kentington wrote:FabledIntegral wrote:kentington wrote:First, let us get one thing straight. Did you and MedeFe not ask us what we would do about the violinist? If I am answering your question then I should say I would and not give a complete and logical argument for it. Can you grasp that point?
I can't grasp the point because I have no idea what you just said. Care to rephrase your third sentence? Because I am completely and utterly baffled by it.
Second, when you are talking about moral permissibility then you are talking about the right thing to do which would be required by the government. Did you not read my next post? Since, the violinist's situation was only brought in to make analogy for the pregnancy you can not keep changing the distance of time to suit your argument. Judging by pregnancy you would take the longest human recorded pregnancy and require that amount of time to be the minimum. That would be the logical thing to do. The last part about character; what did I say about character? Is it just because that is the only argument you can seem to defend? Selfish/indecent/nice/frightfully nice: These have nothing to do with murder or abortion and I never brought them up.
Wrong, it has nothing to do with the government. If it did, then my argument goes "the government has abortion legalized, thus it is morally permissible, end of argument." The violinist argument was NOT brought in to be analogous to a 9 month pregnancy. It was brought in to refute the point that all people do NOT have a right to life - it's circumstantial. And thus once establishing that everyone does not have a right to life, then she can apply it to the case of the pregnancy. Thus time is completely irrelevant and you don't have to use a 9 month pregnancy. Although even if you did, are you going to tell me a person's right to life IS relative to a time basis? Because otherwise, you would be dismissing time from the argument. Instead of attacking me, I'd rather see you answer the basic questions but forth, as I have done with EVERY single post nearly that's relevant in this forum. Notice I've quoted EVERY person virtually and addressed EVERY part of their post, and even with OnlyAmbrose I've given an "Idk, let me think about it."
Selfish/indecent/nice/frightfully nice have very much to do with the topic because people ARE bringing up character and are intertwining it with the permissibility of an act. Thus is the reason I've brought it up, and it is an explanation in Thompson's argument.
Is murder okay because someone is dependent upon you? For nine months? 18 years? That's how long my kid will be dependent for. Consent doesn't matter if you have determined that a fetus is a person.
Of course consent matters. If you take the kid home you just consented to having him/her. Because you DO have the option to NOT take the child home, aka give him/her up for abortion. Thus you are consenting to having a kid. If someone came and dropped a child off at your house that you didn't want, you have absolutely NO moral obligation to care for that child. It might be incredibly indecent to do so, but just because someone else gives you the child doesn't mean you have to take care of it, even if neglecting to take care of it will kill the child.
You were upset because I used the term "I would." If I am answering your question, then I should say, "I would" because your question had the words "would you" in it. If you are asking my personal opinion, then it is not a matter of logic.
You're telling me that moral permissibility has nothing to do with the government? That is ridiculous. Is abortion morally permissible by the government? Yes, it is. That is why abortion is allowed. Your argument abortion being legal wouldn't stand in this situation. The government has found it morally permissible under the assumption that a fetus is not a person. In this argument a fetus is a person. If it was truly determined, by scientists and believed by society, that a fetus was a person, then I believe the laws would change. I thought she mentioned nine months in her argument of the violinist, but I may be wrong.
Okay, aside for the sake of argument about abortion, we need to determine the right to life. That is the only way the argument can be settled. If the right to life is agreed upon then we can go from there into abortion. These topics usually question other beliefs. Right now, a person's right to life is determined partially by consent and time. There is only a certain amount of time, I'm not sure how long it is though, before the right to life is determined by government and not the mother. At a certain point, the fetus becomes a person, which is why partial birth abortions are a big thing. As for answering questions, I try to answer the questions you pose to me. If I don't answer a specific question ask it again, because I may not have seen it. I find your haughtiness more annoying than any repetitiveness.
Of course consent matters, right now. But we are talking about another person, fetus. If the fetus is a person, then it doesn't matter if someone consents to their living. My children are "persons" according to law I am responsible for them. If I neglect them and they die, I will go to jail. If I kill them, depending on the state, I may be killed. If a fetus is a person, then as a parent the mother is responsible, until birth at which she can relenquish her responsibility for adoption. I can give my kids up for adoption too, but that is the only legal way I can get rid of a dependent who is a person.
Erm, no, I legitimately didn't understand what you were trying to say in the first sentence.
I'm going to rephrase the argument, and I'll take some of the blame because apparently I haven't been clear enough, in my rash attempt to give a summarized version of a 7 page argument.
The government is in no way involved with moral permissibility. The definition of "moral permissibility" being here appears to be vague to many of the users that are interpreting it differently than Thompson and I have. I'm dealing here in the realm of only the moral absolutes. Nothing is subjective to society standards. For example, in the world of moral absolutes, many would argue that it is wrong to rape someone NO MATTER the circumstance. Even if a society sprung up that permitted rape, it would be NOT be morally permissible to rape someone no matter what.
The right not to be raped derives from a person's right of non-interference. A person has the right not to be killed, to not be raped, to not be forced to do any particular action for the welfare of another. They have the right to not be forced to worship any particular God, the right to not be assaulted by another member of society, the right not to be spontaneously kicked in the face.
Here is a good example in the moral ethics class that portrays the rights of interference vs noninterference.
There are 5 people on an island and they are going to die if you don't save them ASAP from an incoming tidal wave. You're flooring it in your jeep to get to them. You're aware that someone else is going to die on the opposite side of the island but you don't have time to save him. So you don't save him and you let him die. You did him no injustice because you didn't interfere with his life.
However, once again imagine 5 people on an island and they are going to die if you don't save them ASAP from an incoming tidal wave. However this time you're traveling down a narrow road that your jeep can barely fit through. For some reason or another, a person has been unwillingly tied down in the middle of the road. He is far away enough from the tidal wave that he will be safe and survive. However, in order to save the 5 people, you have to run over the man, lest you don't get to them in time. In this case, it is NOT morally permissible to go and kill the man and save the 5 people because you'd be interfering with his right to life. You would cause him injustice by killing him and interfering with his life, where he would have lived had you done nothing.
In the abortion argument, we not only are including the right to non-interference but also the right to life. Each person has a right to life (which in the latter case you violated yet in the first case you didn't, even though you could have saved him had you let the other 5 die). However, what happens when these rights aren't coexisting well? You have to analyze them further.
Nearly everyone arguing ethics agrees (from what I've read) that the right of life is directly interpreted to be "the right not to be killed." Thompson takes it one step further by defining it as "the right to not be killed unjustly." For example if someone tries to rape you, and you kill him in self-defense, you did not violate the other's right to life. You are not killing the other person unjustly.
She did mention the 9 months with the violinist, you are correct. But that was only to tie it to abortion. She then makes it clear that you can analyze the situation by itself by NOT making it analogous to abortion, rather simply by analyzing "does the violinist in this case have his right to life violated?" If we come to the conclusion of "no, his right to life wasn't violated, because when you decide to unplug yourself from him, you did him no injustice, you were just being possibly indecent as a person," then we've established that the right to life does not necessarily trump the right of noninterference. The entire premise we are arguing under is that "the fetus is a person and thus has a right to life." Thompson tries to argue that "even though the fetus is a person, it is not having it's right to life, AKA it's right not to be killed unjustly, violated," only in cases where the mother did not consent to the presence of the fetus attached to her.
Concerning your case of your children and being responsible for them, I can only repeat myself. Consent does matter. You consented to taking care of your children when you brought them home, thus if you neglect them, you are directly responsible for the neglect.
However, if you neglect for example all the starving children in Africa, are you responsible for their starvation? No. If you decide to adopt one and then let it starve are you responsible? Yes. A fetus in this case is a person. Yes, it will die without your care. But you never consented to taking care of it in the first place. Thus you wouldn't be responsible for the welfare of the fetus. Just as you aren't responsible for the welfare of other humans on this planet.
To me the argument of 1 in 10,000 condoms breaking really just sounds like a person who wants to have sex with out any repercussions, they don't want to be held accountable for there actions.
