US.
I have never stated that I’m in favor of abortion so please drop judgments that are unfair to me. Still what about mother that did not want to have children and does not want to carry it? There are 3 sides in this situation. Your response does not answer my second question.
You are right, my apologies. The mother has the right to have the baby removed nothing more. An eviction… But she does not have the right to evict the child and kill it in the process. If the child is not viable outside of her body and dies then there is no rights violation. If it is a viable and no one voluntarily takes care of the child then again no rights violation.
Point is murder and theft are illegal everywhere (there is consensus here), abortion is not and that creates situation where people that want to do it can do so without any consequence. You don’t go to another country to steal - it is illegal everywhere. You can go to another country to do abortion - if it is legal there.
There is no consensus as to what constitutes murder or theft. For example, in some places if you shoot and kill someone breaking into your house in the middle of the night you will be charged with murder… In other places you will be commended. Another example is… well abortion. Some places it is considered murder… other places it is not.
Besides a consensus has nothing to do with the law. There does not have to be or will there ever be a consensus. If there were then there would be no need for law. Everyone would behave as expected by everyone else. The law exists because there is no consensus.
Really? I thought that punishment and restitution act as deterrents too. Law that does not prevent crime is not efficient. I would rather live in society where there are strong anti-incentives to committing crime (including laws that discourages it) to prevent it as much as possible.
Efficiency has nothing to do with the law. The punishments for breaking the law do act as deterrents, but that is not the point of the law. Again it is to create a guideline for behavior between individuals. The point is to publicly declare what is expected of people and what will happen if that expectation is violated.
If the point of the law was to discourage crime… why not make the death penalty the punishment for everything. That would certainly make everyone think twice before stepping out the door in the morning.
Where are they legal? Somalia?
The point is not are murder and theft illegal. It is that what constitutes murder and theft changes from place to place.
boniek wrote the following post at 10-10-2010 6:15 PM:
Prohibition on abortion will have exactly the same effect like prohibition on drugs - crime and lower quality service/merchandise which results in higher mortality than under market conditions. I will never take drugs nor will abort any of my children, but there are people that will have their own reasons for doing it no matter what laws are there. Thus this problem will be never solved by law.
Prohibition on murder will have exactly the same effect like prohibition on drugs - crime and lower quality service/merchandise which results in higher mortality than under free market conditions. I will never take drugs nor will I murder anyone but there are people that will have their own reasons for doing it no matter what laws are there. Thus this problem will be never solved by law.
[Therefore, murder should be permissable, and no actions should be taken against the aggressor.]
Logical problem here?
Yes, it is in your argument. It’s a false analogy. The victim in your murder example did not live inside the body of the murderer. No conflict or potential conflict of property rights existed.
Logic is not on your side on this issue. Whether it is right or wrong boils down to a discussion over personal values and nothing more.
DD5 wrote the following post at 05-12-2011 1:15 PM:
Yes, it is in your argument. It’s a false analogy. The victim in your murder example did not live inside the body of the murderer. No conflict or potential conflict of existed.
Logic is not on your side on this issue. Whether it is right or wrong boils down to a discussion over personal values and nothing more.
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It is not logical to assume that a mother has more of a right to her body than the child has to its life and body. Could you prove that this is the case?
You are right to point out a conflict of property rights, but that does not lead us to a pro-abortion conclusion
It is a 1st step to at least recognize the fallacy in the “pro-life” argument, which relies on the exact equivocation that you have just made.
The absolute right to self ownership means that every woman has a right to her own body (including everything within it). This includes the fetus. The fetus is there by the mother’s consent. (it cannot be the other way around). Should the mother decide she does not want the fetus any longer, the fetus becomes an invader living off the mother parasitically. The mother then has a right to force out the “invader” like in any other case when property is invaded. This doesn’t mean it’s moral to do so. It just means that has a right to do so.
DD5 wrote the following post at 05-12-2011 1:44 PM:
It is a 1st to at least recognize the fallacy in the “pro-life” argument, which relies on the exact equivocation that you have just made.
The absolute right to self ownership means that every woman has a right to her own body (including everything within it). This includes the fetus. The fetus is there by the mother’s consent. (it cannot be the other way around). Should the mother decide she does not want the fetus any longer, the fetus becomes an invader living off the mother parasitically. The mother then has a right to force out the “invader” like in any other case when property is invaded. This doesn’t mean it’s moral to do so. It just means that has a right to do so.
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I don’t find Hoppe’s argument convincing, and its simply because it posits that a mothers self-ownership trumps the babies life and body. Which you still haven’t supported.
If a baby will one day have the ability to exercise its rights, it has the same protections as any other human being. The mother is the slave to the baby until the baby is born, at which point the mother must not put the baby in harms way.
This is not ideal, but it is a fact of human development.
Mothers property rights < (Babies rights + life)
imo people would migrate to communities where their most critical values and customs are commonly held.
If enough people in a certain geographical area are willing to fund violence to stop abortion, why would any pro-choicers stick around? For reasons explained a thousand other times, it wouldn’t be practical for a community where abortion is a crime to produce a super army of pro-lifers to take over the rest of civilization. I think there would be a natural segregation of hardcore pro-lifers and everyone else.
If the argument against abortion is based on future rights, then abortion is OK so long as we can reasonably know that it won’t have one day have the ability to exercise those rights. Like if prenatal monitoring determines that the baby will be born with serious defects, making it unlikely to live more than a year after birth. Since that baby won’t one day have the ability to exercise its rights, then we can abort it, right?
Morality, ethics and law are not precisely the same things, though they do inform each other.
The law is the enforcement of ethical principles between legal subjects. The trouble is that it is extremely problematic to describe a person who does not exist as a legal subject. Therefore, though abortion may violate an ethical principle, it cannot violate a legal principle due to the absence of an infringed interest on the part of an existing person. The law can only employ fictions to allow otherwise.
A similar situation would exist in the hypothetical case that someone is murdered, and he has no heirs, relatives or anyone willing to prosecute on his behalf. Private law might be inapplicable against the murderer, but he obviously violated an ethical principle. Abortion is no different, except that in every case there will be no one who can file suit on behalf of the child, so abortion is never illegal as a principle, as sobering as this observation may be.
To employ a religious metaphor, one might say that there are certain crimes only God can judge.
mikachusetts wrote the following post at 05-12-2011 3:09 PM:
If the argument is based on future rights, then abortion is OK so long as we can reasonably know that it won’t have one day have the ability to exercise those rights. Like if prenatal monitoring determines that the will be born with serious defects, making it unlikely to live more than a year after birth. Since that baby won’t one day have the ability to exercise its rights, then we can abort it, right?
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That would be up to the mother. As an added point, it seems like it would be perfectly legitimate for a mother to pass on the costs of child birth to the child when he/she becomes independent. The begging question though is, “How much should we be willing to pay on the childs behalf?” and there’s no easy answer other than, “However much you would be willing to pay to save your own life?”
“Private law might be inapplicable against the murderer…”
This is an interesting point that has broader implications. Can anyone prosecute another person on the victims behalf, even without the victims permission? It would seem to me that you can. After all, right, wrong, and justice are not dependent on anyones permission.
I think the important thing to note is that the problems revolving around particular circumstances can really be resolved another time. When a mother kills a perfectly healthy baby under normal conditions it is an act of murder against another human being. There are alot of gray areas in life, but this is not one of them, and incidentally this is the case of the vast majority of abortions. We really don’t need to get into debates like, “If you know the baby is going to kill billions of human beings, is it alright to abort him in the womb? Given that you absolutely know it’s true.”
Abortion is wrong in princible, I’ll put it that way.
In criminal law as it currently stands, cases are normally referred to as “The State/Sovereign v The Accused”.
Who exactly takes the place of the state or sovereign under a system of exclusively private law? Even the present system recognises that you can’t prosecute a case if you don’t have a valid legal interest, or aren’t representing someone who does, which is why there’s the fiction of the state for purposes of public criminal law.
Still, it’s not like you or a whole private community can’t kick someone out of your property for violating your terms of occupancy.
This isn’t just an unsolved problem from a modern libertarian perspective. The Roman law jurists had to invent the “nasciturus fiction” to allow for an unborn child to be considered alive for legal purposes when it is subsequently born alive, and where to do so would be to the benefit of the child, e.g. to allow them to inherit.
It’s called a “fiction” because it envisions the existence of a person who does not exist at the time a cause of action arises, and that’s not logical.
Not familiar with Hoppe’s argument
On the basis of your arbitrary values perhaps, but not on the basis of property rights. Slavery (involuntary servitude) on the basis of a right to self-ownership is a contradiction in terms.
You ended up supporting my argument. The fetus is there by consent of the mother. If the mother withdraws this consent, and force or threat of force is used against her in order to prevent her exercise of free choice to expel the “intruder”, then she effectively becomes a slave. But not a slave to the fetus (that’s another fallacy of yours), but to those aggressors that are now preventing her right to exercise her free will regarding her own body.
You forget that the right to self-ownership and property is conditioned on not violating others’s rights.
Oh boy, where to begin.
“Not familiar with Hoppe’s argument”
You’re not or I’m not? If you’re not it’s strangely almost identical. If you believe I’m not, well that’s you’re opinion.
“On the basis of your arbitrary values…”
Pointless statement. What values are not arbitrary? Including respecting another persons personal property. I’ll take it that you’re just throwing jabs at me for no real reason. If so jab back. haha…
“Slavery (involuntary servitude) on the basis of a right to self-ownership is a contradiction in terms.”
There is a conflict not a contradiction. I stated that the mothers right to self ownership is not absolute when concerning both the babies right to self ownership and its life. On the one hand you’re respecting the mothers rights to self ownership and on the other hand you don’t respect the childs rights to self ownership or even its life, would you please distinguish why you don’t respect the childs rights or life?
“Not a slave to the fetus…”
Mere semantics. One must make decisions on behalf of the child. If the mother does not respect the childs life then others are morally obligated to step in and protect the child. Whether you want to say the child is enslaving the mother or others are enslaving the mother is really unimportant.
Perhaps I have made an incorrect assumption here. Do libertarians value human life?
I would like to note again that under ideal conditions where people just popped into existence fully formed none of this would be an issue and you could make up absolutes like, “A mother has complete authority over her own body.” and such, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t come into this world fully formed. It is an imperfect system, right in the beginning both the childs rights and the mothers rights are infringed upon. For more than a decade we are inherently dependent on others for our survival. They need us and we are obligated to help them. I’m sure this is very much common sense in your personal life, so I struggle to see why it’s so controversial in philosophical discourse.
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“It’s called a ‘fiction’ because it envisions the existence of a person who does not exist at the time a cause of action arises, and that’s not logical.”
Neat. I don’t agree with the Romans though.
A fetus did not give birth to me. I was once a fetus. You were once a fetus. A fetus is the early stage of a person, followed by baby, toddler, adolescant, adult, and elderly. That’s all there is to it.
“Who exactly takes the place of the state or sovereign under a system of exclusively private law?”
Well if it’s considered legitimate for a state to prosecute those murders, then its legitimate for private law to prosecute those murders. If you don’t think it’s legitimate, then how can you argue that a family has legal standing? They weren’t murdered, nor was their personal property effected.
You asked about the perspective of libertariansim. If you wanted to hear just more arbitrary values that do not respect persons and property, why did you ask your question here?
It is nonsense to claim that human life is always and everywhere sacred. No conflicts could be resolved.
An intruder has no rights to his own body when you attempt to expel him. A rapist has no rights to his own body when you attempt to defend yourself.
What distinguishes the intruder from a guest?
What distinguishes the rapist from a lover?
A: One simple word: Consent!
Empty rhetoric. Even a thief and a rapist can value human life if they object to killing their victims.
Libertarians value self-ownership.
You know, reactions like yours are funny. I suppose statists that basically force you to finance abortions value life more.
I’m on board with the idea that the mother has a right to her own body. No issue. I’m also on board with the idea that I have a right to my own home. They’re both one’s property.
The problem I have is with the idea that if some kid comes to my house selling Girl Scout cookies that I have the right to murder them and dump their body in the street. I mean, they’re violating my property and I can expel them, right?
This is the same problem I have with pro abortion arguements as well. This a subject where the idea of proportionality is ignored. As a property owner you have the right to remove an unwanted tresspasser at will. But you do not have the right to do so by any means neccessary. The only time lethal force is justifiable is if the trespasser uses lethal force to remain.
If applied to abortion then the woman has a right to remove the child intact. But killing the baby in the womb and then removing the dead body is beyond the rights of the woman.
non-sequitur.
You also, have put forward a false analogy. The girl is only an intruder if you do not consent to here presence and she refuses to leave.
Also, proportional reaction and response to property violators is another issue. I don’t believe there is a formula you can use to figure out what is appropriate and what is not. The market would have to sort out what is acceptable and what is not.
However, a proper analogy would be as follows: The girl by some means, permanently attaches herself physically to your body living off you parasitically and there is no possible way to ever expel her without killing her.