You’re missing my point. Sure, any particular individual in any particular set of circumstances can raise the arguments that those in both the pro-life and the pro-choice camps do. Conflicting goods let’s call them.
My question however is this: to what extent can either science or philosophy determine which argument reflects that which rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to embrace?
Also, I suggest that each of us as individuals come to embody one set of political prejudices rather than another based largely on the existential trajectory of their life. Again, I encompass that on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382
How about you? What crucial variables in your life predisposed you to think this way rather than that way about abortion? Either you accept my point regarding dasein here or you are able to obviate it by coming up with an argument that does in fact resolve the issue deontologically once and for all.
Don’t skip this part okay?
Another general description intellectual contraption that would, for all practical purposes, be meaningless if proposed to those in the thick of the political struggle to sway the Supreme Court here in America to lay off Roe V. Wade.
Then more of the same:
I spent many years involved in political organizations that confronted the abortion wars head on. Back then I was a left wing objectivist. Thumping the right wing objectivists. Or, rather, back then, so I thought. One thing for sure though…almost no one I knew then would have a fucking clue as to what anything you propose here has to do with the nitty-gritty existential rights of the unborn to live vs. the rights of pregnant women to choose.
Huh? Come on, what would that mean to a flesh and blood woman pregnant and not wanting to be? Or to a pro-life advocate speaking for the unborn that they insist should not be destroyed? That’s what it always comes down to. Particular men and women interacting in a particular set of circumstances viewed from a particular point of view. So much more so than “the abstract ethical and legal category of the Individual and the nation as a whole”.
Right. As though those on the other side of the political spectrum don’t have their own arguments in defense of a woman’s right to choose. Hell, we can’t even pin down the precise moment when the unborn becomes a “human being”. For some it’s the day of conception, for others a beating heart, for others its capacity to live outside the womb. While others are even able to rationalize abortion on demand. Or, for that matter, infanticide.
My point however is always the same. Are you an objectivist here? In other words, is your argument above regarding a woman who has been raped accepting the responsibility of raising the rapist’s child seen by you to be her moral obligation as a rational human being…or not?