Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (14979)	11/22/2006 6:28:31 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Well I think you where clear later in your post. I understood (and replied to) the argument your making in this post, and that you made in the middle of your previous post. I just didn't see any connection between the beginning of your previous post and the middle, so I replied to them as two different arguments. My reply to what is apparently your main argument was - --- Your statement - If we don't accept that the mother has a choice up to that point, we'd need to consider restrictions on things in addition to abortion. Medical experts believe women shouldn't abuse drugs, drink, or smoke. My response - There is a balance to consider. If both the mother and the child has rights, its one thing to say that the mother can't kill the child, quite another to say the mother has to make every decision with the welfare of the child ahead of her own desires. Its one thing to make a moral decision to put the welfare of the child first (and even then few would say it is totally ahead of the mother's wishes or welfare in any possible situation, even if they do give it a great deal of weight), its quite another to enforce that moral decision as a legal obligation. Taking that step goes far beyond restricting or even outlawing abortion. --- Since you expanded on and/or rephrased the argument I'll reply again to the same general idea. So, if you start granting 'rights' to the fetus, you have to deal with these legal and moral issues of the lack of physical separation of the mother and baby. If the child has rights, then recognizing them means you have to deal with the complexities of the real world. In the real world there are balances between protection of rights, and the costs (in money, in effort, in imposing restrictions on people, etc.) of protecting rights has to be considered. A greater cost could reasonable be expended to deal with clearer and/or more severe violations of rights. Killing an organism outright is a more clear and severe violation of its rights then exposing it to a non-fatal dose of alcohol. Which doesn't mean that I am arguing against the principle of protecting fetuses from alcoholic mothers either. I'm just, 1 - Agreeing that its very difficult and impractical to provide such protection, and 2 - pointing out how you don't have to provide that level of protection in order to argue for other forms of protection. Recognizing an organism as one that has human rights (defined as natural rights generally associated with humans), doesn't mean that any possible effort, no matter how costly or difficult, must be made to protect those rights against any potential violation of any severity. In the example, the child gained moral and legal rights that, by definition, require the child to be born. You still haven't backed up your argument. Certainly not by definition. You might be assuming a definition of rights, that precludes the existence of any rights, where there would be any problems or difficulties or costs in protecting those rights, due to the fact that it is surrounded by another organism, but you haven't even explicitly expressed such a definition, let alone argued for it. More generally I don't see how difficulties in protecting a natural right mean that the natural right does not exist. Generally "be definition" arguments should be definitions that are almost universally known (at least among people knowledgeable about the area under debate) and widely held, or are expressed prior to the argument. What definition of rights are you applying? Or is it really an argument based on something other than a definition?