Ron Paul: only ‘honest rape’ merits abortion

[Simon_Jester]

I apologize if this counts as dogpiling, but I really am hoping to take this up with D13 in a substantial way without burning too much of his time. I'm not trying to hound him to death here.

3) Consider this:
[...]
Viewed unsympathetically, this becomes: "Bearing children is mandatory, making sure they have a good life is not."

Yea, but what I'm saying is they feel that way about all people, so it isn't an important part of the abortion debate; an insufficient safety net is a problem whether there's an abortion ban or not, and the issue of an abortion ban would be debated whether there was a strong safety net or not.

They are independent issues. While an individual's choice to abort or not may be influenced by money, as a matter of government policy, they have nothing to do with one another. Abortion bans aren't there to save a few bucks on the welfare budget, and if they were, I'd be very concerned about it, for the reason I laid out in my first post.

Since we know abortion has this effect- it's... I don't think it's entirely independent. It's like being pro-war but opposed to instability in foreign countries. Having the one means you get more of the other, there's really no way to avoid it.

Banning abortion means lots of kids born into situations where their parents are poorly equipped to raise them, and where the society around them is poor and full of crime and otherwise not a good place to grow up in. There's no way around that. So I think wanting an abortion ban while being officially indifferent to the fate of the child once they're born... those aren't independent positions.

And I mean 'officially' as in, you don't actually do anything legally about it except wring your hands and say it would be nice if someone else would put up the money but hey, no pressure.

Compare this to, say, the Catholic Church. When they had political power, they ran a lot of orphanages, schools, and charities- a chunk of tithe money went there. They still do some of that, even without political power. So while they were (and are) anti-abortion, they're more consistent about it: they continue to value the baby after it's born, and are willing to sacrifice from a communal pool of resources to make sure the baby has a chance of survival and a future.

Or in thinking that if you really care about forcing women to bear children, for the sake of the children and not for the sake of limiting the women, you should also care about forcing those women (and everyone else) to raise the children after they're born.

This actually gets interesting... conservatives often talk about opportunity rather than guarantees, so let's use their perspective.

They say you aren't guaranteed to be rich, but you need the opportunity. You don't get that opportunity if you are aborted! That's an interesting justification for the ban. (Before someone goes OMFG VIRULENTLY ANTI WOMAN, please read the whole post first. BTW, do non persons deserve opportunity? Probably debatable, but let's just accept it for now, for sake of exploration.)

By banning abortion, you ensure the fetus has the first step to opportunity. Logically, you should go the whole way to achieve that goal.

If that were the argument, and it is certainly a plausible one, yeah, the safety net is a good thing to talk about! American conservatives and I typically disagree on this. Simon, you and I probably agree that you can't ensure a fair opportunity without some kind of big government liberalism.

So, if you ban abortion for the sake of opportunity, I think you indeed would have to be a big government guy to be consistent. Interesting criticism and interesting argument.

Opportunity isn't compelling to counter the other pro-choice arguments; I don't think it comes close to justifying a ban. But, that's really interesting angle to think about just for fun. I've never considered it before.

Yeah- although really, opportunity isn't something you see much in anti-abortion arguments. For the fetus's opportunity to carry much moral weight you almost have to decide to consider the fetus human or near-human. And then the "dude, you're killing people" argument comes into play.

[RedImperator]

I apologize if this counts as dogpiling, but I really am hoping to take this up with D13 in a substantial way without burning too much of his time. I'm not trying to hound him to death here.

You were in before I closed the gate. No worries.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Imma put on my mod hat right now and say "no dogpiling". If you're not already in the debate with D13, unless you have something really original to add, you missed the boat. Sorry.

Um... which category do I fall under? I got in kinda early.

Yes, indeed. This is one reason why I don't think straight up utiltarinism is the one true path to moral behavior; maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering, both on their own, can lead to really weird stuff.

For ever loving fuck. Use paragraphs, or at least standardize your line spacing. You are scrawling like a Mad Person(tm)

As can all ethical systems, which is why I later specified that it does not matter what ethical system one uses. Additionally, you are either missing the point or deliberately misrepresenting it. So, I will put it in nice little if/then statements for you.

If: A future life is worth living (here, life is operationally defined not as the biological process, but in terms of the experience of being alive for a conscious being)
If: This future life being worth living imparts moral obligation by itself
Then: We are obliged to never forgo an opportunity to reproduce. This may come as some sort of moral comfort to virginal basement nerds, but it makes no sense if one considers what we would generally consider to be a good and decent moral life. But, let us extend the argument.

If: This argument is true
If: There are other concerns that ought be taken into consideration inside a moral argument
If: Those other factors may outweigh the obligation to reproduce that follows from argument Number 1

But, let's turn it around. At what point is a life not worth living? Suppose you have a very poor person. Is it acceptable to euthanize him to prevent the suffering of being poor?

Irrelevant strawman. I have moral obligations to a poor person, and the subjective experience of his life may very well be worth it to him. There are also people who have relationships with this person, and numerous interdependencies.

Anywho, if no, why does it change if you have a potentially poor fetus instead of a poor person?

Because I have Zero obligation toward a fetus.

This is an arbitrary restriction (of course, all of morality is), and a dangerous one too. I prefer to be as all-inclusive as possible in morality; I think it is wrong to needlessly destroy an inanimate object as well as plants, animals, people and many other things. I haven't decided how to weigh it all though for ethical dilemmas.

Then your opinion is worthless if you dont know how to make a distinction between a rock, a lizard, and a human being. Here, let me help you.

These things are NOT arbitrary. What are ethics? Principles applied to govern how we ought interact with others. What is the underpinning of it? Well, we have this thing, it is called empathy. We also have logic.

If: We do not like experiences and think others should not inflict this on us, and we like it when we experience positive experiences
If: Other things are largely similar to us. We call this Intrinsic Value. It may have a magnitude
Then: It stands to reason we ought not inflict negative experiences on others, to the extent that they can experience them, and we should promote the converse.

If: The prior argument is true
If: Conflicts periodically arise
Then: We ought take the course of action that minimizes negative experiences, and maximizes positive experiences

I could use deontology as well. The same basic principles of empathy apply. Things that have experiences get moral consideration. Also, keep in mind, there are other forms of intrinsic value at higher levels of organization, but that is irrelevant here.

A rock or other inanimate object does not have intrinsic value because they do not experience things. They have instrumental value, whereby they have value only because things with intrinsic value might require, use, or subjectively value them. Thus, you may waterboard a rock at will. Plants, while alive and possessing of some... really really basic ability to sense and respond to stimuli, are not conscious. So, barring instrumental value to other things (a place to live, oxygen and various ecological functions), they dont have intrinsic value. Almost any other competing claim would permit you to destroy a single plant provided no other entity or entities had a more compelling claim via instrumental value. For example, if a colony of birds lives in that tree, you might not want to cut it down because it is blocking your view of the sunrise, because your claim is rather low intensity, while the birds..kinda NEED the tree.

A fetus falls into this category, as it has no ability to consciously perceive things.

Conscious beings can experience things to one degree or the other. At a basic level, they can feel pain and experience pleasure. Smarter creatures have a wider range of experience. They can experience angst for example, or perceive injustices. As a result, the range and magnitude of their experiences in an ethical calculation can be larger.

But, the problem with having morally relevant entities is it means you also have morally irrelevant entities. What if you misclassify something and then mistreat it?

You cannot mistreat a rock

Surely you'd agree that is a possibility.... and even under utilitarian ethics, the risk of this has to be considered (the consequences of making a mistake brings suffering), so the moral agent ought to err on the side of caution.

Not to this great a degree.

But, I don't agree with the idea of having morally irrelevant things at all.

How would you mistreat a stone? your position is ridiculous on its face.

Are we infringing upon her right to choose with a ban? Yes, obviously, but there is no right to choose murder anyway, so that's not a slam dunk unless we again agree the fetus is morally irrelevant.

OK. What makes it relevant? I dont give a shit about whether you agree or not. A statement of opinion is worthless without an argument.

Oh, also... if we are going to talk about rights...

If I hook you up to a machine that devotes portions of your kidney function to someone else--turning you into a living dialysis machine-- do you not have a right to remove yourself if I hook the other end of that into another person? What if I just take one of your kidneys with the intent of giving it to someone else? Do you not have the right to kill me in self defense, even if you are taking two lives instead of just mine, one of which is an innocent?

Murder CAN be permissible. It is called self defense. Defending against a rape qualifies for the use of lethal force in self defense. Rape is evil because it is a violation not just of a person's body, but their most intimate parts, and violates a person's control over themselves, which causes an intense amount of psychological distress. Why is forced pregnancy any better? Why, even if we accept the idea that a fetus is a person, should we permit forced pregnancy?

[RedImperator]

Imma put on my mod hat right now and say "no dogpiling". If you're not already in the debate with D13, unless you have something really original to add, you missed the boat. Sorry.

Um... which category do I fall under? I got in kinda early.

Simon_Jester, Serafina, and Alyrium were in before the clock, and Keevan obviously has a right to respond if he wants to. That's it for now.

[Alyrium Denryle]

More importantly, though, he made a clear philosophical statement about morality. He said a fetus is not morally relevant, and even said it really does not matter what ethical system I use! The latter is false, and the former is arguable, regardless of the scientific facts.

No. The second statement is not false. Rights ethics: The fetus is irrelevant because it is a foreign invader. Kant: It has no mind, therefore the maxim "abortion should be permitted at the discretion of the mother" does not violate the categorical imperative. Utilitarianism is clear cut. Pragmatism is clear cut. Religious morality or your subjective opinion are not ethical systems. Even christianity, if I actually read the damn bible, permits abortion.

The fetus has no mind. No consciousness. It did not have one at the past that may recover. And if killed, it wont have one in the future. No characteristic we might use in order to ascribe moral relevance to an entity is possessed by a fetus.

I think defining personhood is the wrong question to ask in any moral argument, because it opens the door to saying "that's not human, so it doesn't matter". (If you think this is hypothetical, think about the people who dismiss animal's rights, or environmentalism, or any other thing you care about that some people don't. I betcha if you asked them why they don't care, some variant of "it isn't people" would come up eventually.)

Personhood is distinct from human

You also talked about crime... maybe a small effect there, but it's not like babies are criminals. They might put financial pressure on parents who could turn to crime.. but I don't have numbers, but I'd be really, really surprised if it was > 1%.

The effect is long term. An unwanted child is A) Likely to be poor, and thus more prone to crime, B) born to parents who dont want the kid, and thus may not treat it well.

The end result is actually the massive reversal in rising crime rates that happened ~20 years post roe v wade. It explains ~50% of that reversal statistically, with the rest being accounted for by changes in policy and social programs.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/ ... ed2001.pdf

Right, though the human thing doesn't have to apply: opportunity is all about realizing potential, and we can all agree that fetuses are at least potential people. So maybe.

And you fall into an infinite regress problem. If potential people impose obligations, we are obligated to take every opportunity we can to mate for procreation.

[RedImperator]

Meanwhile, on another prong of the discussion:

Not a fan of most of Rep. Paul's usual schtick, but this seems much ado about not very much. He appears to be giving two different scenarios for a woman seeking an exemption for what would be, in his estimation, a good and just ban on abortion. I don't get the impression that he considers these to be the only two possible scenarios, but rather two extreme ends of situations on both ends of the spectrum. I will break it down a bit more:

Situation 1: a woman approaches Dr. Paul (who is, for some reason, putting in a shift at an emergency room), says that she was forced to have intercourse earlier that day, and wants to prevent pregnancy. She has a police report in hand, and her story checks out. Boom, estrogen, away you go.

The first scenario is, in his opinion, pretty cut-and-dried, and really I doubt that very many outside the militant anti-choice crazy people would deny her a permanent resolution to this one aspect of her new problem. I would find it difficult to find a clearer example of a person more deserving of an exemption to an abortion ban (which, fortunately, does not yet exist).

Wait, why does having a police report in hand make any difference whether the exception is justified? I assume you're playing devil's advocate for Paul here, but this is still sloppy philosophy. If you have a police report, a one-day-old fertilized embryo isn't human life, but if you don't, then it's not? Why would that be?

You can keep stepping back and it still doesn't make sense. Take away the requirement that the woman has evidence she was raped or a credible story or just the fact itself with no evidence whatsoever, you've still arbitrarily decided--for one day only--that a fertilized embryo is not human life, due to the manner in which it was conceived (which was obviously no fault of its own). Paul is just being inconsistent, probably because he doesn't want to look like a crazy person (even though the crazy no-compromise pro-lifers are actually holding a more sensible position). He's probably also genuinely sympathetic to rape victims, but the fact he's not able to set that sympathy aside for the sake of the embryo's alleged humanity just means he's morally confused.

[Simon_Jester]

Anyway, there's about 900,000 abortions in the US each year according to the CDC. The latest Census numbers put 46 million people below the poverty line, about 17% of the population. The previous year had about 43 million. The economy is in the shitter, so this is probably reflective of that, but that's a growth of three million; about up 7% from the previous year.

Now, if every one of those abortions would have produced a baby in the poverty line - surely a big overestimate - the growth would have been ~ 30% more than it was, or up about 9% from the previous year.

This is where I got the one or two percentage points I think I left in one of these posts.

Yes, but that's in one year- I don't agree that you can discount the cumulative effect. Assume it's half the abortions that would be born below the poverty line, figure a child and teen mortality rate that's actually pretty harsh, and you're still looking at a group of over fifteen percent of all people presently in poverty, being in poverty eighteen years after an abortion ban.

Moreover, adding extra babies to a family teetering on the edge financially will tend to push people over the poverty line who wouldn't otherwise be there (so one baby may mean three or four more people 'in poverty' by official standards), and makes it harder for the parents to pull their way back out of the hole- especially with a single mother.

So the effect isn't limited to the increase in any one year.

(Note: this is already talking about growth, so I don't think accumulation of births would change the conclusion much. There's about 4 million live births in the county a year, and if about 1/6 of people are below the line, odds are a similar fraction is there for children too; we're doubling the growth rate from births, worst case scenario. The poverty growth from the failing economy - 3 million in one year (2010 I believe) - is far more significant.)

Yes, but we'd like to think that the economy will eventually restart. The increase due to more births in poverty won't go away nearly so fast, if at all.

In the big picture, we're definitely talking about <1% of government spending. If you're looking to cut something, this shouldn't be very high on the priority list.

It's not so much "save money- allow abortions!" It's "if you're willing to tell all women that they are required by law to carry pregnancies to term, and put the private burden of raising those children on the mothers, you should be willing to require a modest public burden of care on others."

Banning abortion puts a very large burden on a specific class of women- those who don't want children or don't think they can afford to have them, but are now forced to have them anyway no matter the cost. If the result (more children) is worth the cost to that group of people, it should be worth something to the rest of us, too.

You also talked about crime... maybe a small effect there, but it's not like babies are criminals. They might put financial pressure on parents who could turn to crime.. but I don't have numbers, but I'd be really, really surprised if it was > 1%.

Again, it just isn't a significant consequence.

No, I mean many of those babies are going to be born into a social environment already full of crime- which could be reduced effectively if we were willing to spend money and pay attention to the issue. But most people who would ban abortion are not willing to do this.

EDIT: I think I lost the forest for the trees in here. Yeah, maybe the policy makers see a benefit here... but I sure hope not. Pretty minor change, and that's the same kind of stuff used to justify shit like eugenics.

Again, it's not "allow abortions to save public money." It's "if we're going to ban abortions, if we care enough to do this to these women and create a specific law preventing them from doing this, then we should also care enough to do these other things."

It's like, we agree that if a man fathers a child, he's responsible for that child entering the world, and he should pay a nice big share of the costs of raising that child.

But when all of society says "this child must be carried to term and raised," then isn't all of society at least somewhat responsible for that child entering the world? Shouldn't society be willing to provide the funds to make the difference between misery and poverty for that child, and some reasonable degree of happiness and success?

The birth of children who would have been aborted is a consequence of our decisions as a civilization. Should we not be willing to help pay for the consequences, or does that burden fall entirely on a narrow group of women who knew they didn't want or couldn't afford to carry it?

Which, again, I actually would be- I'd be for society helping to pay with the usual (or more than usual) services in terms of education, crime prevention, antipoverty measures, and so on. Even though I don't want an abortion ban. But so many of the people who want such a ban don't seem to care about it- once the child is born, it becomes Someone Else's Problem and the costs of raising it go directly to the whore-mother who bore it.

Compare this to, say, the Catholic Church. When they had political power, they ran a lot of orphanages, schools, and charities- a chunk of tithe money went there. They still do some of that, even without political power. So while they were (and are) anti-abortion, they're more consistent about it: they continue to value the baby after it's born, and are willing to sacrifice from a communal pool of resources to make sure the baby has a chance of survival and a future.

Aye. BTW, do you know if this used to be much bigger forty years ago?

Probably not that much- I'm talking centuries ago; the Church's charity was a big deal in medieval times.

Note that if you go back far enough before the sexual revolution, a child born out of wedlock was a name-blackening scandal for the woman- about the only way she could get charity to help raise that child was to more or less abandon the baby on an orphanage doorstep.

Yeah- although really, opportunity isn't something you see much in anti-abortion arguments. For the fetus's opportunity to carry much moral weight you almost have to decide to consider the fetus human or near-human. And then the "dude, you're killing people" argument comes into play.

Right, though the human thing doesn't have to apply: opportunity is all about realizing potential, and we can all agree that fetuses are at least potential people. So maybe.

But we don't automatically assume that non-person things have some right to achieve potential that trumps the privacy and rights of other people. By turning the fetus's "potential-human" status into a really big deal that is weighed as equal to, say, the chunk of the mother's potential and opportunities she sacrifices by having the baby, you are implicitly accepting enough of the human status that the "dude, you're killing people" argument really should matter.

What I find interesting about it though is just that I've never seen it before. What you said about the Catholics is the same idea in a way: basically do what they can along the whole process, though for life rather than opportunity. But I just get joy over stuff like this.

Well, in theory they do, it's complicated. But the point is, no one can really accuse the Catholic church of having a history of being anti-abortion but indifferent to the plight of children in poverty, they do try to do something for poor children. It may not be exactly what I'd like, I might not approve of every last detail, but they try, so I don't accuse them of being a pack of goddamn hypocritical assholes about it, the way I do Protestant evangelists who are so obviously doing it out of misogyny.

[SCRawl]

Meanwhile, on another prong of the discussion:

Not a fan of most of Rep. Paul's usual schtick, but this seems much ado about not very much. He appears to be giving two different scenarios for a woman seeking an exemption for what would be, in his estimation, a good and just ban on abortion. I don't get the impression that he considers these to be the only two possible scenarios, but rather two extreme ends of situations on both ends of the spectrum. I will break it down a bit more:

Situation 1: a woman approaches Dr. Paul (who is, for some reason, putting in a shift at an emergency room), says that she was forced to have intercourse earlier that day, and wants to prevent pregnancy. She has a police report in hand, and her story checks out. Boom, estrogen, away you go.

The first scenario is, in his opinion, pretty cut-and-dried, and really I doubt that very many outside the militant anti-choice crazy people would deny her a permanent resolution to this one aspect of her new problem. I would find it difficult to find a clearer example of a person more deserving of an exemption to an abortion ban (which, fortunately, does not yet exist).

Wait, why does having a police report in hand make any difference whether the exception is justified? I assume you're playing devil's advocate for Paul here, but this is still sloppy philosophy. If you have a police report, a one-day-old fertilized embryo isn't human life, but if you don't, then it's not? Why would that be?

You can keep stepping back and it still doesn't make sense. Take away the requirement that the woman has evidence she was raped or a credible story or just the fact itself with no evidence whatsoever, you've still arbitrarily decided--for one day only--that a fertilized embryo is not human life, due to the manner in which it was conceived (which was obviously no fault of its own). Paul is just being inconsistent, probably because he doesn't want to look like a crazy person (even though the crazy no-compromise pro-lifers are actually holding a more sensible position). He's probably also genuinely sympathetic to rape victims, but the fact he's not able to set that sympathy aside for the sake of the embryo's alleged humanity just means he's morally confused.

I was trying to create two scenarios: one which would have been as clear as possible that it would be due an exception to an otherwise complete ban on abortion, and another which was far less likely to "earn" that exception. The police report in the hands of the rape victim was just another piece of evidence intended to make the position less ambiguous. In other words, taking Paul's side for the moment, yes, the fertilized egg is a thing worth protecting, but if it was done completely without the woman's consent then an exception could be made.

Unfortunately, I made that argument without first consulting the video, and Paul's explanation for his reasoning. It wasn't that he would have made an exception based on the merit of her situation, but rather because it could plausibly be denied that fertilization had taken place. The ER doctor giving her the shot of estrogen would be unable to detect pregnancy, and so it would be unknowable whether or not pregnancy would be aborted or merely averted.

I'm personally not happy with this latter line of reasoning, but then I'm not going to agree with very much of Paul's position in this matter.

[Metatwaddle]

Unfortunately, I made that argument without first consulting the video, and Paul's explanation for his reasoning. It wasn't that he would have made an exception based on the merit of her situation, but rather because it could plausibly be denied that fertilization had taken place. The ER doctor giving her the shot of estrogen would be unable to detect pregnancy, and so it would be unknowable whether or not pregnancy would be aborted or merely averted.

If this is all true, why did he qualify the first part with "if it's an honest rape"? If his position is "Plan B (or shots of estrogen, whatever) is okay, abortion is not", then it doesn't matter whether it was "honest rape", "dishonest rape", or consensual sex.

To me, this "honest rape" language illustrates what he thinks about rape victims: that when someone says she has been raped, the default position you should take is "she's lying". I think it also raises the specter of other common tropes about rape -- like that a virgin being raped by a total stranger in a parking garage is "more rape" than a sexually active sorority sister being raped by a friend of a friend in his frat house, that sort of thing.

[SCRawl]

Unfortunately, I made that argument without first consulting the video, and Paul's explanation for his reasoning. It wasn't that he would have made an exception based on the merit of her situation, but rather because it could plausibly be denied that fertilization had taken place. The ER doctor giving her the shot of estrogen would be unable to detect pregnancy, and so it would be unknowable whether or not pregnancy would be aborted or merely averted.

If this is all true, why did he qualify the first part with "if it's an honest rape"? If his position is "Plan B (or shots of estrogen, whatever) is okay, abortion is not", then it doesn't matter whether it was "honest rape", "dishonest rape", or consensual sex.

To me, this "honest rape" language illustrates what he thinks about rape victims: that when someone says she has been raped, the default position you should take is "she's lying". I think it also raises the specter of other common tropes about rape -- like that a virgin being raped by a total stranger in a parking garage is "more rape" than a sexually active sorority sister being raped by a friend of a friend in his frat house, that sort of thing.

The video reveals that yes, his position is morally confused. Either that or he was talking without thinking very clearly about what he was saying.

[RedImperator]

If you have a police report, a one-day-old fertilized embryo isn't human life, but if you don't, then it's not? Why would that be?

Not sure exactly what SCRawl was going for, but I don't think Ron Paul was saying an abortion is justified there at all. I'm pretty sure (I could be wrong) that an estrogen shot the day after is a contraceptive, so no fertilization yet to worry about.

It looks to me that Paul answered with what he would do rather than what he wouldn't do. When I worked in customer service, they said always answer questions that way, since people don't like to hear "no". I'm sure the same rule applies in politics.

Then, talking about the other extreme, he could reiterate his core position for the conservative base, while giving moderates a "no" they are likely to agree with anyway.

tbh I didn't watch the entire video yet though.

Yeah I looked it up and there's actually some pretty serious scientific doubt that the morning after pill prevents implantation at all

But if that's the case, why bring up rape victims at all? I guess Paul's reasoning is that there's 1) enough doubt to say we can't know that a morning after pill is causing an abortion, and 2) it's worth taking the chance in the case of a rape victim because carrying your rapist's baby is a pretty rotten thing to have to do (as long as it was an "honest rape" and she's not a slut or anything, I guess), but this is still seems like a terrible muddle. Either there's enough doubt 24 or 72 or whatever hours after intercourse that Plan B is acceptable to anyone, or there's too much a chance there's an actual human being in there to risk it no matter what the circumstances. He's still basically arguing that by consenting to sex, women abrogate the right to their own uteruses regardless of the circumstances, and he's still carving out an exemption for rapes that doesn't actually make any sense given his justification for the above.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd argue the fetus thing is about mind- what distinguishes a person from an animal is the property of intelligence or sapience or whatever you want to call it. That's a huge qualitative difference between almost any human and any animal, except for a few of the most intelligent species that raise serious ethical issues about anyway.

Up until about the age of viability, a fetus just... doesn't have the wetware to be fully a 'person' to my way of thinking.

Now, you can ask "Well, what about children or adult humans who don't have intelligence? What about brain damage?"

My answer to that is that the ethical reason we should be careful about how we treat them because of the consequences. When we become cruel and dismissive towards beings that are very like us physically but lack the mental equipment to be 'people,' it coarsens us and makes us more likely to be cruel and abusive towards those who are people. Moreover, except for humans who are literally born without a brain, or whose brain basically dissolves during a coma, even a badly brain-damaged human will still be an intelligent lifeform so the category is small and, I think, not that severe a problem with the ethical model.

[Darth Wong]

Perhaps you can stop spouting lines of strawman bullshit.

You can stop spouting lines of contentless spam, or actually make an argument. Either way works for me. Or, I guess you could put your mod hat on, but until you do, I'll treat you the same way I'd treat anyone else.

Anyway, it is not valid to simply slap a label on an argument to dismiss it. You can call it a strawman, but you'll have to actually show why and how it is one before it is defeated.

You replaced "abortion" with "murder". That's a strawman. Far-right anti-abortion fanatics do this all the time, because they believe abortion is murder, but that doesn't mean you can adopt it as an assumption and then alter anyone's abortion-related statement the same way.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Empathy is not the underpinning of ethics. Check out the secularity morality thread in SLAM from a little while ago for a discussion on this.

I did. I participated in it, last I checked. Arguments for ethics derived from sources other than the human mind and it's facilities are non-starters. Why? Because there is no external arbiter. What? Do you think the universe cried when the holocaust happened and that is what makes it wrong? No. The holocaust was wrong because I would not like to be in a concentration camp and generally think someone ought not put me in one. Other people can generally be assumed to be similar to me. Therefore, I ought not put people into a concentration camp.

The only difference between the major ethical systems is how this is applied to solve ethical dilemmas.

This is what I meant by arbitrary, though that might not be a good word for this. You're simply asserting these things. I guess 'axiom' is a better word. This is a necessary thing to have, but we should recognize it for what it is.

How about you provide complete quotations so as not to dishonestly represent my arguments via lack of context. Here:

I have moral obligations to a poor person
[...]
Because I have Zero obligation toward a fetus.

I have spelled out arguments regarding why i hold this to be true, rather than just asserting it like you have claimed in your revolting little strawman. But of course, that seems to be how you like to argue in this thread. I will remind you of Dalton's warning on the subject of stawmen.

How exactly would one mistreat a rock? Does it have dignity? Does it care if I step on it? No. Does the universe cry when I step on it? No. How about when I take out a chisel. The statement "one can harm or otherwise mistreat a rock" is ridiculous on its face, until you define how such mistreatment could occur. I am waiting.

As for the other part, here is the rest:

OK. What makes it relevant? I dont give a shit about whether you agree or not. A statement of opinion is worthless without an argument.

I do not give a shit if you agree with a statement. People dont "agree" with things all the time. Said agreement or disagreement is worthless without a REASON. Make an argument to show how I might mistreat a stone, or how I might misclassify something?

How do you handle the risk? This is a sideshow, but I'd like to know what you think.

Risks exist in the margins, so I tend to classify things higher than they otherwise would be, and tend to be risk averse. However, a fetus is really clear cut. Their nervous system can process signals of various types, but the connections permitting awareness of those stimuli are not complete until well into the third trimester, and even then, the fetus is endogenously sedated (in a biologically induced coma, effectively) until just before birth. The house has been built, but no one has moved in. Thus, I cannot murder people living inside.

A person is both a physical body and a collection of other traits - personality, memories, connections - many of the things you talked about.

Why is a physical body relevant? you are simply asserting things without evidence or argument. The very same thing you falsely accuse me of doing.

It also applies to other things: say you were forced to pick one of two animals to kill. One of them is an endangered species, the other is not. Which one do you kill?

A) that line of reasoning has no bearing on the question. This question is a non-sequiter.
B) All other things being equal, the non-endangered species. As mentioned before, other things at higher levels of organization such as intrinsic and instrumental value of nature itself that have far more complicated underpinnings, and are also irrelevant to this discussion, are what justify that.

It is bad enough to destroy a life, let's try to limit the collateral damage. But, a "species" doesn't have consciousness, doesn't feel pain... so I wonder what you'd do here.

Red Herring. Completely irrelevant to the discussion of abortion.

The answers to these questions always depend on the details. If it was a permanent and debilitating connection, maybe. That'd be ending the other guy's life, but the other choice involves its own costs, so it might go the other way.

This is a response to the question. Not an answer.

But, if it was a temporary connection and/or had a relatively minor affect on me, no, I would think it is wrong to disconnect. In other words, I'd personally prefer to find another way. (Note: this does not necessarily mean there should be a ban on this choice in law in any situation, and especially not the abortion one.)

Do not dodge the analogy. Go take a look at the risk of kidney transplant, having long term openings in one's body cavity, stress on the kidneys. They are analogous to pregnancy, and pregnancy is actually a very risky procedure, and often leads to affects on the mothers life for decades.

Answer the fucking question. Do not weasel out of it like a shit-covered stoat.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Next, you're going to tell me that Mel Gibson is no true Scotsman.

No. Religious morality are commands, and tautological commands at that. A tautology is, you know, kinda fallacious.
Same thing with your subjective opinion, unless you back it up with actual logic, which so far you have refused to do. It is as if you read Plato, lost your mind while contemplating the mysteries of the dodecahedron, and decided that your new role model should be the sophists.

I just finished reading this link. (BTW, they said it may also be 15-25%, it isn't 50% for sure

I was going off memory when i posted the link. Sue me. Either way, it is not insignificant when you consider we have the highest violent crime rates in the western world, and they USED to be worse.

So, we're just talking about the statistical tie here, not right or wrong.

I did not use the paper as an ethical argument. I used it in support of the premises of an ethical argument of my own.

Here is the syllogism hidden in my argument.

Crime Reduction is Good, and should be preferred to the opposite (all other things being equal)
Permitting Abortion Reduces Crime
Therefore: Permitting Abortion is Good, and should be preferred to the opposite (all other things being equal)

This is not hard

Additionally, do not presume to lecture me about the utility of various forms of regression. More on this in a moment.

SNIP

Go learn how variance partitioning works. You display a lack of knowledge regarding what the term "explains 50% of the variance" means.

It means that out of a spread of data (in this case, variation in crime rates between years) a portion of it was explained by a relationship between crime and abortion whereby children who would otherwise have been born into poor homes, or to parents who did not want them (and who would thus be abused/neglected/just not raised well) were never actually born and thus do not contribute to crime.

We are not looking at 1 factor that causes X percent reduction in crime rates. We are looking at multiple factors, each one contributing to what the crime rate ends up being.

If being raised by a single parent leads to increased crime, it should have increased in the 90's. It didn't. Without this, the link starts to fall apart.

Unless other factors were in play that reduced it. You cannot just play connect the dots with data. You actually have to do the statistics. Additionally, it is called a time-lag. Some effects do not show themselves until well after the initial cause. For example in the case of abortion, you dont start to see a drop in crime until around 20 years post Roe v Wade, because the children who would have been born into shitty households and resort to crime never made it to maturity. Why on earth would an increase in single parent households in the 80s and 90s affect this? We would expect to see the results of that later as well, as the children reach maturity.

The pdf didn't mention a lot od relevant data. Why didn't they look directly at the number of poor? Or the number of single parent families? I did, and I have an explanation: it doesn't fit their conclusion.

Appeal to motive, for one. Second... Already dealt with in the literature... Third, it is not what they were interested in

They go on to note that
“the marginal children who were not born as a result of abortion
legalization would have systematically been born into less favorable
circumstances if the pregnancies had not been terminated:
they would have been 60 percent more likely to live in a singleparent
household, 50 percent more likely to live in poverty, 45
percentmore likely to be in a household collecting welfare, and 40
percent more likely to die during the Žrst year of life.”

They were looking to see if this proposed relationship was true. Given the statistics about the circumstances of aborted fetuses, does the presence of those individuals actually being raised vs not have an impact on crime.

Oh, and yes. The authors DID look directly at the number of poor.

A higher state
unemployment rate is associated with signiŽcant increases in
property crime, but not violent crime, consistent with previous
research [Freeman 1995]. The three other measures of state
economic conditions—per capita income, the poverty rate, and
AFDC generosity (lagged Žfteen years to roughly correspond with
the early years of life of the current teenagers) do not systematically
affect crime. Shall-issue concealed carry laws appear to
signiŽcantly increase the amount of property crime, but have no
effect on violent crime or murder. Finally, beer consumption is
weakly linked with higher crime rates, but never signiŽcantly so.

You lying shitbrick. What, were you counting on me not to have re-read the paper in the interim between my posting it and your reply? Do you not think I have grown to expect intellectual dishonesty from you by now?

3) They only talked about other countries in isolation, but if this is a casual trend, shouldn't this same effect be available worldwide? Canada's abortion history is quite different than America's, but their crime history is similar. How does abortion being a primary cause explain that?

They did not look at it. Sorry. They had enough data to deal with as it is. It is not a problem for a study to say it did not address something that it did not aim to look at. If I write a paper on dominant calling frequency and mating success in Acris crepitans, you cannot criticize the paper because I did not also look at Pixiecephalus adspersus.

Also: It is CAUSAL, you retard, not CASUAL.

edit: sorry, 50% of the reduction, not 50% reduction. But this would mean the slope changed significantly in that time, and I didn't see that at all.

No moron. That is not how it works. A regression partitions the variance in the response variable to its respective causes. You cannot naively look at a trend line in the response variable and conclude that a relationship with a causal variable is not there.

For instance: Say I have some response variable... Oh, I dont know... Cancer rate or something like that, by state, over time. As predictor variables, I have smoking rate, and exposure to various toxins like pesticides. Assume for this thought experiment that other variables are irrelevant.

Smoking has been going down over time, to various degrees across all states, pesticide exposure going up. Well, cancer is going up. By your logic, there is no link between smoking and cancer. That is a load of bullshit. The net effect is just larger for pesticides than smoking, and if one does the math, one can statistically remove the effect of pesticides, and only look at the relationship between smoking and cancer.

So either do your god damn math and show me your data tables (because I dont trust you) or do not make claims about statistical trends, you have no expertise and no knowledge of what you are talking about.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I've been saying a lot that all other things aren't equal, and moreover, this is very dangerous.

Gee, that could be because ethics is rather complicated, and it is useful to isolate factors so they can be dealt with. You have used the very phrase yourself, so dont move your damn goal-posts.

They went from "cut welfare costs" to "forced sterilization of minorities". Call it a slippery slope, but this actually happened. I could see this same thing happening with "cut crime rates".

There is a BIG difference between saying "People we deem unsuitable for having children will be made to not have them" and "women who are not ready to have children and wont do a good job raising them for a variety of reasons, know this, and will often act accordingly of their own volition"

What you describe is simply not applicable in this case. One is taking a permissive attitude that on average yields a good result. The other is coercion. You will notice my syllogism says PERMIT abortion, not MANDATE. Thou shalt not use false analogies. Thou shalt not use arguments from a slippery slope. Thou shalt not use strawmen.

If the change was as big as they say, as widespread as they say, and legalized abortion was the cause, why didn't they replicate the results in other countries? Why didn't someone else replicate the results?

Because no one has tried? There are a lot of studies that do not get replicated because no one else studies the issue, because data is not available etc.

If you want to throw stones about snipping, you shouldn't be breaking up a paragraph like you did, then complain something wasn't addressed that actually was right there.

My apologies. I missed it. However, that mathematical qualm was addressed elsewhere anyway, in the bit about things with multiple causes acting in opposition. Single parent houses also may well not be the actual cause. Most often, single parent households are simply poorer than multi-parent households, so one needs to control for poverty. It is likely that most of the variation explained by single parent households is in fact an artifact, and the actual root cause is simple poverty.

If abortion accounts for half in the rate of change in crime in a place as big and diverse as the United States, the slope should show some change with it reliably in other countries.

Again: Variance partitioning does not work that way. Nor will that number be the same in all systems.

For example: Abortion acts in this system via poverty. Fewer children are born into it etc. If another system has a different history, changes in abortion laws wont have the same effect. Take Norway for example. For a long time, Norway has had very low poverty rates, its prison system is rehabilitative rather than punitive etc. They have a lot going for them in terms of having a naturally low crime rate. A change in abortion laws wont affect this much, because the mechanism through which it acts to affect crime rates in the US is simply not as applicable.

On the opposite side of the coin, if I take a country like South Africa and change their abortion laws so few children are born impoverished, I would expect a large effect size.

Additionally: I am not seeing any data. Oh, that is right. They did not do any actual math. They asserted something using bad statistical reasoning, and did not test it. Fuck them, and fuck you for wasting my time.

I will play your game though. Why not. Results replicated in Canada, Australia and Romania
http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/ ... u-believe/

Hey, I'll admit I'm not qualified to get into the details of the math. But, surely their peers are. And their peers criticized it pretty harshly, finding serious flaws.

Interestingly, none of them talked about sex-ed on wikipedia. I suspect that's at least as big of an impact.

As it happens, I happen to actually be an expert on statistics. Go figure, the biologist who makes his career statistically analyzing large populations of organisms might be one.

Their effect size was reduced. Not nullified. If you are going to appeal to authority, at least have your conclusions follow logically from your sources. Non-Sequiter. Thou Art Guilty.

As for Sex Ed, if anything, the results will wash or be in the opposite direction. Why? Because sex ed in the US is absolute crap, and promotes actual lies about human reproductive health, contraception etc that increases the rate of unwanted pregnancy and children born in poverty/to single moms.

[Junghalli]

I did. I participated in it, last I checked. Arguments for ethics derived from sources other than the human mind and it's facilities are non-starters. Why? Because there is no external arbiter. What? Do you think the universe cried when the holocaust happened and that is what makes it wrong? No. The holocaust was wrong because I would not like to be in a concentration camp and generally think someone ought not put me in one. Other people can generally be assumed to be similar to me. Therefore, I ought not put people into a concentration camp.

I'm not sure if empathy is the only ethics-enforcing mechanisms that comes from the human mind though, or even the heavy muscle of ethics-enforcement.

I'm not sure the mechanism that does the heavy lifting is empathy so much as adherence to codes of conduct, be they religious, legal, or philosophical.

David Brooks wrote an interesting essay on this: The Limits of Empathy. You might not agree with it and I think you and D13 might be using a different definition of empathy from him, but you might find it worth checking out.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I did. I participated in it, last I checked. Arguments for ethics derived from sources other than the human mind and it's facilities are non-starters. Why? Because there is no external arbiter. What? Do you think the universe cried when the holocaust happened and that is what makes it wrong? No. The holocaust was wrong because I would not like to be in a concentration camp and generally think someone ought not put me in one. Other people can generally be assumed to be similar to me. Therefore, I ought not put people into a concentration camp.

I'm not sure if empathy is the only ethics-enforcing mechanisms that comes from the human mind though, or even the heavy muscle of ethics-enforcement.

I'm not sure the mechanism that does the heavy lifting is empathy so much as adherence to codes of conduct, be they religious, legal, or philosophical.

David Brooks wrote an interesting essay on this: The Limits of Empathy. You might not agree with it and I think you and D13 might be using a different definition of empathy from him, but you might find it worth checking out.

It is not the only driver of human behavior, no. It is however a driver for ethical thought and ethical reasoning. It is the reason people ask the question "Why should I behave ethically at all?", and what is, largely, applied in the formation of the various ethical systems either directly or indirectly.

Argument from counter-example: Sociopaths do not feel empathy. They answer the "Why should I behave ethically at all?" question with "....no reason", and follow through with not doing so to the extent that they wont get caught, and view others as objects to be used. If we had an in-born desire to follow codes of conduct that was actually driving ethics, then when sociopaths were examined, they would no have defects in the parts of their brain dealing with empathy, and few if any other differences. They do.

I will trust cognitive neuroscience on this one, I think.

[The Yosemite Bear]

just how did such a misgynistic worm being manage to make a living as an OB/GYN without alienating all of his clients?

[Broken]

just how did such a misgynistic worm being manage to make a living as an OB/GYN without alienating all of his clients?

Going from memory, when he started his practice, he was literally the only game in town and when he went into politics and took on a partner, he demanded that they never take medicare/medicaid and never perform abortions. Its a nice advantage to be the only doctor of that type in the area, get to make all your personal viewpoints impact all sorts of people, for their own good of course.

[Darth Wong]

If you justify rights based on some dubious social outcome, that opens the door to:
...

How else do you justify rights? Obviously, the popular phrase "self-evident" is a ridiculous way to justify anything. Legalism is also a pitiful way to justify anything. If you think that outcomes are an unacceptable way to justify rights, then please, by all means, describe a good way.

[DudeGuyMan]

If I were running things I'd just find out when a fetus typically first develops a functioning brain, subtract a little from it as a safety margin, ban all abortions after that point, and make them trivial before that point. Have fifty, whatever. But you know, that blob of goo could be a baby eventually and that apparently counts in the minds of the god-addled, apparently.

[RedImperator]

If I were running things I'd just find out when a fetus typically first develops a functioning brain, subtract a little from it as a safety margin, ban all abortions after that point, and make them trivial before that point. Have fifty, whatever. But you know, that blob of goo could be a baby eventually and that apparently counts in the minds of the god-addled, apparently.

Depending on how you define "functioning brain", the "acceptable to abort" line could be anywhere from 24 weeks to 2 years old. Don't get me wrong, I think this is the one of the few rational ways to do it (and the others all involve some fairly esoteric philosophy I don't really understand), but it's not easy, and has some potentially huge knock-on effects (drawing the line at 24 weeks, for example, makes vegetarianism practically obligatory unless you resort to special pleading).

[Eternal_Freedom]

If I were running things I'd just find out when a fetus typically first develops a functioning brain, subtract a little from it as a safety margin, ban all abortions after that point, and make them trivial before that point. Have fifty, whatever. But you know, that blob of goo could be a baby eventually and that apparently counts in the minds of the god-addled, apparently.

Depending on how you define "functioning brain", the "acceptable to abort" line could be anywhere from 24 weeks to 2 years old. Don't get me wrong, I think this is the one of the few rational ways to do it (and the others all involve some fairly esoteric philosophy I don't really understand), but it's not easy, and has some potentially huge knock-on effects (drawing the line at 24 weeks, for example, makes vegetarianism practically obligatory unless you resort to special pleading).

IIRC in Britain the cut-off is 24 weeks, although there has been talk of lowering it to 21 weeks. Abortions are possible past 24 wees if two doctors certify (independently) that it is medically necessary.

On a nother note, what do you mean by:

drawing the line at 24 weeks, for example, makes vegetarianism practically obligatory unless you resort to special pleading

[RedImperator]

IIRC in Britain the cut-off is 24 weeks, although there has been talk of lowering it to 21 weeks. Abortions are possible past 24 wees if two doctors certify (independently) that it is medically necessary.

On a nother note, what do you mean by:

drawing the line at 24 weeks, for example, makes vegetarianism practically obligatory unless you resort to special pleading

A 24-week old fetus can feel pain but has very few, if any higher reasoning functions, and clearly don't have the same mental capacity as an adult vertebrate--maybe an adult fish, but certainly not any tetrapod that I can think of. If you're just going by "brain function" to determine moral worth, then there's nothing distinguishing a 24-week old fetus from a chicken or a pig, and if you're going to argue it's morally wrong to kill one, you're going to have a hard time excusing the other without resorting to special pleading or potentiality arguments or something like that (especially since legally mandating a woman carry an unwanted pregnancy to term is a pretty serious imposition that shouldn't be taken lightly, whereas for the overwhelming majority of people, especially Westerners, meat is not a dietary necessity and please oh please nobody start some stupid fucking tangent about rare disorders or Eskimos who need vitamin D or hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari or some stupid shit like that because they're special exceptions that don't disprove general statements).