Hey Lion, you up to my challenge?
Sure. It's a good way of making sure both sides aren't inadvertently or deliberately talking past one another.
Frankly, its hardly a mystery what makes the pro-choice side feel their position is justified and in good faith, you have to take them at their word if you expect them to extend the same courtesy.
And like many others who were in high school debate teams, I have argued for positions with which I strongly disagreed and in doing so, put myself into the shoes of people I don't understand.
I think, that
they think, to varying degrees, one or more of the following;
- There's really nothing wrong with humans in power, deciding what constitutes the definition of a human with less power.
- The end justifies the means. (Lesser of two evils - my unhappiness is worse than your not being allowed to live.)
- Abortion is a civic duty. It would be wrong not to allow/force women to abort an unwanted baby. (Unwanted by the government. Unwanted by the father. Unwanted by the mother.)
- This isn't even a moral dilemma full stop. Mind your own business. (No, seriously, what's it got to do with you?)
- Having an abortion isn't that bad. Other people do much worse things. (Tu quoque)
- Abortion must not wrong because otherwise the Supreme Court wouldn't have allowed it. (Appeal to authority)
- Abortion must not be wrong because X percent of the people in an opinion poll said so. (Ad populam fallacy)
- There's no God. Life is cruel. Life is short.
And if all of these pro-choice beliefs were objectively true (or even just unfalsifiable because of moral relativism,) then
they are correct and abortion is no more immoral than breaking wind in an elevator.
And you failed.
First, you need to understand that for many of us there is a difference between (morals: what we feel), and ethics (strategic rules which, if followed, benefit the collective that follows them, and which are a product of the shape of the reality we live in).
Morals are an approximation of ethics. Morals are by definition relative, whereas ethics is not; it is contextual, but not relative.
It is not about power. Your first failed attempt conflicts with literally everything in the last few posts: it conflated "human (genetic): a thing made of Homo Sapiens DNA in Homo Sapiens cells" with "human (person): a thing which is expected to and accepts fulfilling particular obligations to society" or perhaps "human (proto-person): a human (genetic) entity into which society has made an investment and thus accepted an obligation to make every reasonable attempt to foster into a human (person)."
Means don't need justification because
we can see a delineation between (person), (proto-person), and (genetic).
Abortion of a child is not a Civic duty. It is a choice. It is the choice of a parent over whether they are going to make the investment that differentiates a (genetic) from a (proto-person). The only time in which "it's not your business" enters into this is "you have no right to force someone else to make an investment, specifically of health and time; such would be slavery".
It
might be a Civic duty
if the person does not want to be a parent
and a society was messed up to the point where
nobody wanted the child. We don't live in that world, however, and there are plenty of people who want to raise children who cannot produce children on their own and there are such people all over the world. The government does not enter into it.
Your failure continues to come down to the point that you seem blind to the conflation which I described.
At any rate, it's my turn:
-there is a god (prove it!) Who gave people souls (prove it!), And every soul has value (in what context; prove it!) Because the god you say created it values it (prove it!).
-everything from the moment when the sperm meets egg, so long as it contains human DNA, is imparted with a soul (prove it!).
Ok, here's where things get fuzzy as different denominations believe different things..
(A) -killing a human (genetic) is killing a thing with a soul (prove it!) And killing things with souls means that the god who loves every soul will torture you forever*.
(B) -things with souls dying before they can decide whether they accept this love get tortured for all eternity. Your decision to not care for it inspires god (who loves this thing's soul) to torture it. Forever.
(C) -it is innocent (somehow) and while this ensouled thing will end up in a cosmic opium den for all eternity, shame on you, the god we believe in said no (prove it), so you still get eternal torture.
It all comes down to believing in a particular super natural entity, believing that entity has made specific investment into a thing, believing, believing, believing.
Without a (conspicuously absent) god in the equation, a monster willing to torture things it "loves" for
forever, for making decisions that benefit both themselves and all people, including the children they do eventually have.
There are a lot of unfounded assumptions here, not the least of which being assumptions of what constitutes piety and the existence of the soul.
Even if you could establish these things as more than the fanciful attempts of ancient people to describe concepts that they only vaguely understood, you haven't even begun to establish that your god's dubious existence would justify their behavior or that such conflicting statements as "our god loves us unconditionally" and "our god will torture you forever" are not, in fact, contradictory.
In short, my ethics comes from studying the universe, and the way things within it may relate to one another, and what strategies benefit which things as they seek to relate.
