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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.
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.
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