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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"
You brought up the point about organ donation. You’re not engaging in “organ donation” in the normal process of pregnancy. “Your body” is no longer “your body,” at the point it involves the life and death of someone else. That’s the entire point.
Precisely. You chose the risk. And now you live with the consequences of said risk.
You realize fighting was in quotation marks, right?
We are going to disagree irrevocably about this. "My Body" is always my body, morally it is wrong to remove bodily autonomy from a being regardless of the reason. I don't think you can convince me that any form of slavery regardless of the cause will ever be ok. I'm not a consequentialist, and am not a utilitarian. The freedom to bodily autonomy is a quintessential natural right and it requires Tyranny to override that.
I'd go as far to say you benefit from this as we currently aren't harvesting your organs against your will because it will save the lives of multiple other people. Afterall "your body" is no longer "your body".
I also did not bring up organ donation, please highlight where I did.
Show me the law or the penal colony where we condemn smokers to die of lung cancer without any chance of treatment.
Do you support abolishing prison? Or law enforcement entirely, since almost all criminal law enforcement requires taking people's bodies and holding them against their will (and threatening them with bodily harm if they don't comply)? I can't think of any moral framework that includes absolute bodily autonomy without resulting in absurd results in all other walks of life. And we're not talking about weird edge cases here, we're talking about normal things a society needs in order to function.
I mean this gets into how a social group enforces rules, there are a lot of gray areas. For example, if I kidnap you and hold you hostage is that ok because society believes that imprisoning people is ok? What if I commit you to an insane asylum against your will while you are perfectly sane?
I'd argue that holding someone against their will for no reason other than you can is wrong, and there are a bunch of different lens you could use to explain why.
However, if I violate some social compact around what constitutes lawful behavior in my tribe what are my options? Non-Exhaustively:
Scale these up from tribes to modern society and I'd argue the intuitions follow. Realistically a criminal could fight their incarceration, its up to them if they think losing/being treated as an enemy of a society is worth that cost. They could escape to the wilds and form their own tribe, or wait until such unjust rules are overthrown. They can accept the punishment in hopes of re-integration afterwards. They have lots of options, but fundamentally they have the right to bodily autonomy, just as members of a society/tribe have the right to associate with individuals they want to. There's tension there, but I don't see the conflict.
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Your body always is “your body,” right up to the point in involves someone else’s body. Just as your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. This is the first time I’ve come across someone equating pregnancy to slavery, but it’s surely interesting. And this is what I was getting at earlier:
Not saying to belong to the in-group, but the logic sure does seem to get pretty fuzzy whenever the topic is brought up. Words lose their meanings so fast to its advocates, probably because it’s the only way they can square this circle.
Contrary to your last point, the reason either of us are benefiting at all entirely comes from the moral wealth of my side of aisle, I’d argue. The reason someone doesn’t have the right to come along and end my life without retribution comes from the self-worth and dignity of each person. Which is also why I’m against abortion.
People vary in both of these.
What do you think about the Iranian schoolgirls the United States killed? Do they deserve retribution? Or do they lack as much self-worth and dignity as Americans?
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But I'm not blue tribe, I'm a libertarian. It should be pretty clear that I value the sanctity of bodily autonomy very highly. So it would follow that I view the removal of that right as pretty catastrophic.
Can you make the actual argument around collective amnesia clear. Because if you are just arguing the teleology of sex then I point you to this comment I just made link. What was said about Christian assumption of a default universalism applies to your comment/argument as far as I can tell.
Technically so does the babies... which is why I can remove their body from mine, after which I have no say in their bodily autonomy. Their rights end where my body begins. Their dependence on my body and their lack of right to my body is morally consistent. If the technology existed to incubate those babies until they were fully formed then I imagine it would be considered correct by my morals to do so. After all who doesn't want to keep existing. However the lack of a technology existing does not suddenly make morals change.
I didn't realize your moral side was now claiming total ownership over any and all children and births across the universe? Isn't that a bit of an arrogant and grandiose claim? My parents were trying intentionally for children. I don't think you can claim me. What about my dignity to not be enslaved? Of if I dress a certain way and walk down a certain street in a bad neighborhood do I lose that dignity?
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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.
And before humans (+ tree shrews) decided to torture themselves, chili peppers produced capsaicin to repel mammals, ergo eating modern kimchi is morally impermissible because it’s a profanation of its natural function?
The opposite, eating makes sense as it is desensitizing/training up against the plant defenses.
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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?
I don’t think there are any animal species, certainly no mammals, who have this trait.
But your argument surprisingly does check out, as human men (and all male apes) are in fact 24/7 365 fertile! Following your reasoning this explains that male sexuality is indeed all about reproduction/impregnation. But female sex is not (or only around a sixth as much). Which explains much about sexual customs and men/women.
Considering it take two people to engage in reproduction, the correct formulation would be 1/1 (male) * 1/6 (female) = 1/3 of sex is about reproduction. (Formula simplification is intuitive and left to the reader as an exercise) From a purely mathematical standpoint.
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The exploration of the purpose of things is called teleology. We assert that things have inherent natural purposes. A knife exists so that it might cut things. You could use a knife for other things, say, as a paperweight, but you are losing the sense of what is means to be a knife if you cannot distinguish these ends.
Aristotle's classic example is the acorn, whose intrinsic telos is to grow into an oak tree. That's what the acorn is "supposed to do". Now, you might use an acorn for other things such as decoration in resin or feed for pigs. But these are closer to technology, in the sense that we have manipulated the acorn. We've changed it. What Aristotle would call the "final cause" of the acorn is to become a tree.
The final cause of sex, its telos, is reproduction. Sex has other ends besides and you obviously don't have to have a child every time you have sex. But you essentially can't talk about sex at all without talking about reproduction because that's its telos. That's what it's for.
Because children are innocent by definition. They aren't fully-formed adults, they are presumed not to have had sex, they haven't fully interacted with the world. They aren't morally culpable in the way an adult is. They can't be legally guilty in the way an adult can be. That's basically the definition of innocence. It's like asking why oranges are considered orange, well it's inherent in the category.
There is no such thing as a knife in nature, at least if you exclude human intent from nature.
If you include human intent into nature, then the inherent natural purpose of an apple is to be eaten and the seeds thrown into a landfill where it will most certainly not grow into an apple tree.
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I link you to this Other Post. I understand what teleology is, but I disagree on your authority to tell me what the telos of something is. Sex is complicated and it will never be decoupled from reproduction but the belief that the telos of sex is solely reproduction is smuggling Christian moral values that are not given. Sex is also about pair-bonding, pleasure, marital alliance, kinship formation, status/politics, ritual or cosmic symbolism and sometimes exchange or obligation within a social system. Many cultures and many religions have a very different teleology about sex, what is your evidence that yours is the correct one?
This is a common problem with Christians and cultural Christians. They are close-minded in that they believe their morals are the one true moral system. Then they argue from that stance without ever identifying that the moral precepts of Christianity are not universal or with the understanding that their moral precepts are even Christian-derived in the first place.
Again, you are using the Christian moral definition of innocence. As a non-Christian, I lack the same moral foundation and definitions you do, so trying to use them to tell me what is and what is moral is not tenable. Make an argument stand on its own two feet instead of just dictating your definitions from a book. I disagree definitionally that children are innocent. Children as a class are merely human spawn. They have as much innocence as any human. Ork babies are no more innocent than Ork adults, Goblin children, elven children, borg children, romulan children, klingon children, Yuuzhan Vong children and all permutations otherwise.
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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.
That would really depend on the kind of sex.
As the new Tyrant of America is is now my degree that premartial sex is limited to Anal or Pegging only. Anyone caught doing something as disgusting as "a penis in a vagina" before marriage shall now be forced into 18 years of indentured labour.
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