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The more I think about politics, I always end up coming back to this quote from a very good video (from a very good youtuber!).
I think in most cases, politics are about values. To piggy back off the abortion example. The go to argument surrounding this typically is bodily autonomy, and although one could argue that this isn't really consistent on a factual, legal level. If I were in the room debating a pro-choice person on the issue, here is how it would go.
PC Person
The fetus is not entitled to its mothers body, consider the court case McFall v Shimp: McFall suffered from a life-threatening bone marrow disease and his cousin, Shimp, was a compatible bone marrow donor. Shimp refused to donate bone marrow. McFall requested Shimp be compelled to donate. The Court considered Shimp’s refusal “morally indefensible,” but still ruled in Shimp’s favor, explaining,
“For a society which respects the rights of one individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for another member, is revolting to our hard-wrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind.”
Judith Jarvis Thomson tackles the issues of bodily integrity and moral obligations in her essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” Thomson asks us to imagine a famous violinist with a fatal kidney ailment. One day a bunch of music lovers kidnap you and hook your kidneys up to the violinist’s circulatory system. In nine months the violinist will have recovered, but if you disconnect yourself prematurely the violinist will die. Thomson asks, “Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?”
When you drive (have sex), you know there’s a possibility you could crash into someone (conceive). Even when you drive very cautiously (use contraception), there is still a chance of a car accident. Should you be in a car crash in which the victim’s life is at stake, the law does not compel you to donate blood or organs to save the victim. While it would be admirable for you to donate, you are not required to do so."
Me:
"Thats cool. Lets say you, for whatever reason, are a psychopath who enjoys taking children, draining them of their blood, hospitalizing them and or possibly killing. If I was king for a day, and assuming your blood was a match, I would sentence you to life in prison, and then order that your blood be drained and given to the remaining children to save them. Fight Me"
I don't find this to be unreasonable, given that we would already use lethal injection for these kinds of people (also a violation of "bodily autonomy"). Draining someone of their blood would be no less worse than forcefully injecting them.
You are free to think I'm a crazy person, fine. But that's not my main point. The same problem exists for issues like nationalism & immigration. You can scream all day about how immigrants are a net gain to the economy, or how they commit less crime. But a ethno-nationalist will simply go "No, I value the culture and heritage of the green people, and I'd rather them go extinct than to have our way of life polluted by the purples.".
Another explicit example of what im talking about is race. A black person does not vote democrat because they are factually good for the economy (whether or not they are is besides the point). If you asked average black voter to produce a study about specific policies that cite this, they would come up short. Support for democrats comes from the idea of racial solidarity, and the fact that black people value the black race, and would like to advance black interest.
I have no clue how one would even go about resolving this. Morals & values are not empirical - you cant prove bodily autonomy and cultural heritage are good in the same way you can prove what foods are and aren't healthy. These things are based on moral intuitions that are fundamentally subjective. I don't think I could ever change my personal mind on that issue to be completely honest, but on a societal scale, this is obviously not sustainable. There needs to be some way to reconcile a difference in moral values.
Are they sure about that? To me, it looks like the difference between manslaughter (if they die) and not (if they live). You can say that the law doesn't "require" you to save the victim, but the prison sentence on the other side of that choice doesn't make it very convincing.
The assumption that babies simply appear from the ether has weirded me out since I noticed the framing. You weren't kidnapped by a music lover and forced to give life support to another human (unless you were, in which case I support the right to abortion in cases of rape). "Where babies come from" has well-understood causality. If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.
I’m split on the use of contraception, which obviously makes me a sinner as a Catholic, but I’m against abortion. It always struck me as disingenuous how the blue tribe seems to get collective amnesia and forget how to be literate when it comes to the matter or abortion. Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet. The notion that a right to have sex isn’t a right to get pregnant is a fallacious argument when biology itself happens to disagree with you because, oh I don’t know people actually ‘get’ pregnant by doing it.
But they don't claim to have found people on another planet; a bacterium is alive, but it is not a person. Thus, I would phrase the question not as "When does life begin?" so much as "When does the developing life-form become a person?".
I think you’re going to find it very difficult to circumscribe the ontology of personhood in such a way that wouldn’t arbitrarily involve marking out large swathes of people for the same kind of treatment you would a fetus.
I find birth to be a natural and fitting Schelling point for when one's life becomes the business of society.
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I once saw someone on Tumblr (who, in their defense, was probably a teenager at the time), try to square this circle by arguing "I consented to having sex, I didn't consent to getting pregnant".
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.
I've always found this reasoning to be weakest of all possible arguments, for the simple fact that is doesn't follow on the male end of things. Can someone get out child support payments purely because they didn't "consent" to fathering the child? No! We give them the old adage of "Man Up" and "You play you pay", and rightfully so.
Just because the West is gynocentric and hypocritical about something doesn't mean the argument is wrong. Realistically Men should be able to opt out of child support if they didn't consent to pregnancy, assuming a world where abortion is legal. It logically and morally follows.
Sure, but nobody actually believes this, and a big chunk of that difference is less ra-ra manhating girlbossery and more the idea that the women getting abortions will raise criminals and make society pay for it.
Normies hate this one clever trick: Don't pay. An expansion of equal rights around this topic is perfectly compatible with a reduction in social welfare to disincentivize anti-social behavior.
Nobody "mainstream" actually believes - I fixed it for you.
With easy available contraceptives, access to abortion, and equality around parental consent rights, if Alice wants to have Bob's baby to lock him down, and Bob withdraws is parental consent within an appropriately timely manner. Alice can chose to have an abortion or chose to carry the baby to term without the societal assistance of social hand outs, her choice.
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These seem substantially different in that each time of having sex is an either/or of conceiving or not, but each instance of nicotine consumption only very marginally increases cancer risk. No one is going to get cancer because they tried smoking a couple of times, but they very easily could conceive a child on their first time having sex.
Why not? People get lung cancer without ever smoking as well. There very well could be some non-smokers whose lung cells were, just due to dumb luck and coincidence, 1 inhale away from becoming cancerous, and 1 puff triggered it. Probably not many, though.
Which, I think, gets at the issue that this argument is about quantity, not quality. Is sex -> pregnancy more like driving or smoking, where you could reasonably do it tens of thousands of times and still not get the consequence, or is it more like playing Russian Roulette with 6 bullets, where your odds of surviving is the odds of the bullet or gun being defective plus of your aim being off enough either to miss or cause non-fatal damage (actually 1-(1-(odds))*(1-odds)), I think, but that's a good-enough approximation), and by how much? I think most people place the line somewhere in between for determining the morality of elective abortion, and it's the different places where people put that line that cause conflict. Especially since many of those people don't even seem to recognize that they're placing such a line, much less where that line is for themselves.
I think a problem with the smoking metaphor is that it does seem like sex/pregnancy is closer to Russian roulette. Besides Russian roulette, a matching metaphor could be rock climbing/falling to your death; flying/plane crash; or driving a car and crashing it. While sometimes people have sex with the aim of conceiving, all of these other "bad" outcomes are things that would make people just never do a given activity if they thought it was at all likely to happen in that instance.
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There are a lot of foreseeable consequences to a lot of actions. We as a society don't stop people from trying to mitigate them or prevent them. In your own example, we don't deny care or deny the attempt to fix lung cancer from smokers.
Do you want to make a stand that any and all foreseeable consequences of actions now require you suffer them with no renumeration or mitigation allowed regardless of the situation?
No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant.
Pregnancy is a risk of sex but it is not a 1:1 relationship.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of this pregnancy"
So what if you didn't consent to lung cancer, you have lung cancer. -> "ok doc what are my options to get rid of lung cancer"
For reference, I voted in favour of legalising abortion in Ireland. This is one of those "there's nothing I hate more than bad arguments for views I hold dear" situations.
Regardless of whether one believes a fetus is "alive" – unlike a tumour in one's lungs, it has the potential to develop into a sentient human being. Removing a malignant tumour presents no moral quandaries even if the presence of the tumour is the direct result of actions you freely undertook. You can't escape the moral quandary associated with abortion just by saying you never consented to getting pregnant.
Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.
No one would be persuaded by this reasoning: the entire reason drink-driving is illegal is because it makes motor accidents vastly more likely. Choosing to drive drunk entails choosing the likely consequences of driving drunk. Choosing to have unprotected sex entails choosing the likely consequences of unprotected sex. As a society we might still determine that abortion should be legal, but the idea that we can just dissolve the ethical dilemma by announcing "I never consented to getting pregnant, so you have to let me do whatever I want" strikes me as exactly insane as letting Alice off the hook because she never consented to hitting Bob with her car.
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We do, at the margins, because we make smokers pay higher health insurance premiums, which reduces their access to care that would fix lung cancer. Similar is the case for car accidents as well, since a track record of reckless driving increases auto insurance premiums, which reduces one's access to mitigate the consequences of auto accidents one gets into.
Given that pregnancy and abortion are more all-or-none things rather than near-continuous like insurance premiums and payouts, I think the analogy breaks down here, though.
I'd be curious to know if there are serial abortion users. If the average user of an abortion is 1-2 times in the life it makes it really hard to track historical usage for insurance to be an applicable analogy.
The problem with bringing in insurance is that insurance is a pool of other people's money. If you were a smoker and you could self-finance your chemo we would absolutely treat it. We just draw the line at paying for care of people engaging in risky behaviors with known risks continuously, from the group/collective funds. By that logic, medicare/universal medicine will not pay for your abortion if you engage in known risky practices, like sex without contraception, but you may finance it on your own. I think that is a fairly acceptable stance, and consistent. But it's not really engaging with the general moral fault line here.
If there were laws on the books that forced smokers to suffer lung cancer and we refused to treat them, that would be more akin to the anti-abortion argument. I'm sure I could come up with dozen more foreseeable situations with risks that people would really dislike care being denied for.
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It’s a way of trying to dismantle the notion that actions have consequences and to the extent one ever becomes separable from the other, there’s a moral obligation to make it so. I also never consented to being compelled to live in the same country as said Tumblr moron. Does that give me a right to knock them out, euthanize them when they’re unconscious and give away their organs?
In the case of the latter, there’s a concept in civil law called “duty of care,” that is taught to doctors in medical school. Doctors have a duty of care to their patients such that, if patients knew that at any point in a medical facility they could be knocked out and euthanized, they would never go there and therefore the utility function of hospitals would be destroyed. In the former it creates ethical conflicts between a doctor’s commitment to protecting life when it’s between the fetus and a patient; especially when it doesn’t explicitly involve the health of the mother.
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Congratulations, by driving in a car you have now signed up for a lifetime as a quadriplegic due to an accident. It was a risk you knew was possible. Please don't do anything but accept the consequences of your choice.
Sex != baby-making. Sex carries the risk of baby making.
Yes, when taking part in risky activities I accept the risk. I’m not sure what the alternative would be?
In the framework you gave, abortion for an accidental pregnancy would be permissible, but one for an intentional pregnancy would not.
I fail to see how this is different than the current accepted practice? People intentionally getting pregnant don't then go get abortions. Abortions happen when pregnancy occurs accidentally (due to risks) or when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.
Or in cases of fetal abnormality. These span a spectrum from absolutely non-viable cases (like anencephaly) to clearly viable babies who are likely to be severely disabled (like Down's) but Christian pro-lifers want abortion to be illegal in almost all of them and normies with an ick about abortion think they are some of the good examples of legitimate abortions.
I'd assume Christians are also against euthanasia of infants in these cases, so...
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I suppose one can contrive a scenario where a woman could have an elective abortion refused because her prior actions indicate the pregnancy was intentional. For instance, if she took active steps to restore her fertility not long before the pregnancy; not just forgetting to take a pill or not wearing a condom, but something like reversing a tubal ligation or removing an IUD without a medical justification.
I have to wonder how rare those scenarios are though.
I think that would be an actually interesting philosophical question, especially if we examine our response to other situations where people engage in actions intentionally that effect other people but then change their mind. In some situations like contract law, we enforce the prior agreement, but in others like a promise to aid or a charitable donation we don't enforce compliance.
It's a question of how much bodily autonomy you have depending on the cost of your bodily autonomy on other people.
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I’m guessing some number of abortions are because the mother changes her mind, and it seems very counterintuitive to say that the intent of the parents influences the morality of the abortion.
To be clear, I’m broadly pro-choice, but I don’t think sex and pregnancy can be neatly decoupled, any more than driving and car crashes can.
I mean I don't think they can be neatly decoupled, one is a risk that is of the other. But we as a society accept other risk pairings as both legally correct and morally ok. This idea that babies are the direct and singular causal response to sex is just not based in reality. Pretending it is, is an attempt at motivated reasoning. Which I was calling out.
EDIT:
I suppose this is probably true, I do wonder what the breakdown in cases between the three would be. Regardless I am pretty pro-choice from a fairly radical bodily autonomy perspective.
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Are you saying that driving != getting into accidents?
I'm saying that driving carries the risk of getting into accidents. But yes that driving != getting into accidents. Sex is to Pregnancy as Driving is to Accidents.
Yeah, not everyone having sex “intends” to get pregnant. But the passenger in the vehicle doesn’t intend on winding up in a clinic with a medical certificate attached to his/her name either.
I think the passenger analogy doesn't really apply well here because the passenger in a car still displayed agency in determining the risk/reward of getting into the car. A baby doesn't display any agency on being conceived.
But if you want me to stake a position, then even if the passenger in my car accident I caused was in needed an organ donation from me. I still have the bodily autonomy to say no. It's my body and you can't morally compel me to use it.
Of course a baby doesn’t display agency, because it ‘can’t’. Therein lies the problem.
The baby didn’t stake an original claim on your body. You’re the one who chose to commit the act. What it’s “fighting” for is on behalf of its own existence.
The baby is dependent on me for survival. If I wish to use my body for something other than its survival and would like to remove it, I am within my rights to remove it. If someone else would like to put it in their body or test tube for its survival they may. It's not my concern. If the baby would like to form a contract with me to exchange value for its continued use of my body, then it should make an offer.
I chose to take a risk. Much like when I decided to smoke a cigarette. Just because the lung cancer became a sentient clump of cells doesn't entitled it to my body or preventing me from attempting to get rid of it.
I forgot the "fighting for existence" is such a moral rectitude that it permits the overriding of any other beings rights. Let me quickly go tell my boss he needs to pay me a bajillion dollars because I am "fighting for my existence"
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This is just patently false.
Driving exists to get you from place to place.
Sex exists to reproduce life.
Sex is literally FOR babies, and the feeling good is a side effect. Driving, on the other hand, is literally FOR moving around, not crashing.
I must have missed the part of health class where they discussed how human females are fertile 24/7 365 days a year. Instead of the short window around the ovulation cycle. Or that how when females are not fertile it is not possible to have sex with them. You should submit your new revolutionary information to the latest medical journal, this could be a major breakthrough on human bodily functions!!
Sarcasm aside, you are smuggling in a moral argument to a functional argument that does not follow it. Just because you believe that sex = babies doesn't mean its actually true from a purely biological functionality fact(which you are also wrong about). I think I could construct several purely biological functional arguments for various other things that you would strongly disagree with.
You are essentially using arguments as soldiers for principles you don't actually care about. Make your real argument that God/bible says abortion is wrong and be done with it.
Ok, but before there were women, there were apes, and before there were apes there were mammals, and before...
Sex is for reproduction. Different animals graft different parts to the single most important drive in the living world.
Sex came first, and sex is for reproduction. But sex isn't the only way to reproduce. We could be pollinators, or reproduce like fish by spraying semen everywhere, or another strategy altogether. We could be crystalline entities forming and reforming in patterns as we reshape the strata in an ever-expanding zone. But not for us, not for this particular class of mammalian vertebrates. We have sex, and we have babies.
I mean, Thou Shall Not Kill is right there, but I'm OK killing people who deserve to be killed, I just don't think they should be innocent children. That's the real argument: yes, it's killing, and no, you don't have cause to kill someone because you simply choose to.
Nonsense the bible says the earth is 6,000 years old and humans were formed directly by God in the garden of Eden. The only ancestor of human women is Adam's rib. Stop cherry picking the bible...
Then why don't humans have a 24/7 365 fertility window. Other animals have it. Obviously sex is ONLY for reproduction. Except apparently not. Listing different forms of reproduction isn't really an argument. You've made a claim that sex is only for reproduction, give some evidence of this, listing a risk/probabilistic outcome of sex doesn't suddenly prove that.
And besides a sky-hook, what moral evidence do you have that this view is the moral correct one. It's not like Christians have never killed children either. Why are children considered so innocent that they demand special consideration? Would Alien Children warrant the same consideration?
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Driving exists to burn gasoline in the engine. Making wheels roll is just a useful side effect.
This is according to the base function that a mechanism can be stripped down to.
According to "the purpose of a system is what it does", the vast majority of sex acts are for pleasure while minimizing the possibility of conceiving, while the vast majority of driving is for getting from place to place while minimizing the possibility of crashing.
According to God or other source of objective telos, well, you can quote them once you present them.
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Is playing Russian roulette != blowing a hole in your skull?
Yes... Would you say that "Blowing a hole in your skull" is the singular causal outcome of playing Russian roulette? Or just a risk?
I'd say a statement like "I didn't mean to shoot myself in the head, I was just playing Russian roulette" sounds pretty dumb.
Probably because a 1/6 chance of killing yourself is a risk that most people think is too much. Especially when there is only a marginal reward.
I don't think that risk/reward ratio really applies in Sex or Driving.
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Someone taking reasonable measures to not produce a baby has not signed up for baby-making. The fact that it is a possible result doesn't mean they signed up for it; we don't use that standard anywhere else. "There's some chance that any human will go berserk and turn into a serial killer, so by living among humans, you've signed up for the possibility that a serial killer will kill you".
Isn't this basically true, though? It's certainly not ideal, but people are generally against constructing the sort of society in which this statement isn't true. See regular political fights over gun control, or even driving laws. Lots of people (tens of thousands in the US) die annually at the hands of plain 'ol human failure modes.
Even if you could semi-reliably identify those that will "go berserk", you'd have to wade through a bunch of legal questions to actually do something about it under current law.
We don't say "you assumed this risk by deciding to live in a place full of humans". It's entirely the fault of the serial killer, and the fact that someone "signed up for the possibility" of living next to a serial killer is not taken into consideration at all.
Generally, we don't say that you "signed up for" something which you've taken reasonable (but not 100% certain) measures to avoid, particularly if avoiding it completely makes it hard to live a normal life.
The analogy would be knowing which sexual acts (even with contraception) will result in a pregnancy, which you can't identify ahead of time either.
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