[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
This is a followup to the running (and persistent) debate over abortion on the Planned Parenthood and Teen Pregnancy thread, and on a few others. I alluded to the question in passing, but I’d like to address it more fully here.
The presumption in the abortion debate is that a human fetus is just as alive and just as human–and therefore as valuable–as an infant, or a child, or an adult.
Let us agree that a fetus is alive. This is self-evident. If it were dead it would not grow. Let us also agree that it is human. It could not be otherwise. Human sperm and human eggs cannot combine to form anything other than a human embryo, which will inevitably become a human infant, unless the process is interrupted by biological, chemical or mechanical means.
So. No arguments so far, correct? A zygote, an embryo, a fetus and an infant are all equivalent in their being alive and human.
Let us for the moment sidestep issues of sentience or viability outside the womb. Let us assume that the living human embryo will, if not hindered from doing so, develop into a healthy baby.
Now, the question. Does this embryo have objective, inteinsic value, by virtue of its being alive and human?
We’ll also sidestep the fact that even a dead embryo or fetus has some value to scientific and medical science. Let’s confine the conversation to a living human organism. Is it a thing of value, and is its value determined by the fact that it is alive, or the fact that it is human?
How valuable is it, why is it valuable, and who decides?
The answers I’ve heard range from the tautological (“a human life is valuable because it’s a human life”) to the legalistic (“a human life is valuable because we all have the right to life”) to the religious (“a human life is valuable because we are created by God in his image”) to the non-argument (“it just is, and how can you even ask such a question?!”)
(Parenthetically, I hear the same arguments about money. Why is a US dollar valuable? It just is. The government tells us it is, and we believe it. But that’s another matter.)
I said on the other thread that everyone falls into a continuum of perception of the intrinsic value of life. On one end, we might find a person who believes that all life, from the lowest orders to the highest, is equivalent in value, and it is wrong to end the lives of any living thing, animal or vegetable. Far off on the other end, we have what we might term the sociopath or psychopath, who believes that only his own life is valuable.
In between we have those who think the lives of their family members are more valuable than the lives of others, that the lives of members of their own tribe or nation are more valuable than those of other tribes or nations, and those who believe that the lives of members of their own species are the only lives with any real value.
Understandably, we all fall on different points of the “perceived value of life” continuum, which is why I anticipate getting a range of different answers.
So tell me: is life intrinsically and objectively valuable, does some life have more value than other life, how valuable is life (in concrete terms: words like “priceless” or “precious” are meaningless), and why?
[/quote]
Only in response to you Varq, as you are someone I respect, and this is a subject I studied a bit.
Consider the concept of ends in themselves vs. means to ends. There are things which have instrumental value, like cash. Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Cash can get you this and that, which might bring you to and end in itself called happiness, or power depending on what you consider as ends in themselves. Intrinsic and Instrumental Good
An end in itself is something that has intrinsic value. Like the aforementioned happiness. But there are also things like love, beauty which are wrapped up in our very agency. You seem to categorize human agency as an end in itself, I feel the same and so did Kant.
The problem with this argument (because I have argued very similarly before) is that we are pitting a womans agency against an unborn potential persons agency. It’s basically agency vs. agency and both are ends in themselves.
So, from here the only leg you can argue from is if the woman had sex willingly, and was aware that with sexual intercourse comes the risk of pregnancy. So, one could argue that a woman had agency in her choice to have sex and therefore as a rational agent could be in the wrong for eliminating or killing (however strongly you want to call it) another fetus or person. It feels like a very weak place to argue from, as the fetus isn’t yet a rational agent.
Even if you grant that a fetus is an agent, there are still circumstances where say a perfectly healthy woman who wanted to get pregnant may suffer from complications which may cause her to be maimed the rest of her life or risk death, if we force that woman to give birth then we violate her agency. I don’t think pregnancy should be a death sentence, considering how hit or miss pregnancy itself is, eggs get fertilized and passed all the time naturally. Those are potential person too, but we aren’t fighting to keep them alive, so God must really want those souls in heaven or whatever if that’s how some of you have to rationalize this trivialization.
Birth and population control are things we will be very concerned about in the next 100 or so years. If we truly treat every agent as an end in themselves, we would all be fed today… But can the world sustain a human populace if we let everyone live? Will we have enough food and other means to treat people as such in the future? Probably not… As it is how many babies starved to death this week? We are too greedy and wrapped up in instrumental value to even feed the hungry, and we bitch about food stamps…
This is where I’m at… I reluctantly support, “freedom of choice.” Because there are no better options… I’m friends with several perfectly healthy women who have had abortion(s), trust me, they go through enough shit already for us to be trying to regulate their bodies.
[/quote]
As even certain poets have sung (not a blanket-endorsement of everything said poets have sung or written, but these strong words imply that some people still have a conscience that has not been seared with a hot-iron):
“There’s no question it’s infanticide. …At the end I’ll escort you to hell. The dark one’s forces lock your flaming cell. To murder the ones unborn. The worst sin you’ve ever performed. …With due respect hear these words of caution. If considering an abortion. If you dig boiling sulphur to which I will not concur” – Type O Negative
“Conceived in lust to their own ruin - a sacrifice to pleasure” – Kemper Crabb
" … Oh nation murders me, me, me. Suck me down your hose. Pieces of my fingers and toes. Use me to brew your lab rat stew. Oh dissolve my voice for your woman’s choice. My execution, it’s your revolution" – Grammatrain
What human being with a conscience would say that abortion is not murder? What kind of monsters could defend and even perform such procedures? What kind of Supreme Court Justice scum could say that a woman has a “right” to have such a thing done to her child? Yet this is the law of the land. And not only of this land, but all around the world.