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Personal subject for me, my next oldest brother has Downs. He's a great guy, extremely high functioning, but he is limited in his life options, and he knows it. He wants the same things most guys want, a family, which he can't have. He's been an immense amount of work for my parents, who have been very supportive of him and his relative independence. He was a fair bit of work for me when we were children, as well as being a source of conflict between me and kids looking to pick on the tard. Not a bit of which do I begrudge him, he's absolutely worth it.
But in the larger sense, this option is not a reasonable one for many parents and I don't fault anyone who doesn't have that drive and faith for that sort of thing. I don't have any fundamental moral compunction with soft eugenics at the individual level. Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer. I'll bite the bullet, the correct number of dead (proto)infants isn't zero. Death is not the worst of outcomes. Obviously there will be disagreement over what counts as worse.
I love my brother, and my life is better, and I am a better person for having him. But I'm not going to moralfag about the real costs of that and people who don't want that for themselves or their retard-to-be kid. Those are the sort of life and death choices we have to make about family. When is it time to pull the plug on Grandma? How big a retard do we think we can raise? Nothing the law or the priests or the redditors say is going to remove the responsibility for these choices.
Ultimately, the abortion issue is, like most hot-button political things, just a way to moralfag over who is killing kids, raping kids, shooting kids etc. etc. Meanwhile, basically everyone is on the same page in practical terms. 80%+ of the electorate, including supermajorities of both parties are fine with restricting late-term or partial-birth abortion, but want it legal up to some point and for emergencies, etc. In practical terms, this is the reality in most states. There is no political conflict underneath that except the most extreme five percent on each side trying to either make all abortion illegal or legal after actual live birth.
Yes, there is legitimacy in thinking about the issues as a moral exercise in where exactly we draw the lines for questions like this, of life and death. But the politics of it is just pure bullshit. The underlying problem is not one with a simple answer, but our current system is far from outrageous.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
People think they can enforce their bright-line morality, but it won't work. You can denounce the "blood guilt" of others, but we all kill to live. We all kill those we love, and some of us kill quite a bit more than that. It works at the other end for assisted suicide too. Taken to the logical conclusion, we must all bankrupt ourselves every generation to eke even a single moment of continued brain activity because every nanosecond of life is so precious as to dwarf the world economy. Compromises with reality will be made, and if your morality can't handle reality, then it's not much use to anyone.
The slopes both ways are always slick.
I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.
When your next relative is terminal in the hospital, I want you to spend every single dime you can beg, borrow or steal in a fruitless attempt to extend their life until you have zero possessions left. You wouldn't want to murder an innocent, would you? You wouldn't put your personal belongings and finances above a human life would you?
There's millions of scenarios, mercy killings, long-term comas, brain death. Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die. Your buddy sustains third-degree burns over 90% of his body and will surely die in extreme agony within days. Best let him scream, you wouldn't want to murder an innocent! Your grandfather is trying to starve himself to death because he's taking way too long to die, so you hold him down and force-feed his withered form so you can be a heckin decent human bean. Wouldn't want a murder on your conscience!
This "hurr durr gotcha murder" is ridiculous and childish. The sort of thing people think right up until they actually have to make one of these calls for themselves.
On average, we will all, by your lights, murder most of our families until we in turn are murdered by them. Is this a useful way to think morally about life and family?
Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?
This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.
The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.
It’s also not clear to me that action vs inaction is a super bright line. I would certainly consider someone a murderer who stared down passively as someone else slowly lost their grip on the top of a cliff when the watcher could have reached down to save them at any point.
Oh? But what if the cliff is unstable and the potential rescuer is maybe not strong enough to lift the other person? Say, a 100 pound woman and a 300 pound man hanging off the cliff?
Or even if the situation is reversed, but the man has a fear of heights. And so on. Inaction as murder or even hostile intent is a hard sell.
That’s not how thought experiments work. You can’t resolve the trolly problem by just saying, “well what if there is a third track with no one on it! Ha!”
None of those situational tweaks apply in the scenario I proposed. The watcher can trivially save the dangler. They are not afraid of heights, and they are plenty strong enough. It costs them basically nothing to save the dangler. If you want to argue that there is still some risk, we can even make them tied into an anchor point by a climbing harness so it’s completely safe. To me that’s murder.
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