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 Originally Posted by wufwugy
I think the points boost is making, as well as a lot of the points made by others, intentionally or unintentionally, highlight the need for a utilitarian approach. For example, very few people who support abortions can reasonably feel 100% confident in themselves, but that doesn't mean the other option is they're wrong.
Morals will always get you in trouble. Why? Because they assume idealism. But reality doesn't give a fuck about idealism. What is murder to us is best summed up in utility. If we consider it through morals, we'll simply hit a whole bunch of logical problems and people will pick sides and fight it out. Imposing morality lets heuristics or inconsistent logic or emotions rule. At least with a utilitarian approach we can get the best of what reality allows. Keep in mind that the "abortion debate" is a product of the moralistic worldview assumed by American Christianity, more specifically, the modern xtian movement known as the Moral Majority
If it wasn't for believers of superstition, the idea that "abortion is murder" wouldn't even exist
I think we probably agree, but a lot of the terms would have to be cleaned up. If we replace "morals" with "any ethical code that considers anything beyond the subjects of an action", and "idealism" with "categoricalism", and "Imposing morality lets ... rule" with "lets ... rule universally" (at least two of the examples are useful things to follow).
The ironic thing with your argument is that ideals and heuristics are useful for the very fact that they're practical. Feel free to skip the next two parts if you don't care for the nitty gritty of what I mean by that.
ON THE PRACTICALITY OF IDEALS **EDIT: I'm not sure of my use of the word "ideals" here. I felt at the time that this was the best way to appropriating wuf's use of the word, but on second thought, I actually think I "corrected" his use of "ideals" by talking about something else that has nothing at all to do with idealistic approaches to moral problems. I still think all the content in this section is still good though, other than, you know the original point I set out to make.  **
Ideals are not quite universal and are wrong when applied categorically, but they're beliefs that are generalizable enough in the context of our {insert noun here; usually culture} that they are practical guides for action/policy/etc. Freedom of speech is a particularly useful ideal that more near-sighted utilitarians lose sight of. People are naturally inclined to blot out anything from the public forum that they find deplorable, not appreciating the larger picture that living in an intellectually lively and open society where errant opinions slowly fade from the public conscious through a “survival of the fittest”-like process is better than a society of repressed deplorability that festers in our subconscious. In any context where too much speech is made allowable (a scientific community with no peer review, for example; a forum thread with such a low standard for relevance that stream of consciousness would be an improvement; a news station that gives no regard to qualification when selecting interviews and panels; etc) the advice to that anyone can say anything at any time does more harm than good. It just so happens that the disinclination to allowing dissonant opinions is such an inextricably human quality that those contexts are unlikely and, thus, rare (even if you're tempted by that news station example to cite Fox News bringing on a dentist to discuss Obama's citizenship, I'd argue that that is much more representative of the disinclination to allowing dissonant opinions than it is a disproof of it).
To continue the poker analogy, ideals are those things you here in the BC all the time: "Fold against nits", "Value bet fish", "Don't bluff fish", "Don't call a turn raise with less than two pair", "Size your vbets larger than your bluffs", etc. These things do more good than bad for players at a beginner level of consciousness. For those who graduate beyond that, the game gets more complicated.
So any ethical system that claims to prize practicality should make room for ideals. The good of the ideal's application outweighs the infrequent bad of when it's applied to the exceptions and no one does anything about it out. We can hold out hope that society will one day graduate beyond them, but banishing them now would do us no good.
ON THE PRACTICALITY OF HEURISTICS
Heuristics are extremely applicable to use for personal ethics. If you've learned a thing or two about coping in your own generalizable context of life with your own generalizable personality traits, etc, then by all means, apply them to future actions (while "keeping an open mind" to improvements/nuances/such). The problem only arises when people are silly enough to not realize that everyone's different and applying their own personal ethical framework to someone who is surrounded by different kinds people, has different strengths and weaknesses, etc will not be helpful.
APPLYING THE ABOVE TO ABORTIONS
To apply this clarification of terms back to the topic at hand: the ideal to "Don't kill humans" has been a strange one in the history of mankind. There have been precious few societies that actually believe it (see: wars, self-defense, allowing people to starve when having the means to prevent it, etc), and yet there are those who want to make for oddly stringent applications. I have a hard time imagining crime-of-passion abortions or abortions-on-principle or mass-eugenic-abortions or any such thing resulting from a society that doesn't see extinguishing prenatal life as a Big Fucking Deal, so yeah, I don't really see the ideal all that useful here. It's probably important that the pregnant woman be appreciative of the weight of the situation--either in deference to psychoanalysis or to ethical conservatism--and that the gravitas should probably increase as the fetus gets more and more humanoid, but you could just as well argue that this is only creating a problem that didn't exist.[1] Regardless, I don't think the ideal is all that practical here.
As far as heuristics go, if you feel that based on previous experience (with falling for friends' kids, I guess, or maybe postmortum depression from miscarriages, or I don't really know what, the examples aren't important) abortions just aren't for you, then don't get an abortion, ldo. Again, ethics is nothing more than the value of choices, so making poor choices is--by definition--unethical. Forget whether or not abortions are "amoral"; they're not--it's just that the morality is independent from whether the term "abortion" applies to the action you are committing to.
CLIFFNOTES AND FOOTNOTES
Anyway, hopefully that clears up terms a bit. I think we're in perfect agreement that categorical moral laws are stupid, which I think is your main point, but your point is problematic because in the process, you're building a massive pyre and throwing idealism and subjectivity and theory and morals themselves all into the flames.
[1] An abortion candidate might not have had feelings to confront and deal with in the first place if they didn't take abortions so seriously, and ethical sticking point of valuing the fetus might not have transpired if not for the gravitas; I'm definitely not qualified to comment on the former, and the latter seems contingent (and I'm also not qualified to comment much on it).
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