I disagree: [feeling pain is] very much relevant (though not exclusive).
Is whether or not an adult that is murdered felt pain fundamentally relevant to whether or not the action was wrong? There is certainly a difference in intent behind toturing someone to death and drugging them up with excessive amounts of animal tranquilizer, but the fundamental action of taking their life isn't any different. Similarly, it is not all right to kill someone who has spinal cord injuries and cannot feel the pain how you kill them. Capacity to feel pain is irrelevant to the debate of whether or not ending their life is all right.
Now you're just playing fast and loose with language.
Language is important. The definitions you use are means of classifying objects in your surroundings into one category or another and how you treat it. By using the term "future person," you quite succinctly deny that the embryo is a person and that it should be accorded the same rights as a person. Similarly, people around the turn of the century distinguished between "Americans" and "immigrants" to justify discrimination against them regardless of their actual citizenship status. For a particularly unsubtle commentary on the importance of definitions, read "1984" by Orwell.
But if that's the case then you have to start over with the justification as why it is wrong to kill all people.
That is simply a postulate that most people accept. As in my original post, I clarified that if you value human life beyond those that you immediately care for, then the arbitrary distinctions between human and not human in the abortion/fetal stem cell debate should be objectionable. If you don't care about others being killed, then the entire argument becomes moot. Also left out of that equation is that you must believe in equitable treatment for all of your fellow man. If discrimination against other adults is okay, there's no inherent reason to discriminate against the unborn as well.
Eh? They certainly could be killed with human malice: but it's still not wrong to kill them.
Point conceded. I should've phrased that better.
What if they could become other people with slight alterations that activate their codes in the right way? How is that different from the way the uterine lining chemically triggers embryos to develop into fetuses?
Then the slight alterations are an equivalent direct action to fertilization of an egg, with the exception that it is inherently a deliberate action. This is distinct from them naturally turning into other people like a cut-up starfish can become multiple starfish. The way it differs from the actions of the uterine lining is that, as far as I know, there is no way to implant any cells from within the body into a woman's uterus and get a developing embryo.
No, left to its own devices, an embryo will die quite rapidly. That's why an embryo is not left to its own devices but nurtured within the mothers body. And even there, a large fraction, perhaps as many as half, die anyway.
The first part is a semantics debate. An embryo is not naturally created outside of an environment that will nurture it. The second part is as much a tragic part of human existence as starvation and old age.
The people doing stem cell research are not acting out of malice; they are trying to save people's lives and health--about as far from malice as it is possible to get.
Their intentions towards the lives they work to save are generally as noble as they can be, but their actions towards those they use for their research are quite different. I suppose malice has the wrong connotations, but amoral apathy doesn't quite get the intent across.
Abortion always has been and always will be a women's rights issue.
I would respectfully disagree and say that the choice over whether another being should live is no other person's right, even if that person is dependent on the choice-maker for life. While the mother's interests are certainly relevant, in the end, abortion as birth control is bit like closing the barn door after the animals have been let out. I'm a bit more moderate when it comes to issues of rape and immediate risk of death for the mother, but I don't see killing someone (or something, if you must) instead of accepting the consequences for one's own actions as an intrinsic human right. I think that being accepting of this sort of mindset is detrimental to society in the long term.
It makes someone else pay the ultimate price for your own actions. I think that being able to accept that as reasonable is but one symptom of basic problems of personal responsibility facing modern society.
In the most practical sense, it's the point which a majority of voters agree on [...]
Honestly, I don't remember voters having much of a say in the original Roe vs. Wade, which overturned state laws banning abortion that were placed in effect by voters. In effect, the Supreme Court has said that short of a Constitutional Amendment, there isn't a thing the voters can say about it.
[T]o put it another way, the point at which it becomes socially acceptable to enough of the population that they can effectively impose their will upon the rest.
This is what I referred to in my original post about using the exact same arguments used to justify slavery and forced sterilization. There is such a problem in democracy as "the tyrrany of the majority." Our Constitution provides a few mechanisms to protect against this, such as the 1st and 14th Amendments.
I don't inherently mind society as a whole taking life from a person, as in the death penalty. It just needs to be applied in a fair and just manner with the victim getting a chance to defend themselves, and it needs to be done only for aggregious and unprovoked assaults against another person. To do otherwise, is just common murder.
Let's ignore souls. True, they don't have nervous systems yet, but a newborn isn't an intelligent being yet either. Feeling pain is also irrelvent to whether or not its right to kill someone. There are two major differences between embryonic stem cells and the cells in your body:
1. Left to its own devices, an embryo will grow into a child and then an adult. Begging the question of "future beings" or "potential people" denies that they already are a person -- just an undeveloped one. The discarded cells of your body will not spawn other individuals. When someone implants unaltered bone marrow stem cells into the womb of a woman and grows it into a person, I'll be more impressed with this argument.
2. These cells die naturally without human malice. Since they cannot become other people anyway, their deaths are irrelevant. In the case of miscarriages and unimplanted embryos, it's just a tragedy of life that some people die of natural causes. Abortion aside, there are ethical concerns about creating a human life for the express purpose of causing it to die of unnatural causes or be exploited.
I think a newborn can reasonably be considered to be sentient. Certainly it falls into the class of "possibly sentient." It has a working brain, after all. Birth is an important demarcation point, not because of sentience, but because:
1. It is completely well-defined, which is useful for legal-purposes.
2. It is the point at which the infant ceases to be parasitic on the mother's body. One can reasonably suppose that there should be limits on how much a being--even a sentient one--is entitled to impose upon somebody else's body.
I'm trying to avoid abortion-specific dialouge, but you raise a few common arguments which bear some relevance to the discussion at hand.
1. Childbirth is indeed a clearly defined moment. That, in and of itself, does not make it any less arbitrarily chosen. Age 3 or 4 weeks after conception would also be clearly defined moments which would be convenient for law.
2. Regardless of whether the newborn is "parisitic" on the mother is not a good argument. A newborn still cannot survive without the aid of a caretaker -- it is just no longer dependent on a single one. You say that there should be limits on how much a being is entitled to impose upon another. However, I turn the point around to ask when does someone's imposition on the comfort and lives of others earn them death? When does the comfort of one person supercede the life of another where malice is not a factor, especially when in the common case the "injured" party is partially responsible for the other party's existence and their need to live off of them?
These concerns vanish when you are dealing with an early embryo such as is used for stem cell production. There is no debate about whether or not it is sentient, because it doesn't have the neural equipment.
The sentience of a newborn is debateable. There are certainly animals that are not widely considered sentient, such as certain parrots and octopi, who are capable of functioning at a much higher level of intelligence that a newborn human. There certainly is no part of the birthing process that endows a newborn with any more sentience than they had the day before. Developmental psychology will give you a list of tasks needed for most metrics of sentience that newborns and children don't acquire until later in life. I would argue that a newborn isn't sentient yet. Because of that, I see an inconsistency in saying that a newborn is worth the protection of law and an embryo is not.
As for sperm, ova, and other cells of the body, they are not viable and capable of growing into a seperate person yet.
Even a retarded person is sentient, so no. [...] As far as people in irreversible comas, this is already done, and seems ethically quite reasonable.
For the first point, it depends on the level of retardation and your view of what sentience is. For the second point, I agree, but only because that only happens at what will unrecoverably be the end of that person's life. Sentencing someone to unnatural death from their creation is not equivalent in my book.
NO KIDDING. There was one not too far from where I grew up. When the wind blew wrong, you did NOT want to go outside. I truly pitied the people who lived in the normal downwind direction from the place. Over the years, though, they've gotten better pollution controls, and I don't think I've smelled the place in ten years.
However, my dad grew up in the same house I did, and he said that when he was a kid it was even worse. The area even had acid rain problems from the plant until the EPA forced them to clean up and add some scrubbers.
Popeye was a character in the 1910s-1930s comic strip Thimble Theatre who grew from being introduced as a bit role midway through the run of the comic to the starring character that took it to the national stage. There was no cereal company involved.
The person that strays from "life" and "choice" and into something more reasonable like "abortion", "abortion rights", "the right to abort", etc. is the only one worth listening to, because they're the most likely to view the discussion in a reasonable manner.
I would disagree that use of the terms "abortion rights" and "the right to abort" implies an open-minded person. Any time you describe something as a "right" you are already presuming that the "pro" side is the correct one. The opposition in such cases always vehemently denies that the debated topic is a right and does not use that term.
The right to bear arms vs. gun-control Civil rights vs. integration Gay rights vs. "special privileges for gays"
Along those lines, I think that "legalized abortion" is a much more neutral term, much like "legalized drugs" or "legalized gambling." It's a much more balanced term that talks simply about the matter at hand -- whether or not the activity in question should be legal.
Stem cells and cloning are the obvious progression of medicine: we have near infinite potential to repair human bodies, minds, and lives sitting in the palm of out hand and we're debating whether or not we want to play with it.
You sound like Edward Teller, mooning over an advance of science without one whit of concern for the fallout (excuse the pun) it has on society. If never ceases to amaze me how some people think that if it's possible to do something, then it's the inevitable march of progress and that we must do it at all costs. This is the sort of thinking that led Teller to advocate using nukes to alter the weather and to dig mines and canals.
Of course, the dangers are far greater if the moral side is the one not to embrace its power.
Have you ever considered that like chemical weapons there may be no way to embrace its power and still retain the moral high-ground? "Lives sitting in the palm of our hand" are not generally the kind of thing that most reasonable people think are something that should be "played with." Fetal stem cell research results in the exploitation and death of a human lifeform. It's senseless when there are alternatives that do not. Sure, it can save lives, but we can save lives now by cutting up retarded and insane people for organs. Should we deny our prerogative as "the moral side" to "embrace the power" there?
I think that the solution to the abortion 'problem' is for all of us to make the changes necessary to make the need for abortions as rare as possible.
I agree. I'd much rather see abortions never be needed in the first place, especially as a pro-lifer. I hope that one day when medicine and society advances to the point that unwanted children are extremely rare and nigh impossible that we look back on these days with as much horror as we looked back on forced eugenics and slavery. When reproduction is fully a matter of responsible choice instead of an accident that can be "fixed" we'll be a much more mature society all around.
I suppose you've opened the proverbial can of worms already, so I'll clarify the stance of those opposed to fetal cell research for you: When does a human life become worth protecting?
What makes childbirth a defining moment between being a human being and not a human being? If that's not the moment at which to protect a human against death, then when does it happen? Is it in the 3rd trimester? Is it at two years old? Is it when they pass some formal IQ test?
What I don't like about both abortion and fetal stem cell research is that someone is arbitrarily deciding that a human lifeform doesn't have a right to live based on their own or someone else's selfish needs. It's ethically no different from killing someone for food because you're poor and you need it to live. Sure, you can argue about the sentience of an embryo, but then do you advocate allowing people to kill and harvest life-saving organs from severely retarded people or people in comas? What about people in cryogenic suspension? Should we treat them as "corpsicles" and take their organs for living people too? At what point does a human's right to live end (or never begin) without connection to any actions that they have done? These arguments over the worth of a human life and human dignity aren't any different from those who advocated slavery and forced sterilization on the basis of the inferiority of the victims in comparison to enfranchised society. If you place any value on human life beyond that of your immediate friends and family, then you should object to an arbitrarily drawn line on human worth.
That is why many of us object to fetal stem cell research. There are so many possibilities for bone marrow research that could save lives without creating and killing them. We explore them fully before less ethically sound path just because it's easier.
Oh, true, but that doesn't stop the NRA from touting it. I think the reality is just that Kennesaw is filled with relatively well-adjusted and economically comfortable people with no real need for crime, many of whom moved to Kennesaw because of the low crime rate.
Interesting. I was aware that Kennesaw had about 54 residential burglaries in 1981 with a population of about 5,500-5,700 and only about 36 in 1997 with a population of about 19,000. I was going to smugly quote that, but there's that little spike of 70 burglaries in 1986 as well as a few years of burglaries hovering at about 30-something before 1981. One thing that the authors of those posts don't realize and argue about is that those are in fact completely residential burglary statistics. I wish I could find the site again that I saw which had the numbers for 1982 and 1997, but they had commercial burglaries in a seperate category and the residential burglaries match that number. (Note that the guns laws didn't seem to have a significant effect on commercial burglaries.)
However, if you assume that 30-33 is the mean for Kennesaw's history, you can still see that the average amount of crime per capita is going down as the county's population has more than tripled in the past decade and a half. The murder rate and rape rates have also both declined, but those are unlikely to be directly a result of gun laws. I think that the populace is just now a demographic less likely to commit crime in the first place. It's a pretty heavily conservative Christian area with a lot of middle class residential areas.
Yes. It's funny that you mention it because I bring up the same point in discussions all the time. I am astonished that so many people think that they have a chance of winning the lottery but find it inconceivable that someone else may try to harm them. I am not willing to gamble on the hope I never need my gun.
This is actually a well-known principal amongst financial investors. Ask yourself the following questions:
1) Would you be willing to spend $1 on a 1 in 100,000 chance of winning $10,000? 2) Would you be willing to cheat for $1 on your taxes when there's a 1 in 100,000 chance of being caught and fined $10,000?
Many people surveyed would do #1, but next to no one will do #2. #1 is almost a guaranteed waste of money, while #2 is almost guaranteed money in your pocket. Funny, that. Most people are "risk adverse." They'll give away small amounts money on the off chance that it might pay off, but they won't take small amounts of money on the off chance it might come back to bite them.
Now ask yourself the same questions with $1000 for the cheating/lotto ticket and $1,000,000,000 for the fine/prize. Suddenly far fewer people are willing to play the lottery, and the number of cheaters goes up. Suddenly the pay off/punishment seems remote compared to the cost/reward. This is the problem with preparing against violent crime. While the punishment for being unprepared can be severe, the chances of getting caught is miniscule. Plus, there's no immediate reward like there is in cheating on your taxes. In fact it's an extra burden in the form of carrying it around and maintaining it as well as living in the mindset of being prepared to be attacked.
Meanwhile, all the lotto costs you is a dollar you'll never worry about again and gives you a small ray of hope out of your current drudgery. Is it no surprise that people, emotionally, prefer to buy lotto tickets while not caring about their safety?
Actually, we live in a democratic republic, and it's a good thing too. The biggest problem facing a democracy, and to a lesser extent a democratic republic, is "the tyrrany of the majority." Our system of government is specially set up to allow people to express unpopular opinions. However, much like a true democracy, our government fails to properly protect those people sometimes and actively goes after them other times. Remember Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Shouldn't bringing a new baby human into this world require at LEAST as much licensing / education / certification as catching a fish?
Hell, yes. I think a great number of the social ills plaguing our society could be solved by making sure parents pass an independent psychological and financial evaluation before being allowed to reproduce and then encouraging them to have as many kids as they can safely support to make up for the large numbers of people who should fail that evaluation. As the son of two teachers, I can tell you that so, so much of what's wrong with kids and adults today all stems from the fact that all that's needed to be a parent is functioning sex organs.
Poverty, juvenile crime, being ill-equipped for success, debt-saddled families, drug abuse, bullying and wife and child beating, molestation, etc. could all be reduced sharply by making sure people who can't properly care for children aren't allowed to have them.
The problem is that it's impossible to implement in a reasonable, dignified manner. How do you stop kids from being born? Forced abortions, forced (but reversible) sterilization, or forced abstinence? All are abhorrent in one way or another. How do you fairly judge parents-to-be without allowing political views, racism, religion, eugenics, etc. to get in the way? How do you tell a couple that they're just too poor (welfare mothers) or too abused (beaten as children) to safely raise a child? What do you do when people break the laws anyway?
Many of my favorite authors have positted a future where such population controls are in place. Most are not very egalitarian, however. Niven's Known Space universe in the early days of "The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton" had people prove some great accomplishment for humanity (or win a lottery). Walter John William's "Aristoi" was modeled after Plato's enlightened dictatorship and had the aristoi who were equally burdened with responsibility and privilege able to decide who had kids on their carefully population controlled worlds. I think the most egalitarian means for determining who gets to have kids is an exponential tax, as proposed in one of Asimov's books, I think. The first kid costs X amount, the second 2X, the third 4X, and so on. Money is the closest thing our society has to measuring worth (though it's still a flawed mechanism), and it's coincidentally one of the things needed to raise a kid well. Pay a tax and pass several child-rearing classes, and you should be good to go.
The problem of how to stop people who don't qualify from having kids still isn't addressed, and I don't think it ever will be. Until we have some "vaccination" against pregnancy that can be administered in childhood/puberty that doesn't have long term health risks, like in "Aristoi," and a means of suppressing its effects or of having children without pregnancy, no means of suppressing childbirth will be humane.
Even with all those difficulties, it's still my dream that one day we will have a fair and just means of licensing childbirth to prevent overpopulation, bad parenting, and kids trapped in social situations with no hope for the future.
Own whatever you want on your own property, but to take that firearm with you in public you have to be licensed.
That's effectively what a concealed carry permit is like where I live. Most rational people won't carry a pistol openly without making threatening gestures or movements (which is legal where I'm from), because you'll unsettle people and get a lot of inquiries from cops. Anyone who operates with a gun in their regular life pretty much has to have one of these licenses. At home, they don't matter.
It's not that hard to get where I live, but thankfully it's still harder to get than a driver's license. Well, maybe it's not that great that it's harder to get. Man, the idiots on the road where I live. If only I had a gun... <g>
I have a friend whose family lived in Kennesaw, GA for a few years, and they were legally required to own a gun in their house due to a law passed in 1982. The law was a backlash against Morton Grove, IL's law outlawing all handguns within city limits. Humorously, the law has enough loopholes to let people get out of it that no one could truly be forced to own one, and no one's ever been prosecuted for breaking it, but when his family moved in, the local law enforcement did actually check to make sure that they owned a gun. That's definitely an improvement over gun ownership being regulated through nepotism.
Kennesaw's violent crime rate dropped 89% in 1983 and has stayed that low while crime state-wide has only dropped 10%. If I recall correctly, Kennesaw has had 3 murders since 1982 despite the population doubling since then, and only one (in 1997) was done with a gun while the other two were stabbings. There have been no incidents of children being killed in accidental discharges. As a result, the NRA loves Kennesaw. It's the best pro-gun example they could've ever dreamed of.
Curiously enough, yes, I'm a Mac user and an INTJ on the border of being an INTP. Could you dig up a link on that xNTx Mac user correlation? I'd be fascinated to see that. I always figured that Thinker personalities, even xNTx's, would tend to have less Mac users than Feeling personalities, but I guess it takes a little bit of the ol' xNTx iconclasm to go an alternative platform route.
I wonder if there's a higher percentage of Linux users in the xNTx crowd as a result.
Umpty-teen answers, and every one of them got it right. It's not like Yakov Smirnov only made one "In Soviet Russia, X does Y to you!" joke. The car joke is a parody from the TV show "Family Guy" where in one episode they had the GPS unit that did Yakov Smirnov impersonations.
Now y'all all fight over whether I should be moderated +1 Informative, or +1 Funny.;-)
Not surprising. He's talking about the way it's advertised to the American market. I still remember how Foster's had to pay bars in Australia to stock their beer when the Olympics were in Sydney because American tourists only knew of Foster's while none of the natives hardly liked it at all.
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I disagree: [feeling pain is] very much relevant (though not exclusive).
Is whether or not an adult that is murdered felt pain fundamentally relevant to whether or not the action was wrong? There is certainly a difference in intent behind toturing someone to death and drugging them up with excessive amounts of animal tranquilizer, but the fundamental action of taking their life isn't any different. Similarly, it is not all right to kill someone who has spinal cord injuries and cannot feel the pain how you kill them. Capacity to feel pain is irrelevant to the debate of whether or not ending their life is all right.
Now you're just playing fast and loose with language.
Language is important. The definitions you use are means of classifying objects in your surroundings into one category or another and how you treat it. By using the term "future person," you quite succinctly deny that the embryo is a person and that it should be accorded the same rights as a person. Similarly, people around the turn of the century distinguished between "Americans" and "immigrants" to justify discrimination against them regardless of their actual citizenship status. For a particularly unsubtle commentary on the importance of definitions, read "1984" by Orwell.
But if that's the case then you have to start over with the justification as why it is wrong to kill all people.
That is simply a postulate that most people accept. As in my original post, I clarified that if you value human life beyond those that you immediately care for, then the arbitrary distinctions between human and not human in the abortion/fetal stem cell debate should be objectionable. If you don't care about others being killed, then the entire argument becomes moot. Also left out of that equation is that you must believe in equitable treatment for all of your fellow man. If discrimination against other adults is okay, there's no inherent reason to discriminate against the unborn as well.
Eh? They certainly could be killed with human malice: but it's still not wrong to kill them.
Point conceded. I should've phrased that better.
What if they could become other people with slight alterations that activate their codes in the right way? How is that different from the way the uterine lining chemically triggers embryos to develop into fetuses?
Then the slight alterations are an equivalent direct action to fertilization of an egg, with the exception that it is inherently a deliberate action. This is distinct from them naturally turning into other people like a cut-up starfish can become multiple starfish. The way it differs from the actions of the uterine lining is that, as far as I know, there is no way to implant any cells from within the body into a woman's uterus and get a developing embryo.
No, left to its own devices, an embryo will die quite rapidly. That's why an embryo is not left to its own devices but nurtured within the mothers body. And even there, a large fraction, perhaps as many as half, die anyway.
The first part is a semantics debate. An embryo is not naturally created outside of an environment that will nurture it. The second part is as much a tragic part of human existence as starvation and old age.
The people doing stem cell research are not acting out of malice; they are trying to save people's lives and health--about as far from malice as it is possible to get.
Their intentions towards the lives they work to save are generally as noble as they can be, but their actions towards those they use for their research are quite different. I suppose malice has the wrong connotations, but amoral apathy doesn't quite get the intent across.
Abortion always has been and always will be a women's rights issue.
I would respectfully disagree and say that the choice over whether another being should live is no other person's right, even if that person is dependent on the choice-maker for life. While the mother's interests are certainly relevant, in the end, abortion as birth control is bit like closing the barn door after the animals have been let out. I'm a bit more moderate when it comes to issues of rape and immediate risk of death for the mother, but I don't see killing someone (or something, if you must) instead of accepting the consequences for one's own actions as an intrinsic human right. I think that being accepting of this sort of mindset is detrimental to society in the long term.
It makes someone else pay the ultimate price for your own actions. I think that being able to accept that as reasonable is but one symptom of basic problems of personal responsibility facing modern society.
In the most practical sense, it's the point which a majority of voters agree on [...]
Honestly, I don't remember voters having much of a say in the original Roe vs. Wade, which overturned state laws banning abortion that were placed in effect by voters. In effect, the Supreme Court has said that short of a Constitutional Amendment, there isn't a thing the voters can say about it.
[T]o put it another way, the point at which it becomes socially acceptable to enough of the population that they can effectively impose their will upon the rest.
This is what I referred to in my original post about using the exact same arguments used to justify slavery and forced sterilization. There is such a problem in democracy as "the tyrrany of the majority." Our Constitution provides a few mechanisms to protect against this, such as the 1st and 14th Amendments.
I don't inherently mind society as a whole taking life from a person, as in the death penalty. It just needs to be applied in a fair and just manner with the victim getting a chance to defend themselves, and it needs to be done only for aggregious and unprovoked assaults against another person. To do otherwise, is just common murder.
Let's ignore souls. True, they don't have nervous systems yet, but a newborn isn't an intelligent being yet either. Feeling pain is also irrelvent to whether or not its right to kill someone. There are two major differences between embryonic stem cells and the cells in your body:
1. Left to its own devices, an embryo will grow into a child and then an adult. Begging the question of "future beings" or "potential people" denies that they already are a person -- just an undeveloped one. The discarded cells of your body will not spawn other individuals. When someone implants unaltered bone marrow stem cells into the womb of a woman and grows it into a person, I'll be more impressed with this argument.
2. These cells die naturally without human malice. Since they cannot become other people anyway, their deaths are irrelevant. In the case of miscarriages and unimplanted embryos, it's just a tragedy of life that some people die of natural causes. Abortion aside, there are ethical concerns about creating a human life for the express purpose of causing it to die of unnatural causes or be exploited.
Lesson #2 learned -- Preview again after making changes.
I'm trying to avoid abortion-specific dialouge, but you raise a few common arguments which bear some relevance to the discussion at hand.
1. Childbirth is indeed a clearly defined moment. That, in and of itself, does not make it any less arbitrarily chosen. Age 3 or 4 weeks after conception would also be clearly defined moments which would be convenient for law.
2. Regardless of whether the newborn is "parisitic" on the mother is not a good argument. A newborn still cannot survive without the aid of a caretaker -- it is just no longer dependent on a single one. You say that there should be limits on how much a being is entitled to impose upon another. However, I turn the point around to ask when does someone's imposition on the comfort and lives of others earn them death? When does the comfort of one person supercede the life of another where malice is not a factor, especially when in the common case the "injured" party is partially responsible for the other party's existence and their need to live off of them?
The sentience of a newborn is debateable. There are certainly animals that are not widely considered sentient, such as certain parrots and octopi, who are capable of functioning at a much higher level of intelligence that a newborn human. There certainly is no part of the birthing process that endows a newborn with any more sentience than they had the day before. Developmental psychology will give you a list of tasks needed for most metrics of sentience that newborns and children don't acquire until later in life. I would argue that a newborn isn't sentient yet. Because of that, I see an inconsistency in saying that a newborn is worth the protection of law and an embryo is not.
As for sperm, ova, and other cells of the body, they are not viable and capable of growing into a seperate person yet.
For the first point, it depends on the level of retardation and your view of what sentience is. For the second point, I agree, but only because that only happens at what will unrecoverably be the end of that person's life. Sentencing someone to unnatural death from their creation is not equivalent in my book.
NO KIDDING. There was one not too far from where I grew up. When the wind blew wrong, you did NOT want to go outside. I truly pitied the people who lived in the normal downwind direction from the place. Over the years, though, they've gotten better pollution controls, and I don't think I've smelled the place in ten years.
However, my dad grew up in the same house I did, and he said that when he was a kid it was even worse. The area even had acid rain problems from the plant until the EPA forced them to clean up and add some scrubbers.
Popeye was a character in the 1910s-1930s comic strip Thimble Theatre who grew from being introduced as a bit role midway through the run of the comic to the starring character that took it to the national stage. There was no cereal company involved.
The person that strays from "life" and "choice" and into something more reasonable like "abortion", "abortion rights", "the right to abort", etc. is the only one worth listening to, because they're the most likely to view the discussion in a reasonable manner.
I would disagree that use of the terms "abortion rights" and "the right to abort" implies an open-minded person. Any time you describe something as a "right" you are already presuming that the "pro" side is the correct one. The opposition in such cases always vehemently denies that the debated topic is a right and does not use that term.
The right to bear arms vs. gun-control
Civil rights vs. integration
Gay rights vs. "special privileges for gays"
Along those lines, I think that "legalized abortion" is a much more neutral term, much like "legalized drugs" or "legalized gambling." It's a much more balanced term that talks simply about the matter at hand -- whether or not the activity in question should be legal.
Stem cells and cloning are the obvious progression of medicine: we have near infinite potential to repair human bodies, minds, and lives sitting in the palm of out hand and we're debating whether or not we want to play with it.
You sound like Edward Teller, mooning over an advance of science without one whit of concern for the fallout (excuse the pun) it has on society. If never ceases to amaze me how some people think that if it's possible to do something, then it's the inevitable march of progress and that we must do it at all costs. This is the sort of thinking that led Teller to advocate using nukes to alter the weather and to dig mines and canals.
Of course, the dangers are far greater if the moral side is the one not to embrace its power.
Have you ever considered that like chemical weapons there may be no way to embrace its power and still retain the moral high-ground? "Lives sitting in the palm of our hand" are not generally the kind of thing that most reasonable people think are something that should be "played with." Fetal stem cell research results in the exploitation and death of a human lifeform. It's senseless when there are alternatives that do not. Sure, it can save lives, but we can save lives now by cutting up retarded and insane people for organs. Should we deny our prerogative as "the moral side" to "embrace the power" there?
I think that the solution to the abortion 'problem' is for all of us to make the changes necessary to make the need for abortions as rare as possible.
I agree. I'd much rather see abortions never be needed in the first place, especially as a pro-lifer. I hope that one day when medicine and society advances to the point that unwanted children are extremely rare and nigh impossible that we look back on these days with as much horror as we looked back on forced eugenics and slavery. When reproduction is fully a matter of responsible choice instead of an accident that can be "fixed" we'll be a much more mature society all around.
That is...
We should explore that fully before the less ethically sound path just because it's easier.
(Lesson learned -- always Preview, kids.)
I suppose you've opened the proverbial can of worms already, so I'll clarify the stance of those opposed to fetal cell research for you: When does a human life become worth protecting?
What makes childbirth a defining moment between being a human being and not a human being? If that's not the moment at which to protect a human against death, then when does it happen? Is it in the 3rd trimester? Is it at two years old? Is it when they pass some formal IQ test?
What I don't like about both abortion and fetal stem cell research is that someone is arbitrarily deciding that a human lifeform doesn't have a right to live based on their own or someone else's selfish needs. It's ethically no different from killing someone for food because you're poor and you need it to live. Sure, you can argue about the sentience of an embryo, but then do you advocate allowing people to kill and harvest life-saving organs from severely retarded people or people in comas? What about people in cryogenic suspension? Should we treat them as "corpsicles" and take their organs for living people too? At what point does a human's right to live end (or never begin) without connection to any actions that they have done? These arguments over the worth of a human life and human dignity aren't any different from those who advocated slavery and forced sterilization on the basis of the inferiority of the victims in comparison to enfranchised society. If you place any value on human life beyond that of your immediate friends and family, then you should object to an arbitrarily drawn line on human worth.
That is why many of us object to fetal stem cell research. There are so many possibilities for bone marrow research that could save lives without creating and killing them. We explore them fully before less ethically sound path just because it's easier.
Oh, true, but that doesn't stop the NRA from touting it. I think the reality is just that Kennesaw is filled with relatively well-adjusted and economically comfortable people with no real need for crime, many of whom moved to Kennesaw because of the low crime rate.
Interesting. I was aware that Kennesaw had about 54 residential burglaries in 1981 with a population of about 5,500-5,700 and only about 36 in 1997 with a population of about 19,000. I was going to smugly quote that, but there's that little spike of 70 burglaries in 1986 as well as a few years of burglaries hovering at about 30-something before 1981. One thing that the authors of those posts don't realize and argue about is that those are in fact completely residential burglary statistics. I wish I could find the site again that I saw which had the numbers for 1982 and 1997, but they had commercial burglaries in a seperate category and the residential burglaries match that number. (Note that the guns laws didn't seem to have a significant effect on commercial burglaries.)
However, if you assume that 30-33 is the mean for Kennesaw's history, you can still see that the average amount of crime per capita is going down as the county's population has more than tripled in the past decade and a half. The murder rate and rape rates have also both declined, but those are unlikely to be directly a result of gun laws. I think that the populace is just now a demographic less likely to commit crime in the first place. It's a pretty heavily conservative Christian area with a lot of middle class residential areas.
Yes. It's funny that you mention it because I bring up the same point in discussions all the time. I am astonished that so many people think that they have a chance of winning the lottery but find it inconceivable that someone else may try to harm them. I am not willing to gamble on the hope I never need my gun.
This is actually a well-known principal amongst financial investors. Ask yourself the following questions:
1) Would you be willing to spend $1 on a 1 in 100,000 chance of winning $10,000?
2) Would you be willing to cheat for $1 on your taxes when there's a 1 in 100,000 chance of being caught and fined $10,000?
Many people surveyed would do #1, but next to no one will do #2. #1 is almost a guaranteed waste of money, while #2 is almost guaranteed money in your pocket. Funny, that. Most people are "risk adverse." They'll give away small amounts money on the off chance that it might pay off, but they won't take small amounts of money on the off chance it might come back to bite them.
Now ask yourself the same questions with $1000 for the cheating/lotto ticket and $1,000,000,000 for the fine/prize. Suddenly far fewer people are willing to play the lottery, and the number of cheaters goes up. Suddenly the pay off/punishment seems remote compared to the cost/reward. This is the problem with preparing against violent crime. While the punishment for being unprepared can be severe, the chances of getting caught is miniscule. Plus, there's no immediate reward like there is in cheating on your taxes. In fact it's an extra burden in the form of carrying it around and maintaining it as well as living in the mindset of being prepared to be attacked.
Meanwhile, all the lotto costs you is a dollar you'll never worry about again and gives you a small ray of hope out of your current drudgery. Is it no surprise that people, emotionally, prefer to buy lotto tickets while not caring about their safety?
If you live in a democracy, why not?
Actually, we live in a democratic republic, and it's a good thing too. The biggest problem facing a democracy, and to a lesser extent a democratic republic, is "the tyrrany of the majority." Our system of government is specially set up to allow people to express unpopular opinions. However, much like a true democracy, our government fails to properly protect those people sometimes and actively goes after them other times. Remember Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Shouldn't bringing a new baby human into this world require at LEAST as much licensing / education / certification as catching a fish?
Hell, yes. I think a great number of the social ills plaguing our society could be solved by making sure parents pass an independent psychological and financial evaluation before being allowed to reproduce and then encouraging them to have as many kids as they can safely support to make up for the large numbers of people who should fail that evaluation. As the son of two teachers, I can tell you that so, so much of what's wrong with kids and adults today all stems from the fact that all that's needed to be a parent is functioning sex organs.
Poverty, juvenile crime, being ill-equipped for success, debt-saddled families, drug abuse, bullying and wife and child beating, molestation, etc. could all be reduced sharply by making sure people who can't properly care for children aren't allowed to have them.
The problem is that it's impossible to implement in a reasonable, dignified manner. How do you stop kids from being born? Forced abortions, forced (but reversible) sterilization, or forced abstinence? All are abhorrent in one way or another. How do you fairly judge parents-to-be without allowing political views, racism, religion, eugenics, etc. to get in the way? How do you tell a couple that they're just too poor (welfare mothers) or too abused (beaten as children) to safely raise a child? What do you do when people break the laws anyway?
Many of my favorite authors have positted a future where such population controls are in place. Most are not very egalitarian, however. Niven's Known Space universe in the early days of "The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton" had people prove some great accomplishment for humanity (or win a lottery). Walter John William's "Aristoi" was modeled after Plato's enlightened dictatorship and had the aristoi who were equally burdened with responsibility and privilege able to decide who had kids on their carefully population controlled worlds. I think the most egalitarian means for determining who gets to have kids is an exponential tax, as proposed in one of Asimov's books, I think. The first kid costs X amount, the second 2X, the third 4X, and so on. Money is the closest thing our society has to measuring worth (though it's still a flawed mechanism), and it's coincidentally one of the things needed to raise a kid well. Pay a tax and pass several child-rearing classes, and you should be good to go.
The problem of how to stop people who don't qualify from having kids still isn't addressed, and I don't think it ever will be. Until we have some "vaccination" against pregnancy that can be administered in childhood/puberty that doesn't have long term health risks, like in "Aristoi," and a means of suppressing its effects or of having children without pregnancy, no means of suppressing childbirth will be humane.
Even with all those difficulties, it's still my dream that one day we will have a fair and just means of licensing childbirth to prevent overpopulation, bad parenting, and kids trapped in social situations with no hope for the future.
Own whatever you want on your own property, but to take that firearm with you in public you have to be licensed.
That's effectively what a concealed carry permit is like where I live. Most rational people won't carry a pistol openly without making threatening gestures or movements (which is legal where I'm from), because you'll unsettle people and get a lot of inquiries from cops. Anyone who operates with a gun in their regular life pretty much has to have one of these licenses. At home, they don't matter.
It's not that hard to get where I live, but thankfully it's still harder to get than a driver's license. Well, maybe it's not that great that it's harder to get. Man, the idiots on the road where I live. If only I had a gun... <g>
I have a friend whose family lived in Kennesaw, GA for a few years, and they were legally required to own a gun in their house due to a law passed in 1982. The law was a backlash against Morton Grove, IL's law outlawing all handguns within city limits. Humorously, the law has enough loopholes to let people get out of it that no one could truly be forced to own one, and no one's ever been prosecuted for breaking it, but when his family moved in, the local law enforcement did actually check to make sure that they owned a gun. That's definitely an improvement over gun ownership being regulated through nepotism.
Kennesaw's violent crime rate dropped 89% in 1983 and has stayed that low while crime state-wide has only dropped 10%. If I recall correctly, Kennesaw has had 3 murders since 1982 despite the population doubling since then, and only one (in 1997) was done with a gun while the other two were stabbings.
There have been no incidents of children being killed in accidental discharges. As a result, the NRA loves Kennesaw. It's the best pro-gun example they could've ever dreamed of.
For a little more info on both towns, go here.
Curiously enough, yes, I'm a Mac user and an INTJ on the border of being an INTP. Could you dig up a link on that xNTx Mac user correlation? I'd be fascinated to see that. I always figured that Thinker personalities, even xNTx's, would tend to have less Mac users than Feeling personalities, but I guess it takes a little bit of the ol' xNTx iconclasm to go an alternative platform route.
I wonder if there's a higher percentage of Linux users in the xNTx crowd as a result.
Umpty-teen answers, and every one of them got it right. It's not like Yakov Smirnov only made one "In Soviet Russia, X does Y to you!" joke. The car joke is a parody from the TV show "Family Guy" where in one episode they had the GPS unit that did Yakov Smirnov impersonations.
;-)
Now y'all all fight over whether I should be moderated +1 Informative, or +1 Funny.
How about Overrated?
Well, considering how Trident was talking up how these cards would get blown away by their new graphics card, I think the comparison is wholy fair.
Not surprising. He's talking about the way it's advertised to the American market. I still remember how Foster's had to pay bars in Australia to stock their beer when the Olympics were in Sydney because American tourists only knew of Foster's while none of the natives hardly liked it at all.