Citizen,
Having frankly told you of the offense I felt at your form of address, I'm inclined to see if you are willing to have a civil dialogue. So I'm going to go forward with that here.
If you desire to respond, in a civil manner, I ask that you show me the same courtesy I'm showing you: start your post by addressing me directly by either name or username, and then simply focus on the topic at hand. If that is more than you are willing to do, I ask you to be civil enough to simply ignore entirely.
Fair enough?
Omitted from the list of possibilities
I never claimed the list was exhaustive. Let's examine your possibility since it is interesting to me..
is the concept that reason, applied across time, and communication between people, can evolve higher and higher moral standards; and persuade others who, applying their own reason, can agree and even add to the discussion. Also, errors in reasoning can be exposed. More data can be discovered. More reason applied.
Does this not concede then that at any given moment reason, and (lack of available) data, may be wrong?
Stepping back for a moment from laws and policies, do you not accept that there is a source of universal morality? That God has conduct he expects of us, individually? Or, in secular terms, that what is truly moral doesn't change even if our understanding of what is moral or why it is moral does change (and hopefully improve) over time?
IOW, I think you've just conceded my point. Our best data, our best logic and reasoning, today, may very well lead us to adopt a position that is not moral. It may be less immoral than what our parents accepted. But being less wrong isn't the same as being correct.
If there is a source of absolute morality--or if morality simply is absolute--then the fact that we have to expose errors, gather more data, and grow into better morality means that logic, reason, and data are flawed, incomplete, and not a solid foundation on which to build morality.
Admittedly, they may be the only foundation that is universally accepted in a secular, pluralistic society for the foundation of laws. But I wouldn't ask you to abandon your anarchist principles to argue for any foundation of laws other than individual consent in the moment. And I suspect that in making the post to which I responded, SVG was also talking of individual morality, rather than claiming any basis for society to impose laws on the unwilling.
This means our discussion will have to be limited to whether logic, reason, and data, are at any given point in time, the sure foundation on which to discern individual morality.
The ideas in the quote balloon seem to have as a foundational premise ....that relevant information is undiscoverable (aka unknowable)--is the same premise behind witch-doctors who claim only they can interpret the spirits' state of mind, only the high priests of Om can interpret Om's signs.
Not my premise at all. But in taking that tact, you've helped articulate how current logic and reason, impeded by faulty or incomplete data can so readily arrive at a wrong conclusion. Hence, it seems self evident that logic and reason cannot be solely relied upon to determine
true and eternal morality.
So I appreciate you exploring the angle.
Regarding abortion, I will only touch in passing on the insults: "morally repulsive" and "grossly flawed."
Insults? Nay.
Merely observations. Claims perhaps.
Can you tell me that you don't find elective, late-term, partial-birth abortion to be "morally repulsive"? Does the notion of taking a fully viable child, days or short weeks before expected delivery, inducing a partial, breech delivery and then severing the spinal cord, suctioning out the brains, and ultimately crushing the skull for no other reason than the mother doesn't care to be pregnant for 2 more weeks to be morally repulsive? Is it really any less gut wrenching than a 2 week old baby being left to die in a garbage can rather than turned over to someone who is willing and able to care for the baby?
With very good reason has our nation banned partial birth abortions. With good reason did even the court of 40 years ago discover only a right to elective abortions in the first 6 months, but not after what (was then) the point at which viability outside the womb became distinctly possible.
So on what basis do you find my description of elective abortion to be an "insult?"
Yet, after all the invalidation, we see no explanation, no rational argument explaining why elective abortion is immoral. Just the unsupported statement about any decent man would find elective abortion morally repulsive. Circular argument.
Kind of like the circular arguments that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I'm sorry Citizen, you cannot lean so heavily on the "self-evident truths" expressed in the DoI at a time when they were anything but self-evident to much of humanity with its royalty and castes and classes being such a major component of the human condition when such self-evident truths support your views, and then turn around and complain about "circular logic" when someone points out another self-evident truth. If PBA or elective abortion generally is nor morally repulsive, then why do even supporters claim to want it to be "safe, legal, and
RARE."
No one suggests that removing moles, or colon polyps, or cancer tumors should be "rare" now do they?
If you wish to tell me that you do not find elective abortion to be morally offensive, and that the offensiveness grows the later in the pregnancy it occurs, then do so straight up.
But I have no intention of engaging in some formal debate with rules here. We are men, intelligent, moral, decent men, conversing as men. There is a place for formal logic and debate governed by strict rules. But the great questions of the ages--self-governance rather than rule from England, abolition or slavery, equality of men or castes, pure self-interest or a regard for others--are answered at least as much in a man's heart and conscience as they are strictly in his head.
There are powerful and compelling arguments against legal bans on elective abortion. But sideways claims that elective abortions are not morally troubling (at least), are not going to cut the mustard.
Before I go on, a little disclosure here: I consider myself religious.
I am aware of that, but I believe it is largely irrelevant to our discussion, except as you might accept that God is a source of absolute morality. The secular might well accept that there is some absolute, true morality to be discovered. You and I might accept some divine influence in guiding our conscience while the irreligious would simply attribute near universal concurrence on certain matters to be evidence of evolutionary mechanism at work.
There is something much more important: the ideas have at their core an unstated transfer of responsibility. Here is what I mean by that. ... "God told me." .... But, who did the assigning? That's my point. That's the transfer of responsibility: forgetting that they themselves did it.
An interesting side discussion, but not my point at all. So I'll leave it for another day. You will note that nowhere in my post about morality or abortion did I invoke God.
Back on point:
Well, if a man has a soul, then there must be a precise instant in time in which the soul or spirit takes up residence in the body. I mean this literally. ...
At what point does that occur? At which exact instant does the soul/spirit take up residence in the body? It is a crucial question with regard to elective abortion. Destroy a fetus after the soul has taken up residence, and there is no two ways about it--it is murder. Destroy a fetus before the soul has taken up residence in the body, and its just so much tissue being separated from the mother.
...
I didn't ask what you believe. I am asking what you observed.
Or, from a totally secular point of view, at what moment does the mass of cells assume the characteristics and thus the rights of being human? We religious fanatics can talk of souls, but we can't observe them. What we all can observe are things like statistical viability outside the womb. We can observe independent heartbeats and blood flow. We can observe measurable brain activity, independent motion, sleep and wake cycles.
If human rights are inherent in being human--as opposed to being contingent upon self-reliance, or ability to defend those rights--then these are the metrics we must use to determine when rights are endowed. It is not in the ability to defend rights, but inherent in being human that a human has the right to life, is it not? So what are the traits that make a human a human? Independent heart beat? Independent brain activity? Self directed motion? Certainly not something so trivial as whether the lungs have breathed air or not?
When it comes time to harvest organs for transplant, we have a rigorous set of neurological tests to determine whether that "person" lying before us is still a person, or whether he is--for all legal, moral, and other purposes--deceased and now merely a mass of tissues, some of which might be used to save or improve the life of another. It seem our neurologists can differentiate between comas, persistent vegetative states, and actual death such that we don't actually cut open the chests of living men to retrieve organs, but we only remove organs and tissues after someone has actually died and his body is temporary kept from starting to decay and decompose through the use of artificial means like respirators.
Would not logic, reason, and simple consistency suggest that similar tests might be used to determine whether life has yet begun, or whether the fetus is merely an inanimate mass of cells?
By your own admission, to kill a living soul (or an actual living human being), is murder. It is immoral.
To remove an unwanted growth that is not (yet) an actual living human being, is a strictly private medical matter.
The problem, of course, is that the tests that determine life has ended clearly demonstrate that life has started much earlier than abortionists are willing to concede that any legal limits at all are acceptable. And so, they use "logic" and "reason" and some data, and a lot of misdirection to avoid dealing with that issue directly.
Where is the morality in forcing a woman to forego an elective abortion, bearing and raising an unwanted child, when the demander ... himself cannot say when the soul takes up residence, changing the fetus from tissue to person?
Where is the morality in potentially committing murder simply because we are not quite sure whether the target of our actions is a mass of cells or a human being?
When it comes to human life, we normally place such a high value that we adopt rules like, "Know your target and what is beyond," and "Only use deadly force with a reasonable man belief it is essential to protect life and limb."
You and I would both roundly castigate any man who took a "brush shot" at what he thought might be a deer, but then discovered he had shot and killed an innocent human being. Ditto any man who woke to noises and started shooting through his front (or bathroom) door before determining there was a real and immediate threat, rather than his wife getting home a day early from her business trip.
Yet when it comes to purely elective abortion, you want me to flip that standard on its head and permit anything until we can prove the child is a living soul?
Citizen, where is the reason, logic, and data as well as consistency of views which you value so highly? Why have you given flight to them in this case?
I suspect that fear of government power is taking a higher priority to you than protection of innocent human life. And that is fair game. But you've left it noticeably unacknowledged.
And for the record, nobody I know suggests a woman has to raise a child she doesn't want. We just don't want her to murder it (your description if the child is a living soul) out of that being slightly more convenient than adoption.
Charles
