Considering the legal framework for abortion

[Papewaio]

I do not understand the concept of debating as a spectator sport, and I do not, generally, play to the crowd.

Wasn't rhetoric developed for debates with spectators?
Why teach one when you can teach many. Also if you wish to see your viewpoint prosper surely having spectators helps. Last point PMs are for one on one conversations so you have implicitly acknowledged that you are debating infront of spectators.

=][=
As for genes and moral/ethical systems one just has to consider emergent systems. Genes are a starting point but once a system emerges that can self program you get a whole sleuth of consequences that include stepping beyond mere instinct.

[Scienter]

High numbers of single teenage mothers are caused by moral degeneracy and poor sexual habits, not ignorance. The people know about condoms and the Pill, often they choose not to use them. What is lacking is the ability and or willingness to take responsibility for ones actions.

Don't you mean "teenage parents?"

Also, while you are right that some people have poor habits when it comes to safe sex, there is a great deal of ignorance and also lack of access to contraception. Many abstinence-based sex education programs convey inaccurate facts about the efficacy of condoms such that a lot of teens get the message that using it is a pointless exercise. Or they don't teach about birth control at all. Then, it's up to the parents to teach it, and they choose not to. So, in some places there are groups of teens who are either ill-informed about safe sex.

There are also problems with access to contraception. In very conservative areas, or for teens with conservative parents, it's not an option for a girl to ask her parents if she can go on the Pill, or for a teen of either gender to ask for condoms. If a teen's family's attitude about premarital sex is shame-based, they're going to be a lot more reluctant to go into a store to buy condoms, especially if they are behind the counter and they have to ask for them.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Don't you mean "teenage parents?" Also, while you are right that some people have poor habits when it comes to safe sex, there is a great deal of ignorance and also lack of access to contraception. Many abstinence-based sex education programs convey inaccurate facts about the efficacy of condoms such that a lot of teens get the message that using it is a pointless exercise. Or they don't teach about birth control at all. Then, it's up to the parents to teach it, and they choose not to. So, in some places there are groups of teens who are either ill-informed about safe sex. There are also problems with access to contraception. In very conservative areas, or for teens with conservative parents, it's not an option for a girl to ask her parents if she can go on the Pill, or for a teen of either gender to ask for condoms. If a teen's family's attitude about premarital sex is shame-based, they're going to be a lot more reluctant to go into a store to buy condoms, especially if they are behind the counter and they have to ask for them.

What you said is 100% true for the US, but I wasn't under the impression that the UK did such backwards abstinence only policies since they are more liberal in general. Maybe someone can correct my ignorance, are the chavs being taught that crap?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Don't you mean "teenage parents?"

While it takes two to tango in a lot of cases the mothers don't idetify the fathers after the fact and in all practical and legal senses they are not aknowledged to exist. So in this country we have teenage mothers.

Also, while you are right that some people have poor habits when it comes to safe sex, there is a great deal of ignorance and also lack of access to contraception. Many abstinence-based sex education programs convey inaccurate facts about the efficacy of condoms such that a lot of teens get the message that using it is a pointless exercise. Or they don't teach about birth control at all. Then, it's up to the parents to teach it, and they choose not to. So, in some places there are groups of teens who are either ill-informed about safe sex.

There are also problems with access to contraception. In very conservative areas, or for teens with conservative parents, it's not an option for a girl to ask her parents if she can go on the Pill, or for a teen of either gender to ask for condoms. If a teen's family's attitude about premarital sex is shame-based, they're going to be a lot more reluctant to go into a store to buy condoms, especially if they are behind the counter and they have to ask for them.

This is adaquately answered by this:

What you said is 100% true for the US, but I wasn't under the impression that the UK did such backwards abstinence only policies since they are more liberal in general. Maybe someone can correct my ignorance, are the chavs being taught that crap?

We have the NHS, and our national socialised healthcare provides free condoms at all family planning clinics and I'm pretty sure a fgirl over the age of 16 can go on the pill, on the NHS, free without her parents knowing. Yes, we have religious abstinence-only people but they have no effect on national policy and they are only concentrated in very small numbers. You won't find a town utterly without free contraception in the UK, and you can also get condoms in every high street chemist and pub toilet. Accidents may happen, but you don't have any excuse for being completely stupid over here.

[Nowake]

Hello gang
Yay, I have not missed much!

A small request PVC, you lately tend to forget to address the main point of the passage you quote and engage a lengthy reply on some vague side-issue I am not necessarily disputing. Please, for the sake of brevity and format, lets pace ourselves a bit, we can’t get everything in if we want this to remain readable. And apropos of readers, lets start with:

I do not understand the concept of debating as a spectator sport, and I do not, generally, play to the crowd.

That’s a novel argument. I have to ask at this point if you ever thought why this place is called a Forum? It always was the declared goal to imitate the ancient public squares dedicated to popular assemblies.
As a personal observation, if you are not writing this for the audience and if you are not, hopefully, writing pages upon pages just to develop some atrophied debating skills, are you actually dedicating all this time to me? In all honesty, I’d feel rather guilty. I admit, almost none of my comments on your views were meant for you, but rather for the handful of undecided readers who follow the thread. That is how you affect opinion after all; you rarely can approach people after they commit themselves to a cause; you show the flaws to those with an open mind.

If you read Dawkins carefully you will see that he often, if not always, refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality. (...)

I have to recapitulate this argument for you because you’ve completely lost track.
First you defined yourself as a moral absolutist. You then claimed persons such as Richard Dawkins and movements such as the New Atheists share your moral absolutism because they believe in the existence of good and evil. Thinking you knew what moral absolutism means, I voiced my disagreement on their adherence to moral absolutism and argued that we do not debate the existence of good and evil when I wrote:

I know I know, while you agree on that, you also think that there is some actually genuine notion of good and evil out there which is the only one worth being adopted by human beings.
Yes. There is. I've never disputed that. I just think we are able to sometimes grasp what it truly means to be Good due to the mind-altering effects of empathy which haunts us to justify in any way, even by deluding ourselves, actions we’d be horrified to experience ourselves. It leads us to develop secular principles.

But then Dawkins is considering good and evil to be discoveries made by our empathic brain – for which I provided a crystal clear quote.
At this point, you continue to argue your initial position through: “[Dawkins] refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality.” which is such a total non sequitur to all I have written.
To conclude, you simply do not understand that believing in the existence of good and evil does-not-a-moral-absolutist-make. The nuance you fail to recognize lies in the fact that Dawkins believes good and evil to be free of social mores, but not free of the empathy-dictated understanding of one’s action’s impact. Or, if you want the taxonomy laid out, you are a moral absolutist, while he, the New Atheists and I are moral objectivists. Please stop and at least ask for clarifications instead of just typing away the same reply.
I don’t know how this could be explained more clearly. But for example, if Dawkins would read that appalling side-debate you had with Vuk over the righteousness of having Hitler murdered, he would never side with you. Both he and Vuk would consider the context changes the valuation of Hitler’s murder as an evil act, making them moral objectivists.

The problem is that this view is presented as "scientific", but it is really a blending of natural and moral philosophy. Read Dawkins and you see that he believes everything stems from our genes, but he consistently make imaginative leaps to try and connect his, essentially quite duelistic philosophy, to his monistic scientific realism. For example, he has claimed that belief in God is an inherited survival trait independent of any deity, but he also claims we have now outgrown this belief - we can transcend our genetics. On the one hand man is as he should be, because he follows his deterministic genes, on the other he should be more than he currently is and change his nature, in contravention of his genes.

For this I direct you to Pape’s reply, he did a much better job of presenting the same argument than I would’ve, as my pedantry for explanations would’ve prevented me from being as terse as he was.

Uhmm empathy is a lot more complex. It does not only employ emotional recognition, it creates self-reflective perspectives through imagination. It’s a fairly well researched phenomenon.
But that was merely to address your inaccuracy when presuming that one needs to have previously experienced an emotion in order to understand it. What bothers is that you think empathy is irrelevant because it doesn’t explain the foetus. It does explain to us the gravida.

What you are really talking about, then, is empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the understanding of another's emotions, sympathy is sharing them. Empathy is the tool you use to engage sympathetically, one can have one without the other, both ways.

No, I’m really not talking about that PVC. We are again having to return to definitions. Case in which I find it impossible to confuse employing imagination to create self-reflective perspectives with sympathy. Perspective-taking is re-creation. It’s also known as cognitive empathy and it is the farthest component (of empathy) from sympathy. It is, if you like, the empathy you demonize as cruelty-inducing and morally neutral, and yet, at the same time, it is the side of empathy enhancing our brain’s imagination the most; it is perspective-taking which allows us to establish good and evil jointly with emotional empathy , and thus a lot more than a useful social tool.

In other words, you can't demonstrate that your one night stands haven't been with persons who were already in relationships, but you're too proud to admit you might be the dirty secret in someone else's marriage? (...)
Ulterior reply: The worst that I have said of you is that you are refusing to engage with my point that if you have a one night stand you cannot know the other person's social situation other than by their report. You are obviously an intelligent and educated man, so you must realise this. Accusing you of a deliberate lack of self reflection is, admittedly, an Ad Hominem but a very mild one. I am not accusing you of a genuine failure of character. (...)
As regards education in rhetoric, Cicero is one of my favourite Latin authors.

I don’t know PVC, is that the worst you have said of me? Because your first phrase really makes some rather creepy allegations about my sexual conduct and asks me to justify choices which could only be explained by delving into personal details that are none of your business. A rather vulgar approach. Your ulterior spin shows a lack of will to assume responsibility for your own words, rather a pity, you were passing for such a cerebral chap.
To clarify my Ad hominem remark, I discovered the Internet to be a trove for berks exercising petty forms of sciolism. These sciolists relish in slamming Ad Hominem all over the place; since I find them a tad repulsive, the term now shares the taint in my head, yet it was very fitting on this occasion so I grudgingly used it without being able to help myself to grumble on the side. Thus the comment itself did not target you.

Really? The emotional and psychological damage they provoke to the owners of the vandalised joints who willingly rent them to them beforehand while fully aware of the club’s reputation? Hmm, nice touch there.
Very similar emotional and psychological damage to the one lower-class English hooligans inflicted upon the Italian spectators on the Heysel Stadium when their attack caused 39 people to be crushed to death.

This is a rationalisation of the Bullers, they do vandalise randomly as well. In any case, they are just a more recent manifestation of the callous young aristocrat, the lord's son you rape the farmer's daughter and then pays the father for the "whore".

So modern lower-class English hooligans were now brought about by the rapist son of the lord. Hey, nicely done though, it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to deny any Skinhead heritage to the Chavs while considering the House of Lords to have fathered the English ultras. Tallyho bruv?!

[Rhyfelwyr]

it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to deny any Skinhead heritage to the Chavs

What does chav even mean? A lower-class person?

How can you compare them to a violent subculture like Skinheads?

[rory_20_uk]

Skinheads have made a concious decision to dress and act in a certain way, however distasteful that is.

Chavs are more of a branch of human evolution which hopefully is a dead end. It requires heavy intake of genotoxic substance throughout pregnancy, usually ethanol, although methanol, propanol or butanol will also suffice. Keeping the foetus in a chronically hypoxic state also helps arrest development of the cerebral cortexes which is usually achieved using cigarettes, which generally continues post partum. Coupled with large families, absence of families and an an inability of the mother to care for in even a rudimentary way are the final steps in honing a Chav.

After sinking like a stone to the bottom of society, they will remain there generally on benefits with no dreams higher than narcotics and casual sex to ensure that more chavs are created. One can only help that sterilisation occurs from a combination of chronic STDs and ethanol and cigarettes.

[Nowake]

Do not confuse neo-nazi skinheads with the original British skinheads. For lack of a better definition to be found at a moment's notice, lets settle for this:

A skinhead is a member of a subculture that originated among working class youths in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. Named for their close-cropped or shaven heads, the first skinheads were greatly influenced by West Indian (specifically Jamaican) rude boys and British mods, in terms of fashion, music and lifestyle. Originally, the skinhead subculture was primarily based on those elements, not politics or race. Since then, however, attitudes toward race and politics have become factors by which some skinheads align themselves. The political spectrum within the skinhead scene ranges from the far right to the far left, although many skinheads are apolitical. Fashion-wise, skinheads range from a clean-cut 1960s mod-influenced style to less-strict punk- and hardcore-influenced styles.

A chav is a stereotype of certain people in the United Kingdom. Also known as a charver in Yorkshire and North East England, "chavs" are said to be aggressive and arrogant teenagers and young adults, of underclass background, who repeatedly engage in anti-social behaviour such as street drinking, drug abuse and rowdiness, or other forms of juvenile delinquency.

Beside the point however, the egregious assertion that still remains to be demonstrated is the blaming of all moral degeneracy amongst the lower-class on the social elites, as PVC stated.

[Beskar]

What does chav even mean? A lower-class person?

Chav's by definition are the underclass, the "non-working class". Opposed to members of the community which respect eachother, work and attempt to make a good life for themselves, chav's are those who somehow circumvented the entire system generally failing to emotionally and intellectually mature. Their only means of income is through abuse of the welfare system and having as many children as possible to increase the contribution. They come from generations that haven't worked and 'sponged' from the state.

Due to their lack of maturity, they are very aggressive in their behaviour, preferring to use fists and pocket knives to solve any issues, requiring on more base conceptions such as territory. They also have no respect for any authority, including the police, seeing enforcers as a 'hindrance' to them having run.

Some people argue that this is a neo-classism to paint the 'working class' in a degrading new light. This isn't the case at all as it refers to an underclass which doesn't even work.

Some other people have used the term also on a very superficial level referring to anyone in a "Hoodie, tracky bottoms and socks overthetop of their pants and trainers" as being a 'Chav', since this seems to be the current fashion trend of those happen to be part of this underclass. Unfortunately, some peoples lack of fashion sense or taste makes sure they get branded this way as well, however it is inappropriate since it refers more to the socio-economical attitude of the underclass members, not their poor fashion tastes.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

A small request PVC, you lately tend to forget to address the main point of the passage you quote and engage a lengthy reply on some vague side-issue I am not necessarily disputing. Please, for the sake of brevity and format, lets pace ourselves a bit, we can’t get everything in if we want this to remain readable. And apropos of readers, lets start with:

I address my point to what I feel is relevent, this may or may not be the primary text of your reply.

That’s a novel argument. I have to ask at this point if you ever thought why this place is called a Forum? It always was the declared goal to imitate the ancient public squares dedicated to popular assemblies.

Having a crowd to judge the debate does not mean that the debate is for the crowd. It's not a very novel idea to engage in disputation in order to resolve a philosophical question; it is the foundation of the medieval university system and the principle survives today. Playing to the crowd is demegoggy.

As a personal observation

, if you are not writing this for the audience and if you are not, hopefully, writing pages upon pages just to develop some atrophied debating skills, are you actually dedicating all this time to me? In all honesty, I’d feel rather guilty. I admit, almost none of my comments on your views were meant for you, but rather for the handful of undecided readers who follow the thread. That is how you affect opinion after all; you rarely can approach people after they commit themselves to a cause; you show the flaws to those with an open mind.

Atrophied debating skills? And you're complaining about other using Ad Hominem, seriously? If your comments on my views, and my writing style, are meant for the rest of the Backroom and not me then you are engaging in an extended attampt at character assassination, aren't you?

we might as well have a penis measuring contest.

To extend one of our favourite sayings here: Play the ball, not the man or the audience.

I have to recapitulate this argument for you because you’ve completely lost track.
First you defined yourself as a moral absolutist. You then claimed persons such as Richard Dawkins and movements such as the New Atheists share your moral absolutism because they believe in the existence of good and evil. Thinking you knew what moral absolutism means, I voiced my disagreement on their adherence to moral absolutism and argued that we do not debate the existence of good and evil when I wrote:

I know I know, while you agree on that, you also think that there is some actually genuine notion of good and evil out there which is the only one worth being adopted by human beings.
Yes. There is. I've never disputed that. I just think we are able to sometimes grasp what it truly means to be Good due to the mind-altering effects of empathy which haunts us to justify in any way, even by deluding ourselves, actions we’d be horrified to experience ourselves. It leads us to develop secular principles.

But then Dawkins is considering good and evil to be discoveries made by our empathic brain – for which I provided a crystal clear quote.
At this point, you continue to argue your initial position through: “[Dawkins] refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality.” which is such a total non sequitur to all I have written.
To conclude, you simply do not understand that believing in the existence of good and evil does-not-a-moral-absolutist-make. The nuance you fail to recognize lies in the fact that Dawkins believes good and evil to be free of social mores, but not free of the empathy-dictated understanding of one’s action’s impact. Or, if you want the taxonomy laid out, you are a moral absolutist, while he, the New Atheists and I are moral objectivists. Please stop and at least ask for clarifications instead of just typing away the same reply.
I don’t know how this could be explained more clearly. But for example, if Dawkins would read that appalling side-debate you had with Vuk over the righteousness of having Hitler murdered, he would never side with you. Both he and Vuk would consider the context changes the valuation of Hitler’s murder as an evil act, making them moral objectivists.

For this I direct you to Pape’s reply, he did a much better job of presenting the same argument than I would’ve, as my pedantry for explanations would’ve prevented me from being as terse as he was.

Obviously, I read Dawkins differently to you. Regardless of the label you wish to apply, my point remains valid, that an objective morality includes arbitary "goods" and "evils" and this requires an arbiter, which leads one to some form Deism and is not compatable with Atheism, which is what modern "secularism". That is modern seculaism abmits no religious or philosophical position beyond the use of deductive logic.

No, I’m really not talking about that PVC. We are again having to return to definitions. Case in which I find it impossible to confuse employing imagination to create self-reflective perspectives with sympathy. Perspective-taking is re-creation. It’s also known as cognitive empathy and it is the farthest component (of empathy) from sympathy. It is, if you like, the empathy you demonize as cruelty-inducing and morally neutral, and yet, at the same time, it is the side of empathy enhancing our brain’s imagination the most; it is perspective-taking which allows us to establish good and evil jointly with emotional empathy , and thus a lot more than a useful social tool.

That's just a thought process then. What actually affects you is the sympathetic sharing of emotion, you do not merely understand what someone else feels, you share the experience with them and therfore you are able to share, to internalise that emotion as your own. Most of this can be included in a general definition of "empathy". If I read back what you wrote I see no difference between the affective responise of a normal person and the intellectual working-out that we see in psychopaths. A psychopaths are capable of understanding someone's emotional respose intellectually and "re-creating" it logically, what they lack is the ability to internalise affectively, to actually share a feeling.

I don’t know PVC, is that the worst you have said of me?

Yes. You still refuse to self-reflect on your sexual activities, for all that you quoted me.

Because your first phrase really makes some rather creepy allegations about my sexual conduct and asks me to justify choices which could only be explained by delving into personal details that are none of your business.

You are the one who valourised casual sexual experience, and then tried to sidestep the example I gave of why I find such activities distasteful, namely that in my experience one party is married or otherwise unavailable. As you repeatedly failed to engage with that, and tried to sidestep the issue in the example I provided (that it was immoral because of infidelity) I accused you of a lack of self reflection due to evasion. If you had just said, "yes, it is immoral to have casual sex when you are already in a monogomous relationship" the debate would have gone in a different direction.

I then would have said, "how do you know your partners are not being unfaithful even if you aren't?" and you might have replyed something like, "because I know who they are, even if I don't have a personal relationship with them."

Then I would point out that they aren't exactly "strangers" and this is a different social arrangement to the casual bedhopping many people engage in, which is where we started. I would also point out that these sorts of liasons are profoundly atypical outside small exclusive communities.

Or some such.

A rather vulgar approach. Your ulterior spin shows a lack of will to assume responsibility for your own words, rather a pity, you were passing for such a cerebral chap.

It's quite possible to be both a deeply dissagreeable person and highly cerebral, but a Berk is a fool. There is no ulterior spin in my point, and I'll quite happily be explicit:

The more one night stands you have with people (I'm assuming women, but I don't know) whose social situation you do not actually know, the more likely who have slept with someone's partner. The only way you could avoid this it by only sleeping with people whose social situation you know by independant report. That implies an unusual social situation though, and a comparatively small community - cocktail part vs nightclub, really.

If you want more agrrable discourse you might refrain from phrases such as, "rather a pity, you were passing for such a cerebral chap." I do not respond well to condecension.

To clarify my Ad hominem remark, I discovered the Internet to be a trove for berks exercising petty forms of sciolism. These sciolists relish in slamming Ad Hominem all over the place; since I find them a tad repulsive, the term now shares the taint in my head, yet it was very fitting on this occasion so I grudgingly used it without being able to help myself to grumble on the side. Thus the comment itself did not target you.

You cannot accuse me of Ad Hominem and then say the comment is "not directed at" me, it obviously is.

So modern lower-class English hooligans were now brought about by the rapist son of the lord. Hey, nicely done though, it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to be able to deny any Skinhead heritage to the Chavs while considering the House of Lords to have fathered the English ultras. Tallyho bruv?!

Not what I said, I said moral corruption tends to percolate down the social strata because it makes it easier for the lower class to justify behavious if the upper class are already doing it. As to Chavs and skinheads, I'm not saying they have nothing in common, but skinheads are not inherrently anti-social, nor do they form an underclass. Like Mods and Rockers Skinheads were a youth movement - Chavs are a social strata all their own, it denotes a way of living not a concious lifestyle choice.

[Nowake]

Hello hello

I address my point to what I feel is relevent, this may or may not be the primary text of your reply.

Well, when the main point of my reply contradicts your statements and you choose to not answer it, we’re not really debating anymore are we, we’re just talking past each other.

Having a crowd to judge the debate does not mean that the debate is for the crowd. It's not a very novel idea to engage in disputation in order to resolve a philosophical question; it is the foundation of the medieval university system and the principle survives today. Playing to the crowd is demegoggy. (...)
If your comments on my views, and my writing style, are meant for the rest of the Backroom and not me then you are engaging in an extended attampt at character assassination, aren't you?

I am not sure you realise that debates were always resolved by the amount of support coaxed by each party; ultimately, it can lead to gaining your interlocutor’s support; I simply stated I was not having illusions about that final part here.
But demagogy? How do you get there? Simply aiming your arguments towards an independent third party does not equate to playing on that party’s prejudice.
And hold on with that moaning about character assassination PVC, I am engaging in an extended attempt to expose your views to be wrong on a few particular subjects, I am not trying to destroy your reputation as a human being.

I have to recapitulate this argument for you because you’ve completely lost track.
First you defined yourself as a moral absolutist. You then claimed persons such as Richard Dawkins and movements such as the New Atheists share your moral absolutism because they believe in the existence of good and evil. Thinking you knew what moral absolutism means, I voiced my disagreement on their adherence to moral absolutism and argued that we do not debate the existence of good and evil when I wrote:

I know I know, while you agree on that, you also think that there is some actually genuine notion of good and evil out there which is the only one worth being adopted by human beings.
Yes. There is. I've never disputed that. I just think we are able to sometimes grasp what it truly means to be Good due to the mind-altering effects of empathy which haunts us to justify in any way, even by deluding ourselves, actions we’d be horrified to experience ourselves. It leads us to develop secular principles.

But then Dawkins is considering good and evil to be discoveries made by our empathic brain – for which I provided a crystal clear quote.
At this point, you continue to argue your initial position through: “[Dawkins] refers to "good and evil" in the abstract, this is not a matter of his personal opinion only, it is very clearly something he believes to be embedded in reality.” which is such a total non sequitur to all I have written.
To conclude, you simply do not understand that believing in the existence of good and evil does-not-a-moral-absolutist-make. The nuance you fail to recognize lies in the fact that Dawkins believes good and evil to be free of social mores, but not free of the empathy-dictated understanding of one’s action’s impact. Or, if you want the taxonomy laid out, you are a moral absolutist, while he, the New Atheists and I are moral objectivists. Please stop and at least ask for clarifications instead of just typing away the same reply.
I don’t know how this could be explained more clearly. But for example, if Dawkins would read that appalling side-debate you had with Vuk over the righteousness of having Hitler murdered, he would never side with you. Both he and Vuk would consider the context changes the valuation of Hitler’s murder as an evil act, making them moral objectivists.

Obviously, I read Dawkins differently to you. Regardless of the label you wish to apply, my point remains valid, that an objective morality includes arbitary "goods" and "evils" and this requires an arbiter, which leads one to some form Deism and is not compatable with Atheism, which is what modern "secularism". That is modern seculaism abmits no religious or philosophical position beyond the use of deductive logic.

Well that moral arbiter is in ourselves, that was what Dawkins and the rest of us are saying, and it is developed through empathic processes. Any normal person can reach the same moral truths about good and evil through introspection, their intellectual and emotional capacity allowing. We don’t need an abstract arbiter.

Or some such.

Yes, or some such, it is all very confusing, a lot simpler to require everyone to obtain sex-permits and breeding-licenses right? That’s a joke, I cannot quote you on that yet But it’s so awfully "unregulated", I believe that was your term right?

To clarify my Ad hominem remark, I discovered the Internet to be a trove for berks exercising petty forms of sciolism. These sciolists relish in slamming Ad Hominem all over the place; since I find them a tad repulsive, the term now shares the taint in my head, yet it was very fitting on this occasion so I grudgingly used it without being able to help myself to grumble on the side. Thus the comment itself did not target you.

You cannot accuse me of Ad Hominem and then say the comment is "not directed at" me, it obviously is.

I don’t know, you’re a Brit and my English is not that bad, it’s crazy I can’t get even this simple point to you. So, again, I hate using the term Ad hominem, because it is associated in my head with sciolists who use it extensively, as I wrote above. Thus, when I used the term, I apologised for using such a construction which nowadays is almost under monopoly by those berks. It was merely a vocabulary conundrum of mine and did not include you, you had not even used the term.

Not what I said, I said moral corruption tends to percolate down the social strata because it makes it easier for the lower class to justify behavious if the upper class are already doing it.

My argument was that, in this particular case – abortions and moral irresponsibility – the lower class is simply short-sighted, to which you replied:

You are falling into the aristocratic fallacy that the "lower orders" are degenerate due to base stupidity/ignorance, such is not so. Historical degeneracy at the bottom of society tends to follow degeneracy at the top.

And the whole exchange unravelled into my demonstration that social elites cannot be blamed for this case in the same way they cannot be blamed for a few particular others, British football hooligans chiefly among them, which you acerbically dispute every step of the way.


We should figure out a way to bring this debate back to its original subject by the by, the word “abortion” was not used once on this page.