I don't think anyone capable of thinking intelligently about this issue is actually going to be swayed by this
Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion
- Thread starter Piscian
- Start date
Interestingly, one could argue that J.S. Mill's utilitarianism-- rule utilitarianism-- is a synthesis of Bentham's utilitarian (a more specific kind of consequentialist) approach and Kant's deontological approach. Which makes a certain amount of sense if you think that dentological ethics is founded upon a consequentialist meta-ethics, which some of the arguments for it seem to take for granted. "If we adopt [some form of consequentialism], the outcomes will be worse!" is a common line of argument. And deontological approaches to ethics-- as well as virtue ethics, for that matter-- seem either circular or arbitrary without at least some reference to consequence. Consequentialists have a satisfying answer to the question "why even have ethics?"; deontologists and virtue ethicists are correct to steal it.
I believe we reached the heart of the matter a long time ago.
You want a lump of meat to be a person. You need the world to conform to this delusion because your faith is too weak to survive the complexity of the universe you actually live in.
The reason it's pointless to argue this is not because there is any fundamental or irreconcilable disagreement. It's because your nihilism is a dead end. It's the termination of all human thought. Once you have decided there is no value in thinking, anything you believe or think has become meaningless.
In short, if you think you have the same value as a fetus, I'm happy to oblige you. Enjoy being meat.
There's quite a difference in figuring out a worst case scenario vs actually predicting what something will do.
You need the world to conform to the delusion that organisms are imaginary and life is meaningless because otherwise you cannot rationalize your purely hedonistic moral viewpoint.
Hedonistic?
I know I've already stated this to you before but most people who have abortion are being responsible, only bringing life into this world if they can look after it
It's not hedonistic. It's being responsible.
(There will be some people who are hedonists and do fall under your cartoonisation. Most do not)
Hedonism, as a philosophical term (the original usage of the word), is a school of thought in which the things that can be felt, pleasure or pain, are either the primary or sole indicators of moral goodness. Typically the idea is that which causes pleasure is good, and that which causes pain is evil, though there are variations of it. The central aspect that ties those variations together is the idea that consequences of pleasure and suffering are the things that should be considered in ethical decisions.
Terminal insists that a fetus not being a "thinking, feeling person" is of moral significance, that the "thinking, feeling" part is why we don't murder people, and without it there's nothing wrong with killing. If the unborn can't feel the pain, there's no moral reason not to have abortions. That is Terminal's stance, that is hedonism. That is not my stance, I would say we don't kill people because human beings have intrinsic value independent from their experience of life.
Hedonism is when you want to save the life of a woman with a nonviable fetus. God wanted her dead, you're just being a hedonist in wanting to save her life.
You're welcome to read back a few pages and choose not to say complete nonsense.
Edit: There's no chance you're doing it, so I'll explain it, cause you're not going to think of anything yourself. Arguments about viability favor me. Terminal does not care about viability, if something is just a piece of meat that's part of the mother, what it may become later doesn't matter if she wants it gone for any reason. The point of bringing up viability is to appeal to people who do treat life as intrinsically valuable, where a situation with an unviable fetus threatening the mother would allow an "abortion" to actually save a life. If you paid attention to the conversation, allowing for such a procedure is exactly what Terminal is accusing me of being a hypocrite over.
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Why do you want mothers to die? You keep supporting mother killers and their policies of mother killing.
*cuts off my finger and holds it up reverently*
Behold! A man!
Behold! A man!
The problem is that, if you believe that humans have instrinsic value, that does not mean you become a pro-lifer. It is very easy to use that same logic and become pro-choice
Why is that a problem, and how does that apply to my argument against someone who says that life itself is meaningless?
That you also for pointing out the absurdity of "organism is a made up distinction".
Objectively, that actually is what it is. Counterintuitive is not the same thing as absurd. Assigning significance to certain features is a choice. Basically all common sense distinctions are like this. Chairs, tables, walls, doors, roofs, radios, clocks, lions, tigers, and bears... all of these are categories we can use to make sense of the world. They can have objective criteria. But chairs never existed before someone decided they wanted a concept for a thing to sit on-- or maybe benches or stools came before chairs, who knows? In any case, at that moment even some things that were not chairs before became chairs. The picking out of the features of a chair was basically arbitrary; based on nothing more than the relevance of sitting to our shared experience.