We will clearly have to agree to disagree about this then. There are decisions made by doctors who perform abortions that are predicated on the objective knowledge they must accumulate relating to human biology – knowledge pertaining to sex and pregnancy. Then knowledge pertaining to a particular set of learned skills that successfully brings an unwanted pregnancy to an end.
And the doctor performing it can be either a Communist or a fascist, a man or a woman, gay or straight, black or white, liberal or conservative, atheist or religious, American or Russian, short or tall, fat or thin.
I’m merely pointing out the obvious: that there is no equivalent of this once we shift gears from abortion as a medical procedure to abortion embedded morally/politically in conflicting goods.
The experience, knowledge and certainty that a doctor can acquire in order to in fact abort a pregnancy is there for all to see.
What experience, knowledge and certainty must an ethicist acquire in order to establish abortion as in fact either moral or immoral?
Does or does not the game of chess revolve around long-established rules regarding how the pieces either can or cannot to moved? Are these rules not applicable to all players? Are not some players able to move these pieces such that they either win or lose the game?
And yet in the film Searching For Bobby Fischer – viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2465377&hilit=Searching+for+Bobby+Fischer#p2465377 – the narrative focuses in turn on issues that revolve instead around the is/ought world. Ought the father have driven his son to focus so much of his time on the game? Ought the father have pushed the son into approaching the game as one in which winning and losing took precedence over love of the game itself?
Was the son’s decent, caring, compassionaite personality [defended fiercely by his mother] an obstacle that had to be yanked out of him in order to ruthlessly crush the competition. As, for example, Jonathan Poe had been taught?
Let’s focus the beam there.
That’s your distinction. Mine revolves more around the skills required to calculate choices in playing a game like poker and the skills required to calculate whether it is moral or immoral to gamble on a poker game.
The past, present and future are all involved in these calculations. But the success rate is there to be seen among the players. But what of the ethicists? How do we calculate their success rate?
Well, from my frame of mind, your frame of mind seems intent on convincing us that, when push comes to shove, there really is no difference between accumulating knowledge to play the game and accumulating knowledge to assess any moral conflicts that might arise as a result of playing the game.
It’s really as simple as that, right?