See title.
See title.
Do you have to give the clinic a percentage?
That's funny because I escort as an abortion at a work clinic
Pot $31
Blinds $1/$2
BB $194
Hero $234 A♥ 3♠
In your six-max game online it's folded to you on the button and you make it $6. The big blind calls and the flop comes A♠ 8♥ 2♣. He checks and you check behind. The turn comes 7♥. He checks. You fire $9 and he calls. The river comes 2♦. He checks.
What should you do?
abort it!!! seriously , you are risking rilla's wrath posting poker hands in the commune .
Bet tree fiddyQuote:
Originally Posted by GrayFoxxxx
also on a serious note
Why does an abortion clinic need an escort?
is this because people cant actually find their way to it on their own?
something to keep the husband /boyfriend busy while wife/gf is doing the deed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Miffed22001
He could be talking about someone who goes with the female to/from the clinic to make her feel safe from people protesting, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by Miffed22001
Man for several beats after I read this I thought that you were a gigolo who fucks depressed post-abortion women to make them feel better.
Turns out America is such a shitty place that patients need an armed escort to protect them from the psychotic right-to-lifers.
How do you get past wanting to attack the vermin who stand outside these places and abuse young women who are probably in one of the hardest times of their lives?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ImSavy
Meh, they are only a symptom.
A symptom of the systematic murder of unborn children.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Have you ever fucked any of your clients?
Ok I didnt know this was actually a thing...
trust ongieQuote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
Before or after?Quote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
Ha, nice.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I wonder how often I use inflammatory misleading phrases like "unborn child" without noticing. When someone else does it, it's so easy to pick up on.
I'm of the opinion that abortion is murder, but I also do not believe that murder is inherently wrong, so maybe I have an atypical viewpoint.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Edit: Also, I believe that abortions should be able to be carried out until the end of the 18th trimester.
Sorry for not clarifying. Spoon is right that I do escort women past prolife protesters that stand outside of the clinic. The vast majority of protesters are older white men and most of them have signs that range in offensiveness. I've gotten in shouting matches several times but have gotten better at controlling my anger and better understand that nothing I say is going to change their mind.
Protesters will shout or say anything to the women going into the clinic from the fairly innocuous "you can always come out" to "don't kill your baby". I've talked to several women who have said that the worst part about the whole experience of getting an abortion is having to walk through those people.
I'm not aware of any other businesses or establishments that are impacted in this same way and I thought bringing this up might make for interesting discussion.
Business idea:Quote:
Originally Posted by kingnat
1. Hire people to protest outside of a business and harass patrons.
2. Offer your security/escort services to said business.
h5 goodguy kingnat.
Question: Have you seen any of the protesters try to physically assault the women? Or are they just constantly yelling bullshit?
I've only ever seen them yell. There are cameras for surveillance so if anyone was ever physically assaulted they'd be hauled away. Our regular protestors generally know what they can and can't get away with but they need to be reminded about not obstructing the sidewalk occasionally.
I always enjoy these sort of out-of-the-norm positions. People so often chose which side they feel is right, then adopt the logic tree put forth by the voiced advocates of that side. I am curious about your stance on it being murder though. Is the threshold conception? If so or if not, why is this an appropriate threshold?Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Without derailing the thread into the abortion debate, here's a quick rundown of the logic:Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
1. Murder is typically defined as the premeditated act of killing a human being, so there you go.
2. Start with the premise that this baby is a human being the moment just before it is born and the premise that this baby has X cells which have 23 chromosomes.
3. If we go backwards in time, this baby will have fewer cells. At X-1 cells of 23 chromosomes, the baby is still a human being. Call the current number of cells Y.
4. At Y-1 cells of 23 chromosomes, the baby is still a human being. Call the current number of cells Z.
5. If you continue this recursion, you will have to decide at what point the baby is no longer a human being. For example, for the baby to have A cells of 23 chromosomes means it's a human being, but to have A-1 means it's no longer a human being. Choosing a point like this seems absurd to me. You will eventually get down to the point where there is only one cell left with 23 chromosomes. I believe this is a human being along these lines.
I've grown a bit weary of the "no-derailing" unwritten rule, esp in a off topic forum. Coherence in discussion is paramount, but nonetheless interesting discussions often start as derails. We could always split the thread, so I guess there's that...
But anyways...
I agree your logic is sound given we accept your definition of murder. The objection I have is that murder was a concept which referenced "human" long before our understanding of what now seems to be an acceptable definition of "human" which you very concisely laid out. So while I don't think you're process is flawed, but instead I find error in your approach which relies heavily on an inflexible interpretation of language.
For example, in much of history rape, in practice, was defined as the unauthorized physical use of someone's body for sexual gratification. Sounds like a weird way to phrase the contemporary definition of rape-- but the catch is who has the right to do the authorizing. I.e., historically a man cannot rape is wife, as he has clearly given himself permission to help him self to a hearty serving of stank.
So what I mean to say is, murder is a concept which references "human", but not in the context of our modern scientific understanding of what defines a human.
I think the benefit of the concept of murder is in utility, yet the way most consider murder is within a moral framework. A cut and dried definition of murder doesn't exist, and if we're trying to be purely logical about it, we will always let something slip. A utilitarian approach bypasses this because it doesn't intend to be perfect since it attempts to simply be a reflection and interpretation of reality. It allows us to frame some "killing of humans" circumstances within a murder concept, and sometimes not
I understand the idea that abortion is murder yet murder isn't always wrong, but I'm not satisfied with that because I think it poorly explains what's going on and it opens up a ton of unintended consequences. A better approach IMO is to claim that murder is a utilitarian concept dependent upon the concept of person and society, and aborting a fetus doesn't fit that. Granted, a forced abortion (like a dude kicking a pregnant lady in the stomach) probably should fall under similar legal concepts to murder (like manslaughter).
I guess what I'm saying is that I have a hard time supposing I know what right and wrong is (because it isn't anything, really), and I think the abortion issue is a good example of why that is. I'd like to wrap the issue around my finger, but I can't. My most basic response to somebody who thinks abortion is murder and/or wrong is "there is no god, the world doesn't care about you, the world doesn't care about her, the world doesn't care about the fetus, the only problems you can solve are your own"
Beyond that, it's hard to find something more ludicrous than to think somebody who has an abortion is a murderer. There's a canyon of differences between somebody who gets an abortion and somebody who deliberately ends the life of a fellow person. Calling abortion murder is vastly overstating what it is and belittles real murder
Spend some time with a chick who has had an abortion, and you'll find she's just average. Spend some time with a dude who has stabbed somebody to death, and you'll find he's pretty fucked up. Abortion even registering as an issue to us is a product of bible-thumping, and that's basically it.
Yeah, people and their fondness of absolutes is understandable but terribly frustrating. For example, yes, consent is important, but no every drunk girl who has sex was not raped. Yet this sensible assertion suddenly makes you a misogynist, racist, holocaust denier in the eyes of a non-insignificant portion of the population.
The definition of murder and semantics aside, it's still the premeditated killing of a human being (unless we want to define human beings by how many cells they have). And again, I don't think that the premeditated killing of a human being is necessarily wrong. With that having been said, I am a much more amoral (not to be confused with immoral) person, so this viewpoint isn't for everybody.
I agree that it's similar to the topic of rape [in current times] and how both rape and consent is defined. If you define rape as all sex without consent (as it has been changed to be in many places), then since legally someone who is drunk cannot give consent, if you have sex with a woman who is intoxicated, then that is rape. If you want to change this, then you have to change the definition of rape and/or the definition of consent.
(That's a rant for another time.)
Along these lines, if you want to change it so that abortion is not necessarily murder, then you have to change the definition of murder and/or human being, etc. I'm in the camp that thinks that changing the definition of human being is ridiculous (ie: that a human being is created at conception via the thought process I detailed above), but I also have the seemingly atypical combination of not really clinging to the idea that all human life should be preserved whenever possible.
And on that note and as a fun aside, I'm anti-death penalty because of the relatively high chance of killing someone who is innocent combined with a much higher cost to taxpayers.
(Another rant for another time.)
Again, I'm exceptionally amoral and understand that people act almost entirely in self-interest almost all of the time. I do not blame any female for wanting an abortion because of the negative effects it would have on their own lives. I also do not blame people for having dumb reasons for believing the things that they do about topics like abortion, rape and the death penalty.
As for escorting chicas at abortion clinics, if you believe they should have that option, and if you want to help them to feel more safe while they exercise that option, then that's awesome. On another note, I think that the clinic's use of unpaid volunteers (assuming kingnat's unpaid because otherwise I don't think he would be doing it) for this is smart.
I think it is important to maintain that the concept of murder applies to people instead of humans. This is because if we don't, we end up calling 1-month old fetuses things that can be murdered. It should be clear that killing a 22-year old person isn't remotely close to a woman getting an abortion. I think the reason why this isn't clear to a lot of people is that it has become commonplace to think of killing humans as murder, when the reality is that murder applies to people, not humans. Remember that "humans" i.e. "homo sapiens" is a very new concept. Abortion wasn't an issue in basically all of human history because they didn't confuse themselves by equating a biological or genetic specification with being a member of a society.
That said, it isn't necessarily exactly right to call murder something you do to people instead of humans. Different races used to not be considered people, partly because they weren't considered humans. But also, that specification changed based on social interactions, not a biological discovery of homo sapiens.
My point is that, even with its drawbacks, the concept of murder that we have today is the kind that best applies to people instead of humans. And I think the reason why abortion is such a crazy topic is because people are mistakenly applying the concept of murder to something it was never meant for in the first place
How about this: you can't murder a glob of goo and you can't murder something that is essentially your own body.
It's a little ironic that the anti-science crowd (bible-thumpers) obsesses over what amounts to a scientific technicality (that a fetus has the genes of a homo sapien)
Yeah that didn't work.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Natty, are you afraid of your clinic getting bombed or something of the like?
I've always been basically pro-choice, but since I've come to disagree with pro-choice people on almost every other issue (especially economic issues), I've felt the need to re-evaluate how I feel about abortion. I'm still pro-choice I think, but I think when you empathize with the women who get abortions, some curious thoughts emerge:
Someone (I think savy) referred to the women as being harassed in the "worst times of their lives." Why are these times so bad if there isn't a part of them that believes that they are murdering a child? I mean other than the physical discomfort of the procedure and the previous anxiety about being pregnant and all the future uncertain outcomes. To me, you either aren't killing a baby and its thus no big deal, or you are killing a baby and you're a fucking baby murderer. It's all from the perspective of the woman really, and if you believe you killed a baby but did it anyway, you're a piece of shit.
I also think the position of being pro-abortion "in events of rape or incest or mortal danger of the mother if the baby is carried to term" is some seriously weak sauce shit. Again because it is logically inconsistent. Either the fetus isn't a person and you should be able to toss 14 of them into a blender with some flax seeds and banana after your morning run, or it is a person and you'd be terrible to even consider that vivid mental image that you now can't un-know :p. Why does the event of the woman being raped by her father have any effect on this underlying reality?
For me, I think the issue of person-hood should be when a consciousness develops, not the number of chromosomes. We should develop some sort of litmus test for what constitutes a human consciousness, decide what the earliest point in utero that this emerges, abortion before that point should be unequivocally not murder, and abortion after that point should be unequivocally murder.
This post is full of false dichotomies. Unless you're comfortable making fetus smoothies you're a fucking piece of shit? Really? No shades of gray in the middle?Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
I've thought about this quite a lot actually. There's plenty of time to stand around thinking disturbing thoughts. I think the chances are relatively small as this type of thing doesn't happen as much these days, but I think I'd have to kick my own ass for being a coward if this was the thing that kept me from helping in this small way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Galapogos
In my experience, there are very few women who come to get an abortion who have a 100% clear and free conscience as you describe. Most are scared, concerned, the majority are not financially well off to say the least. There's a shitload of misinformation and conflicting ideas surrounding this issue. Abortion is heavily stigmatized and is almost never discussed in the open. People generally tend to have extreme beliefs or don't want to talk about it at all. I think the evidence suggests that women tend not to regret there decision but they also tend to not feel good about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
I don't agree with this position at all. Even if a woman who is aborting feels that she is not killing a human being, the fetus will still be considerably more significant to the mother than a wasp or a piece of fruit. To say that a woman is a piece of shit for feeling bad about aborting, that the fact she feels bad shows that she has willingly murdered a child, I think this is a particularly ignorant position to hold. You're basically saying that a woman should feel that the fetus is either a human child or a lump of goo, with no middle ground at all. Many women who abort will be in emotional turmoil, and that is perfectly understandable. Just because they are in turmoil, this does not mean that their actions are the same as killing a 6-month-old baby. I would argue that those who have no problem whatsoever with what they're doing are devoid of emotion, these are the ones I would be more inclinced to call a piece of shit, not those who feel bad about it.Quote:
It's all from the perspective of the woman really, and if you believe you killed a baby but did it anyway, you're a piece of shit.
I mostly agree with Ong above, but I like to further say that I don't believe that those who feel no remorse for it are pieces of shit either.
I'm going to take a risk - and it really is a risk because I am actually a very sensitive person, even in the face of anonymous Internet judgment, so hooboy, here we go - and admit that I have had an abortion. I didn't feel like I was "murdering" anyone, but I do understand the ambiguity over whether it is murder or not.. To me, the strangest thing about it was knowing that all the genetic coding for a specific human being was already set in motion, which is, to me, the most distinct difference between that and the "killing" of sperm that doesn't get fertilized. Other than that, they are both still just soups of code, with zero consciousness whatsoever. Mine was very early, so there was no sensation of killing something that was fully formed enough for me to identify with it as a human.
I don't know though.. Spoon's attitude resonates the strongest with me. Again, I really don't know if I would call it murder -- I think the difference between killing an alive, sentient creature and something that is still incipient, only theoretically a full person, is distinct enough to warrant a different approach in talking about it. I believe the semantics of this are the object of some very dense philosophical discourse, so I won't even try to tackle it now.
Nonetheless, I'm with Spoon in what I suppose you'd call my "amoral" attitude about it. The quality of my life, my ambitions, my goals are of too much value to me for me to have ever even considered keeping the child, and I am completely okay with that. It's not even a question. I do feel uneasiness, maybe a bit of guilt, about the thing itself, and I think that is a mix of societal attitudes influencing how I feel and just my own human tendency to overanalyze the death of anything. But I am my highest priority, and that's precisely why I would not dream of having children any time in the near future, because I absolutely could not compromise my own path right now for my child... and that would be unacceptable parenting, to me. (I don't think parents need to be the ultimate martyrs of sacrifice or anything, but if you have a child you should be in the position to, at the very least, prioritize that child's needs just as much as your own).
It is certainly not an emotionless topic, and it's completely understandable that the natural human reaction is to feel discomfort about it. That being said, I am ultimately much more concerned and emotionally affected by the death of sentient people on this planet than non-sentient fetuses.
The shades of gray lie in the very normal reaction of feeling bad about destroying something with the potential to be a human being, and I don't think anything in my post ruled out this possibility. My problem is the logic behind what abortions people condemn and allow is inconsistent, often ridiculously so.Quote:
Originally Posted by d0zer
I think 75% or more of the pro-choice crowd would look down on a serial abortionist, some woman who gets like three per year and doesn't feel the slightest bit of remorse. To me I don't see a difference between that person and the woman who was impregnated by her father. I don't think this is a false dichotomy. Either its a life or it isn't. To me it isn't. I'm just saying pick a side and stop equivocating like a mofucker.
Renton, the child of incest or rape and the mother of that child have a much higher chance of being absolutely fucked up for life than a woman attending college who had a condom rip on her. Abortion is a tool, and a tool which imposes finality when employed. When a process is irreversible it makes complete sense to be hesitant to use it and weigh all the factors first. The incest and broken condom cases pose the same dilemma, an unwanted pregnancy, but there are myriad differing factors which can dictate how this is best handled.
Essentially what you are advocating is that all unwanted pregnancies should either be aborted or not. Should all cars involved in an accident be categorically totaled or not?
What makes you think the arrival of consciousness is a singular instantaneous event? If we are unable to test for this, what should we do in the interim? What if we can test for it and we discover it doesn't arise in utero, but instead sometime after birth?Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
Is it even possible for consciousness to develop in the womb...? Don't our minds kind of "turn on" way after we're born? I mean, even killing a live baby is different than killing, say.. a 2 year old or something.
http://www.wired.com/2013/04/baby-consciousness/
"New research shows that babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old."
Ok, way earlier than I expected, but still - not in the womb.
To me, you either aren't killing a baby and its thus no big deal, or you are killing a baby and you're a fucking baby murderer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
I think the idea of deciding if it's okay to kill something based on whether or not it has consciousness is ridiculous.
Pigs have consciousness and we kill them all the time without giving a shit.
I'm going to risk being called a reverse troll here by saying this, but I don't believe life is precious. The universe is going to be just fine after the sun takes out the entire fucking planet.
Gotta frame it within personhood. I think this seems like such a complicated issue because people frame it through life or consciousness or humanity. I don't think any of those are pertinent because the purpose of the murder concept is how it applies to people, not life or consciousness or humanity
In our everyday lives, we already inadvertently frame it "the right way". If somebody kills our pets, we are more likely to consider it murder than if a cop shoots and kills a gunman on a killing spree. This is because of the differing social role of pets and of the gunman. If we define murder through consciousness, it becomes wrong to kill either at any time. If we define it through human life, it becomes wrong to kill the gunman anytime but not the pet. But if we define it through social roles (which we normally do subconsciously), then we have easy, reasonable decisions that make it right to kill a gunman on a killing spree and wrong to kill somebody's beloved pet.
Does any of this make sense? I'm trying to explain how the idea of murder has never been for the purpose of distinguishing things the way pro-life people think. It has instead always been about social roles. I think abortion looks wrong to some people because they are improperly redefining things
I guess I should clarify that I am referring to the act of killing a person in moral/legal terms. Of course its natural to feel bad about it, but I'm more interested in the reasons why you feel bad. I think that if you get an abortion and you think that abortion = killing a person, that makes you a willing perpetrator of murder from your own point of view. I think this is true even if you think there's a 1% chance you're killing a person. Sort of like how 1% of infinity is still infinity, the risk that you are killing a conscious sentient human being is unacceptable.Quote:
Originally Posted by d0zer
On the other hand, if your negative emotional response is a byproduct of female hormones that represent the core objective of a human being being to procreate and pass on genes, that is natural. I haven't been disputing that, I'm more disputing the illogical and inconsistent nuances the standard pro-life / pro-choice positions, such as "fine in cases of rape/incest etc" "fine as long as you don't do it too much," "fine as long as you were on birth control and it failed," etc.
Life isn't precious in and of itself but I think we all agree that we would like to live in a world where people can't perform acts of aggression against one another with impunity. The abortion issue is interesting because it questions what a human being is. I find it interesting in particular because it's one of the only issues I've seen that even libertarians are split on, as the right to choose is an issue at the core of liberty, but so is the right not to be murdered.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I'm not advocating that all unwanted pregnancies be aborted or not, I'm simply stating that all abortion is wrong or none of it is wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
As far as consciousness, that's where I was hoping we'd go and both you and aubrey went there. I agree that it is quite likely that many aspects of consciousness do not arise until long after birth. I guess that's why I'm pro-abortion and do not have any problem with it.
I'm not so sure. It is generally seen as more deserving of condemnation to kill something which more closely resembles our understanding of consciousness vs something more alien. So the idea is that consciousness isn't binary, and therefore the closer you are to what we would consider full consciousness the more valuable and worth protecting your life is. Most people wouldn't bat an eyelash at you if you smushed a spider in front of them, but they would go ape-shit (ha) if you curb stomped a baboon.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
If you want to argue that this is silly, fine, but I don't think you do a good job of it by treating consciousness and the lack thereof as a dichotomy.
In practice, what is the difference? I can go and edit my post so that it more accurately reflects your clarified stance, but I'm not sure what purpose this would serve other than pressing for an answer you don't seem willing to give.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
I don't follow. If it is shown that no level of consciousness is gained between birth and age X, are you fine with "aborting" any unwanted baby under age X?Quote:
As far as consciousness, that's where I was hoping we'd go and both you and aubrey went there. I agree that it is quite likely that many aspects of consciousness do not arise until long after birth. I guess that's why I'm pro-abortion and do not have any problem with it.
Sounds like an unusual and interesting job. I wonder if there are many protestors or escorts in the UK? Anyway:
Have you escorted anybody to their a 2nd (or greater) abortion yet?
Do many back out and do the protestors play a big part in that?
Are you allowed to discuss their decision to abort with them at any point e.g. If they ask you if they're doing the right thing?
Why is the 1% infinity? I mean, yes, something is fucked up with a person who "fully" believes they are committing murder, and goes through with it anyways, but someone who is conflicted due to the current state of the issue is not the same as the former example. I mean, I'd venture to say that most women getting abortions are not any where near shallow philosophical depth we are right now. Some do, but calling those who don't, and therefore are conflicted, horrible people is.. I mean.. where are you even going with this?Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
How about this: If a woman is deciding whether to have an abortion or not, and some part of her believes it's murder because of her religious upbringing, but she also knows that due to her situation, herself and the child are highly likely to have an awful life. Herself and the father are hopeless drug addicts, both have long family histories of mental illness and hereditary physical ailments, they are homeless, etc. You're saying that categorically she is a bad person if she chooses to have the abortion?
I agree that often there is an attempt to mask poor logic in nuance, but this is a complex issue and the attempt to hide poor logic in nuance doesn't negate the fact that there is nuance. Violence is more or less acceptable depending on the circumstances, why do you feel abortion is different?Quote:
On the other hand, if your negative emotional response is a byproduct of female hormones that represent the core objective of a human being being to procreate and pass on genes, that is natural. I haven't been disputing that, I'm more disputing the illogical and inconsistent nuances the standard pro-life / pro-choice positions, such as "fine in cases of rape/incest etc" "fine as long as you don't do it too much," "fine as long as you were on birth control and it failed," etc.
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
You just agreed with me that it was ridiculous to base it off of whether or not it has consciousness, btw.Quote:
Originally Posted by boost
Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
A few hours ago I was going to type up a post that resembled something like this, except mine was more caustic so I didn't bother...but yeah. I don't like to admit it...but what wuffwuggy said.
I'm not sure how I feel about this tbh. If some woman looks me cold in the face and says with a shrug that she's aborted a baby without feeling a shred of guilt, I'd question her sanity. I just don't understand how a woman can feel nothing towards her unborn baby. I think I'd find it much more likely the woman in question is merely putting on a brave face and is in turmoil inside. I think it's what I'd hope. I would not feel comfortable if I felt that she truly felt nothing. "Piece of shit" might be too strong, but "devoid of emotion" isn't.Quote:
I mostly agree with Ong above, but I like to further say that I don't believe that those who feel no remorse for it are pieces of shit either.
I have friends who have aborted, one of which has done so more than once. I certainly do not judge people for making such a decison, especially those closest to me. I'd feel different if the unborn child was mine though. I would certainly not want her to abort. How much of a say the father has is a whole different debate.
Your phrasing tells the story. "Aborted a baby". Could somebody simply not consider a fetus a baby, and thus not be making a hard decision to abort a fetus?Quote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
The entire abortion debate depends on the framing that it's baby murder. My problem with this is that fetuses are neither babies nor things capable of being murdered (unless, arguably, they're late term, where almost everybody agrees they hold person-like traits and should not be aborted)
I should've said potential baby.
I'm not sure what the legal cut off point is here in the UK. 15 weeks maybe? I'm pulling that number out of my arse. But there's a point at which it becomes illegal, and that point isn't going to be based on anything logical. But there has to be a line, even if that line is based on a number pulled out of someone's arse. And as you can see from the debate in here, trying to logically draw a line is futile.
The cutoff should be the end of the 18th trimester, as I stated above.
Replace "inherently" with "intrinsically" and place quotation marks around the semantically murky word of "murder", and this is basically my viewpoint.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
So, I guess this is awkward.
Sometimes I realize that the only thing keeping us as a species from solving the abortion debate is to recognize the plainly obvious fact that the value of life is dynamic. But then I remember that we really are dumb enough to prefer generations of dissimulation about human life:
"Well, of course it was just as sad when my 97-year old great grandfather as it was when that 30-year old with 3 kids died suddenly in his sleep. I would never say anything that remotely implied that anything sadder has ever happened than someone who's lived a full life and made full record of what he'd like to be done with his legacy and that even his closest living family members (who were all 1+ generation removed) forgot about in 99% of the normal course of their lives finally passed after a 10 year battle with cancer; it's just that, well, this 30 year old passing was, um, clearly not sadder, but you know, [trails into inaudibility] ... "
The idea would exist, however it would be a peripheral philosophical topic out of the mainstream and it would look much like the discussion we are having here I would like to think(hi five everyone).Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
But yeah, I think exploring morality is very interesting, but even morality is and should be utilitarian. The raw utility can be hard to stomach though, so we express it through morality, but things get lost or simplified in the translation. While it's nice to live in a moral fantasy bubble, things start to go haywire when you attempt to extrapolate and apply moral principles to similar but distinctive scenarios.
I think you are drawing a conclusion from points in my post which was neither intended nor is it the only reasonable conclusion to be reached.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
There are 3 branches of Philosophy: what is (Physics/Metaphysics), what we can know about what is (Epistemology), and what is the value of what is (Aesthetics/Ethics). Ethics is simply the inquiry into the value of different actions. If you prefer your steak medium rare and you tell the server you'd like it well done, you have acted unethically. It is clear that your action is of poor value.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
I'm sorry, but I don't believe people when they throw their hands in the air and say, "We can't know anything about ethics, so I'm just gonna take the Socratic stance on all things ethical." Ethics is far too general a term for this desertion to make any sense. What people think that they're saying when they bow out of an ethical debate is that they see no value in sitting in armchairs, stroking beards, and/or appealing to any "higher" judge and executor, but that's not what ethics is foundationally; those are just connotations developed in our cultural history.
Unless you literally adhere to an RNG, you value ethics: whether you're an egotist or an altruist; a thinker or a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-ist; a categoricalist or a consequentialist; a universalist or, yes, even if you're a relativist, you value some actions more than others and think it's generally better to do the better things than to do the bad things (implying that you're better off knowing which is which).
That being said, if I have any idea what the fuck you're talking about in the first two paragraphs, then I think we're in agreement that it should be approached pragmatically and not categorically or semantically.
10 Extra points for me using a jizz word for you.
Sentience is an important point of demarcation because at that point a human can *value itself*. In utero, if the mother and father don't give a fuck what happens to this human/fetus/humanoid/ball of cells/I don't give a fuck what you call it, then it is valueless. The second a human is has achieved sentience, its life holds value--if through nothing else--through its own valuation (I couldn't think of anything less relevant to the fetus' value to the world than the fact that some guy in Kansas thinks that Jesus whispers "Abortion is wrong" in his ear every night while he's asleep).Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
This CERTAINLY doesn't mean that it's never bad to kill a human before this point (if a pregnant woman loves their fetus and is dedicating themselves to nurturing it until it can sustain itself, then clearly kicking her the stomach with the intent of ending that life/potential of life/I don't give a fuck what you call it is clearly a wrongful action; the vast vast vast majority of pre-sentient humans hold a high value), and it doesn't mean that it's never bad to kill a human after this point (it's perfectly fine for someone to go all Terminator and go back in time to kill a 5-month-old Hitler), but the genesis of sentience is officially when there is always an assumed[1] bad to killing that has to be outweighed by good.
Everything else in the post is irrelevant. Who cares about the definitions of "murder", "humans", "people" or whatever else has been brought up. Actions regarding those terms won't be categorically right or wrong *regardless of how they're defined*. Of course getting an abortion isn't always ethical, even if you believe there's nothing categorically wrong with abortions. If you want to have the baby, for example, and go off and kill it, then that's wrong; there are other examples, but that's the most obvious one. And as spoon and I have discussed, it doesn't matter if you're a "fucking baby murderer." Those are just words.
I do agree with you that all of the stuff about rape and incest babies is meaningless noise that just gets a rise out of people. I just happen to think that the fact that that is noise is also noise ;)
[1] Unless it's assisted suicide
I think I was having trouble explaining my point. I was referring to attempts to devise perfect answers within the kind of framework that most in the abortion debate use. I don't have an answer for that other than trying to point out the futility and irrationality of considering reality to behave according to moralistic abstractions instead of, well, however reality is
If we approach this subject the way it usually is, the margin of error is huge. Even the best of the best of the most logical arguments will have a ton of error in them because they assume some rather strange abstractions and attempt to box up the unboxable into ideals. However, if we use utilitarianism, the margin of error is smaller and its existence isn't even a problem in the first place
Maybe this is even more confusing. Basically, if people are arguing about ideals and morals of abortion, all I can do is throw my hands in the air and tell them the beliefs they hold that provoke them to assume perfection and unrealistic ideals (*cough* god *cough*) aren't real. However, I think we can have a meaningful discussion when we go with utility
This is an important way in which we disagree. Utility doesn't need to be categorically right or wrong. In fact, it isn't, it kinda can't be, since it is a reflection of an amoral reality.Quote:
Originally Posted by surviva316
Basically my point has been that we should discuss abortion as if we live in reality, not as if we live in a world made up of our abstractions and ideals. The former allows us to get it right even when we "get it wrong", and the latter forces us to get it wrong except for the times in which we just so happen to not be wrong
Not in a million years is it reasonable to consider a woman aborting a 1-month old fetus the same as stabbing a 30-year old person walking to work, unless we're stuck in the mind-space of fairyland where things like life and consciousness are given false equivalences. The latter is what I think most abortion discussion does.
The point is that stabbing a 29-year old person walking to night class isn't the same as stabbing a 30-year old person walking to work. Nothing is the same as anything else. It doesn't mean that exactly one will have a positive result and exactly one will have a negative result, but it would be sheer coincidence alone if they had exactly equivalent value. Approaching ethics as a categoricalist is like offering generalized poker advice; the anti-categoricalist is the one that says "It depends."Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
The generalized ideal of "you shouldn't bluff fish" sounds good and is quite useful (insofar as we should bluff fish far less frequently than we might naturally feel inclined to, so getting advice to not do it serves as a great mnemonic guide for action that's preferable to the intuitive course), but it's not an inherently true statement.
Practicality is contingent, and should be frequently reevaluated to fit to the cultural and general mode of thought for the times. In any context where people have come around on the idea of never bluffing fish, and actually bluff fish too infrequently, the rule, “Don't bluff fish”actually does more harm than good.
All of this hoop jumping to find a definition of "murder" and "human life" and such that allows for the statement "Murder is wrong" to be universally true is a silly approach to ethics. It may or may not be possible, but it's a silly exercise. It's like arguing in a hand history that Hero should go all-in against a loose-passive player with a hand that is behind Villain's range, but instead of focusing on the EV of the play, fixating on the semantics of the terms "bluffing" and "fish" and arguing that this isn't *really* bluffing--it's just bottom range aggression--or that Villain's playstyle isn't *really* fishy--it's just a poorly executed trapping strategy. It's much more sensible to just say, "It is profitable to bluff here, even though it is against a fish. The advice, 'Don't bluff fish' is a generally useful piece of advice because it adjusts the natural inclination of beginners closer to optimal play, but it isn't actually a universally true tennent."
In the same vein, killing other humans is the right thing to do far less often than society seems naturally inclined to believe. As such, "Don't kill people" is a pretty practical piece of advice. In the case of at least some abortions, though, there is literally no reason whatsoever to not do it (aside from the marginal health risks and such), except for finding semantical concoction that makes the rhetorically appealing argument that it is the murder (which generally has a negative connotation) of a human (which generally has a positive connotation).
________________
By the way, it is very possibly true that even abortions are rarely right* to do; I'm not qualified to say. The cognitive dissonance that pregnant women go through in the process of either getting an abortion or keeping the baby is cardinal because the correctness of the decision rests on whether or not they value birthing a healthy baby into this world.
This is why it is so important to offer *intelligent* support as they try to figure out one of the toughest biological and existentially difficult decisions a woman could possibly face. The intelligent support comes through focusing on the important questions: do you want this child? Will your life and this world be better off for it? Etc. Not figuring out how Bronze-Age prophets would have viewed the act; not by trying to find a definition of words to rationalize the act; by fucking focusing on whether it would be good to have a baby or not!
Ideally, enough of this sort of support can quell the cognitive dissonance as we come to a decision that aligns with the factors, the most important of which is, "Do you feel fit to handle the results of your decision (whatever the results may be; which ever the choice might be)?"
[1] There's nary such thing as "amoral"; get that thought out of your head right now!
[2] Which may rest of near- or far-sighted factors. Maybe a pregnant woman "doesn't feel like it", but they are 34, wish to have children at some point in their life and are in as good of a position as they can reasonably expect to be in the next several years to do so. I'm sure there are other more sophisticated examples of far-sighted considerations.
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).Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
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. :oops:**
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).
A line has to be drawn for policy's sake[1]; a line does not have to be drawn for ethics' sake. It might sometimes be right to undergo partial-birth abortions and might other times be wrong to take a morning after pill.Quote:
Originally Posted by OngBonga
This isn't meant to support any sort of relativism or even to go against the Categorical Imperative: you can't make exceptions simply based on whether you feel like doing those things or not while considering it unethical for others to make the same exact choice in the same exact scenario. If you were to run the scenario a billion times (the EXACT scenario that is, with all factors intact, not just any old case of abortion), then the right decision is still the one you would make 1 billion times.
[1] At birth is probably good. I can't imagine that going through 9 months of pregnancy and labor, that the baby will very often hold negligible value as the literal fruit of literal labor that is worth preserving. Also, the fact that, while the baby isn't self-sustaining yet, it no longer is the sole responsibility of the mother--she could live it on a doorstep, and it would likely live. So basically, after the mother and the baby both survive labor, so much has gone into the creation of life at this point, that it is safe to assume that it holds some value that is difficult to negate, and since the mother alone is not the sole proprietor of the life, she cannot as easily be sole executor of whether the burden (whatever that might hypothetically be) isn't worth it.
That might sound like a lot of insensitive wording, but cliffnotes is that postnatal babies are great; I'd support a law to not kill them.
Good posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by surviva316
Good way of putting it. I've been trying to point out that abortion seems like a big issue largely because of the mind and word games we play, but forgot to simply even mention rhetoric and semantics
ExplainQuote:
There's nary such thing as "amoral"; get that thought out of your head right now!
I don't know if I've escorted anyone multiple times. I don't pay too close attention to who is coming in and it wouldn't matter to me if they were coming in multiple times though.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Bean Counter
I've never seen anyone back out because of the protestors, but I've many, many scared and nervous faces. Many women (and even some men) crying as they go in due to the shaming and harassment.
I don't say anything to women coming to use the clinic other than "Hi, I'm with the clinic would you like an escort to the door?" and then I usually walk with them giving them directions to the door and telling them they are going to have to walk past some jerks on the sidewalk up ahead and then I just try to keep them distracted from the shitty things protesters say to them, and generally put myself between the women and the protesters. Essentially, body blocking the protestors so the women can get to the door quickly.
Cool thread. Where are the cat pics?
Have you ever had to escort someone who was in a wheelchair, who had crutches or who otherwise had a difficult time getting around? If so, what was that like dealing with the jackoffs?Quote:
Originally Posted by kingnat
How much does it pay?
Is this a second job?
Can you ask what type of birth control they tried?
So, you're helping to drop the kids off?
Amoral exists legally, scientifically, philosophically, psychologically, colloquially.. in what way does it not exist?
There are good ways to spend your time, talents, etc, and there are poor ways to spend your time, talents, etc. There are things in between--actions that, once all factors are decision, are more or less breakeven--but the idea that this applies to entire classes of actions is ridiculous. And there certainly aren't actions where you can say "It's not for morality to judge." Refer back to my post to wufwugy to see how this can't even make sense. Morality is, essentially, the judgment of actions, so if there's an action, it's within the realm of morality to judge.Quote:
Originally Posted by jackvance
Our culture's impression of morality is rooted in the judeo-christian tradition of sin/redemption/commandments/testaments/etc, and so we naturally think that so long as what we're doing doesn't constitute as a sin (or isn't illegal) that we're outside the realm of evaluation. This is plainly wrong. To reiterate the analogy, if you like your steak well-done, then asking for it rare is an action with poor value.
Now, it might be fairer to say that there are actions that are so low-stakes that it's not worth dissecting. Two things:
1) On a technical note: if it takes you a mentionable amount of time to commit this low-stake act, then it can be said that you are, if nothing else, making a poor investment of the limited time you have on this earth. This is actually perfectly analogous to poker: we calculate folding in poker as 0ev, but since folding is forfeiting of an opportunity to make money, and thus keeping pace with the blinds, even this isn't a truly indifferent decision.
2) On a much more relevant note: THE LAST THING THIS WOULD APPLY TO IS ABORTION anyway.
Abortion is a very high-stakes decision, where all of the values we way or extremely positive or extremely negative. Morality is in no way, shape, or form indifferent to whether you get an abortion or not: if you do not want a child, feel no attachment to the assortment of cells growing within you, and do not have proper resources (especially time or money) for supporting a child for the next 18 years, then morality is emphatically in your favor when you get an abortion; if you do want a child, feel a strong attachment with the one that is gestating in your womb, and your maturity level, bank account and calendar are prepared to do so, then morality is going to be in a rage when you get an abortion.
I agree that the fact that an act is an abortion is insufficient to determine whether it's good or bad (which, btw, is true of literally any action). But to say that it's amoral--that just because the term "abortion" applies to the action you're taking means that the action you're taking can neither be moral or immoral--is absolutely ridiculous.
That doesn't negate amorality. Using your verbiage, amorality is an effect of actions regardless of judgmentQuote:
Originally Posted by surviva316
It seems that you're defining morality the same as is defined the economic concept of opportunity costs. It's an interesting idea, but making a "should" or "ought" judgment, regardless of what it is, is still a moral imposition onto something that is inherently amoral. Opportunity costs aren't real. The physical universe doesn't determine them. What you or I feel or believe create the opportunity costs. We can go through life making nothing but decisions, all based in morality, yet the "truth" behind them is still amorality
Furthermore, you're begging the question when you say there are "good" or "poor" decisions you can make. Those concepts are emergent of thoughts and feelings. When we talk about the world we've constructed around us, it is reasonable to say "right" or "wrong", but if we dig deeper, that morality breaks down. We may judge abortion as right or wrong based on any conceivable criteria, but the universe, the basal truth of the matter, doesn't have this judgment embedded into it.
This bit makes me think you misunderstand what amoral means. It doesn't mean that it's neither moral or immoral, it means that you disregard morality completely.Quote:
Originally Posted by surviva316
No, this hasn't happened. It's interesting to think of what the protestors would say... it'd probably be condescending and shitty though.. and I don't say that just to sound bitter. They'd honestly say those things because thats how they think.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
It's purely volunteer. Like I said before, I don't say anything to the women except what is necessary to let them know why i'm there and to get them into the clinic with the minimum amount of shitty interference.Quote:
Originally Posted by flomo
Do any one of the people protesting ever pose as escorts, walk the girl up to everybody else, and then yell "Get her!" at which point they surround the girl and yell mean shit?Quote:
Originally Posted by kingnat
Again, though, I reject this possibility offhand.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
Everyone sets values on actions, regardless of whether they:
- Are students of ethics or ignorant to it
- Are considerative or whimsical
- Have beliefs are set in stone or change from day-to-day, hour-to-hour
- Value results for themselves over results for anyone else
- Place simplistic, short-term values on happiness (eg: hedonists, people who might say "Life is a beach", etc) or value long-term gains enough to make short-term sacrifices
- Find morality to be in the eye of the beholder or believe in universal values that everyone shares
Whatever. None of these demonstrate indifference to morality; they're simply different approaches to it. Unless you live life by an RNG, to whose results you are dispassionate, or unless you are a stone, you have a moral compass.
I don't want to pretend to know you better than you know yourself, but for the sake of classification, I have seen your thoughts on several moral quandaries at this point (the Red Button, for example), and I wouldn't at all consider you amoral. Your views are a bit off the beaten path of popular moral codes, but again, you're not as dispassionate as a stone about the actions you take--or even the areas where you are dispassionate, this is a conscious approach used to get best results.[1]
The best counter I can imagine is a Humeian argument that actually does equate the impetus of human action to Natural Law. This is tough to do in summary, but essentially Hume argues that we can ask why anything ultimately happens, we can't really know. We obviously are much "closer" now than we were in Hume's time to understanding (to use his example) why the sun rises every morning, insofar as we understand the underlying mechanics of it much more, but we still don't so much understand WHY gravity operates as it does; we know the laws, but we don't know WHY everything actually follows them.
Yet we intuitively attribute any non-understood impetus for our own actions to "choices." Free Will essentially is a god of the gaps as far as Hume is concerned, used to explain away things that we don't understand about ourselves even though we have the very same non-understandings of inanimate objects. Maybe a stone chooses shift this way or that, or that mass-to-mass attractions is only a near-necessary attraction that is only an empirically predictable phenomenon because (after all, quantum mechanics supports the fact that there may be a modicum of randomness in an electron's movements; that an electron cloud is a representation of probability); or, conversely, maybe man doesn't choose to gravitate toward pussy or 10 year olds toward ice cream, and value is only a measure of probability, though obviously applied to a MUCH MUCH more complicated system than the stone is.
(This is obviously very closely related to Determinism, though the twist is that Hume wasn't necessarily arguing Determinism. He was more so making an epistemological argument that we can't know the difference between Free Will, determinism and some mad anthropomorphism, as a way of turning our own hubris over the mysticism of why we do what we do in on itself.)
So I COULD see some Humeian support for the the fact that you and I and everyone ARE in fact operating in nonmoral systems.
I think this is kinda getting far from the topic at hand and isn't really what you wish to argue, but it's an interesting enough tangent to include for completeness's sake, imho.
[1] FWIW, as far as moral philosophies that are completely antithetical to my own go, your approach to morality is my favorite, because I can't possibly disprove it. I like to say that if you boil down all human moral philosophy, you would be left with irreducible bits at the bottom of the crucible; it takes a certain leap of faith (literally the smallest application of faith humanly possible, but a leap nonetheless) to go from caring about the results of our actions to caring about how the results of our actions affect anything outside of our sphere of perception. Regardless, though, they're both forms of morality--it's just that one has sustained many more millennia of dispute than the other has.
The whole, "Even doing nothing is doing nothing" thing was an aside as much as anything else, which is why I put the beginning of the next section in all caps. I disagree with this paragraph, but it's so irrelevant to abortion that I'll put it in a footnote just to emphasize its ancillary nature.[1] The point is ABORTION IS MOST DECIDEDLY NOT A LOW-STAKES DECISION! It is either highly moral, highly immoral or--given the negation of massive terms that are difficult to quantify and weigh against each other--a difficult moral quandary that might fall somewhere around breakeven.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
I'm not meaning to beg the question: I tried to establish my thoughts on morality off-hand and that operate on that assumption as I moved on. I didn't mean for my proceeding points on morality to prove my initial one on how morality exists and is worth it.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
FWIW, I believe that value of action--much like aesthetics--are subjective, and I am an ardent existentialist. I do not believe we are the chosen people following the universe's laws of primacy; I do not believe that are actions have effects that extend to all ends of the universe: from spatial end to end, from the time the act was committed right to the universe's ultimate instance. I don't know what you mean by "digging deeper" or morality "breaking down", but I do agree that "right" and "wrong" does not extend much beyond "When we talk about the world we've constructed around us."Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
To this, I say, "So what?" I don't understand why humans have this natural inclination that it's all or nothing when it comes to the value of their actions: either we're God-by-Extension or I am meaningless cog in an indifferent machine[2] (Shelly Kagan makes a similar argument in a debate with William Lane Craig here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiJnCQuPiuo, though he takes it one step further to argue that it matters objectively, and I even think that *that* is a superfluous step). It might sound truistic, but our actions affect--at the very very least--the sentient beings that they affect. I don't know how my actions would be perceived by Marglarb the Elder on Planet Marglarb or a hypothetical god or any other arbiter, but by definition, my actions don't affect them, so I don't give a fuck. The very fact that the subjects of my actions are online enough to care about how they're affected necessitates that my action has value. I can disregard that value in favor of the values I place on my own actions (and as I said to spoon, I can't prove the inferiority of a moral system that does exactly that), but that requires that I value my own actions.
Besides, universal, objective standards wouldn't be the end-all, be-all anyway. What if multiple universes exist, and the objective standard there differs from our own? Do we suddenly feel like even universal, objective standards are worthless because the action *would* be valued oppositely if performed in a whole other universe? No, it's an asinine standard to apply to the value of actions.
Worry about the subjects of your action. How would all affected parties value the expected results of various choices? When you consider that, you consider all you need to. Beyond that, *shrug* haters gone hate.
Either I am a God-by-Extension or I am nothing. This doesn't mean I am a We are a part of the universe; we may only be able to affect a small percentage of humans within a small percentage of their history which itself makes up a small percentage of not only sentient life (as though that's all that matters) but the universe's timeline as a whole, but we still affect the universe with our actions.
[1] Doing nothing with your time on this earth is not simply an opportunity cost because we are mortal. If you'd prefer, we are given a budget of x amount of time, and the way that we spend each day within that time is an expenditure. If you spend days within that budget with the resultant of nothing, then you have spent time poorly.
This is exactly why there's an inherent fascination when people ask how you would spend your life if you were immortal. When time is no longer of the essence, it is no longer incumbent on any second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year or indeed even century to be "worth" the time "spent" to get y results. You could do nothing but earn 0.00000000001 morality points per day, and your lifetime would still be infinitely valuable; as such, ambitious action is less important than ensuring positive return.
Again, though, this is completely irrelevant to this discussion, so if you don't agree, then agree to disagree. I only get in a huge tizzy over this when I'm making the argument that people should be judged by the good they do as much as by the mistakes they make. Again, since we grow up in a culture that sees morality simply as avoiding transgressions (aspiring to perfection), the idea of doing as much good with your life as you can (aspiring to optimization) goes underappreciated.
[2] I speak confidently of this natural inclination humans have because I feel it, too. Hell, I don't think my protagonist cares about what he does in life unless it appeals to some kind of Higher Standard, which is why his atheism is so problematic.
Evaluation of the quality of a decision does not imply morality.
Code:************* WORD COUNT **************
spoonitnow: 62
surviva: over 9000
************* RESULTS *****************
spoonitnow wins the troll-off
I don't think spoon is (out-and-out) trolling. Pretty much everything he's said in this thread seems consistent with the spoon I know outside of the FTR Commune post-2011.Quote:
Originally Posted by d0zer
I am sometimes unsure of what your point is. Some of what you said is what I would say to demonstrate amorality
Abortion is a morality decision for humans, but that doesn't mean it's morality for the universe. Inherent to your argument is the existence of value, which is increased or decreased based on decisions. We can take that and apply it to the world beneath human experience, and find that there is no increasing or decreasing of value based on anything we do.
Value and morality are concepts that depend on conscious arbiters. Amorality is a concept that exists despite that and isn't affected by it. If you could find that there isn't one thing that your value assessments don't affect, you would probably have disproven amorality. If we were to anthropomorphize the universe, its response to your decision to abort or not abort would be "I don't care. This determines nothing"
I generally find that the hold up with morality is that people don't see merit in the process of morality (of judging the value of actions)--that people think that it's perfectly reasonable to be indifferent to what values what actions hold on some objective scale. Arguing that we can evaluate actions all we want, but we don't *genuinely* value some actions more than others--that someone could burst into our house right now and strangle us to death with barbed wire right now and we would be indifferent to it--is something I'm not prepared to disprove.Quote:
Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I'm skeptical, but I can't say I have a rebuttal waiting in my back pocket.
My point is, who cares what an anthropomorphized grain of sand on the far side of the galaxy thinks? Does it have to matter to everything for it to matter to anything? I don't see why it should. For someone with a purportedly practical conception of ethics, this is a terribly impractical way to approach the problem.
Why are value and morality (ie: value) contingent on conscious arbiters? You could probably argue that it's contingent on conscious beings, but why do they have to be impartial ones? The Jews of mid-century Germany, at the very least, valued their homes, lives, liberty, freedom from pain, nutrition and several other things (though this is technically speculation); they had friends and loved ones and such who also valued their continued existence; the Nazis may very well have valued the cathartic feeling of gassing their economic scapegoats. Why are ANY of those values disqualified simply because they're subjects of the case? Surely the relevant thoughts and feelings of the relevant parties are the most important values?
Now, you can make all sorts of moral conclusions based on what perspective you take on: most people (including myself) from utilitarians to categoricalists to mid-century German Jewish egoists would argue that the holocaust was immoral; prejudiced, utilitarian eugenicists would argue that the holocaust was moral; anti-social Germans who got pleasure out of torture would argue that the holocaust was moral. Clearly value and morality still exist, with or without an objective judge; everyone in the case values something.
Is there one capital "V" Value or capital "M" Morality? That's hotly disputed. But the affected sentient beings of our actions will certainly value our actions one way or another (including ourselves); consider all of those disparate and disputing values for the innumerable permutations of actions you can take, and you'll be doing fine for yourself. Let the judgements of the unaffected by the least of your concerns.
I guess since you said this, we're potentially in agreement on what really matters. I just don't see why the sentence needs to go on from there.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
I mentioned amorality because the anti-abortion movement assumes total universal morality (because of god). I went in the direction that if people use this as their foundation, I throw my hands in the air and tell them their god doesn't exist and the universe doesn't give a shit, so they're just making peoples lives worse by imposing their fantasies onto them
But this is not amorality, this is a-universal-morality, no? Insisting it is amorality forces us to throw up our hands, while taking the stance that there is no universal morality, or that it is unknowable (certainly by way of their book), allows us to explore the issue further. Claiming amorality just seems lazy here.Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
I'm not sure what you're askingQuote:
Originally Posted by boost
I don't think I was trying to use amorality as an explanation. It's my response to the anti-abortion movement that believes, without any concrete reasons, that there is universal morality (God's morality) and this means that they can be and are right about abortion. I don't know what else to say to that mentality other than to point out how god isn't real, the universe doesn't care, and they're simply just imposing their ideals onto others even when it hurts people
It was a side comment too. Nobody here made this anti-abortion case. Also I guess I thought surviva's claim that amorality doesn't exist is strange, so we went further into it
Right, but your counter isn't that we live in an amoral universe, it's that either we can't know that we live in a universe with universal morality, or that we live in a universe with relative morality. I mean, right? Those two things are far different from an amoral universe.
Also, I find it strange that you are dissociating the universe with human trappings (morality) while treating it as this anthropomorphic entity which happens to not care. Not to sound all new-agey, but there is no partition between us and the universe, and we do have(maybe express is a better word?), at the very least, relative morality.
The reason I'm picking this nit is because I think, firstly, it's a more accurate depiction of reality, and furthermore, it's a much stronger foundation upon which a productive dialogue can be built. Claiming amorality has you throwing your hands in the air and the bible jockeys thinking of you as some sort of godless nihilist-- while moral relativity allows us to grant them their (albeit misguided) morality while showing them how absurd it is that they demand it be accepted as universal.
That's probably a better idea. I like throwing my hands in the air and telling people their gods don't care about them
It's reasonable to say we know we live in an amoral universe
Rhetorically, it is tough to discuss amorality without some odd anthropomorphizing
I still don't see it as reasonable unless we consider the universe something separate from ourselves, or if we claim determinism, which I'm fine with, but it doesn't really offer any sort of productive avenues of discussion outside of discussing determinism itself.
So you too are saying amorality isn't real?