Danya

bd from kg,

Notice the author/article also presents your views:

It looks to me like he is making arguments for both sides and sounds just like you on this point...regarding that hemophiliac baby he goes on to say:

So the book is not an endorsement of killing babies as you have suggested but a look at every stage. Except the chapter you site is the one following abortion and it is really about euthanasia, assisted suicide, mercy killing, or killing as a 'choice' for the parents.It is impossible to judge abortion rationally by siting such extremes, which will always exist, but cannot be made into a rule for all of society.
Even so, it is not relevant since children are already protected by the law and recognized as people. I have conceded the fact that they are persons and so has everyone who has participated so far in this thread.

This book is hardly a call for society to start killing little babies whenever they want to. And if this is the best argument you have to show the dreaded effects of abortion on society in all these years it doesn't say much. People would be discussing such things even if abortion were never legalized.

I mean they are already 'here' to the extent where it is beyond argument. If she has succeeded in becoming pregnant we can all pretty much agree she is already a person.

The context was not to give a complete definition of a person. As you know, I was saying that the woman is obviously an established person and is already considered such in the eyes of the law. Her life should be the primary concern.

Jerry Smith

I do not think that I have used the word "baby" to refer to an individual who has not yet been born in this thread or anywhere else.

If you think I have, please point it out. One of us needs correcting.

Jerry Smith

BD: Sorry that I have been away.
Lately, I'm getting from you that this is your main thesis. I don't think it is supportable. I have given you a definition of Person (that is entitled to full civil rights) that includes all babies and no animals that we know of. If this definition can be made, you cannot say that the position that animals must be given right-to-life or human babies can be denied right-to-life is logically entailed by the pro-choice position. You can only say that it is possible to construct a pro-choice position where one of these positions is entailed.

In this post, I will focus on personhood.
My definition of personhood is based on physiological structures, namely those necessary for cognition to take place.
You argue that mental events are the only morally relevant issues in defining personhood, and that physiological considerations are morally irrelevant. If this is the case, we can only take one position that I am aware of: a person sleeping or in a coma (who cannot have cognition in their current state) must non-persons. You have objected before that the values we use to determine personhood are forward looking, and that they must consider future potential for cognitive mental states. But, how does this square with the idea that physiological structures are irrelevant? How could we possibly determine whether an individual (animal or thing) had potential for cognitive mental states (or that it did not) without examining physiological structures? What does a doctor look at when a woman goes to get checked in order to determine whether she is pregnant or has a tumor?

My position is that the physiological structures are morally relevant, because by employing them we can encapsulate the concept of personhood in a simple statement that always agrees with our moral values about what a person is.

I also feel it is wrong to limit moral discussions as forward looking. Personally, what I value looks to the past, and to the present. In most cases moral decisions take into account consequences (in the immediate or in the distant future). In most cases moral definitions have to do with what a thing is, in the present, which is usually determined by what it has been and has done in the past.

I will give you a chance to reply before going any further with the person-hood angle.

Editing to add this:
If we found something capable of cognition, but with the body of an orangatan, we would still find that the structures it uses for cognition would be, well, of a kind to make cognition possible.

[ March 31, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>

Jerry Smith

The objective is not to show that these legal ramifications make it clearly unfeasible to treat the unborn as "persons". Yet, I don't think the discussion is pointless. I'll suggest that this is the point, and whether it is a good one or not, I hope you will agree that it is a point:

The point is to discuss how much(if any)law would have to be re-written if we did consider an embryo or fetus a person.

I have suggested that there might be little or no need for a change in laws concerning abortion if the definition of "Person" included an embryo or a fetus. You replied:

In other remarks, you defended the position that if an embryo or fetus is considered a Person, then its right to life superceded (that is, could infringe upon) a woman's right to decide what to allow to grow in her body. We have gone back and forth arguing on whether a woman can be said to have already consented to being pregnant by consenting (if she actually did consent) to sex.
Your formulation has it that anyone who does something with knowledge of its posential results becomes responsible for those results.

Neglecting the possibility of rape for the moment, we still must ask how far the responsibility (for the results of consensual sex) carries.

Now, I have just found a long post you wrote to me on page 3 of this thread that I had not seen before, and maybe I should go back and make a full reply to it before carrying this any further. I do have some things to say now, though.

You still have shown absolutely no good reason that a person's responsibility for the unintended results of an act can carry to the point where they are obligated to allow their body to be used as a life-support-system for another person.

You did remark that pregnancy was a unique situation, and asserted that it is reasonable that it is the only case where responsibility carries this far.

You stated the obvious, that with pregancy, the person for whom one must provide one's own body as life-support-system is a person of whom one was involved in the creation. Apart from this obvious fact, you did not explain why the responsibility to this newly created person carries so far.

I provided another example where one person is directly responsible for making another person dependent on themselves as a life-support-system in part and pointed out that under the law, the responsibility created by this does not carry so far as a requirement to provide themselves as a life-support-system. You only countered that a woman's body is a life-support-system that is automatically engaged. You did not offer a rationalization for the conclusion that she must therefore let it continue to operate as such.

(Side note: I hope that someone with medical knowledge will post on this thread about the question of whether a woman's body goes out of its way to become a life support system or whether an embryo secretes chemicals that suppress the woman's immunological reaction to a foreign body inside of her, and proceeds to attach itself to her placenta and draw blood and nutrients out of her body by connecting its own circulatory system to hers.)


Another side note: I do not have time to post a new thread on "partial birth abortion." I will just say a couple of things about the procedure:
1) it is sometimes a medical necessity. In severe cases of hydroencephalitis, a "partial birth abortion" is by far the best means of protecting a woman from death or long-term disability resulting from the attempt to deliver a live baby with a skull 4 times or more the normal size.
2) if Congress had included a clause in their last attempt to ban the procedure that provided for the protection of the woman from death or long-term disability, by allowing the procedure in only those cases, Bill Clinton would have signed it. I guess you notice that no one is trying to push that bill through for GW to sign.

Look for a full reply to your page 3 post as time allows.

bd-from-kg

Jerry Smith:

No problem. In your March 22 post you'll find the following exchange:

Since the terminology in question has never been applied to anything but a fetus, this statement can only be construed as referring to a fetus.

[ March 31, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Danya

bd from kg,

I really didn't want to have to read all of your extremely long posts again to have to find an example of where you will often interchange the word 'baby' when discussing abortion. Here is one example and if I have the time or inclination I will find more...

In this case we were talking about abortion...not killing babies. This is the type of word play that I have seen you use.

Jerry Smith

I did not remember that exchange or I would have at least known what you were talking about. However, I think there is a difference between me making a statement reflecting how I react to the emotionally charged language and imagery from the pro-choice side, and me using the term "baby" to identify the unborn. I did not think that anyone would be confused about the intention of my statement or I would have clarified at the time.

[ April 01, 2002: Message edited by: Jerry Smith ]</p>

Jamie_L

I agree with this partially, but I still take issue with the "in the future" part.

An embryo with no central nervous system has no physical structures that can produce mental events. Period. New structures must be produced for mental events to be generated. That, I believe, is a significant difference between an embryo and a comatose person. Both may have no mental events. However, only the comatose person has the actual structures capable of producing mental events in the future. The embryo does not.

Jamie

bd-from-kg

Danya:

Actually we were talking about adoption.

Unfortunately the English language has no word that can be used for both the fetus and the baby that it will become if carried to term. This can create an awkward situation in some contexts. The sentence you quoted is a good example. Replacing “baby” with “fetus” in this sentence would hardly do; it’s even more inappropriate to speak of “giving the fetus ... a ‘low-quality’ life” (that is, as you put it, one in which it would “go hungry, be abused, or otherwise ... grow up unwanted or unloved”) than it is to speak of “giving the baby death” when referring to an abortion.

In fact, the grammatical difficulties here tripped you up. The complete sentence referred to above was: “But, in some cases, it has to do with why a woman chooses to get an abortion rather than raise a child that she knows will go hungry, be abused, or otherwise be born and grow up unwanted or unloved.” It doesn’t make sense to say that a woman knows that a child will be born.

bd-from-kg

Danya:

As usual you’ve forgotten the original point. I claimed that a number of people now take the position that a baby is not a person. You challenged this by asking “Who has argued that babies do not have a right to live?” I replied by citing Dr. Singer among others. Now you note that he agrees with me in some other respects, which is quite true. But it doesn’t change the fact that he believes that babies are not persons.

Actually the passage you cite supports my position (which you seem to have found almost incomprehensible) that there is no significant moral difference between fetuses and babies. What Singer and I agree on is that fetuses are persons if and only if babies are persons. But he concludes from this that, since fetuses aren’t persons, babies must also not be persons, whereas I argue that, since babies are persons, fetuses must also be persons. Since you apparently agree with me (and disagree with Dr. Singer) on the question of whether babies are persons, if you accept the logic of the passage you quoted you are logically compelled to conclude (as I did) that fetuses are persons. If you don’t accept this logic, why did you bother to bring it up?

Quite right. All that Dr. Singer endorses is allowing parents to kill their own babies at their discretion.

If the previous excerpt from Singer’s magnum opus were not clear enough on this point, here’s some more:

It could hardly be clearer that Singer believes that infanticide is often the right thing to do, which is to say that it is not only permissible but morally obligatory, and that this decision should in all cases be left up to the mother (or to the parents; he is not entirely consistent on this point).

As Peter Berkowitz pointed out in <a href="http://www.thenewrepublic.com/011000/coverstory011000.html" target="_blank">The Utilitarian Horrors of Peter Singer</a>:

Thus the logic of Singer’s position is that infanticide should be treated exactly the same as abortion. Since the moral issues are so complex and intractable, the only fair, compassionate policy is to leave such extremely personal decisions in the hands of those who are most intimately involved and understand all of the ramifications and consequences. There is no more reason, in terms of Singer’s moral calculus, for society to second-guess the parents’ decision on whether or not to kill their newborn baby than there would be to second-guess their decision on what books to give their child to read. Less, in fact, because in the latter case the child will (finally) be old enough to be a person, and thus will have rights that society is entitled to protect.

Absent such rights, there is no way to justify coercive intervention on the baby’s behalf. That’s what the whole concept of “rights” is all about. If an individual has rights, the state is entitled to intervene to prevent those rights from being violated; otherwise it has no basis for such intervention. Thus, for example, if you kill your neighbor’s cat, you can be punished, but not very severely, because all you’ve done is to destroy your neighbor’s (not very valuable) property. If you kill a stray cat there is no penalty whatsoever because you haven’t infringed on anyone’s rights.

Now we are finally in a position to comment on what Dr Singer has to say about adoption.

Yes, this is a possibility to be taken into account. According to Dr. Singer’s philosophy it is no doubt often wrong to kill one’s own baby rather than put him up for adoption. But then, according to Dr. Singer’s philosophy it is wrong not to give at least 30% of your income (and all income above $30,000 per year) to charity to alleviate world hunger and poverty. But he certainly does not hold that it should be against the law to fail to do so. There are lots of things that one should do, but which no sane person would want to have you arrested for failing to do, and things that you shouldn’t do that no sane person would want you to be arrested for doing. Dr. Singer’s position (or at least the position that the logic of his argument unavoidably leads to) is that infanticide, when it’s wrong at all, is in the latter category.

But Dr. Singer is advocating that these laws be repealed; he believes that society should stop recognizing babies as “persons”. This is not a trivial, abstract proposition. Most people (including you, I take it) think that if a mother suffocates her one-month-old child we should react with the most severe condemnation and outrage, and that she should be (at the least) imprisoned for a good many years. Dr. Singer believes that we should regard her more or less the same way we would regard someone who has chloroformed her pet cat. We might regard her action with distaste, but with an awareness that it might well have been justified. It certainly does not warrant punishment. This is a rather significant difference in moral outlook. If, as you say, you believe that babies are persons, you have a profound moral disagreement with Dr. Singer.