Originally posted by Patient_Leech
Fixed. You can call me Leech. And there's no "A" in it. 😉Fixed again. We really need to work on your spelling! 😛 But yeah, this forum would be a lot more interesting if people engaged with ideas more and accused others of being socks less.
My brain keeps wanting me to think there's an A in there.
Originally posted by Patient_Leech
So the issue here, then, is this: Are sexual decisions the exercise of one's perfect and conscious free will for which one could easily do differently given the same opportunity having no knowledge of what they decided in the previous instance? Do the passions of desire, lust, biological needs, etc really allow for people to exercise their perfect "free will"?Species reproduce. That's what they do to proliferate and become successful. It's built into our biology, our very being. But as a species we have become so successful that births are actually becoming a burden and children are suffering.
At the very least we treat people as if their decisions are their own and that's the model we build society upon. That's certainly the model we base our criminal justice system and law enforcement on which are responsible for our very safety.
We also have a lot of natural instincts, some tilted more towards things like physical aggression, that we are socialized to reign in. We also have non-pregnancy risking options to achieve orgasms as creatures with hands.
I'm not particularly convinced that we should green light terminating human life because some people desperately need to get their rocks off. Me weighing people not getting their rocks off as much against abortions happening... it's not really a difficult question for me.
Originally posted by Patient_Leech
So doesn't it just make sense to allow for abortions to prevent that unneeded suffering? Especially if, as Rob pointed out, there aren't going to be sufficient social safety nets in place?
I suppose you could come at it through a more utilitarian lens, though it's not really a lens I fully adopt partly because we aren't omniscient, we don't know all ends, all outcomes, much less short term outcomes versus long term outcomes, or the kind of consequences justifying decisions with "for the greater good" could lead to, as opposed to taking a more humble approach towards how clear our vision actually is and working in a layer of ethical boundary around our actions towards other people. Additionally the utilitarian model isn't really one that takes guilt, innocence, and responsibility into account, which I think are relevant factors to this issue.
Lastly, I'm not particularly comfortable with appointing people as the arbitrators to determine the termination of human life based on their cost and not as a matter of innocence or guilt (not saying I support the death penalty, am saying I draw a delineation between the death of the innocent and killing someone on the field of battle or a school shooter who is guilty of forcing the situation). Even if you aren't particularly interested in innocence /guilt/responsibility (which based on your post and you being a fan of Sam Harris I suppose you might throw a "Free Will" interjection in there), it's certainly at the very least a useful model to circumscribe the excesses of human behavior and the purview of authority. Especially if you're interjecting an opinion that people can't even be expected to govern their own sexual impulses, such a statement doesn't really inspire confidence in me in the ability of human beings to handle a purely utilitarian model of acting towards the termination of human life.
I'm also not really a fan of preemptive prescribed euthanasia, if they'd rather not live after they're born I suppose there are measures they could take, but they may very well find life worth pursuing despite their life circumstances.
But I suppose we've hit something of an impasse where our moral epistemology doesn't really align. You seemingly being a hard determinist utilitarian, and my ethical structure being moreso an aim towards the good with important circumscriptions on the ethical nature of actions out of deep concern with negative liberty and the boundaries of innocence guilt and responsibility.