but you clearly feel a moral responsibility to condemn
If "condemn" merely means "thinking it's immoral", then yes. If means "publicly shaming" or something, then no, I haven't done that.
But with all the millions of children who die each year due to preventable causes, do you believe that noone is directly responsible for that?
Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't. I'd have to be omniscient to know.
Do you believe that the people who run Apple, which has an annual revenue greater than many countries GDP, are unaware of the conditions for workers in their factories? Do you think the governments and military and paramilitary groups who wage these wars are unaware of the human cost of their actions? Do you believe that politicians who enact discriminatory policies or cut social welfare programs are ignorant of the human cost?
No, No, and No.
Do these direct responsibilities entail the same severity of criticism?
Yes. "That's immoral". There, now we're at the same level of criticism.
I have, by the way, spoken against discriminatory policies, here on these forums, in the past. For example, affirmative action.
If acknowledging the responsibility for the consequences of your actions would lead to the situation where the best course of action was to lie in a hole and wait for death, then to me that says that you are living a life over which you have very little control.
That depends on how broadly or narrowly you define "the consequences of your actions". If one were to buy an iPhone, would they be guilty of the same crimes that Apple has committed? If one were to live in a country, vote, pay taxes, etc, would they be guilty of the crimes of their government or politicians?
That was my entire point. Each of us contributes to the world in small ways and each action has a impact, for better or worse. Have you researched EVERYTHING you buy to make sure it wasn't made with slave labor or conflict minerals? That it was sustainably harvested? That it was "fair trade" certified? Are your taxes funding the military industrial complex? Should you move to some place without a standing army,? How are you going to get there without depleting the ozone? My point was that if you spent all the time and energy needed to make sure that you weren't the least bit morally culpable for anything bad, you'd go crazy. That's when you would lay down and die.
Nobody has that level of control. Nobody can be 100% morally clean.
But you have one power which this society cannot (yet) take from you, and that is your ability to know that it is wrong. Do you know that it is wrong? Are you willing to say publicly that it is wrong?
Yes, and yes.
Or have you already accepted its wrongness as necessary and inevitable, have you already implicitly accepted that lives must be sacrificed to maintain this society
That's exactly what Elvis and Xprimentyl have been saying: "it would completely change up the woman's lifestyle! We can't have that!"
One can buy an iPhone and say "I know it's wrong, but....."
Can one have an abortion and say "I know it's wrong, but...."?
Because my debate partners have not joined me in agreeing that abortion is wrong. We can all readily agree that we share a certain amount of moral culpability for purchasing modern electronics, however.
If they were to say "Yes, abortion is wrong, BUT we need it to maintain society!" then we would have nothing to argue over.
Why is to so easy to dream of a hypothetical world in which abortion is illegal, and yet so hard to dream of a world in which no child dies of the effects of poverty?
It's equally easy.
