@E. R., gay sex isn’t technically sex. “Sex” is sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse is the act of mating. You can’t mate with someone of the same sex, therefore you can’t have sexual intercouse with someone of the same sex. Society calls it “sex” but it’s really just touching genitalia and feeling pleasure. Male/female sexual intercourse will naturally lead to pregnancy. That is it’s primary purpose. Pleasure would be secondary.
Who are you to declare what the “primary purpose” of having sex is for every human being? The women who end up having abortions were not having sex for the purpose of procreation. This is exactly how bad laws end up being made. Some “lawmaker”, in between their campaigns of lies, has nothing better to do than force their subjective valuations on another person. The process of making foie gras or the sight of a junkie revolts them, or some study comes out on the health risks of soda, and a new victimless crime is born.
Like I said before, this is some sort of naturalistic/moralistic fallacy. It’s “natural” that humans have sex for pleasure, and don’t just mate in the springtime. The two purposes sit beside each other and neither is superior.
Consider a car. It’s primary purpose is to move someone from point A to point B. If I park my car on a hill, and proceed to use it as a bed for the night, am I liable for any damage my car creates when the brakes fail while I’m sleeping and I damage another car or run someone over? I wasn’t using it to move me from point A to point B, but I still parked it on a hill and sat in the driver seat. If someone is responsible for their “negligence” in this case, why wouldn’t they be responsible for their “negligence” in getting pregnant?
I don’t see what sleeping in the car has to do with it. Unless you knew that your brakes needed fixed and parked on a hill anyway, this is an accident and there is no negligence. Good luck proving that a condom wasn’t used and a mother just recklessly had sex and planned to abort any possible baby.
Either way this debate goes, I agree that it’s not something that would be easy to enforce in a free society, and it probably wouldn’t be. But abortion also wouldn’t be given the green light by a state, producing a sort of entitlement mentality that women are free to concieve and abort, and how dare anyone criticize or ostracize them for it. It certainly wouldn’t be state incentivized (as in China), but neither would it be culturally acceptable without a state saying it’s okay. You know?
Right, the economic argument is that practice will trend toward the correct answer anyhow. I’m ethically opposed to abortion as much as anyone, but consistently applying private property as law is the only solution. Those who really care about the “intrinsic value” of every life, just like the enviro-communists with whales, need to put their money where their mouth is.
In a free society, there is no barrier to adoption. With no child labor laws, raising kids could be a profitable venture. Some monastery that churns out baked goods could pay mothers who consider abortion to carry the fetus to term. Also, women could agree to all sorts of wacky laws, like compulsory head-scarfing or to be punished should she abort a baby. Then again, these women would want these rules. It’s completely libertarian to agree to odd cultural mores, but not to force them on outsiders.
@ER
I remember in another thread about child rape you were arguing that since very young children would eventually have rights (even if they are too young now to claim them) it is wrong to do whatever you please with them. If you buy that argument how can you put forth a pro-choice argument? If a fetus will eventually become a human and have rights how can you logically say that you can do whatever you wish with it (like aborting it)?
I’m not saying that a woman can do whatever she wants with it. I’m saying the rights of self-ownership a woman has over her body, to determine what grows in it, is superior to any other claims to the uterus. For the actual topic of young children, there is no justification of positive rights as well. You can’t just abandon the responsibility of guardianship, lock a child in a secret room, and forestall other would-be guardians.
Block isn’t wrong in his position on abortion (video); however, two things I have been saying recently need to be added to the explanation.
A fetus, like any young child, has a certain amount of negative rights due to it being a potential moral agent. This has been discussed at length in many threads, including the child slavery thread.
Evictionism, as opposed to “pro-life” or “pro-choice”, is timeless in its correctness. Scientists have begun to attempt to raise children from adapted pig uteri. Parents can’t just abandon children in any way they see fit. It may be customary to drop an infant off at a hospital or fire station. One day we might not have these things, rather Star Trek like handheld healing modules and advanced sprinkler systems, and some other measure will be deemed “reasonable”. The question of what is reasonable is a matter of jurisprudence and not legal philosophy.
Before analyzing the consequences of adopting the pro-life doctrine into libertarianism, it’s necessary to understand how the provision of justice in a free society would work. There is an analogous relationship between economics (praxeological catallactics, not mainstream pseudo-science) versus econometrics (applied economics) & law (praxeological legal philosophy) versus Austro-libertarian jurisprudence (human law put to action). The former of each group uses the axomatic-deductive method along with verbal logic, and the latter of each can draw on an array of relevant nomothetic fields (military strategy, geology, meteorology, psychology, blood spatter analysis, and many more.) This is the quality-quantity dichotomy between the disciplines of social science and natural science. (See also what I wrote here.)
So the same requirement of “reasonable measures” being taken applies to the eviction of a fetus. If there was some researcher wanting the fetus to do his research, a mother would have to hand it over, rather than the procedure of vacuuming it into a wood chipper type device. The latter procedure is technically not acceptable, even if there is no way to keep the baby alive. Technological means is one consideration of jurisprudence though. So, Block conflates these two and just assumes what a judge would do. It’s a good assumption, but even with a good theory there has to be a person willing to act to carry it out. See what I wrote about the via negativa here.