suicide, and someone might have pushed them, but it was really just an accident.

In other words, it HAS to be treated as a criminal case. Congratulations, shithead - you just criminalized a large percentage of women.

Yes, just like any other suspicious natural death, like psychologically healthy people tripping off of the tops of buildings, or elderly millionaires whose young wives stand to inherit dying in their sleep. The latter is probably a better example, since both are natural deaths with someone who stands by to profit from the fact that it occurred (and let's be blunt here; a good chunk of abortions are due to economic reasons).

Yes, it is. Unless something (like a spontaneous miscarriage, or complications surrounding childbirth) happens to intervene, that fetus will grow up into a person, even if they might not be one at that stage. In America, there's an infant mortality rate of .63%, and a child mortality rate of .6%. Therefore, you can think of a fetus as having the moral weight of about 98.7% of a five-year-old child.

Hey, moron: Morals and math do not mix like that. Yes, that includes utiliarism.

Yes, they do. They totally do, if you're being rational about it. The exact mathematics I used might not be the exact equations Friendly AIs and the like would use (I'm not particularly interested in wading through Bayesian learning, decision making, expected utility functions, and whatnot), but they're close enough for this purpose.

But most importantly, you INGORED the actual point:
By what measure are embryos human beings?

I believe I've already covered that; they have a 98.7% chance of become a human being, and are therefore close enough that the difference doesn't matter, morally.

Because the only thing they have in common with human beings is their DNA. By that logic, cutting my skin is also murder. They can not survive without the most extensive life support. They have no brain and therefore personality that could be killed. They do not even have a nervous system, so they can not even feel pain on a rudimentary level. There is NOTHING that makes abortion comparable to murder, except religious concepts like a soul. In other words, you want to force women to adhere to your religious beliefs and punish them if they don't.

Your skin doesn't have a 98.7% chance of becoming a human being in its own right. An embryo does. That's the important bit; what the embryo's actually made of is irrelevant. It could be a clump of cells or a small swarm of nanomachines or a seed crystal or a self-assembling robot, and my argument wouldn't change.

Now answer the questions and defend your "policy".

Just did. Impatient, much?

So you support the death penalty for abortion or "failing that, vigilante actions to bring [the abortion doctors] to justice", yet you somehow do not support murder?

Killing someone not accused of any crime (or even someone who was accused and sentenced!) is murder. It's strictly a legal definition: a soldier killing an insurgent is not murder. The same soldier shooting an unarmed insurgent is. The difference is a legal one. Therefore, you do support murder: you just think it's justified.

I do support killing, if the killing is morally justified. Whether or not it's legally murder is a matter for the legal systems, though using "murder" to refer to unjustified killing is a decent shorthand for it.

So every drunk woman picked up by the police would have to be forced to have a pregnancy test, then if it was positive, the DA would need to start an investigation, and then it would probably go to court. Is this correct?

No more so than a woman who marries an elderly millionaire is automatically put through a background check or something.

That's nice ; Essentially, you advocate harshly punishing pregnant women for getting into any stressful or harmful situation (manslaughter charges for a fender-bender). Do you see now why society doesn't consider fetuses to have the same rights as born people? Even aside from your premise, it's massively impractical to implement the logical consequences of equating a fetus with a developed human, since the police are already having problems solving actual murders.

Only if the fetus actually dies as a result.

Also, outlawing abortion by targeting the mothers has proved the be completely unenforceable. How do you prove the mother had an abortion, and not a spontaneous miscarriage?

How do you prove an elderly gentleman was suffocated, and didn't just die in his sleep?

Wait, so the fetus is equal to a full grown person, yet abortion is acceptable if the mother's life is in danger? What measure do you use to conclude the mother's life is worth more than the fetus? You need to include potential for the fetus to become, say, the next Norman Borlaugh, or just being more succesful than its parents.

If we can expect the fetus to earn, say, 5 times the taxes during its lifetime, shouldn't we logically let the mother die?

The mother has the right to self-defense, like anyone else. Additionally, as far as I know, there's no way to statistically calculate the probability of success of any particular person; you can at best calculate the average for their demographic.

That's interesting ; Seeing as 30% of all pregnancies end with a spontaneous miscarriage, that means 30% of all pregnant women would need to be arrested, investigated, tried and released to make sure they didn't induce the miscarriage themselves. Did you include the harm of this in your simplistic utilitarian analysis of the situation? Legal fees are not small. You can expect families to go bankrupt from that, especially if they try to get pregnant several times and miscarry. For an average American family, a bankrupcy means destroying the lives of two adults and two children, increasing the probability of the children turning to crime in the future. Since you say future potential matters, you have to include the chance a child from a bankrupt family turns into a criminal and eventually commits murder, or gets killed itself - then pit that chance against the potential prevention of murder.

Same reason why we don't just jail everybody and provide work for them through the state ; Crime would be eradicated, but society would collapse, and that's just not acceptable.

Yeah, obviously. You'd just hire more coroners, and let them sort through it. You'd only arrest them if there was reason to believe that criminal wrongdoing was involved. Just like you only arrest the widows of elderly millionaires if you think criminal wrongdoing was involved. Most likely, you'd just create another bureaucratic burden on the police force and coroners. Besides, even if criminal charges do get involved, "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

This is stupid. Exo-wombs? Those sharks gestational processes are different from human beings. Exo-wombs for them work because the shark embryos gestate in eggs - except instead of laying them outside like other species, the sharks that give birth just incubate the eggs inside of them. This is why inside the sharks' uterine cavities are countless eggs and hatchlings, and why the biggest hatchling shark gets to eat the smaller hatchlings and eggs (the newly hatched sharks swim inside the mommy shark).

This gestational process is different from humans or mammals. The human fetus is not inside an egg, and in order for the fetus to develop it has to have a link to the mother's body via the umbilical cord and placenta that connects it to the maternal bloodstream. This is different from the gestational process of the sharks that "give birth". In these sharks, there are simply eggs inside of them that hatch - with no physical connection to the mother shark's body, save for the fact that the mother shark's body serves as protection and incubation and growth environment. A human fetus on the other hand is connected to the mother's body via the umbilical cord and placenta, and the mother's body system actually does bodily processes that the undeveloped fetuses are not capable of (like, say, breathing - the umbilical cord gives the baby oxygenated blood, and the baby sends the deoxygenated blood back to the maternal bloodstream. I also think, IIRC, that hepatic function is also done by the mother's body instead of the fetus's, not sure though. forgot).

I don't claim to be a scientist; I don't know exactly how the machines work. I just know that scientists were building them. Those all sound like engineering problems, though; you could probably rig up some sort of hybridized iron lung/reverse dialysis machine to fulfill those functions or something.

[Shroom Man 777]

It is not as simple as purchasing Indian nuclear weapons to try and build a nuclear explosion-propelled spaceship. It's a medical problem, pretty complicated one at that (like all medical problems).

Anyway, I won't engage you since Edi has specified no dogpiling. I just needed to mention it as a point that needed to be addressed (didn't know if PeZook/Serafina/Liberty knew anything about maternal nursing, or sharks and sandworms), and as something I could heckle.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I don't claim to be a scientist; I don't know exactly how the machines work. I just know that scientists were building them. Those all sound like engineering problems, though; you could probably rig up some sort of hybridized iron lung/reverse dialysis machine to fulfill those functions or something.

Nope. Not within the next hundred years probably. They are not engineering problems. There are very very complicated interactions between mom and fetus we dont have a handle on yet.