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.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

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.

In that case you may wish to state it more plainly. I am having to wade through long posts which use what I would have to call unnecessary figures and words. However, you are still ignoring my point about casual one night stands, and my experience that at least one party is not free to engage in such liasons.

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.

You can be sure I am aware. If you like I could write an essay on theological arguments delivered in the medieval university, or political ones in the Roman Senate - but short of that you should have picked up the references I have dropped.

Regardless, debate for support is political. Debate with an interlocutor is philosophical.

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.

Then be more careful what you write. Accusing me of "moaning" is not going to engender greater affection on my part, is it? Nor while questiong my mental factulties or calling my remarks "creepy".

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.

I dissagree, the "arbiter" cannot be just "ouselves" either singly or collectively. In order for their to be a "right" and "wrong" answer to a question the arbiter has to be independant of you or I and our preferences. Otherwise you can believe one thing, me another and we can both be right. That doesn't work, and it's not what New Atheists believe anyway. In order to have objective morality the most that we can be allowed to do is recognise the correct choice, but that choice has already been decided independant of our judgement and what we are doing is bringing our thinking into harmony with the "right" choice.

Anything less and moral objectivity collapses, because thew only way moral objectivity can work is if we are all the object and none of us the subject.

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?

Ideally we would all meet the "right person" and get married before we felt the need for more casual human contact. A marriage is really just a "sex liscence", so you are basically correct there. However, finding that person is actually quite difficult, and in view of that I'm quite happy for people to have sex with partners they have not made a lifelong commitment to. That is not an endorsement of casual sex, I ferverently believe you should be in a relationship before engaging in bedroom gymnastics.

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.

Reading your last post in the context of this statement I believe what you should have written was, "the accusation 'Ad Hominem'", or simply put "Ad Hominem" in quotation marks, without that context the more direct reading is that you dislike people who make Ad Hominem attacks, which is what you accused me of.

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

My contention is that moral degeneracy in the elite encourages moral degeneracy in those below them. In this case "elite" should be understood to be those either in charge or in influencial positions. The link is this: If a rich banker is seen to "steal" or or legally hoodwink investors or to extort money from debters then less wealthy people conclude that if he can steal millions using clever accounting they can shimy up a ladder and nick the lead off the Church roof, especially if the bishop lives in a big house and therefor looks rich. Put another way, when you percieve that your rulers do not uphold good standards of personnal behaviour you have no external motivation to do better yourself.

With regards hooligans, their immoral behaviour is mainly rioting and drinking; two things rich students are historically known for. The Bullers are just a formalised example of a ancient tradition.

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.

Establishing a frame of moral reference is important for this sort of debate.

[Nowake]

Hallo

In that case you may wish to state it more plainly. I am having to wade through long posts which use what I would have to call unnecessary figures and words. However, you are still ignoring my point about casual one night stands, and my experience that at least one party is not free to engage in such liasons. (...)
You can be sure I am aware. If you like I could write an essay on theological arguments delivered in the medieval university, or political ones in the Roman Senate - but short of that you should have picked up the references I have dropped.
Regardless, debate for support is political. Debate with an interlocutor is philosophical.

I’m sorry PVC, I was not aware wading through these posts tires your mental faculties to such a degree that you’ve become unable to reply punctually. Our talk on one night stands was resolved; I explained over and over that casual sex can be had perfectly safe and morally sound; hence, if a person decides to be negligent when engaging in casual sex by going for a really random one night stand, that is not the fault of sexual liberty anymore and it is not a reason to curtail it.
I am glad you recognized your mistake in utilizing the term demagogy and have now dropped it, it really was misleading. As to your observations on debates, they’re neither here nor there

I dissagree, the "arbiter" cannot be just "ouselves" either singly or collectively. In order for their to be a "right" and "wrong" answer to a question the arbiter has to be independant of you or I and our preferences. Otherwise you can believe one thing, me another and we can both be right. That doesn't work, and it's not what New Atheists believe anyway. In order to have objective morality the most that we can be allowed to do is recognise the correct choice, but that choice has already been decided independant of our judgement and what we are doing is bringing our thinking into harmony with the "right" choice.

Oh boy, here we go again. Look, any normal person is capable, in the absence of judgement impairing trauma and other psychological issues, of utilizing empathy in order to identify the one situation in which their actions have the least negative impact on another human being. You write:
“that choice has already been decided independant (sic) of our judgement”
as if that would imply an abstract authority, when in fact you are describing the very mundane realization that there’s always an optimal solution to a certain problem. You don’t go about talking about the technological arbiter and how our brain is bringing our thinking into harmony with the “right” technological choice, do you? It would just be an utterly redundant way of asserting that there’s always a best outcome for a given set of parameters. The empathic function of identifying the best moral outcome is our moral arbiter, and normal persons may be more or less proficient at searching it within themselves. Reaching different moral conclusions in this case does not mean both persons are right, it means one’s emotional intelligence (which can be increased through education a lot) is more developed than another’s.

My contention is that moral degeneracy in the elite encourages moral degeneracy in those below them. In this case "elite" should be understood to be those either in charge or in influencial positions. The link is this: If a rich banker is seen to "steal" or or legally hoodwink investors or to extort money from debters then less wealthy people conclude that if he can steal millions using clever accounting they can shimy up a ladder and nick the lead off the Church roof, especially if the bishop lives in a big house and therefor looks rich. Put another way, when you percieve that your rulers do not uphold good standards of personnal behaviour you have no external motivation to do better yourself.

Yes PVC, I perfectly know what your argument was. Almost all our points by now have gone through several exchanges in which you pretty much repeat the same statement or write answers which do not reply directly to my assertions. While I have become inured to it by now, it would be kind if you’d be a good sport and employ a tad more creativity.
Yes, both ultras and bullers drink and both ultras and bullers break glass (though bullers do it in a controlled environment and pay for it). Ultras also riot and kill citizens, while you still have to mention one case in which bullers have done such a thing. Point made. But lets reboot.
You believe the current predicament of the lower class, i.e. the increase in the rate of abortions, is caused by a moral degeneracy inspired by the social elite. Please, to resume ourselves to our specific case, the onus is on you, go ahead.

Establishing a frame of moral reference is important for this sort of debate.

Oh I think it a safe bet to say everyone has figured you out already PVC

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Hallo

I’m sorry PVC, I was not aware wading through these posts tires your mental faculties to such a degree that you’ve become unable to reply punctually.

Trying to decipher your grammar is what tries my mental faculties.

Our talk on one night stands was resolved; I explained over and over that casual sex can be had perfectly safe and morally sound; hence, if a person decides to be negligent when engaging in casual sex by going for a really random one night stand, that is not the fault of sexual liberty anymore and it is not a reason to curtail it.

I don't see that as resolved - unless you want a special dispensation for a particular lifestyle practiced by a small number od people in a particular social context - it remains true that most people are "negligent" and not "safe" or especially "moral". If most people are "abusing" sexual liberty you have to look at the idea and wonder if, really, the kind of sexual discourse we have is really healthy.

I am glad you recognized your mistake in utilizing the term demagogy and have now dropped it, it really was misleading. As to your observations on debates, they’re neither here nor there

You're stretching the meaning of what I wrote - demagogy is playing to the crowd. If that's your primary objective you're still culpable.

Oh boy, here we go again. Look, any normal person is capable, in the absence of judgement impairing trauma and other psychological issues, of utilizing empathy in order to identify the one situation in which their actions have the least negative impact on another human being. You write:
“that choice has already been decided independant (sic) of our judgement”
as if that would imply an abstract authority, when in fact you are describing the very mundane realization that there’s always an optimal solution to a certain problem. You don’t go about talking about the technological arbiter and how our brain is bringing our thinking into harmony with the “right” technological choice, do you? It would just be an utterly redundant way of asserting that there’s always a best outcome for a given set of parameters. The empathic function of identifying the best moral outcome is our moral arbiter, and normal persons may be more or less proficient at searching it within themselves. Reaching different moral conclusions in this case does not mean both persons are right, it means one’s emotional intelligence (which can be increased through education a lot) is more developed than another’s.

What you are describing is intellectual process, but not the meta-ethics behind ethical decision making. Further, you are conflating the realm of ethics with that of the physical sciences - this makes a certain amount of sense in a metaphysical model which is monistic, but it is at odds with concepts such as "good" and "evil". You are just describing Utilitarianism, that's not morality in terms of "good and "evil", just "most benefit". In which case you are not talking about the "best" in an objective sense just the "preffered" in a mean or modal sense accross the population.

That is at odds with New Atheist rhetoric, and you just can't have it both ways.

Yes PVC, I perfectly know what your argument was. Almost all our points by now have gone through several exchanges in which you pretty much repeat the same statement or write answers which do not reply directly to my assertions. While I have become inured to it by now, it would be kind if you’d be a good sport and employ a tad more creativity.
Yes, both ultras and bullers drink and both ultras and bullers break glass (though bullers do it in a controlled environment and pay for it). Ultras also riot and kill citizens, while you still have to mention one case in which bullers have done such a thing. Point made. But lets reboot.

So the difference is that Ultras kill people? Surely that's just a result of critical mass in the mob and the herd instinct magnifying the actions pf the individual.

You believe the current predicament of the lower class, i.e. the increase in the rate of abortions, is caused by a moral degeneracy inspired by the social elite. Please, to resume ourselves to our specific case, the onus is on you, go ahead.

Easy. Violent student riots in which shops were smashed and public monuments decicrated were follwed by popular riots in whichs hops wer smashed up and stuff nicked. In both case initially peaceful protest degenerated into random wanton violence and the students came first. Subsequently, it was discovered that many of these students were from wealthy upper class families who would not be practically affected by the rise in student fees.

Oh I think it a safe bet to say everyone has figured you out already PVC

Please, don't be coy. Tell the audience exactly what you think of me.

[Nowake]

Hello people

Trying to decipher your grammar is what tries my mental faculties. (...)
I don't see that as resolved - unless you want a special dispensation for a particular lifestyle practiced by a small number od people in a particular social context - it remains true that most people are "negligent" and not "safe" or especially "moral". If most people are "abusing" sexual liberty you have to look at the idea and wonder if, really, the kind of sexual discourse we have is really healthy. (...)
You're stretching the meaning of what I wrote - demagogy is playing to the crowd. If that's your primary objective you're still culpable.

I already remarked that you do not know the meaning of your own words, because, as I wrote before, simply aiming your arguments towards an independent third party does not equate to playing on that party’s prejudice. The dictionary definition of demagogy: the art and practice of gaining power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people. Could you point out how I have aroused the emotions, passions and prejudices of our readers?
I’d be glad to improve my grammar if you could point the flaws for me PVC, please. I am by no means claiming to be proficient, so I’d welcome your input.
Now, onto sexual liberty, your assertion about which group constitutes the majority still remains to be demonstrated. Secondly, and this should be an inescapable truth, the only path one can rightfully take in addressing the poor understanding of sexual liberty is to work on providing the best environment for its correct development. Upon reaching that point, you have to allow humans their agency. I suppose we are reaching here a negative versus positive liberty argument, with foreseeable results sadly.
I have to quote Isaiah Berlin though because, the fact of the matter is, sexual liberty is part of one’s fundamentally private sphere.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Hobbes, and those who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another, and making social life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to keep them in their places, and wished correspondingly to increase the area of centralized control, and decrease that of the individual. But both sides agreed that some portion of human existence must remain independent of the sphere of social control. To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism.

Lets define the following as Freedom from:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

‘All the errors which a man is likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem is good.’ To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live.

And the next as Freedom to:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they know it themselves. What, at most, this entails is that they would not resist me if they were rational, and as wise as I, and understood their interests as I do. But I may go on to claim a good deal more than this. I may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity – their latent rational will, or their ‘true’ purpose – and that this entity, although it is belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account.
Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, fulfilment of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit submerged and inarticulate, self.

Oh boy, here we go again. Look, any normal person is capable, in the absence of judgement impairing trauma and other psychological issues, of utilizing empathy in order to identify the one situation in which their actions have the least negative impact on another human being. You write:
“that choice has already been decided independant (sic) of our judgement”
as if that would imply an abstract authority, when in fact you are describing the very mundane realization that there’s always an optimal solution to a certain problem. You don’t go about talking about the technological arbiter and how our brain is bringing our thinking into harmony with the “right” technological choice, do you? It would just be an utterly redundant way of asserting that there’s always a best outcome for a given set of parameters. The empathic function of identifying the best moral outcome is our moral arbiter, and normal persons may be more or less proficient at searching it within themselves. Reaching different moral conclusions in this case does not mean both persons are right, it means one’s emotional intelligence (which can be increased through education a lot) is more developed than another’s.

What you are describing is intellectual process, but not the meta-ethics behind ethical decision making. Further, you are conflating the realm of ethics with that of the physical sciences - this makes a certain amount of sense in a metaphysical model which is monistic, but it is at odds with concepts such as "good" and "evil". You are just describing Utilitarianism, that's not morality in terms of "good and "evil", just "most benefit". In which case you are not talking about the "best" in an objective sense just the "preffered" in a mean or modal sense accross the population.
That is at odds with New Atheist rhetoric, and you just can't have it both ways.

You are wrapping yourself in words mister. And you are not doing a very good job at it. First of all, I did not describe a purely cognitive intellectual process and I clearly mentioned we are referring to one’s emotional intelligence. The best moral outcome, the best empathic outcome, does not equate to the most benefit, so any hint of utilitarianism is out of the picture. The moral outcome is always empathy conditioned and it can very well contradict the overall benefit. Also, to quote Paul Zak: “We’re social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain, so I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy, so I tend to do that thing.”, referring to the common emotional development of people. And please provide some sort of sources on that New Atheist rhetoric that so agrees with you.

So the difference is that Ultras kill people? Surely that's just a result of critical mass in the mob and the herd instinct magnifying the actions pf the individual. (...)

You believe the current predicament of the lower class, i.e. the increase in the rate of abortions, is caused by a moral degeneracy inspired by the social elite. Please, to resume ourselves to our specific case, the onus is on you, go ahead.

Easy. Violent student riots in which shops were smashed and public monuments decicrated were follwed by popular riots in whichs hops wer smashed up and stuff nicked. In both case initially peaceful protest degenerated into random wanton violence and the students came first. Subsequently, it was discovered that many of these students were from wealthy upper class families who would not be practically affected by the rise in student fees.

Please provide evidence for the implicit allegation that bullers would also cause murders during their private parties should their numbers reach a critical mass.
And before we engage in another pointless side-debate, how does your last paragraph prove the way in which the rate of abortions rose amongst the lower class due to the moral degeneracy of the social elite? You are side-stepping the issue.
And I pose it to you now because I am tired of waiting for a cogent argument, that it would be a lot more logical, considering the history of the movement, to observe how in the past the widespread use of abortion amongst a lower class desperate to avoid poverty, morally desensitised by war and urban uprooting and ignorant of the plethora and efficiency of contraceptive methods (as many were in the ‘50s to ‘90s) actually influenced the young social elite into accepting abortion as norm even though they had the means to secure the upbringing of their children.

Please, don't be coy. Tell the audience exactly what you think of me.

Personally, that you are a textbook case of a person who was not yet seriously confronted by reality. This, of course, I presume and my opinion is subjective. I believe your frame of reference was established with your first post. No one denies that your argument needs to be dismissed only on factual grounds, but you should not be that worried the readers do not understand your Judeo-Christian cultural baggage

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Hello people

I already remarked that you do not know the meaning of your own words, because, as I wrote before, simply aiming your arguments towards an independent third party does not equate to playing on that party’s prejudice. The dictionary definition of demagogy: the art and practice of gaining power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people. Could you point out how I have aroused the emotions, passions and prejudices of our readers?

Trying is not succeeding, personally I feel that the way you play to the crowd and the little sniping comments are are directed at me, and not my arguments.

I’d be glad to improve my grammar if you could point the flaws for me PVC, please. I am by no means claiming to be proficient, so I’d welcome your input.

I already have, once.

Now, onto sexual liberty, your assertion about which group constitutes the majority still remains to be demonstrated.

I would have thought that would be taken as a given, really, one only has to spend a few evenings in a university town to see the sort of liaisons most people engage in. Of an evening the majority of people who go out go to clubs, the largest clubs have the most people and they are invariably environments where people are intoxicated and the majority of people don't know each other.

Secondly, and this should be an inescapable truth, the only path one can rightfully take in addressing the poor understanding of sexual liberty is to work on providing the best environment for its correct development. Upon reaching that point, you have to allow humans their agency. I suppose we are reaching here a negative versus positive liberty argument, with foreseeable results sadly.

Underlying this is the assumption that "liberty" should be equated with freedom of action, and that freedom is exercised by action. Am I sexually oppressed if I choose not to have sex? I exercise my sexual freedom by not having sex and choosing to be discriminating in my associations.

I'm sorry, but I do not equate "liberty" with "action", otherwise I would conclude that we are all slaves because there are almost no instances in which our actions are not constrained.

I have to quote Isaiah Berlin though because, the fact of the matter is, sexual liberty is part of one’s fundamentally private sphere.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Hobbes, and those who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another, and making social life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to keep them in their places, and wished correspondingly to increase the area of centralized control, and decrease that of the individual. But both sides agreed that some portion of human existence must remain independent of the sphere of social control. To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism.

Lets define the following as Freedom from:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

‘All the errors which a man is likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem is good.’ To threaten a man with persecution unless he submits to a life in which he exercises no choices of his goals; to block before him every door but one, no matter how noble the prospect upon which it opens, or how benevolent the motives of those who arrange this, is to sin against the truth that he is a man, a being with a life of his own to live.

And the next as Freedom to:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they know it themselves. What, at most, this entails is that they would not resist me if they were rational, and as wise as I, and understood their interests as I do. But I may go on to claim a good deal more than this. I may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity – their latent rational will, or their ‘true’ purpose – and that this entity, although it is belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account.
Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, fulfilment of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit submerged and inarticulate, self.

I'm sorry, but who (or what) you choose to have sex with can and does have profound effects on your community and your family. It is one thing to say that what one does behind closed doors is your own private matter, and quite another to say that who you choose to bring into your bedroom is. The former is clearly the business of those two people, the latter is not.

You are wrapping yourself in words mister. And you are not doing a very good job at it. First of all, I did not describe a purely cognitive intellectual process and I clearly mentioned we are referring to one’s emotional intelligence. The best moral outcome, the best empathic outcome, does not equate to the most benefit, so any hint of utilitarianism is out of the picture. The moral outcome is always empathy conditioned and it can very well contradict the overall benefit. Also, to quote Paul Zak: “We’re social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain, so I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy, so I tend to do that thing.”, referring to the common emotional development of people. And please provide some sort of sources on that New Atheist rhetoric that so agrees with you.

"Benefit" does not have to be purely practical, in this case "benefit" might be the decision that sits well with the greatest number of people, given that we are all what you call "empathetic". You've actually proved this by quoting Paul Zak, according to him he does things that make him feel better, i.e. for his own benefit.

In any case, how is "emotional intelligence" not a cognitive process? It's just something your brain does, right?

Please provide evidence for the implicit allegation that bullers would also cause murders during their private parties should their numbers reach a critical mass.

What sort of evidence would you like? It's obvious that the more men who have in a riot the more likely the violence will escalate, and the more people in a protest the more likely it will become a riot. I'm not making an implicit allegation about the Bullers, because 1000 Bullers are somewhat impractical, but one only has to look at previous student riots to see that rioters are more violent the more of them there are. The point is not that the Bullers might cause a riot, but that the sort of person who enjoys being a Buller might enjoy rioting.

You're trying to create a straw man, you want me to claim the upper class is murderous and that's why the lower class is murderous. Sorry, I'm not pushing the point that far. For one thing, the Upper Class today are clever enough to know what fingerprints and CCTV is, well with a few notable exceptions this Summer.

And before we engage in another pointless side-debate, how does your last paragraph prove the way in which the rate of abortions rose amongst the lower class due to the moral degeneracy of the social elite?

I don't believe I said that. In fact I'm sure I didn't, I pointed to sexual immorality, but in this country abortion is, and has historically been, quite middle class. This is particularly true today, were it not we would not have anywhere near as many poor single teenage mothers, would we?

You are side-stepping the issue.

You are constantly moving the issue.

And I pose it to you now because I am tired of waiting for a cogent argument, that it would be a lot more logical, considering the history of the movement, to observe how in the past the widespread use of abortion amongst a lower class desperate to avoid poverty, morally desensitised by war and urban uprooting and ignorant of the plethora and efficiency of contraceptive methods (as many were in the ‘50s to ‘90s) actually influenced the young social elite into accepting abortion as norm even though they had the means to secure the upbringing of their children.

As I said, I don't see it as a lower class phenomenon and I don't recognise "morally desensitised by war and urban uprooting" as a particularly lower class penomenon either, at least in the UK.

Personally, that you are a textbook case of a person who was not yet seriously confronted by reality. This, of course, I presume and my opinion is subjective. I believe your frame of reference was established with your first post. No one denies that your argument needs to be dismissed only on factual grounds, but you should not be that worried the readers do not understand your Judeo-Christian cultural baggage

Just because I am a Christian does not mean I have "Judeo-Christian" baggage", whatever that means anyway; it's not like I have Augustinian sexual hangups or worry about my foreskin. I wasn't exactly raised Christian, after all.

As far as, "not yet seriously confronted by reality" that's rich coming from someone who is claims to be young and well educated from a foundation level, and probably had wealthy parents given that he was taught rhetoric in school.

I'm fed up now, so I'm going to go away and pray for forgiveness.

[Nowake]

I'm fed up now, so I'm going to go away and pray for forgiveness.

NO! Come back to us, we have cookies

Now where were we *shuffle shuffle* ah yes, Kralizec's post, he was pretty upset for a lack of feedback.

Simply put, I don't think that an embryo is a human being in any relevant sense of the word, and doesn't deserve to be protected by the law. For the later stages, somebody here (forgot who) suggested that awareness be a criterium, but that's a bit iffy - I'm not versed in developmental psychology, but IIRC even newborn infants are not even self-aware in the sense that they realize they're independent creatures, distinct from their mother and other humans. I hasten to add that I don't think that self-awareness should be a criterium (otherwise, post-natal abortions would be legal), I'm just pointing out that the mere presence of some neurological activity doesn't necessarily amount to much - I have no idea when the first brain cells begin to develop, but it sounds like an arbitrary criterium. Which is not to say that I have an idea where the cut-off point should be.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on two related subjects:
Wrongful birth: this term refers to legal cases where a pregnant woman consults a doctor, to see if the unborn child is in good health. The child actually has some serious genetic defect or some other health issue, but the doctor (through negligence) fails to detect this. The woman, thinking that everything is allright, gives birth to the child months later and is unpleasantly surprised, to say the least. She sues the doctor; the grounds being that he failed in his duty and the damages being the costs of raising a disabled child and/or emotional damage.
So, thoughts? I imagine that those opposed to abortion in generally would als oppose this one, but since it is legal, should the woman's claims be honoured?

Wrongful life: related to the above. The difference is that the now-mature child, or the parents on behalf of the child, sue the doctor for damages that the child itself has suffered. Usually, this will be the costs of living after reaching maturity, as the child will in all likelyhood never be able to hold a paying job. Such claims have been honoured in a number of countries; personally I think they're absurd. Simplified, the essence of civil torts is the premise that the claimant would have been better off if the defendent had acted in a correct matter. But if that had happened, the claimant (the disabled child) wouldn't have existed at all.
I know of one Dutch case at our supreme court where such a claim was honoured, naturally provoking a storm of controversy. As for the reasoning above (the child's existence versus his non-existence), the supreme court refused to even adress the argument. A similar claim has been accepted in France by their highest court years ago, but since then the French parliament has outlawed claims like this.

Yet I agree with your premise, so as you correctly point out, the first definitely presents grounds for trial.
The second is ethically problematic. Professionally, I would opine that it should be litigated under the argument that the child is simply a patient harmed by the medic's actions. However, the optimal solution, or at least the one preventing headaches, would be to my mind to always attempt to fold the case into the parents' wrongful birth lawsuit and basically demand for their damages to be calculated by taking into account the full life span of the human being they brought to life, seeing as it will always remain in their care.

[Nowake]

More from Mississippi, for the ones who still have to catch up:


The next front in the abortion wars: Birth control

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Mississippi debates a "Personhood" initiative that could ban the pill -- but ultimately aims at Roe v. Wade

Dr. Freda Bush has a warm, motherly smile. In her office just outside Jackson, Miss., she smiles as she hands me a brochure that calls abortion the genocide of African-Americans, and again, sweetly, as she explains why an abortion ban should not include exceptions for rape or incest victims. The smile turns into a chuckle as she recounts what the daughter of one rape victim told her: “My momma says I’m a blessing. Now, she still don’t care for the guy who raped her! But she’s glad she let me live.”
Bush is smiling, too, in the video she made to support as restrictive an abortion ban as any state has voted on, Initiative 26, or the Personhood Amendment, which faces Mississippi voters on Nov. 8. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, black or white, or even if your father was a rapist!” she trills. But Initiative 26, which would change the definition of “person” in the Mississippi state Constitution to “include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof,” is more than just an absolute ban on abortion and a barely veiled shot at Roe v. Wade — although it is both. By its own logic, the initiative would almost certainly ban common forms of birth control like the IUD and the morning-after pill, call into question the legality of the common birth-control pill, and even open the door to investigating women who have suffered miscarriages.
Personhood amendments were once considered too radical for the mainstream pro-life movement, but in the most conservative state in the country, with an energized, church-mobilized grass roots, Mississippi could well be the first state to pass one. Initiative 26 even has the state’s top Democrats behind it.
And in Bush, it even has a respectable medical face. Last month, Bush led a press conference of fellow gynecologists to try to refute the “scare tactics” of the opposition, which includes even the solidly conservative Mississippi State Medical Association. (The group feared 26 would “place in jeopardy a physician who tries to save a woman’s life.”) In one of several “Yes on 26″ videos in which she stars, Bush says unequivocally, “Amendment 26 will not ban contraception.”
But when we spoke, Bush was far less sure. And if her smiling face carries the day, the debate over even basic access to birth control could be heading to similar votes in every state legislature, and extremists have their dream case to take to a Supreme Court where the Roe majority teeters precariously.
- – - – - – - – - -
That’s partly because the Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.
Indeed, at least one pro-Personhood doctor in Mississippi, Beverly McMillan, refused to prescribe the pill before retiring last year, writing, “I painfully agree that birth control pills do in fact cause abortions.” Bush does prescribe the pill, but says, “There’s good science on both sides … I think there’s more science to support conception not occurring.” Given that the Personhood Amendment is so vague, I asked her, what would stop the alleged “good science” on one side from prevailing and banning even the pill?
Bush paused. “I could say that is not the intent,” she said. “I don’t have an answer for that particular [case], how it would be settled, but I do know this is simple.” Which part is simple? “The amendment is simple,” she said. “You can play the ‘what if’ game, but if you keep it simple, this is a person who deserves life.” What about the IUD, which she refuses to prescribe for moral reasons, and which McMillan told me the Personhood Amendment would ban? “I’m not the authority on what would and would not be banned.” No – Bush simply plays one on TV. And if her amendment passes, only condoms, diaphragms and natural family planning — the rhythm method – would be guaranteed in Mississippi.
Bush also says in the commercial that the amendment wouldn’t “criminalize mothers and investigate them when they have miscarriages.” And yet if the willful destruction of an embryo is a murder, then that makes a miscarried woman’s body a potential crime scene or child welfare investigation. What about women whose miscarriages were suspected to be deliberate or due to their own negligence? One Personhood opponent, Michelle Johansen, told me she wondered whether she could have been investigated for miscarrying a wanted, five-week pregnancy, because she rode a roller coaster. (Her doctor ultimately told her they were unrelated.)
The boilerplate Personhood response, echoed by both McMillan and Bush, is that no woman was prosecuted for miscarriage before Roe v. Wade, so why start now? Of course, there was no Personhood amendment at the time, nor much knowledge of embryonic development. And in countries with absolute abortion bans, like El Salvador, women are regularly investigated and jailed when found to have induced miscarriages.
Pressed, Bush said, “Look at the numbers of women who were injuring themselves [pre-Roe] in an attempt to have an abortion. It was not 53 million,” the estimated number of abortions since Roe v. Wade.
“I don’t have all the answers,” she said, “but those questions that are there do not justify allowing nine out of 10 of the abortions that are being done that are not for the hard cases,” she said.
But a Colorado-based Personhood activist, Ed Hanks, is more than willing to publicly take things to their logical conclusion. He wrote on the Personhood Mississippi Facebook page that after abortion is banned, “the penalties have to be the same [for a women as well as doctors], as they would have to intentionally commit a known felony in order to kill their child. Society isn’t comfortable with this yet because abortion has been ‘normalized’ — as the Personhood message penetrates, then society will understand why women need to be punished just as surely as they understand why there can be no exceptions for rape/incest.”
- – - – - – - – - -
Personhood represents an unapologetic and arguably more ideologically consistent form of the anti-choice movement. It aims squarely for Roe v. Wade by seizing on language from former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun – the author of the Roe decision — during the hearings that the case would “collapse” if “this suggestion of personhood is established … for the fetus.”
Similar ballot measures have failed twice in Colorado, where an evangelical pastor and a Catholic lawyer started the Personhood movement, but Mississippi is no Colorado. It’s the most conservative state in the nation. Planned Parenthood (which doesn’t even provide abortions in its one clinic here) and the ACLU are dirty words. Where there were once seven abortion clinics in the state, the one remaining flies in a doctor from out of state. As for supporting life, Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is the worst of any state in the nation. It also has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy nationwide, alongside a child welfare system that remains dangerously broken.)
Even so, if Initiative 26 passes, it would embolden similar efforts in Ohio, South Dakota, Florida and other states, currently trying to get a Personhood amendment on the ballot in 2012. And though there have been no reliable public polls, insiders on both sides believe it is headed for approval. “This thing will pass if people don’t understand what it really means,” says Oxford-based attorney and Initiative 26 opponent Forrest Jenkins. The Personhood movement “can either convince people that birth control is abortion or they can convince people that it’s not really true and we’re just being silly.” (Indeed, when I asked one college student who described himself as pro-life about the birth-control implications, he said, “I thought that was just gossip.”) Unfortunately for opponents, talking about sweeping and nuanced implications takes a lot more words than “stop killing babies.”
Mindful of anti-abortion sentiment in the state, even the local pro-choice opposition has taken to referring to all these implications – like banning birth-control pills — as “unintended consequences” of the initiative. But as my conversations in Mississippi with pro-Initiative 26 doctors made clear, for many Personhood supporters, these effects are anything but unintended. They’re part of the plan.
- – - – - – - – - -
I had barely arrived in Mississippi when I was declared a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” by the grass-roots wing of the movement. Les Riley, the self-described “tractor salesman with 10 kids and no money” who got Personhood on the ballot, stopped responding to my messages, so I’d posted interview requests on the Personhood Mississippi Facebook page, disclosing that I was pro-choice but committed to giving them a fair hearing.
“This is just a reminder of some of the ‘Neutral and Fair’ mainstream media that are trying to lure us into debate, argument, and confrontation,” Wiley S. Pinkerton wrote on the same page, not long after. “They are coming to this site hoping to catch us without the full armor of God.”
Of course, even if I’d wanted to, the chances of catching any of them without “the armor of God” seemed remote. The Personhood movement in Mississippi is openly theocratic. Riley has written that “for years, the pro-life movement and the religious right has allowed the charge [of being “religiously motivated”] to make them run for cover. I think we should embrace it.” Riley, in fact, had already enthusiastically embraced Christian secessionist and neo-Confederate groups as part of his coalition. (The national media play his personal history received by the time of my visit this month might explain some of the hostility to the press.)
Last summer, a more mainstream face, Brad Prewitt – a lobbyist and former high-level staffer for U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran – took over the campaign at the request of the American Family Association, which, like Prewitt, is based in Tupelo. (Riley continues to actively campaign, though he isn’t listed on the official Yes on 26 site. Prewitt promised an interview several times, but never came through.) Prewitt, too, publicly described the conceptual origin of Personhood being “the Bible, Genesis,” and declared, “Mississippi is still a God-fearing state.”
At several public forums organized by the secretary of state to discuss ballot initiatives, resident Scott Murray’s statement was typical: “I know there is an issue with pregnancies, unmarried pregnancies, but I tell you the greatest prevention is God, and we’ve got to return to God.” So was Stephen Hannabass’ assertion that “we’ve got to repent. We’ve got to come before God and beg for mercy for our state and for our country.”
There are women in the Personhood movement too, of course. In Tupelo, two of them thanked the men who were “created to be protectors” and who “are to speak out for the women and children.” Another, who said she wished the law had protected her from her own choice to have an abortion at 18, took a more practical tack: “Yes, it’s going to cost us money, but you know what? Have we thought about the cost it’s already costing the state from the ladies who are hurting themselves and the babies and the hurts?”
- – - – - – - – - -
But is there mercy for women facing life-threatening pregnancies – specifically ectopic pregnancies, which are never viable and can seriously threaten a woman’s life? In countries with absolute abortion bans and in many Catholic hospitals, doctors often have to wait to operate until fetal death or until there is a rupture, increasing the risks to the mother and baby.
As for cases where a woman has to choose between pursuing treatment for a life-threatening illness and her pregnancy, McMillan said, “I like to think about them as a graph. You have health going up and down, you have time nine months going this way. Here’s the mother’s health going down, down, down over those nine months of pregnancy. Here’s the baby’s chance of survival going up, up, up over that nine months. What I pray to recognize is that when those two lines intersect. That’s not the time for an abortion but for a planned early delivery.” I pointed out that, say, cancer tended to involve far less predictability than she described. “It’s a medical wisdom thing. You try your best,” the doctor replied.
The Yes on 26 site speaks of “saving both lives” as if it’s an unequivocal setup in which doctors can just pick both. “You can’t write a law that takes into account all of the amazing range within pregnancies,” responds Randall Hines, a Jackson doctor who opposes the initiative. “That’s why physicians have to counsel patients given the best evidence that they have.”
Prewitt has also frequently proclaimed that in-vitro fertilization, which gave him his two sons, won’t be banned under the measure. But Hines, one of only three doctors who do IVF in the state, told me, “It’s conceivable that with this same amendment, some IVF practices would be illegal,” adding, “I’ve heard a variety of opinions and they all sound bad.”
This, too, is seen as simple by the Personhood crowd, whose understanding of the actual science is, well, simplistic. Alex Strahan, who described himself as Personhood’s Southern field director (he’s not currently listed on the site), said at the Tupelo hearing, “If you harvest 10 eggs and you implant three and you throw away the other seven, you’re aborting seven children. You’re aborting seven humans. You’re killing seven humans. So do it the right way and don’t kill children.”
The best chance of an in-vitro pregnancy involves a winnowing process, starting with harvesting eggs and ideally ending in a fertilized egg implanting, and embryos are usually frozen in the process. Using all of the fertilized eggs at once could result in a dangerous multiple pregnancy, or if fewer are used, a very low chance of success. Some Personhood people even want to do away with freezing embryos, because roughly half of the embryos don’t survive it. Hines says of these strategies, “We would lower the overall pregnancy rate and we would often fail.” He says several patients have called frantically asking what to do about their frozen embryos. “These people who say that they’re all about the sanctity of life are creating great anxiety for women who are already desperate to have children,” Hines says. Personhood advocates, including Prewitt, have also suggested couples give leftover embryos, if there are any, up for “adoption” by another family.
- – - – - – - – - -
So how did something so radical get on the ballot in a state where such initiatives are rare? Prewitt has admitted that he didn’t even sign the initial petition to get Personhood on the ballot, which was filed in February. That’s not particularly surprising; until Riley got close to, then exceeded, the 90,000 needed signatures, his cause was considered marginal and dangerous by many mainstream pro-lifers.
Personhood hadn’t just failed in Colorado; it had also helped elect a pro-choice Democrat to the Senate, according to that state’s Republican Party chair. (Michael Bennet had run ads saying opponent and Personhood supporter Ken Buck wanted to ban birth control, and by the time Buck backed off it was too late; Bennet won by dint of independent women.) Florida’s Catholic bishops opposed it as strategically unsound. (Mississippi’s Catholic brass followed.) And it was just plain weird – there was its Coloradan leader (who also declined comment), darkly warning of a future of human-animal and human-robot hybrids unless Personhood amendments were broadly accepted.
It was the American Family Association endorsement that put media muscle behind the movement in Mississippi, with email blasts, radio PSAs and interviews, promotions on its own website, and combined with the grass-roots energy, the state’s anti-choice groups took notice. Suddenly, people who had previously focused on incremental change – parental consent laws, waiting periods, ultrasound laws – were ecstatically heralding an end of the “murders.” Mike Huckabee keynoted a fundraiser and even presumed GOP front-runner Mitt Romney to endorse the concept on his show. (It’s unclear if Romney knew what he was getting into.)
The state’s tiny pro-choice contingent was stunned by Personhood’s success. It didn’t help that a legal challenge mounted, and eventually lost, by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood delayed the official opposition. The Personhood coalition had been busy organizing – getting churches on board, showing up at every gun show, county fair and flea market telling people it would save babies — for months. But the opposition coalition, known as Mississippi for Healthy Families, waited until a state Supreme Court decision a month ago kept the initiative on the ballot. Before that, says Stan Flint, the managing partner of Southern Strategies who’s advising them, “People wouldn’t pull out a checkbook.”
They could expect no help from local Democrats. The party’s current candidate for governor, Johnny Dupree, who would be the first black statewide official since Reconstruction, supports Personhood. (Republican candidate Phil Bryant embraced Personhood early on, and co-chairs Yes on 26.) Only one of Mississippi’s legislators, Deborah Dawkins, has come out against the measure, telling the Huffington Post that her fellow Democrats “are at a different place in their life, they’ve got to have a job.”
Just how much Personhood has succeeded in moving the goalposts was clear at a recent gubernatorial debate. Dupree said he had concerns about rape and incest victims and the impact on birth control. “But I’m answering the question and voting on the question based on what was asked in the initiative,” he said. “That initiative says, ‘Where do you believe life begins?’ I believe life begins at conception.”
Cristen Hemmins, an anti-26 activist and survivor of a brutal carjacking, rape and shooting, told me she’d gotten a call from Dupree after repeatedly contacting his office. Dupree reiterated that he opposes abortion but thought there should be some provisions for rape and incest victims. Moreover, he said, his daughter had had an ectopic pregnancy and eventually had a child through IVF, both situations potentially impacted by Personhood.
“I said, ‘I don’t understand, if you’re for all these things … why are you voting yes?’” Hemmins recalled. “[Dupree] said, ‘I’m starting to see that there are issues …I’ve said I’m going to vote yes and it’s too late to go back on it now. It’d destroy me politically.’”
I tried to confirm those quotes with Dupree; he did not return calls to his cellphone.
But Democratic candidates aren’t the only ones who are scared. As one anti-Personhood woman angrily put it in a community forum in Cleveland, Miss., I attended last week, “They are counting on us being so afraid of being ostracized in our communities.”
Personhood advocates say all these ambiguities can be hashed out later by the Legislature – quite the small government line, leaving some room for the opposition to use conservative rhetoric.
“We feel it’s the greatest invasion of government into private family matters in the nation’s history,” says Flint. “We’re in a half a billion dollar budget hole. We don’t need ludicrous lawsuits about dangerously extreme constitutional amendments.” Anti-26 phone bankers have cited the possibility of higher taxes to pay for all of those lawsuits, criminal enforcements and presumed new additions to the Medicaid rolls.
Internal polling showed the initiative had overwhelming support among the state’s voters – until they heard the opposition messaging. “It’s the largest movement on numbers I’ve seen, in terms of the undecideds. It reverses the position,” says Flint. A straightforward abortion ban, he said, would have been tougher to beat. “They’ve given us all the ammunition we need to defeat it.”
Personhood could represent the most audaciously successful reframing of the national abortion debate yet – in which pro-choicers have to fight over whether forms of birth control are abortion, as opposed to ensuring a woman’s right and access to reproductive choice. But even in Mississippi, allowing the fringe to drive the antiabortion movement could represent the point where it overplays its hand.
If it’s the latter, the best hope for defeating Personhood in Mississippi lies in the hands of people like the stammering middle-aged man I saw rise at the same community forum. The room was full of indignant pro-choicers, but he described himself as a minister opposed to abortion. “I’m disturbed by this initiative,” he volunteered. “In the name of something that pro-life people like myself think is good – stopping abortions – we’ve designed this thing that is horrible, or has the potential to be horrible.
“I do have a concern about the broadness of this and the way that it says things,” he went on. “And I tell you, it’s almost like it’s not true. It’s like they come in — I don’t like people coming through back doors. And I think I’m more honest than that as a preacher. I hope I am.”

Mississippi, Personhood and the future of the anti-abortion movement

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

A burgeoning effort among anti-abortion advocates to amend state constitutions to define life as beginning at conception. Such an amendment could outlaw abortion and may hinder access to birth control or in vitro fertilization.
So far though, no personhood amendment has gotten very close to becoming law. Many don’t get enough signatures to land a ballot initiative, and those that do have failed by double-digit margins. But Carmon thinks that may change when Mississippi votes on a new personhood amendment, Initiative 26, next week. “In the most conservative state in the country, with an energized, church-mobilized grass roots, Mississippi could well be the first state to pass one,” she writes.One key thing Carmon picked up on in her piece is the relatively fringe role the idea of personhood has played within the anti-abortion movement. I covered the personhood movement for Newsweek in 2008, when Colorado was the first-ever state to vote on such an amendment. The whole campaign was organized by an energetic 21-year-old named Kristi Burton. The anti-abortion establishment, however, was none too thrilled with it. Here’s whatI wrote back then:

Burton has not received much support for Amendment 48 from her most natural allies—the country's major pro-life groups. Heavyweights like National Right to Life and Americans United for Life are not backing it. "There are other ways to protect human life that we focus on because we believe they are the most effective," says Clark Forsythe, president of Americans United for Life. Although pro-life leaders generally agree with Burton that life begins at fertilization, they fear a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade would ultimately be slapped down by the Supreme Court—still at least one vote shy of an anti-Roe majority—setting back the movement. "The established pro-life movement feels … we should stop trying to overturn Roe because the time isn't right," says Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative public-interest firm that has advised Amendment 48. "Then there is this huge grassroots movement saying it's immoral not to try and save innocent lives."

The Colorado ballot initiative went on to fail by a 40-point margin, but similar initiatives began popping up in other states. And when Carmon traveled to Mississippi, she found much greater enthusiasm for personhood activism, noting that some Democrats there had come to endorse it. Perhaps an even more telling sign of personhood tiptoeing into the mainstream is its recent endorsement by presidential contender Mitt Romney. He told told Fox News he would “absolutely” support a constitutional amendment defining life as beginning at conception.Still, its hard to argue that personhood has become part of the mainstream anti-abortion agenda. Most major groups in the movement are still skittish about the strategy. When I attended the National Right to Life Committee’s state strategy conference this year, there was no mention of personhood: The group was more focused on late-term abortion bans and ending insurance coverage for the procedure. Americans United for Life, the country’s oldest anti-abortion group, provides states advocates with dozens of model laws to use in their legislatures. But it has not written a model law to define life as beginning at conception.The Mississippi vote next week will be a key one to watch for the personhood movement. If it passes, it could very well draw a Supreme Court challenge on the issue while forcing anti-abortion advocates to figure out where it fits into their movement. But if a personhood amendment can’t pass in Mississippi, it could draw more questions about whether this could succeed anywhere.

[classical_hero]

There is no legal framework to be considered under international law. The is no "right" for abortion under international law.
http://www.sanjosearticles.com/

Article 1. As a matter of scientific fact a new human life begins at conception.

Article 2. Each human life is a continuum that begins at conception and advances in stages until death. Science gives different names to these stages, including zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent and adult. This does not change the scientific consensus that at all points of development each individual is a living member of the human species.

Article 3. From conception each unborn child is by nature a human being.

Article 4. All human beings, as members of the human family, are entitled to recognition of their inherent dignity and to protection of their inalienable human rights. This is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international instruments.

Article 5. There exists no right to abortion under international law, either by way of treaty obligation or under customary international law. No United Nations treaty can accurately be cited as establishing or recognizing a right to abortion.

Article 6. The Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee) and other treaty monitoring bodies have directed governments to change their laws on abortion. These bodies have explicitly or implicitly interpreted the treaties to which they are subject as including a right to abortion.

Treaty monitoring bodies have no authority, either under the treaties that created them or under general international law, to interpret these treaties in ways that create new state obligations or that alter the substance of the treaties.

Accordingly, any such body that interprets a treaty to include a right to abortion acts beyond its authority and contrary to its mandate. Suchultra vires acts do not create any legal obligations for states parties to the treaty, nor should states accept them as contributing to the formation of new customary international law.

Article 7. Assertions by international agencies or non-governmental actors that abortion is a human right are false and should be rejected.

There is no international legal obligation to provide access to abortion based on any ground, including but not limited to health, privacy or sexual autonomy, or non-discrimination.

Article 8. Under basic principles of treaty interpretation in international law, consistent with the obligations of good faith and pacta sunt servanda, and in the exercise of their responsibility to defend the lives of their people, states may and should invoke treaty provisions guaranteeing the right to life as encompassing a state responsibility to protect the unborn child from abortion.

Article 9. Governments and members of society should ensure that national laws and policies protect the human right to life from conception. They should also reject and condemn pressure to adopt laws that legalize or depenalize abortion.

Treaty monitoring bodies, United Nations agencies and officers, regional and national courts, and others should desist from implicit or explicit assertions of a right to abortion based upon international law.

When such false assertions are made, or pressures exerted, member states should demand accountability from the United Nations system.

Providers of development aid should not promote or fund abortions. They should not make aid conditional on a recipient’s acceptance of abortion.

International maternal and child health care funding and programs should ensure a healthy outcome of pregnancy for both mother and child and should help mothers welcome new life in all circumstances.


We — human rights lawyers and advocates, scholars, elected officials, diplomats, and medical and international policy experts — hereby affirm these Articles.
San Jose, Costa Rica
March 25, 2011

[a completely inoffensive name]

There is no legal framework to be considered under international law. The is no "right" for abortion under international law.
http://www.sanjosearticles.com/

Because we all need to listen to Costa Rica?

[Papewaio]

I'm not even sure of the validity of Article 1 let alone the rest. Seems to overstep a few sovereignty issues on the rest of the articles as most countries core laws trump treaty obligations ie Consitution equivalent.

The so called scientific consensus must be very narrowly defined to a subset of science in both type, geographic location and meme embedded background. Because I'm pretty sure in most first world secular countries it is quite far from being a consensus.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

It's not a question of whether life begins at conception, it's what kind of life it is.

[Nowake]

Oh boy, I was wondering when this would surface. I will admit we were just talking the other day about its quality; we would’ve loved to have pitched for this PR contract.

However, linking to it is perhaps the most egregious demonstration of naiveté one could display.

What I mean is, this campaign / manifesto was put together in a hurry as a reaction to UN Women’s stand during the meeting of the Third Committee of the General Assembly at the United Nations, in its 66th session, to discuss Item 28 (a,b) concerning the Advancement of Women internationally.
In the executive summary of the document UN Women presented, it is expressly stated that 61 countries still restrict women’s access to abortion and also highlights an obscure Colombian Constitutional Court Decision in 2006 that overturned the country’s abortion laws as a flagship decision that should be used a model for future advocacy.
The only point UN women actually made:
“We have devoted significant efforts to positioning UN-Women as a catalyst for change. We are focusing on building partnerships, cutting edge analysis, strategic presence and high level advocacy and leadership. We chose to focus our first flagship report on the important subject of women’s access to justice because we recognize that effective systems of justice are a foundation for gender equality and women’s full enjoyment of their human rights. Reforms to bring legislation into compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women are a key step. And so are policy measures to close gaps in the justice chain when women seek to obtain redress.”

That aside, I understand why these so-called Articles daze some people so easily. The List of Signatories seems so very, very impressive. It is nothing but a carefully redacted PR effort, totally covering most names in their most secular titles, when in fact the list consists exclusively of nothing but a bunch of crackpots, Christians, Christian crackpots and crackpot Christians.



Take Douglas Sylva, listed only as Delegate to the U.N. General Assembly; whose delegate though? Oh! Holy See delegate to the U.N. General Assembly!
Take Christine Boutin, a French Christian politican who stated that Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks; just a “former Cabinet Minister of France” on the list.
Take Francisco Tatad, under his shiny title of ex Majority leader of the Phillipine Senate, who is nothing but a jumped up ex journalist who argued that “moral corruption is the global problem hounding mankind nowadays”.
Take Martha Lorena de Casco, head of the Pro-Life Committee in Honduras, but presented as just a “member of Parliament”.
Take Susan Yoshihara, listed only as “Director, International Organizations Research Group”, but who also is C-FAM (The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute) Senior Vice President for Research.


These are not even the most amusing examples. We can do better! Took me almost half an hour but hey, I like to enjoy my morning coffee and muffin when I have the time so it was no biggie to sip it a tad more slowly today
Below you have their name and title as Listed on http://www.sanjosearticles.com and then a short paragraph I added to explain who they really are. I changed the order here and there to group a few persons who are connected by a mutual organisation. There are a few names for whom I could not find information in English that I could copy paste (Guiseppe Benagiano, Javier Borrego, Luca Volonte, Elard Koch, Jakob Cornides). However, I can read both Spanish and Italian and I can confirm their ties to anti-abortion or conservative Christian organisations.


Lord David Alton, House of Lords, Great Britain
In 1987 he resigned as chief whip to campaign for his unsuccessful private members' bill which aimed to stop late abortions.
The Liberal Party merged in 1988 with the SDP, and from 1988 to 1997 he served as a Liberal Democrat MP, but had difficult relations with parts of the party, especially over attempts to make the party adopt a pro-choice position on abortion.
He is known for his strongly Pro-Life position on abortion, which went against the pro-choice politics of some in his party. In 1992, he announced that he would not stand again as a Liberal Democrat after the Party made support for abortion a party policy for the first time.
Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight, Knights of Columbus
As supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, Carl A. Anderson is the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the world’s largest Catholic family fraternal service organization, which has more than 1.8 million members.
Patrick Kelly, Vice President for Public Policy, Knights of Columbus
Knights of Columbus agenda explained above.
Christine Boutin, former Cabinet Minister – Government of France, current president Christian Democratic Party
Is a French politician and a major Christian democratic figure in France.
In a November 2006 interview, published in 2007, Boutin stated that George W. Bush might have been behind the 11 September 2001 attacks. When asked if she believed that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks, Boutin replied:
"I think that it's possible... I think it is possible. I think it more especially as I know that the sites that speak of this problem are the sites that have the greatest numbers of visits.... And so, I tell myself, I who am extremely sensitive ... to the new techniques of information and communication, that this expression of the mass of the people cannot be without any truth. I'm not telling you that I adhere to that position, but let's say that, nevertheless, I'm questioning myself a bit on this question.”
Benjamin Bull, Chief Counsel, Alliance Defense Fund
Serves as executive vice-president and chief counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund at its Team Resource Center in Scottsdale.
“No person – anywhere – should be punished simply for holding to Christian beliefs. Receiving special consultative status at the U.N. is a major advancement for ADF and our global legal efforts to protect and preserve religious freedom, said ADF Director of Global Activities and Strategic Alliances [Benjamin Bull].”
Hon. Martha De Casco, Member of Parliament, Honduras
Is the founder and president of the Pro-Life Committee in Honduras, and member of the Latin American Alliance for the Family and the World Council for Life and Family. She has worked as broadcasting assistant for CBS, and produced educational programs for Honduran Children's Television.
Hon. Tom Coburn M.D., Member, United States Senate
Is an American politician, medical doctor, and Southern Baptist deacon. A member of the Republican Party. He supports gun rights and opposes gay marriage. Coburn opposes abortion. On the issue, Coburn sparked controversy with his remark, "I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life."
Professor John Finnis, Oxford University, University of Notre Dame Is an Australian legal scholar and philosopher. Finnis argues that the state should deter public approval of homosexual behavior while refusing to persecute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation, basing this position not on the claim that homosexual sex is unnatural but on the idea that it cannot involve the union of procreation and emotional commitment that heterosexual sex can, and is therefore an assault on heterosexual union.
Professor Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University, former member of the President’s Council on Bioethics
George has been called America's "most influential conservative Christian thinker."
Professor John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy, University of St. Andrews
Is a leading Scottish philosopher, commentator and broadcaster. He is a Papal Adviser to the Vatican.
Professor Santiago Legarre, Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina
Self-explanatory.
Leonard Leo, Former Delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission
Former Delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission. Mr. Leo is active in the affairs of the Catholic Church, serving as a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and a member of the board of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
Yuri Mantilla, Director, International Government Affairs, Focus on the Family
Is Focus on the Family’s director for International Government Affairs. His work focuses on communicating Focus’ pro-life/pro-family perspective to government, church and business leaders in foreign nations and the Hispanic community in the United States.
Before joining Focus on the Family, Yuri Mantilla worked at the Family Research Council in Washington D.C.
Hon. Elizabeth Montfort, former Member of the European Parliamant
Member of the Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats).
Anna Zaborska, Member of the European Parliament
Member of the of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats).
Cristobal Orrego, Professor of Jurisprudence, University of the Andes (Chile) PVC would have this guy’s babies.
" (...) The third controversy relates to the usefulness of ‘rights-talk’ to guide moral, political and legal reasoning. Some think it very useful because in our culture, which is a culture of rights and of demands made by individuals against other individuals or against the state, to frame a problem in terms of ‘rights’ implies giving it real importance. For instance, if I say that children ought to be born within marriage, I am imposing a duty on adults, a duty which may be the object of argument. But if I say children have a right to have a father and a mother united in a long-term commitment, the issue changes: now I am speaking about protecting children, not just about the duties of adult people as to how they should organise their lives. Similar examples may be adduced in relation to other personal rights.
But, while rights-talk is a means to put significant moral force on one side, so also the other side of the argument may be framed in terms of rights. For example, one might claim that having sexual relations outside marriage does not automatically imply an intention to violate the rights of possible children, and that this corresponds to a right to sexual autonomy. When using this rights-talk we tend to create a ‘clash’ of rights, one against another, in the attempt to drive home our political and legal reasoning. (...) "
Gregor Puppinck, Executive Director, European Center for Law and Justice
For the past ten years, Puppinck has extensively worked on religious freedom cases and political discussions within the international institutions primarily before the European Court of Human Rights. Those cases cover all areas of religious freedom, including tax issues, the autonomy of the church, church legal recognition, religious symbols, conscientious objection, family educational rights and employment. He also participated in litigation before the International Criminal Court. In the recent years he has developed advocacy and support for religious-based asylum seekers.
Ambassador Grover Joseph Rees, former US Ambassador to East Timor
He is also a former legislative aide to Representative Christopher H. Smith, a Republican from Trenton, New Jersey, the leader of antiabortion forces in the U.S. House. Rees shares Smith's antiabortion position.
Austin Ruse, President, C-FAM
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute
Susan Yoshihara, Director, International Organizations Research Group
Is also C-FAM (The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute) Senior Vice President for Research.
William Saunders, Human Right Lawyer, Senior Vice President, Americans United for Life, former delegate to the UN General Assembly
Mr. Saunders is Chairman of the Religious Liberties Group for the Federalist Society. He is Vice President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a member of the boards of the International Right to Life Federation, the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, the Christian Institute on Disability, and the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. Mr. Saunders is a founding member of Do No Harm: the Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics.
Alan Sears, President, CEO and General Counsel, Alliance Defense Fund
The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is a conservative Christian nonprofit organization with the stated goal of "defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation." ADF was founded in 1994 by the late Bill Bright (founder, Campus Crusade for Christ), the late Larry Burkett (founder, Crown Financial Ministries), James Dobson (founder, Focus on the Family), the late D. James Kennedy (founder, Coral Ridge Ministries), the late Marlin Maddoux (president, International Christian Media), and Donald Wildmon (founder, American Family Association), along with the leadership of over thirty other conservative Christian organizations.
Marie Smith, President, Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues
Has made it her mission to identify, unite, and strategize with pro-life groups, lawmakers, and religious leaders to advance respect for life in law and policy. In her work with PNCI, a non-partisan global outreach of Gospel of Life Ministries, she has worked to protect children in the womb and their mothers from the violence of abortion.
Professor Carter Snead, Member, International Bioethics Committee, UNESCO and former U.S. Permanent Observer to the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Bioethics, University of Notre Dame School of Law
His research and scholarship explore the possibility, wisdom, and mechanisms of the governance of biomedical science, medicine, and technology according to ethical principles. He was the principal drafter of the President's Council on Bioethics' 2004 report, “Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies,” a controversial assessment of the governance (both public and private) of the activities at the intersection of assisted reproduction, human embryo research, and genetics.
Douglas Sylva, Delegate to the UN General Assembly
“The world cannot afford to be without the Holy See [the Church] at the United Nations. The Church has been the custodian of universal social truths, among them that all humans possess dignity and equality. We derive our rights from natural law, which is unchanging. We can understand the full nature of those rights through reason," said Douglas Sylva, Ph.D., Holy See delegate to the U.N. General Assembly.
Hon. Francisco Tatad, former Majority Leader, Philippine Senate
Tatad practiced journalism as a wire service reporter for the Agence France-Presse (AFP). Tatad opposes reproductive rights and gay rights, and argues that moral corruption is the global problem hounding mankind nowadays. Tatad noted that the Philippines is only one of three countries (Malta and the Vatican City were the other two) in the world where divorce, contraception, euthanasia and same-sex marriage are not allowed. He said that one does not have to be a Catholic or Christian to recognize the fiction behind these immoral acts. “
Lord Nicholas Windsor, Member of the Royal Family of the United Kingdom
In a private ceremony in 2001 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and therefore forfeited his right of succession to the British throne. In 2011 Lord Nicholas was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life. He is a Trustee of the Catholic National Library and The Right to Life Charitable Trust, an educational body whose goal is the full protection of the unborn child.

[Kralizec]

I wasn't really upset or anything, just curious about everyone's thoughts on the subject. I referred to my post in case anyone missed it.

Yet I agree with your premise, so as you correctly point out, the first definitely presents grounds for trial.
The second is ethically problematic. Professionally, I would opine that it should be litigated under the argument that the child is simply a patient harmed by the medic's actions. However, the optimal solution, or at least the one preventing headaches, would be to my mind to always attempt to fold the case into the parents' wrongful birth lawsuit and basically demand for their damages to be calculated by taking into account the full life span of the human being they brought to life, seeing as it will always remain in their care.

I have no issues with the first case (wrongful birth). My objections against the second (wrongful life) have more to do with the way the decisions are framed than ethics (allthough the implied reasoning is ethically unsound). I suspect that the real reasoning in the Dutch precedent is that, as you say, parents will feel emotionally obligated to care for these disabled children long after they've reached maturity. The courts thus seek to reimburse the parents' costs and efforts which are to be made. However, the claim was made on behalf of the child, and therefore the discussion is about wether the child can be said to have suffered because of the doctor's mistake.
Clearly the only logical way you can argue that the child has suffered because of the mistake is to argue that, for the child, non-existance is preferable to the life he has. The Dutch courts refused to go this route and simply evaded the issue by using bogus reasoning. However, if I recall correctly, France specifically banned "wrongful life" claims because the unspoken reason is implied in the verdict - that is, honouring damage claims on behalf of the child implies that said child would have been better off if he had never existed, no matter how much the courts may deny this reasoning. Another factor the French parliament took into account before they decided on the matter was that France (and western democracies in general) have social services which can give disabled people like this the care they need. I've never actually read the French literature on the subject directly, maybe I'll dig it up when I have the time.

Article 1. As a matter of scientific fact a new human life begins at conception.

Article 2. Each human life is a continuum that begins at conception and advances in stages until death. Science gives different names to these stages, including zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent and adult. This does not change the scientific consensus that at all points of development each individual is a living member of the human species.

Article 3. From conception each unborn child is by nature a human being.

Article 4. All human beings, as members of the human family, are entitled to recognition of their inherent dignity and to protection of their inalienable human rights. This is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and other international instruments.

There's no logical link between points 1-3 and point 4. "Human being" in the biological sense of the word is not necessarily the same concept as "human" (as in, an individual) in various treaties.

As the site mentions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says in article 6 that every human being has an inherent right to life. I've seen it been used by pro-lifers to argue that abortion is illegal under international law before. However, if you read the entire article, it's clear that the article was aimed at the death penalty, which it explicitly mentions. It says something about (not) executing pregnant women, but nothing about abortion as such. If it had, lots of countries would simply have refused to sign it.

1. Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.

2. In countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes in accordance with the law in force at the time of the commission of the crime and not contrary to the provisions of the present Covenant and to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This penalty can only be carried out pursuant to a final judgement rendered by a competent court.

3. When deprivation of life constitutes the crime of genocide, it is understood that nothing in this article shall authorize any State Party to the present Covenant to derogate in any way from any obligation assumed under the provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

4. Anyone sentenced to death shall have the right to seek pardon or commutation of the sentence. Amnesty, pardon or commutation of the sentence of death may be granted in all cases.

5. Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age and shall not be carried out on pregnant women.

6. Nothing in this article shall be invoked to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment by any State Party to the present Covenant.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Ball is in your court hiro de classico

[Lemur]

Each human life is a continuum that begins at conception and advances in stages until death. Science gives different names to these stages, including zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent and adult. This does not change the scientific consensus that at all points of development each individual is a living member of the human species.

Talk to any biologist and you will see how utterly wrong this statement is. "Life" is a slippery term. Is a virus alive? If so, why? Is a fire alive? If not, why? Fire shares many characteristics of "life" as we understand it, and I think you will find excluding fire from the list of living organisms a very tricky bit of business.

Biology does not care, because biology is not political. Scientists recognize that the border between alive/not-alive is broad, gray, and difficult. Politicians and partisans want a nice, clear line that does not exist in science. So your article, which appeals to authority, is appealing in an incorrect and deceptive manner.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Talk to any biologist and you will see how utterly wrong this statement is. "Life" is a slippery term. Is a virus alive? If so, why? Is a fire alive? If not, why? Fire shares many characteristics of "life" as we understand it, and I think you will find excluding fire from the list of living organisms a very tricky bit of business.Biology does not care, because biology is not political. Scientists recognize that the border between alive/not-alive is broad, gray, and difficult. Politicians and partisans want a nice, clear line that does not exist in science. So your article, which appeals to authority, is appealing in an incorrect and deceptive manner.

I just want to say thank you Lemur for saying what I wanted to say but in a much better way than I could have.

[Lemur]

I just want to say thank you Lemur

Meh, anybody who has taken biology should know this stuff, and I'm hardly the first person to point this out.

What's funny is that the extremes are easy. A zebra is definitely alive. A rock is definitely not. But a virus is missing something like five of the seven markers of "life," and a fire has most of the characteristics. And yet we generally agree that a virus is alive and a fire is not.

As for a developing human, I'd say it's "alive" when it has a chance of surviving outside the womb. But that, like most hard lines, is arbitrary.

For extra credit we could try to pin down what it means to be "conscious." That would take up a whole 'nother thread.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

As for a developing human, I'd say it's "alive" when it has a chance of surviving outside the womb. But that, like most hard lines, is arbitrary.

For extra credit we could try to pin down what it means to be "conscious." That would take up a whole 'nother thread.

When the brain begins to spark.

Mainly because, if we do have a soul that's when it wakes up, and if we don't that's when abortion will begin to cause what we recognise as suffering.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Meh, anybody who has taken biology should know this stuff, and I'm hardly the first person to point this out.

Yes, but obviously many people must have slept in biology class since this is a point that has to be made repeatedly to many people. I doubt that hero has not taken a biology class yet...