ok, you have made progress, you have hereby admittted that merely the fact that an object is a human does not mean that they have rights.
I don’t really consider dead bodies to be human beings. I have know idea why dead people are relevant to this discussion. As usual I have defined my position. When exactly do people become human beings and when do they have rights? Why do we need 5 pages for you pro abortion types to answer that question?
This is a theological question not related to science or philosophy. It is just so typical of statists to raise questions that cannot be answered by any objective reasoning. Open another thread if you want to discuss this question.
Because it’s irrelevant as pointed out to you. The error in your reasoning is the misinterpretation of “The right to life”. The same error that the socialists make.
-
NO human can have a right to enslave another no matter how life threatening the situation is.
-
There is no contract other then the one you just made out of thin air, like the social contract made up by statists.
-
When the woman decides to abort, it is her right as an individual. If she no such right, she is a slave to an unwanted host. This is clearly in contradiction with NAP. This truth doesn’t make it right or virtuous. It simply states a fact about nature.
-
The consent argument is absurd and holds no water under any sort of logical examination.
-
The absurdity of the consent argument is easily shown in the case of rape.
-
You still haven’t shown how such a ban could be implemented in a free society without a state.
Sooner or later, you will have to realize that the idea behind a total ban on abortions is incompatible with the free society. You will have to either abandon it or opt for the State.
Hysterical. Then I guess you can never claim you have been agressed against since you don’t even know if your human. Why bothering discussing anything else until you figure that out?
You are confusing enslavement with accountability. Society can not exist unless people can be held accountable for their actions. The logical conclusion of your line of thinking has a major problem, it is unacceptable to human nature that is, contrary to our species. We can no more follow this recipe than we can pretend we are blades of grass. we can not simply pretend that we will consider it unimportant when people are murdering other people. This happens for short periods in history but is always stopped, not because of government but because it is incompatible with the human species basic instinct.
No matter how logical you think it is to permit people to rape and murder children it will not be generally accepted. How do you propose to convince everyone to accept this as normal when we are biologically designed contrary to it?
My conclusion on this debate is simple. It can only be settled by violence. We do not agree on the underlying assumptions. You make assertions and assume they are facts and say the same about me. i will never agree to child murder, of unborn children or one year olds or two year olds or any of that stuff.
You haven’t proven your case because you can not prove your underlying assumptions are correct. You start with a false premise and follow it to poor conclusions. In fact all the evidence that does exist points to the exact opposite of your conclusion. We can not agree on the original premise of when human life begins and what accountability people have for their actions.
This is how I started my original post, we can not agree. There is no middle ground.
Well, I did provide an argument, an implicit one, atleast. The argument of Block seems to reduce to essentially that, if you, via your property, “put[ an entity] in[to] a better position”, you, at any time thereafter, have “the right” to withdraw the assistance of your property and thereby allow them to fall back to the “worse position”. But, although my reiteration of his argument does not seem to immediately reveal any absurdities, I think that some tentative ones, atleast, do exist. For example, if you, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, (a) encounter a sunken ship and a small crew floating helplessly among the wreckage and, then, (b) answer their request, extract them from the water, onto you ship, do you, at any time thereafter and until you dock, have “the right” to tell them to leave the ship, to their almost certain death? If so, that implies, moreover, quite unfavorably, I think, that you would have “the right” to negotiate, to tell them, for example, to either (a) disrobe, bend over and remain silent or (b) acquiesce to the depths of the Atlantic.
The reason the abortion debate never goes anywhere is that the universe and nature don’t give half a damn about our human constructs. There is no black and white.
The difference between a sperm cell situated next to an egg cell, and a sperm cell jammed inside of an egg cell, is merely one of spatial displacement. As is the difference between a mature fetus in a womb, and a newborn baby. You moved something from Point A to Point B. There is nothing to suggest that such spatial displacements magically create life.
And at every point in between fertilization and birth, there is simply a gradual growth of the fetus. It’s all cell division. Consciousness as we know it appears gradually. There is no identifiable point at which a “soul” is injected.
And evictionism sounds great and all on paper. If something is behaving like a parasite, using your resources and whatnot, you have the right to remove it. Of course, this applies equally to dependent children as to fetuses. Yet no culture I’ve ever heard of openly supported abandoning your four-year-old.
There will never be agreement on the morality of abortion, precisely because nature doesn’t operate the way we believe it does when we look at things on a macro scale. There is no discreteness in the universe; any appearance of it is an illusion. And so there are always boundaries at which seemingly obvious moral notions become blurry.
As usual, Evasion. I’ve addressed this. You haven’t refuted anything I’ve said. You’re just evading.
Attempt #5: How is your daughter accountable to the unwanted result after she has been raped?
Until you answer this question, you are a religious freak! How many time will you not answer this question.
This sounds familiar. Did I hear Obama use this line in the recent State of The Union Address??
Translation: We need a State.
Translation: We need a State
I don’t! I never said anything was normal, what ever that means.
Your conclusion is simple: We need a State!
You didn’t answer the question: Do you support a military invasion of France to force them to outlaw abortions?
I’ve answered all of your questions. You haven’t addressed any of mine. You’ve evaded and continued to advocate for a State.
Which is why you support the State. That’s what the State is. A mechanism for people like you to compel everyone to act according to your own beliefs even though you are not forced to conduct any relationship with anybody you do not agree with.
Conclusion: You support a strong State, and not only that. It must be a military super power so it can invade every country that does not agree with you on this issue.
Once again, you prove my other point. That the abortion debate is not compatible with libertarianism regardless of the ethical considerations. It cannot be enforced in the free society. So if you are insisting on forcing your way by violence, you cannot be a libertarian. You must retreat to Statism.
Does Block “openly support” abortion as eviction? Or does he just believe that the law should not intervene?
So seriously mentally handi capped kids be murdered by their guardians by that logic? Just as much of a parasite, and leaving them out in the world would kill them.
Personally, I don’t think libertarians should fight too much over this issue, it’s what seperates the democrats and republicans, not us. I don’t think this is an easy question for people to answer.
Yes.
Wrong. A woman has self-ownership, thus the right to evict a fetus. She doesn’t have the right to murder. The technology is still far off, but there are scientists trying to create an artificial womb from a pig uterus. If such technology came about and someone wanted to claim the fetus, the mother would have to give it up, rather than “running it through a wood chipper” or however abortions are performed today.
There is no other consistent libertarian position.
It wasn’t a valid reducio. I don’t see where slavery (“owning someone”) comes in to play until I. Ryan introduced it. It in no way follows from a person not having positive obligations.
I expanded and tweaked my objection, here:
I will read the rest, but right off the bat it is clear that you are misrepresenting Block’s position, which I basically repeated above.
He argued that having at least been born was making the baby better off than never having been born. This point, agree or not, is irrelevant just like the typical issue of “when life begins”.
-
I never professed that “when life begins” is relevant.
-
That argument, “that having at least been born [makes] the baby better off than never having been born”, is indeed relevant. For that argument is a necessary constituent of his defense vis-à-vis one of the objections.
-
I never said that you did but just mentioned it.
-
The only thing that is at issue is whether you, or anyone, has the right to punish a woman for evicting her fetus. If you wish to make a case to justify these proposed actions, please be consistent.
I was certainly not trying to “make [that] case”. Instead, I was just trying to show that his theory leads to some unfavorable conclusions.
Such as what? Is it more favorable to you to leave questions of legality to the majority or some other purely arbitrary method? Again, eviction is the only position consistent with what we consider property rights, freedom, etc. Any alternative at least leaves the uncertainty that your ruler will not uphold such values. What people choose to accept is what we will have.
Since you don’t want to prescribe punishment to the mother who aborts her child, I will just assume that whatever one comes up with will be “unfavorable” to the mother. Perhaps a single, teenage mother will have to drop out of school and work a low-wage job to support her child, whereas she may have instead gone to college, gotten married, and raised several children in a loving home. This is, in fact, the beginning of when a parent may be considering what is best for her children, a decision best made by that person alone.
So, you’ve conceded the moral or legal question, and raise one of personal preference or ethics. I think that abortion is a terrible action and would be happy to see it not practiced. I feel that the proper method of accomplishing this is respecting individual rights though. Increased prosperity may change the minds of some mothers considering abortion. Removal of regulation regarding adoption would allow groups such as the hypothetical “Friends of Babies” to offer mothers money to carry a child to term.
I won’t deny that a fetus can sense pain after a certain point or that an infant will suffer if left to die. I also will not, however, claim to be able to place a value judgment on such suffering versus that of a child raised in a loveless, squalid home. The pro-lifers, in an ironically similar position as the environmental socialists, need to put their money where their mouth is.
Yes they could be killed. You can’t murder something that cannot reason. And using that logic, cute little puppies and sperm can be killed too.
Wrong. Children are potential moral agents. We’ve been over this before and I won’t rehash it with a parrot. Your point about sperm was another failed “reducio” and it was so ridiculous that I didn’t even respond in the other thread. What is relevant in both the case of abortion and the fact that children have a certain amount of basic negative rights is that eviction or abandonment is not murder per se. If somehow we would consider sperm PMA (and this is quite clearly not the case, google “Aristotle and the oak tree”), libertarian theory says we just have the right to eject, not murder.
Your position that children have zero rights and are the slaves of their parent is wholly un-libertarian.