Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Deborah,
Agree with all of that, and with the others who say that the right to choice involves not having to justify the choice. A reason need never be given.
It's too hard, for starters - here we are spending hours on it on one of the million threads about it. This debate is not sorted and I doubt it ever will be. To expect someone to pick out a part of it that works for them and for us to judge if that is OK or not strikes me as every bit as unreasonable as not even giving a reason. Our own reasons for judging their reasons are in turn questionable. If they have to give some, then we do too. And on it goes.
It's also impractical. You can't really know what a person's reasons are, you can only know what they tell you their reasons are. If you make a reason unacceptable, they can make another reason. So long as there is a default reason - I'm not ready to have a baby - then this can always happen. If you make certain reasoning unacceptable, it will become very difficult to know what people's real reasons actually are. I think that knowing the reason is a far more valuable thing than insisting that it be the right reason. It need not be given - but if there are no consequences attached to it, it would be very valuable data to inform the debate about what is even really going on in people's heads in this situation.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Lilith __,
If we can argue about the importance of that, it’s a very short step to arguing that contraception is wrong.
Yeah, and I don't even think the rights analysis makes sense so I'll leave off here. I think it leads with implacable logic to hair splitting about the sentience of zygotes. It's not my reason for being pro-choice.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There is a finite (and surprising large) probability that an embryo never becomes anything. That is not opinion. I am making a scientifically valid statement.
It is a statement that assumes it was nothing in the first place. I'll give you for sure that it becomes "nothing" from a rights point of view in a great many cases, when it stops being viable. But to say that it was nothing before that is picking a position. You have every right to do pick that position, and it's similar to mine, but it's not a scientific position. It's a moral choice.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Lilith __,
If we allow that a fetus is a potential person, and we decide we should advance the rights of potential people, we are in danger of finding contraception morally wrong.
Yup, although we could find it to be such a weak wrong as to not outweigh wanting to avoid pregnancy. If we can't weight wrongs, then it goes even further than your problem, to saying that we are morally bound to procreate at every possible opportunity. That is if we say potential persons have identical rights to mothers.
That's not clearly true. It's the question at hand. I don't actually know if they're potential persons or even actual persons at that time. It's a line in the sand. It seems to me that they become more and more strongly potential persons every day, and the point at which they become actual humans is quite blurry. We could draw a line at birth if we wanted to, although I do understand that in other contexts, where abortion might be completely impossible, that even birth might not make that boundary. I can understand infanticide as a horrible choice when resources are overstretched and abortion and contraception are not available. Not a choice likely to be faced in NZ.
Practically we draw the line well before birth. The reasons seem sound, as the organism becomes steadily more and more like humans we clearly do value, babies. We have to pick a line. I don't even know what it is in Australia. Some magic number. We'd have to pick one for here, too.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to B Jones,
I’m not sure I buy this approach myself
I don't either. Legal positivism suffers from the problem that it means there can be no such thing as an immoral law. It would, in this context, quite literally mean that what all us pro-choicers think is irrelevant - abortion is wrong because it's illegal. It's a crazy idea.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Bart, rights are a complicated idea, which I think you are oversimplifying. They conflict all the time, and the resolution of that is to prioritize or weight them. They’re a human idea, a construct we impose to enable us to make moral choices. I dispute that they are objective facts at all. So to say that the organism isn’t a human (when it comes to rights), or that the right of the choice belongs to the woman, are the very points in contention. You can’t prove them by asserting them. You’re not making scientific claims here. You can make all sorts of very sound claims about what the state of development of the growing organism is, but the question of whether it has rights is simply a line in the sand that you can draw at one point or another.
It is likely I draw it at the same point as you do. I weight the rights of the woman very highly. When it happened to me, I weighted those rights much more strongly than my own rights.*
*ETA: And I weighted the rights of the organism as close enough to non-existent as to not matter.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The thing that I have always struggled with in the debate is the fact that people can decide that the rights of a possible human are more important than the rights of an actual human.
It's even more complicated than that, though, because the rights being compared are not the same rights. The rights of everyone but the fetus come down to things like right to choice, right to happiness, etc. But the right of the fetus, if it has any rights at all, are a far more powerful right, the right to life. Were it an adult that clearly had rights, it would be clear that the right to life overpowers those others in most cases. We don't even grant the right to voluntarily terminate human life here, much less involuntary/non-consenting terminations.
So if rights is the analysis that we want to apply, then the question of whether the steadily growing organism has any, at what point, and how much those rights apply or not, are vital.
I'm not personally a total convert to rights analysis in the first place - it's one of many ways of examining moral choice. It works very well in a big organized society because rights can have a close relationship to laws. But I think that we typically decide whether a right is a good one or not in the first place on moral principles outside of those rights. We are in total control of what we call a right, and to whom they apply*. Different societies do it differently, and it's often very hard to even comprehend their point of view if you take rights themselves as the starting point.
*At least that is my opinion. It isn't impossible to view rights as a priori. I just personally don't think they are, not even in people who think that. The reason is because they are so damned complex in their interaction that people are constantly changing their minds about what rights apply where and when, and to whom, that I can't help but to think we do that to make rights fit morality, rather than to make morality fit rights.
A discussion like this is incredibly dry and abstract, on a thread in which people share personal experiences about actually going through the point in question. I still feel rather conflicted, despite being pro-choice. I can only offer the experience of a man who didn't even have to have the surgery, but may have had a teenage human to look after right now if the surgery had not taken place. I don't torture myself with "what-ifs" most of the time, but on this question, I can't avoid it. My life would have been totally different. In balance, I don't think it would have been better - everything was wrong with how it unfolded then. But I can't know that things might not have been very different afterward.
With that personal experience in mind, the dry process of ratiocinating about theoretical ethical positions leaves me cold. I know it needs to be done, but I don't really want to do it. To me it is a stark example of why I was always an ethical non-cognitivist. I felt that we make decisions about things like this with our hearts before our minds, and the mind is the slave to the heart, desperately trying to fit a theory to what we already know we want.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Nigel McNie,
Were we silly for just relying on the pill?
I'd say less silly than I was for relying on only a condom. We did actually get the abortion (this was in Oz, where it's legal). It was traumatic as hell even then, I can hardly imagine what it's like here.
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Hard News: The People's Poet is dead!, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I don’t want to re-watch The Young Ones because I have a sneaking suspicion it’s one of those things that had it’s time and place
That was my feeling upon fighting my way through a few of them. The golden moments were still golden, but the bits in between dragged on.
But Rick certainly had the lion's share of those golden moments. Many has been the time I've had to resist hard the urge to mimic him kicking the TV set to death.
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Hard News: The Ides of Epsom, in reply to Richard Aston,
Will an ACT candidate really represent Epsom people? Considering the whole thing seems to be a deal to build a better majority for National in the house.
Well they don't seem to think ACT as a party will better represent them. Only 939 people in Epsom voted for it in 2011, whereas 15,835 voted for Banks. National got a crushing majority of the party vote with 23,725. But Labour and the Greens were actually more popular than ACT itself, by a large margin.
One possible response: a couple of the most popular Labour candidates could break off as independents, on the cuppa-tea proviso by Labour that they will not push their candidate there, and multiple statements by those independents that they firmly support Labour. If they also said they will more strongly advocate for the local electorate than before as their reason for doing so, it would hardly be less Machiavellian than the Epsom scenario. Could be a good way for the needs of, say, Mangere to reach Epsom levels of importance.
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