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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.
Sure, but law enforcement/prison (usually) isn't a "just because we can" thing. Similar to how many people oppose murdering babies (which, by the way, violates their bodily autonomy) "just because we can". I.e. when "it's inconvenient for my lifestyle and/or the baby will have Down's Syndrome or similar" which accounts for roughly 95% of abortions. I'm personally a pro-life absolutist who opposes it even in danger to the life of the mother type situations (though I've grown into that position over time, I sadly used to be more "moderate" in my support of child murder), but for the modal abortion it's essentially done out of convenience, not necessity.
I made a response to this same argument: here. The baby is violating my bodily autonomy, me removing them from MY body does not violate their bodily autonomy. Their inability to survive outside of MY body is not my problem. Pro-lifer's want to assign more moral weight to a baby than to a human, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for it.
To be clear you are asking me to unpack a very complex and complicated topic that only marginally relates to the abortion topic in that they affect similar values. For similar levels of effort I'd like you to address how you can be pro-life yet not immediately donate your body and all your organs to help everyone who needs organ transplants. After all if bodily autonomy is not sacrosanct, and some humans have more moral worth than others, shouldn't we forcibly remove organs to help those of more moral virtue?
Or we can stay on the topic at hand...
At least you are honest and consistent. I can respect that. I am near enough to a pro-choice absolutist, so I doubt we'll ever agree. Furthermore since I think humans are of equal moral worth (barring edge cases) and I am not religious, I don't see how I will ever consider a "child" (even granting a clump of cells is a child) of more moral worth than an existing human being. And thus be willing to abrogate the rights of one to support the rights of the other.
You generally can't remove a baby without violating their bodily autonomy. Most abortions involve essentially blending the baby up and scraping them out.
That's just straight up weird, children have been almost universally considered to be of greater moral worth than adults for all of human history. Even animals are often willing to endanger or sacrifice themselves for the sake of children. Even from an atheistic and evolutionary point of view, ensuring the safety and well-being of children (over that of adults) is essential to the perpetuation of the species. Children are innocent (this was discussed more thoroughly by someone else in this thread), and innocent people have greater moral worth than those who are guilty of wrongdoing (and all adults have done some amount of wrongdoing, some more than others). The same way a serial killer adult has less moral worth than a non-serial killer adult. I don't see any way to see this differently without completely throwing out the idea that morality exists.
Because I'm not a utilitarian? Only utilitarian ethics (and similar deranged branches of ethics) would reach the conclusions you're suggesting. Just because all human life has inherent value but some are more valuable than others doesn't mean any and all measures to save the life of another are mandated. But there is nothing incompatible with this view and the view that we should not take active measures (like abortion) to end an innocent life.
In the hypothetical future where we do a C-section to remove the clump of cells that will be come a baby, or the partially formed baby without killing it in the uterus, you are then ok with abortion? Regardless of the baby's viability outside the womb?
I feel like we don't even live in the same reality if you think this is remotely true. The revealed preference of pretty much all civilizations, cultures, creeds, and faiths is that children as a class are not given any special consideration. Individuals love their children and the children of friends and family (aka the tribe) but the children of the other tribe? Absolutely not. Anyone with even a basic understanding of history should know this.
Do I need to keep going?
If children occupied a universally elevated moral status in human societies. Then history should show near-taboo protection. It does not. It shows repeated infanticide, sacrifice, enslavement, starvation, institutional abuse, and massacre of children across civilizations, including Christian and Western ones. You may believe children deserve special moral protection, but history does not support the claim that humans have generally treated them as a uniquely sacred class.
Incorrect, a deontologist could easily reach the same conclusion, or a consequentialist. It just requires different values.
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Not realistically. There is no right of exile that Society recognizes for the condemned. Fighting will result in severe violation of bodily autonomy, death, 99% of the time. Because it takes a lot of skill to be a fugitive that is not found and executed in a 20 v 1 fire fight or hauled off to the cage.
They definitely have no such thing. At no point in my life have I felt like I have had full bodily autonomy. It's not really a position the West has ever taken. Most people in the West from Edward I onwards have had their bodies treated like objects for significant portions of their lives. That court case that was cited in the OP was like it came from outer space. Had the judge never heard of serfdom, slavery, childhood, incarceration, taxes, clothes laws or seatbelt laws?
There used to be, Britain famously exiled people to Australia. There are other examples if you want me to fish for them. Obviously modern society is a lot more complicated, and I'd say American Society is more on the retributive side of the spectrum.
A right to bodily autonomy does not automatically mean no one may ever physically constrain you under any circumstances. It usually means your body is not available for arbitrary use, domination, or violation by others. Imprisonment, on this view, is not justified because the state suddenly owns your body. It is justified, if at all, as a limited response to prior rights-violations under a public system of rules. Incarceration is one of the ways a society tries to reconcile one person’s liberty with everyone else’s security
And you somehow think this is a good thing, the pinnacle of moral virtue that we should aspire to? Just because the system is flawed doesn't mean we can't dream of a better one, a more principled one.
No, not at all. I just find it misplaced that your argument sort of comes from pretending that we already live in a society that we don't live in. I think critiquing the lack of bodily autonomy more generally is the way to go. If this is done well, you can justify allowing a couple to have an abortion without their neighbors intervening like it's their business. But that can't be done consistently in the present society. Pro choice comes off as narrow special pleading without biting the bullet on a lot of other topics in a way that would make you a libertarian.
Most incarceration, at least of many classes of people, cannot be justified this way. Even a lot of violence incarcerations are really personal disputes that won't spill over to strangers.
Too Late...
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