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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (5778)	2/14/2001 11:49:42 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

Since she has me on ignore there's no point in my asking her to reconcile her various posts. After your post she did post that she opposed Chinese rights abuses. But this is totally contradictary to what she has posted in the past, that whatever a society accepts is moral and right. The reality is that the concept of situational ethics tends to be purely an intellectual construct. When we get to actual cases, it appears that even X isn't committed enough to that principle to say that yes, if the Chinese society accepts torture it is moral and right and we have no right to impose our different morality on them. The torture issue, however, is fairly easy, at least forme. What I find much more difficult, and may merit some discussion here on the thread, is forced abortion carried out in a medically safe and appropriate way as a means of population control. Given that overpopulation is a serious social problem for China -- which I think most of us would accept as a reality, and for the sake of the discussion others might accept as a premise of the discussion even if they aren't sure of its validity; given the likelihood that if population growth outstrips food production and distribution some people will starve to death in famines, as happen too often in that part of the world; is it morally acceptable for the Chinese government to perform forced abortions in a medically safe and legal manner in order to protect the standard of living of the population as a whole and as an attempt to avoid, or reduce the impact of, future famine deaths? I frankly find myself in a quandry over this one.