Carleas wrote: iambiguous wrote:Homicide: "the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another; murder."
That definition is a little narrower than the one I intended. Wikipedia's is closer to what I mean:
Wiki wrote:Homicide is the act of one human killing another.[1] A homicide requires only a volitional act by another person that results in death, and thus a homicide may result from accidental, reckless, or negligent acts even if there is no intent to cause harm.[2] Homicides can be divided into many overlapping legal categories, including murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, killing in war (either following the laws of war or as a war crime), euthanasia, and capital punishment, depending on the circumstances of the death.
But I think you get at the same point later on, and I agree with you that, "down through the ages historically and culturally, the circumstances around which folks deemed specific situations involving the killing of another unlawful varied considerably." Your definition bakes in the notion of "unlawful", and under that definition I think we all have to agree that most abortion is not homicide, at least not in the United States (where it is beyond lawful, it is a constitutional right).
The thing about the law though is that it is "on the book". Laws are written down, and presumably enforced. Thus when a particular behavior is chosen, it is either able to be shown as within the law or it is not. Whereas a moral narrative may or may not be in sync with the law. Someone may believe that abortion is immoral and that the law ought to severely punish both those who perform them and those who have them performed on them. But if the law of the land does allow some abortions to be performed, a citizen might protest against it but agree to be a law-abiding citizen.
But, with the killing of the unborn [which many insist on calling babies] there are also any number mitigating and aggravating circumstances. Everything comes back to the unique set of circumstances surrounding the pregnancy and that which can be demonstrated as in fact true for all of us.
Carleas wrote: But my point was that even if we take as a premise that a fetus is a human, and even a human person, it doesn't follow from that fact alone that abortion is immoral or that it should be illegal.
Well, it does if your moral narrative construes abortion to in fact
be immoral. Whether as a result of the fact that you believe in a God, the God, my God, or as a Humanist, you believe that the unborn have a "natural right" to life.
My point is that, unlike with the law, one's moral values are predicated on what you
believe to be true. An objectivist is not likely to think he or she is obligated to demonstrate that in fact abortion is immoral. On the contrary, it becomes immoral precisely because "in their head" they believe that it is.
Then it just comes down to the extent to which they are willing to accept that democracy and the rules of law is the "best of all possible worlds".
Unless of course I am not understanding your point.
Carleas wrote: Any effective defense of abortion should fall into that category, at least legally. And so I find the strongest defense to be as follows: a woman has a right to control her body, and that right trumps whatever right the fetus has. Just as we can't commandeer a kidney from an unwilling donor to save another person's life, we cannot commandeer an unwilling woman's body to incubate a child.
But, from my frame of mind, this is just one of many different political prejudices that different individuals come to embody in their interactions with others. Out in a particular world historically, culturally and interpersonally. I merely note in turn that, in my opinion, these value judgments are rooted more in the manner in which I construe the "self" as the embodiment of dasein. Rather than in a frame of mind one can acquire through a disciplined study of philosophy or a science.
iambiguous wrote:A God world or a No God world. And, in a No God world, what of the arguments of narcissists, sociopaths and, yes, particular moral nihilists, who view abortion as they do everything else: what's in it for me?
Carleas wrote: There are really two questions, alluded two above: one is moral, the other is legal. It may be that abortion is immoral but also that it should not be illegal (e.g. immoral because babies are good so the harm outweighs the good, but should be legal because the law should recognize bodily autonomy and personal agency over local harms).
Yes, but for those who are only concerned with how any particular abortion makes their life better, the law is still on the books. If, in a political jurisdiction where abortion is illegal, they get caught either having an abortion or aiding and abetting someone else in getting one, they get punished no matter their moral assessment. But what's crucial [for me] is how they are able to rationalize/justify any behavior based solely on their own selfish interest. That a morality of this sort [in a No God world] is not able to be demonstrated by ethicists as necessarily irrational speaks volumes regarding the world that we live in. The global economy itself seems to be the embodiment of this amoral frame of mind.
Carleas wrote: And for the latter question, "what's in it for me" is a very promising foundation. We can justify quite a lot of law on the basis that it produces outcomes that benefit everyone (or at least most people): a strong presumption of control over ones own body has positive outcomes for everyone, so defending someone else's bodily autonomy benefits you to the extent you want to use recreational drugs or experimental medical procedures.
Though, clearly, in regard to abortion, what's in it for the pregnant woman and what's in it for the unborn baby is precisely what sparks the conflicting goods that the law is only able to address either through one or another extant rendition of might, right or moderation, negotiation and compromise.
I merely focus in turn on how any particular individual's moral assessment here is rooted more firmly in dasein than in philosophy. And that ultimately what counts out in the real world is less what we believe is best and more on who has the actual power to enforce one set of behaviors over another. The part where there are actual rewards and punishments [consequences] for what we do or do not do.
Carleas wrote: But the god/no god question complicates things. The existence of a god (or at least certain common interpretations of that claim) collapses the question, because there's no greater good to appeal to in finding compromise positions in the law. Even if permitting abortion creates a better society, a god-based morality can make it preferable to break the law and kill abortion doctors if that prevents even a few abortions.
On the other hand, for the God world objectivists, the existence of God simplifies things. They believe that there is in fact a final arbiter -- a Judgment Day -- that they can turn to in order to obviate conflicting goods. Precisely in subsuming them in the will of God. Then cue the Scriptures and the Ecclesiastics.
And for the No God moral nihilists, the absence of God simplifies things as well. No God, no omniscient and omnipotent point of view. None of that and it only matters if you get caught by yet another mere mortal. They don't argue that "in the absence of God all things are permitted" for nothing.
Carleas wrote: More generally, to your 'fractured I', is that compatible with an objective morality that is deeply contingent, so that individual actions have true moral values, but those values may differ based on personal history? It might also be the case that X is objectively moral, and yet simultaneously objectively moral for some person is to argue that X is immoral. That's a weird outcome, but it no longer seems nihilist.
Again, back to abortion.
My fractured and fragmented self here revolves around the assumption that both sides can make an argument to the legislators that, given one set of assumptions champions the natural right of the baby to life, or given another, champions the political right of the pregnant woman to choose.
Now, at one point, as a devout Christian I was in one moral/political camp, and, then, as a devout Marxist, I was in the other.
Now I am drawn and quartered in that "I" recognize that the points raised by either camp do not make the points raised by the other camp go away.
Further, I recognize the extent to which my own "I" is derived more from the life experiences that I embodied out in a particular world, than from anything I have learned using the tools of philosophy or science.