The Glade 4.0

Aizle:
What differentiates a "fetus" that is 36 weeks into gestation and a "baby" born prematurely at 36 weeks, as far as "personhood" is concerned?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

A great deal of utilitarian ethics argues that you not only can, you should, because Bob's finances can then be used for other good, and since Bob will never know any differently, he is not actually being harmed (nor are his rights since he no longer posesses personhood) so long as we do not inflict pain on Bob's body (to the degree he can still experience it) in the process.

That's a large part of why I have rejected utilitarian ethics; it likes to pretend that it can objectively quantify harm, and, in this case, ignores the harm that will be done to Bob prior to his incapacitation by knowing that as soon as he is dead or comatose, society will fall on whatever meager means he has in order to do whatever small amount of good can be done with them for no purpose other than consistancy with the ethical system itself.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The problem is that none of this is true. Sex is not for its own purpose. It is for procreation; that is its biological function. It is only because of a combination of human intellect and technology that we can ignore its procreative function at all. Procreation is not a "nice tie-in" it is the reason for its existance.

Sex without consequences is not a right at all, and certanly not comparable to the right to life.

The fact that it might be different with creatures other than mammals is irrelevant. With humans, that's the way it is.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sex without consequences is always possible. Abortion's just another reason why, and limiting it because of some mythical right that a fetus has to a woman's womb is sexual slavery, religious fanatacism and oppression of women, nothing more.

The "right to life" is a fantasy with legal backing--everyone dies.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I see. Pregnancy isn't caused by sex. I'm glad we cleared that up.

Only, that's not what you're arguing. You're either claiming that "sex without consequences" is more of a right than the right to life (which I think is indefensible), or else you're saying that the right to life doesn't exist in these circumstances. The latter is a valid point of debate, but that doesn't seem to be the argument you're making. And, furthermore, there is no "right" to do anything without consequences. Sometimes consequences can avoided and sometimes they can't. But either way, it's not a right anymore than a supposed right to be wealthy or happy.

I've never said that it was. You're responding to me, but I don't think you're actually reading what I say. That's fine. You don't owe me anything. But why bother?

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Survival outside the womb basically. I'm assuming that 36 weeks is the usual viability point for pre-mes?

This may seem like I'm trolling, but I'm not.

I think that pretending a fetus is anything other than a parasite prior to birth is interesting. My view on abortion stems from this and it brings me to the same conclusion as Aizle. Once the baby is able to support its own life (developed enough to live out of the womb), abortion should be off of the options table. Whenever this viable point is, I would agree to the "right" of life, though I'm not a big fan of inherent rights.

Until that point, do as you please.

First of all, that's not what the "right to life" means, and you know it. The right to property doesn't guarantee that you'll actually have property, nor does the right to life guarantee that you actually will live. They're merely guarantees that your property and your life won't be trespassed by others without legal consequence.

Secondly, if this really is your position, then we should simply abolish all laws.

Edit:
You know, actually the more I think about it, the more curious I am as to why your logic ends with birth? That's totally arbitrary. You should be able to kill your children after they're born. It's no less possible to terminate an infant than it is to terminate a pregnancy. It's not like their fantasy of a "right to life" can trump your ability to have sex without consequences. It's really just odd that you think birth presents some kind of barrier, given your line of argument.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I don't think you fully understand Talya's position. I'm not speaking for her, but here's my take. Everybody wants what's in their best interests and convenient to a good life style. People want HD tv's, unjammed highways, houses, cars, good food, etc. They want good healthcare. They sometimes feel the need to remove things from their bodies. We want "rights" to do what we want to do. We want a right to life for ourselves, but not necessarily others. A universal "right to life" is silly, but people sometimes want that too because it makes them feel better, and people like feeling good.

Most people don't want lawlessness. That goes against all the conveniences of modern living. It is completely contrary to allowing abortion. I'm sure fetuses "want" things too, but nobody can hear their voice.

This is just begging the question. By this logic, child support is sexual slavery, religious fanaticism, and oppression of men (and sometimes women too). It's jsut an excuse to pretend it's an issue of religion because you've made up your mind there must be some religious reason for any sort of pro-life position.

It's also especially silly given that pregnancy is a highly temporary condition. You're a slave to religious oppression if you have to bring a child to full term because of something you did in the first place? Excuse me while I laugh hysterically. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with abortion prior to viability being legal but your claims are just silly ranting.



You're being silly. You know perfectly well that rights by any concept do not address what happens as a course of nature. Rights pertain to the actions of other sapient beings - humans, for the moment.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not even close. 36 weeks is full term. I'm not even sure if the term fetus still applies at that point. Babies have survived as early as 24 weeks.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

An argument based on "what I want" generally isn't terribly convincing. I have a teenage daughter. I get that argument a lot. I'm sure she'd tell you the success rate is less than encouraging.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Pregnancy is caused by the actually highly rare event of a sperm cell joining with an egg cell. The vast majority of the time, even unprotected sex doesn't result in this happening. Of course, it generally doesn't (but can) happen without any sex taking place at all. And sex generally doesn't happen without men and women being in the same square mile radius of each other. Perhaps we should segregate the sexes? Maybe the muslims have it right and women should all wear burkas so they don't with their satanic wiles entice men into wrong lustful thoughts...



Rights are legalities, nothing more, and nothing less. And frankly, there's no law in america to prevent one from having consequence-free sex. However, there are several laws in America that can deny you your life.


You implied it, or else you wouldn't be arguing that a woman has any sort of obligation to provide for the "life" in her womb if she doesn't want to.

Pro-life arguments all boil down to ingrained sexism. If men had to carry babies to birth, we wouldn't have ever had this argument. Even the failing attempts to continue with this anachronistic prohibition on the termination of pregnancies are pathetic grabs at holding on to control over women as property...as breeding stock. For millennia men have been free to **** around without consequence while women bore the burden of their misogyny. Thankfully, the law has ended this control--but it wasn't so long ago that the debates don't still occasionally flare up.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

All you're doing is speaking to the inefficieny of sex, which is probably a good thing in terms of the drive to have it, and what the resulting population would be if it worked more often. The rest of this is simply a red herring.



So? No one said there should be a low to prevent consequence-free sex. What was said is that it isn't a right. Whether rights are legalities or whatever isn't germane to the issue.



This is a line of horseshit. Men don't have to carry babies to term, but they do have to support them for the next 18 or so years, and they don't get a chance to decide not to.

The fact that things were a certain way for thousands of years really isn't the issue. In fact, men generally weren't free to **** without consequences. If you wanted the community to survive, you had to make sure children were taken care of. Men had to work, and so did women and the only real difference was the nature of the work. That really didn't change until the 20th century when we started automating many everyday tasks.

Aristocratic men, and scoundrels sometimes got away with **** and leaving but that really just speaks to the screwed up nature of many systems of society in the past and the difficulty of making people behave in a society prior to reliable written records. Furthermore, prostitution is called the oldest profession for a reason and aristocratic women ahve a long history of political seduction.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Seriously -- what the hell are you even talking about now? This has absolutely nothing to do with any argument anyone has made in this thread.
I haven't said otherwise.
Actually there are, but that's a whole other discussion. But I should point out that having an abortion is not "consequence free sex". It's sex with the consequence of abortion. The whole issue at hand is whether or not that consequence ought be legal, and if so, under what circumstances.
Yes there are. I don't support those laws, whatever that may have to do with anything.

I did nothing of the sort. You're putting words into my mouth and projecting your own prejudices. To wit:


This doesn't even merit a response. Trollers gonna troll, I guess.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

There's a lot of women who are pro life, so I don't think this is a controlling man issue. I'd like to think I'd have the same views I do on the issue now if I was a woman.

Consequence free sex (or anything else for that matter) is kind of a non-existent thing. you could be completely barren and there'd still be consequences to sex. There's certainly things that can be done to mitigate those consequences.

Yes we kill people legally in this country. Generally speaking you have to do something rather heinous (killing someone first) in order for that to apply. Do we screw up sometimes? Sure. We're fallible at it just like anything else we do. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It's one of the necessities of having a sin touched world.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

No it is not Taly despite how much you might want to believe it is. Actions that necessarily through their undertaking infringe on the rights of others are not rights.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I've decided that smoking without consequences is a right, and the tobacco industry is infringing on my right by not bending the laws of science to my will.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Except it isn't a parasite. Biologically speaking a parasite has to be a separate species from the host.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Rights are a moral philosophy, laws can be created that match them. The two are not related. We are discussing the moral philosophy - please do not bring legality into it as it only muddies the waters.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

You're discussing a moral philosophy; that may not be the case for anyone else.

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From most of the arguments it seems others were as well. Rights are not a system of law though they can be a foundation of such.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Morality does not exist except in one's mind. There is no such thing as "right" or "wrong," "good" or "evil," not objectively. There is only what people accept. We are discussing politics, and therefore, ultimately, legality.

Wanna talk morality? I find the pro-life stance to be completely evil, much as I find the actions and even existence of organized religion to be a stain on human existence. They are completely without merit or reason for continued existence.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Losing the argument with inane/irrelevant/poor analogies? Change the debate to another heated topic. Troll much?

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What about the practicality of this? What would stop women from claiming they were raped? You cannot prove they were <not> raped.