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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Mexico’s supreme court has decriminalized abortion across the country, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The supreme court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
Not sure about the anatomy (though I can agree that some of it is rather funny, when you think about it), but the ability to control your own body is, as I see it, one of the core liberties that can never be taken away from an able person. The ethics of “supporting” people with some mental disabilities is much more convoluted, I do not have a strong opinion there.
Would be curious to see how you do your tax returns if that violates your anatomy!
“Autonomy” not “anatomy”, very different things.
“I’m curious to see how you do your taxes if that violates your autonomy”
Easy, as I pretty clearly laid out violating autonomy is a requirement of society. Social norms require forcing people to engage in certain actions or face punishment (either literal imprisonment or social repercussions like faced by rude people.) If this is permissible, then why is merely prohibiting certain actions to be considered an unacceptable violation of bodily autonomy? Prohibiting something is no where near as severe as forcing someone to do something.
Ultimately nobody actually cares about bodily autonomy, it is simply a post hoc attempt at justifying that people ascribe moral value based solely on how they personally feel.
(A good example of this is forced blood donation, everyone apparently thinks it’s somehow reprehensible (on principle not by making medical risk arguments) even though it is only temporary harm and arguably less harmful than income tax).
That said, I do my taxes just fine, even though the state violates my bodily autonomy by forcing me to do them.
FYI, when people talk about a right to bodily autonomy they aren’t saying you aren’t allowed to mind-control people, they are saying you aren’t allowed to coerce someone since all norms and laws are enforced by coercion rather than rendering people physically incapable of violating the norms.
Oh, my bad, apologies. Scan reading sometimes leads to mistakes like that, and that one was too funny for my brain to let go.
But now it makes even less sense to me with the body thing. I would never accept someone else forcing me to do (or not do) something with my own body - and i see no reason whatsoever for anyone to accept that.
There is an issue of vaccination where some enforcement is justifiable, as there is a true risk for other people in you not doing it. How does someone’s decision of not having a child threatens you?
Any and all restrictions or instructions should be based on a rational argument, otherwise it is just a limitation of your freedom.
And given that the argument in favor of imposing the limitations in question lies in the area of someone else’s beliefs - that becomes even more ridiculous.
On the taxes side - there i can see a strong argument for it in principle, as it allows the society as a whole to do better. You want to use infrastructure built by society - you pay. Now, there is a whole other problem of how exactly the monies collected on the basis of a rational idea are spent. Holding the people in charge accountable is truly a big issue, not for this thread though.
“How does someone not having a child threaten you”
A serial killer that only targets blondes doesn’t pose any threat to me at all. I might even personally benefit from their actions. Why do I still want them to be stopped?
“I see no reason whatsoever to accept that”
But you already do. You even give vaccination as an example where it would be permitted.
You are perfectly fine with one bodily autonomy violation to save lives (vaccination), but are against another (weaker form) violation that also saves lives.
The logical resolution to this is to say that prohibiting abortion doesn’t save lives (i.e the fetus has no moral value or atleast insufficient moral value to outweigh personal feelings). But this renders the bodily autonomy argument worthless, because it is now the moral status of the fetus that matters not any idea of bodily autonomy. This pretty much establishes why I think the right to bodily autonomy is not actually accepted by anyone.
“Any and all restrictions and instructions should be based on rational arguments”
There is tons of academic papers on the immorality of abortion, of course there are tons that argue in the opposite of direction. I would consider most on both sides to have somewhat rational arguments it just depends on what premises you want to accept as true. I find the premises behind permitting abortion to be bit more far-fetched, things like mind-body dualism or continuity of mind as somehow granting greater moral value to be unsupported or impractical.
Blondes are people, fetuses are not - that is my view. Moral arguments can form opinions, not legislation.It is ok for you to hate me if you choose to do so, it however does not grant you a right to stop me doing my immoral in your view thing. That is, unless my immoral thing infringes your rights, then we can talk and see what can be done.
As mentioned, I am always keen to accept a rational argument (as in vaccination, where there is science behind), so can i please politely ask you to point me in the direction of academic studies on the immorality of abortion? Never saw one, so forgive my ignorance.
“Blondes are people fetuses are not”
First you completely missed the point of that question. You initially speculated why people should care if it is not directly harming them, this is a clear and obvious example of people caring about something that doesn’t directly harm them. Showing that your initial objection was unfounded.
Second you immediately abandoned the bodily autonomy argument, just like I pointed out you would.
“Unless my Immoral things is infringing on your rights”
Circle back to the serial killer. They aren’t infringing on my rights, how dare I object! What right do I have to enforce my morality on them?
Obviously it is permissible to enforce morality regardless of whether or not the subject likes it. The question is simply how to determine if the morality is correct, i.e consistent and well-founded.
“Moral arguments can form opinions not legislation”.
Nope, that’s literally all that legislation is. A moral system is something that determines whether or not something is good or bad. If a law declares that some action should be taken or certain actions are to be prohibited it is enforcing a moral system. (That moral system may be wildly inconsistent and contradictory but it is still a moral system).
There seems to be this popular notion ( outside of moral philosophy) that morality is somehow empirically derived. Unfortunately no matter how much you watch someone die, you will never gain any information on whether that circumstance is bad or good. Empirical facts may aid in classifying actions, but they do not create the requirements for the categories themselves. For instance you have a moral system that says that actions with property X are bad, you may use empirical facts to determine that action Y has property X and you can therefore determine that action Y must be bad. Without the initial premise that actions with property X are bad, you could observe Y and any other action and have no ability to determine if they are good or bad.
“In the direction of academic studies”
Not so much studies as arguments, since moral philosophy is not really an empirical field, but rather a rational one. You can find them in many ethics journals. A notable paper is “Why Abortion is Immoral” by Don Marquis, and if you read any papers in favor of abortion or infanticide there is generally a paper rebutting it.
Judging by the length of your replies i make a conclusion that either the topic in question is rather important to you, or you just enjoy arguing. In any case - thank you, it is always a pleasure to have a meaningful debate. Cannot say that the topic in question was ever in my focus (I am getting agitated mostly about personal rights and freedoms in general, rather than this particular sub-case), but your time committed deserves a slightly more detailed response. Also, thanks for a particular paper you mentioned - I enjoyed reading it, and it only highlights the differencies in our views. So let me use the same way of responding to specific lines in your posts. “You completely miss the point of that question” - nope, you provide a specific example of a killer, I respond that killing anybody is bad. The big question is how to define this “anybody”. Based on that single paper you mentioned - the only one I ever read on the subject - this is indeed a central question of the whole debate, as both sides recognise the unacceptability of killing. I draw the line at birth, you do it sometime before. Oversimplification, I know, but I have no intention to contribute to the whole debate with my humble attempts on writing a tome. All I am saying - and it seems you agree, but that is up to you really - is that there is no definitive way to establish the bulletproof concept around abortion rights, so there is no ground to impose a restriction on a woman to do as she sees right. “You abandoned the bodily autonomy argument” - how so? I did not mention it in the short reply, that is true. But I stand convinced that bodily autonomy is the inherent right of every single person living. Moreover, the vaccination case does not contradict it, if taken together with the principle of limiting one’s rights by rights of others. I do not see who’s rights are affected in the abortion case (with a potential exception of a father who could really want this particular baby). “Thats literally what legislation is” Moral code evolved into the legislation, that is not something to argue against. Moral norms, however, as argued by evobiologists, were initially based on natural factors that helped the population to survive and expand. Killing one of your kin is bad, sleeping with your sister or your father is bad, stealing food is bad etc. Then there were less obvious additions and then there come religions that totally screwed it all. The whole idea of a proper legislation is to remove everything arbitrary (as it violates someone’s rights with no purpose) and keep the rules that are accepted by the majority and work. Abortion ban is obviously not accepted by everyone (majoriity is to be seen for any of the sides, from what I heard about US politics, the ban is in minority), and the purpose of it is unclear outside of a particular understanding of the morality. That is what I basically am trying to say: there is no universal moral system, hence there should not be a law based on someone’s belief that something is moral or not. A good basis of a law is the natural right to live, but in my view it does not emerge before someone is born. The deprivation argument from prof Marquis is, as I read it, by his own definition too broad to be practical (animals, contraception, plants,…?).
You abandoned the bodily autonomy argument because you switched to the moral status of the fetus. If the bodily autonomy argument was really sufficient to permit abortion then the moral status of the fetus could not possibly matter, because bodily autonomy will always override it.
You seem to like the idea of bodily autonomy, but apparently don’t consider it to be sufficiently morally relevant to actually be considered in anything but morally neutral circumstances. (This is pretty standard among most people, no matter how much they want to say they value bodily autonomy)
“There is no universal moral system, hence there should not be a law based on someone’s belief that something is moral or not”
By this standard no morality could be enforced because you are acting contrary to someone else’s morality. Not everyone agrees that killing is bad.
“a natural right to live… does not emerge before someone is born”.
They are alive before they are born, so what special property do they gain at birth that gives them a right to life? If it is independence, well children can’t survive on their own until at least 4 years of age (closer to 10-12 in reality).
“Marquis definition is too broad… plants and animals”
That’s why it’s called a future-like-our’s. Plants and animals are certainly deprived of futures, but they are not future humans. It’s to human conscious experience that is valued, and depriving an existing entity of future human experience explains the wrongness of killing adult humans and by extension all humans with an expectation of human consciousness.