Morning Solon
Welcome back to si. I read your post and couldn't help thinking, what a valiant effort it was, to pull a rabbit out of your hat. Unfortunately like our friend Bullwinkle, the thing that emerges is not a rabbit at all, but a monster. In this case the monster is called abortion, but it has many other names as well. You rightly pointed out the inconsistency of Karin's position, but you failed to see how it was fatal to your own as well.
The point I am trying to get at (amongst several) is: If you are the only arbiter of fairnessthen, from your belief that your policy is moral, it follows that what makes a policy moral is your say-so (for you), and my say-so (for me)..and so on. This denies the meaning of morality, which involves relationship. Nothing is immoral to one on a deserted island, unless there is a God present.
"Unless there is a God" Well there's the rub isn't it.
I agree with your assessment of the pro-abortionist failure to come to grips with the fact that every abortion ends a human life. I fail to see how your attempt to justify the same, by shifting to the imagined, firmer ground of " reason and freedom as having fundamental moral value......."escapes from the same criticism that you leveled at K. "Nothing is immoral.......Unless there is a God" Certainly if "morality...involves relationship" then it follows that, "fundamental moral values" must account for fundamental relationships. If God does not exist then you are back to just your say so, as against mine. Unborn children, being helpless and not having the ability to express their say so, are simply at the whim of, and at the mercy of, the stronger.
As you quoted, "To preach morality is easy, to give it foundation is hard" Apart from God there can be no foundation that is not simply arbitrary. You have failed to demonstrate why we should be Free to kill an unborn child simply because it is dependent on the mother for it's existence.
I watched an interesting discussion on the tube the other night. It was dealing with the Brits allowing the experimentation with, and on, human clones. The Scientists defended their Right to conduct these experiments based on the fact that no embryo was kept alive more than fourteen days. The ethicist on the panel said they had investigated the rational, for the fourteen day period and had concluded it to be totally arbitrary. I found myself wondering, if fourteen days was ok, why not fourteen weeks? If fourteen weeks was fine why not forty weeks? Hey if one minute before birth might be alright then what about one minute after? Finally if one minute after is allowed why not one day or week or year. We could use kids with severe disabilities . After all they slipped through the cracks anyway. We should have aborted them when we had the chance. Prisoners might be a great source of excess body parts and a testing ground for new drugs. Just think of all the progress. Ain't Science wonderful????? We (humans) have an almost infinite capacity to rationalize any evil we can imagine, and we use Freedom and Reason to do it.
Greg |
