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51 Responses to “Git yer damn hands off my body, philosophically speaking”  

1. 1 Jill Apr 26th, 2006 at 11:16 am

   Wow, nice post Marc. A few things to add about this careless driver analogy:

   Even if we assume that, like the speeding truck driver, the woman took unnecessary “risks” when she became pregnant, the analogy doesn’t hold. Because even when we take risks, there are ways to recover from them and mitigate them. That’s why we wear seatbelts, and why we have ambulances and hospitals, and why we don’t require that the speeding truck driver transfuse his own blood to the person he injured. If you cause an injury, do you have an obligation to help? Probably yes. If you come to someone’s aid and initiate care, do you have a legal obligation to continue that care and not do further harm? Yes. But you do not have that obligation at the expense of your own safety and health.

   “Likewise, if a fetus is a person with full rights, including bodily rights, the mother’s bodily rights can’t simply trump the fetus’s bodily rights, if she created the conflict situation. Taking a risk with somebody else’s rights is always “entering into a contract.” It is not the fetus’s fault that its rights conflict with the mother’s; it is at least partly the mother’s. (In the usual case of voluntary sex.)”

   No, it’s not a contract at all. It might be a tort, but nothing was contracted for (thank you, first year of law school!). And of course the pregnant woman’s rights trump fetal rights when one body is surviving off the other. To go back to our truck analogy, if a speeding trucker hits a pedestrian and both parties are equally injured, do the paramedics say that the pedestrian should have better care than the trucker — or care at the ohysical expense of the trucker — because the trucker created the conflict? No, of course not.

   “Obviously, it’s a horrible, horrible thing to violate a woman’s bodily autonomy by forcing her to bear a child. But by the same token, if a fetus is a person, it’s an even more horrible thing to force the fetus to not survive an abortion. Both are violations of bodily rights but the latter is a worse violation than the former. The fetus will never have the right to speak freely, vote, make money, marry, or the right that you claim is most basic and “inalienable”—the right to decide what happens to its own body.”

   It’s not a competition of which harm is “worse” if we consider both the fetus and the pregnant women individual people. It’s a question, like you say, of individual rights. Does the fetus have a right to life? Certainly. But if we assume that it is indeed an individual with rights, we can also say that it does not have the right to use another person’s body for its own survival any more than you or I do.

   “The anti-abortion argument is that yes, like a careless driver, a person having voluntary, optional sex is “entering into a contract” in the absolutely usual sense of being responsible for the consequences of one’s actions. Some risks are unjustified and are a violation of that very general “contract” at the outset; other risks are justified but the risk-taker is still responsible for bad outcomes for others. If you gamble and lose, it’s a violation of the “contract” not to pay up.”

   Again with the contract. Having sex does not create a contract. Sorry. A contract requires some sort of agreement for an exchange. It requires consideration (what is the fetus offering in return for being gestated?). None of these things exist here. No contract.

   Additionally, contracts for personal services are unenforceable. So even if we do wrongfully assume that having sex creates a “contract” to support a pregnancy, that contract could not be legally upheld.

   Anyway, sorry to get all obnoxiously law school up in here. This is a great post, nice work!

2. 2 Tammy Apr 26th, 2006 at 11:50 am

   It seems to me that if the body is that which goes with you when you jump up and down, then a fetus can’t be considered an individual until they’re out of the woman’s body anyway. And that makes sense–just because something can one day be a separate individual doesn’t make it one now. No one would say my skin is a separate human with its own rights though it’s now feasible to take a cell off my skin, clone it and create a new person with it over time. Bodily intergrity means that the fetus isn’t in conflict with the mother because it actually is part of the mother until such time as it’s disconnected and surviving on its own.

   So laws banning abortion make as much sense as laws banning the removal of any other organ that an individual and doctor deem a threat to the person’s health. Should we force someone to keep a tumor on their lungs because they took the risk of smoking?

3. 3 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 11:58 am

   Jill writes: “Again with the contract. Having sex does not create a contract. Sorry.”

   Please note my use of scare quotes around the term “contract.” I simply meant entering into a situation that entails obligations, not a contract in the narrow legal sense, as distinct from, say, torts.

   I thought it would be obvious what I actually meant, from context, e.g., in the paragraph you cite, where I say “in the absolutely usual sense of being responsible for the consequences of ones’s actions… some actions are `unjustified’ in the context of that very general `contract,’” etc.

4. 4 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

   For what it’s worth, I’m not “harsh on sex” and I don’t believe in souls. I am very strongly pro-sex—and “pro-choice,” as well; I’m not even afraid of the term “pro-abortion”. I’m for abortion on demand, over the counter when feasible. (E.g., RU-486 without a prescription.) I just happen not to buy certain arguments.

   Thought I’d get that out of the way, for anybody late to the party. (I should also probably reiterate that I don’t think a fetus is a peron, or anything much like a person in the requisite sense, and I think that’s the central, unavoidable reason that abortion is okay.)

   Paul makes his first claim:

   I really don’t buy the argument that since your body is (obviously and crucially) important, absolute bodily autonomy trumps all other considerations. It simply doesn’t follow.

   Ah, but it does follow. Here are some easy steps to understanding why:

   #1) Personal rights depend upon the concept of the person. The “person” — ie, the self — is the only reason we have personal rights.

   #2) Violating bodily autonomy is a violation of the person. If I am forced to cede control over the one thing we can all agree on as the definition of “me” over to anyone else — if I am forced to have my body messed up by you or the government or whoever against my will — then the essence of the person has been violated.

   Sorry, I think think this is grossly simplistic. If you are coerced into clipping a fingernail, that’s a very serious thing—coercion is always serious—but it is not the same thing as having your head cut off. In the former case, the essence of the person survives, and all other things being equal, the person can proceed to exercise other rights, such as freedom of speech—e.g., complaining about the horrible injustice of being held down and groomed.

   #3) If you allow the person to be violated, the person’s rights can also be violated because _the person_ is the fundamental value here. You care that people have the right to free speech because you care about _people_, not that free speech is floating in the aether and must be protected. So once you can violate the core value behind free speech, the person, you can violate free speech.

   That simply does not follow. For example, I consider the right to almost unlimited free speech more important than the right to absolute bodily autonomy. That is not because I don’t care about the person; it’s because I do, and because I consider the use of your brain more essential than the use of that particular bit of fingernail.

   Absolute bodily autonomy in every detail is not the essence of personhood. Some kinds of bodily harm are vastly worse than others, and if you don’t take that seriously, it seems to me that you’re the one who “doesn’t care about people.” If you’d rather allow one person to die as a result of another’s action than physically inconvenience that other person, your values are seriously messed up.

   You are making a false dichotomy here. It is simply not true that I must accept the absolute and inalienable underpinnings that you assert in order to value people’s rights and interests.

   Sure, I think bodily autonomy’s important. But it’s not the absolutely overriding consideration in absolutely every instance. You’d have to use a lot more coercion to shut me up, or keep me from having sex, than you would to take a fingernail clipping.

   This is not a “slippery slope,” Paul, this is logical deduction.

   Not even close. I’m pretty familiar with logical deduction, having written theorem-proving programs, etc., and I can tell you this ain’t it. It’s more like a series of good-sounding bumpersticker slogans with dubious presuppostions and leaps. (That, in itself, doesn’t make you wrong; it just means it’s not rigorous, indisputably sound logical argument.)

   This is the fundamental precept of legal and philosophical argumentation. You cannot hold any right sacred if the one thing it is based on, the one true value at the core of it, isn’t sacred.

   Not even close there, either. Legal reasoning is not generally about “sacred,” absolute and absolutely inalienable rights. It’s largely about adjudicating conflicts between rights, justified levels of risks, and reasonable accommodations.

   For example, there’s taxation, eminent domain, and even conscription. Having to pay some taxes, or possibly give up some land some tiems, does not mean that there is no substantive right to property. It just means it’s not absolute.

   Our legal system is not based on rights being absolute across the board; it’s mostly about limiting rights in the minimal ways to maximize other rights and especially substantive freedoms.

   You may not like that, but you shouldn’t make it sound like our legal system is based on absolute trump-card rights in general; it’s not. It’s largely about tradeoffs.

   You need to make the case that bodily autonomy rights are fundamentally an exception to that generalization.

   They are an exception in practice, in most ways, most of the time. One guiding principle of our legal system is a bias toward the least intrusive, coercive, and/or invasive limitations of rights that still protect other people’s rights.

   So, for the most part, we don’t demand bodily sacrifices because we mostly don’t have to. For example, we don’t have to coerce any individual into donating blood, because there are only a few types of blood, and we can use far less coercive and invasive means to encourage enough people to donate the right types of blood.

   The hypothetical case of the truck driver who carelessly hit Craig—and who is the only possible lifesaving donor—is different in exactly that way, which makes it a better analogy for abortion.

   It’s still not great though, without an extra twist: the truck driver not only knew he was taking a non-negligible risk of hitting somebody, but knew that if he did, he (and only he) could save that person’s life if (and only if ) he would donate a piece of his liver.

   If such a situation was somehow common, I think it would be reasonable to to require that drivers agree to donate a piece of liver, if they hit somebody and that person needed that lifesaving measure. If you’re not willing to donate a hunk of liver, don’t take the risk of killing somebody. Do not drive. Take the bus, walk, ride a bike, hitch a ride, or whatever, but don’t endanger somebody else’s bodily rights and expect to evade responsibility for that. If you would hit me and leave me to die, rather than donate the only hunk of liver that could save me, I don’t want you on the road—and I’d consider it an unacceptable violation of my bodily autonomy. You don’t have the right to risk my body and life without accepting a much lesser risk to your body.

   I don’t think that would be unduly coercive; the right to drive is not fundamental, absolute, and inalienable. You could still choose to drive and accept responsibility for the risks you impose on others, or to not drive. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything except refrain from unduly endanger others.

   Many moderately anti-choice people see the abortion issue the same way. If a particular sex act imposes a non-neglible risk of death on somebody else, do not perform that sex act. Don’t have vaginal sex, or use such an effective combination of birth control methods that the risk of pregnancy is acceptable to you. You can have any kind of sex you want if you’re willing to gamble, but you can’t expect to take the gamble and have somebody else pay the big price if you lose, to avoid a lesser risk to yourself.

5. 5 Tammy Apr 26th, 2006 at 1:42 pm

   I’m for abortion on demand, over the counter when feasible. (E.g., RU-486 without a prescription.)

   Your protests of pro-choice leanings would be a lot easier to believe if you educated yourself on the fact. No one has proposed selling RU-486 over the counter. The controversy you’re invoking has nothing to do with denying a fetus access to a woman’s body against her will. The pill the right is trying to keep from being sold over the counter is Plan B, which is a contraceptive.

   So basically, you just invoked an entirely separate controversy, which is the fight over whether women even have the right not to ovulate if we don’t want to. That you’ve conflated the two makes me concerned you don’t quite grasp the gravity of the physical damage to a woman’s body during pregnancy, which would explain why you continue to deny that abortion laws are reprehensible strictly because they violate a woman’s body. Do you quite grasp that women are autonomous beings with individual bodies?

6. 6 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 2:23 pm

   Your protests of pro-choice leanings would be a lot easier to believe if you educated yourself on the fact. No one has proposed selling RU-486 over the counter.

   I’m quite familiar with the difference. I’ve read several articles on Plan B recently, and I was not confusing it with RU-486. (For a while I thought Plan B was partly an abortion pill, as a number of scientists did, but I’ve been convinced otherwise; either way, I was for it from the start.)

   I was saying above that I would support selling not only emergy contraception pills also actual abortion pills without a prescription, if they’re reasonably safe. (Safer than a coathanger, at least.)

   So basically, you just invoked an entirely separate controversy, which is the fight over whether women even have the right not to ovulate if we don’t want to.

   I didn’t intend that, or expect it. I didn’t expect anybody here to disagree with a woman’s right to contraception. (Or even abortion, really.) That’s crazy.

   If you actually don’t believe me, I can point you to some other discussions I’ve participated in, where my pro-choice views are very clear, e.g., recent threads on Pharyngula about Plan B and RU-486. (In which, among other things, I cited recent papers about failure rates of Plan B, due to its only preventing ovulation, and suggested having RU-486 as a backup—to abort the zygote if Plan B failed to prevent conception, which happens an eighth of the time or so.)

   Do you quite grasp that women are autonomous beings with individual bodies?

   Sure. Do you quite grasp why I think the issue of non-personhood of a fetus is important?

7. 7 D Apr 26th, 2006 at 2:51 pm

   Paul W.: The auto accident analogy that you’ve adopted remains flawed. You are presenting the violation of the truck driver’s autonomy as punishment for having violated the autonomy of the victim. You reject the importance of bodily autonomy on the grounds of what seems like the eye for an eye philosophy. However, a pregnant woman is guilty of no violation to the fetus. Rather, the fetus is the one violating the mother’s autonomy (presuming she does not wish it feeding off her body).

8. 8 punkass marc Apr 26th, 2006 at 2:52 pm

   Paul,

   You say:

   Sorry, I think think this is grossly simplistic. If you are coerced into clipping a fingernail, that’s a very serious thing—coercion is always serious—but it is not the same thing as having your head cut off.

   Err, who is simplistic here? Sure, having your head chopped off is more final than clipping a nail, but once you step away from the “stuff that kills you” violations, who are you to judge what I value about my body or what you can rip off it? Who are you to draw the line between what is and isn’t a big violation of my body? Your black-and-white examples are the simpletons, I’m afraid. Whether it’s my fingers, my hair, my uterus [if I had one], or my eyes, you don’t get to tell me what I deeply value about the thing that defines me and the essence of my self [a definition you do not dispute].

   I bet if you were forced to give birth, you wouldn’t think it the equivalent of clipping a nail. Just a hunch, since I am uterus-less, of course.

   Also, just because the protection of bodily autonomy is absolute and thus easy to understand, it doesn’t make it wrong.

   More of you trying to label me through your lens:

   For example, I consider the right to almost unlimited free speech more important than the right to absolute bodily autonomy. That is not because I don’t care about the person; it’s because I do, and because I consider the use of your brain more essential than the use of that particular bit of fingernail.

   Sure, you consider some part of my body to be “not a big deal” to you. So you assume it’s fine to coercively take it from me just because you don’t care about it and think that as long as you protect what _you_ think is important about me, you are in the clear.

   Wrong wrong wrong. My god, Paul, what if someone in power thought a uterus was no more important than a fingernail? They would think just like you do but about a woman’s body.

   See, this is where you are mis-stepping: Telling a person what is and isn’t okay for you or the government to take from or abuse on their body is a reduction of that person’s _self_ to your own definition. Totally and completely coercive, not okay, and the reason we have to protect the entire package.

   Once _you_ can define the essence of _my_ self, the person is no longer important. It is reduced to whatever you make of it. You may think it’s fine since you seem to think you can define me, and as long as I have control over just the parts of my body _you_ think matter that I am a person, but that doesn’t work for me or a lot of other people.

   My worldview is pretty kickass because we get all the personal freedoms you like, plus no one can fuck with our bodies. Sweet, eh? Oh, and you actually believe this, too, and I will explain why in a moment.

   It is simply not true that I must accept the absolute and inalienable underpinnings that you assert in order to value people’s rights and interests.

   Sadly, yes you do. Otherwise you are telling me what is and isn’t important on my body. Maybe I pray to my fingernails, dude. You can’t take them because they don’t mean anything to _you_ and you can’t tell me what to make of them because they are mine and mine alone. They are part of the nekkid jumping definition you do not dispute.

   If you agree with self = body, and you value the self, then you need to value the body. Just valuing the parts you care about, or not letting me define what parts of myself _I_ care about, doesn’t cut it.

   You’d have to use a lot more coercion to shut me up, or keep me from having sex, than you would to take a fingernail clipping.

   Ahh. And there it is. Your own subjective value of sex over fingernails. Okay for you, sure. But maybe not for me. So back the fuck off of my fingernails.

   I’m pretty familiar with logical deduction, having written theorem-proving programs, etc., and I can tell you this ain’t it.

   Hee hee! Are you trying to measure dicks with me, Paul? Is that what this is about? Because, other than you, no one seems to think I’m being illogical. I state my assumptions, I connect the implications, I state a conclusion. What would you have me do differently? Remember that I am the one who is offering a layman’s version of a proof in this post. Before you accuse me of a lack of deduction, perhaps you should do the same.

   Legal reasoning is not generally about “sacred,” absolute and absolutely inalienable rights. It’s largely about adjudicating conflicts between rights, justified levels of risks, and reasonable accommodations.

   Actually, what I was trying to refer to as part of legal/philosophical reasoning was the idea that if you undercut an assumption or the assumption of an argument, you cannot stand on that argument. If the idea of personal rights is founded on the person, then you can’t selectively coerce the person and unconditionally uphold the rights. You certainly can’t uphold the rights at the expense of the person, as you would with a voting fetus over a mother’s body. Because the body is the person, remember?

   You may not like that, but you shouldn’t make it sound like our legal system is based on absolute trump-card rights in general; it’s not. It’s largely about tradeoffs.

   You need to make the case that bodily autonomy rights are fundamentally an exception to that generalization.

   Boyyyyyy howdy. What the heck do you think I am doing here, son? This is a defense of that position. You have yet to dispute that person = body or that person = core value of personal rights. I say that if you ever mess with the physical person, you are messing with the foundation of all our rights. If you care about those rights, I am asking you to always protect the person from forcible body coercion. I am saying that if you ever allow it in any way, you are allowing for the degradation of everything built on the idea of a person.

   And for the record, taking taxes from me? Not bodily coercion (unless you taped my money to my naked body without my knowledge when I was jumping around). Conscription? Complicated issue, but tentatively I side with that as coercive. I ain’t fer it, but I don’t want to distract from the issues at hand. We’ll do a follow-up on conscription, though, I promise.

   So, for the most part, we don’t demand bodily sacrifices because we mostly don’t have to. For example, we don’t have to coerce any individual into donating blood, because there are only a few types of blood, and we can use far less coercive and invasive means to encourage enough people to donate the right types of blood.

   Whoa. I _hope_ that’s not why we don’t forcibly extract blood from people’s bodies, dude. You scare me. You really would let them do that to me or your mother if someone needed our blood to live? If so, we are so far off that we might as well shake hands and move on. But I don’t think you really would let them do that.

   If such a situation was somehow common, I think it would be reasonable to to require that drivers agree to donate a piece of liver, if they hit somebody and that person needed that lifesaving measure. If you’re not willing to donate a hunk of liver, don’t take the risk of killing somebody. Do not drive.

   *sputter* And you are disputing _my_ logical argumentation? Pot. Kettle. Black.

   I don’t think that would be unduly coercive; the right to drive is not fundamental, absolute, and inalienable. You could still choose to drive and accept responsibility for the risks you impose on others, or to not drive. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything except refrain from unduly endanger others.

   Sigh. Like I said in the post, if you drive, you do accept the risks of your mistakes — the punishment you can incur from them. Making a driving mistake doesn’t mean I give you license to cut up my body as part of that punishment, for christ’s sake. Look at Jill’s succinct discussion of the subject: both the driver at fault and victim of his mistake receive equal medical treatment. The driver’s body is not any less valuable than the victim’s. If you want eye for an eye, dude, you are living in the wrong eon (good call, D!).

   Many moderately anti-choice people see the abortion issue the same way. If a particular sex act imposes a non-neglible risk of death on somebody else, do not perform that sex act. Don’t have vaginal sex, or use such an effective combination of birth control methods that the risk of pregnancy is acceptable to you. You can have any kind of sex you want if you’re willing to gamble, but you can’t expect to take the gamble and have somebody else pay the big price if you lose, to avoid a lesser risk to yourself.

   Sorry, either you are willing to sell completely out to defend a dying point or you are not pro-choice. By stating it in this way, you are defending this position. True colors revealed?

   Having sex doesn’t give the government or the fetus or the partner the right to force a woman to mangle her body to give birth (Tammy is right about you underestimating the severity of bodily alteration during pregnancy, I think).

   At the end of the day you are essentially left holding the bag (douchebag?) of “it would be okay to forcibly take your blood if it were needed by someone else” (which you essentially said above), and that really isn’t any different than Bluey’s kidney example, is it?

   If someone needed your mother’s kidney to live and she didn’t want to give it up, what is different about that vs. the blood example? She would have a few more stitches from the operation, but people get on fine with one kidney.

   But I don’t really believe you’d make your mother be strapped to a table and have a kidney removed or even blood stripped from her if she was kicking and screaming for them to stop. I don’t think you’d make anyone suffer that. It’s why I think you really believe the same things I do — when you aren’t trying to make me ooh and ahh over your e-NOR-mous theorum-proving program, that is.

9. 9 Tammy Apr 26th, 2006 at 3:04 pm

   For a while I thought Plan B was partly an abortion pill, as a number of scientists did,

   Not any scientists who know what a “pregnancy” is, actually. It was well understood from the beginning that Plan B prevented pregnancy. What was uncertain was whether or not it could make it marginally more likely for a fertilized egg not to implant. However, pregnancy doesn’t begin at conception, as male-centric thinkers would like to believe. It begins at implantation, so Plan B was and has always been understood as having no ability to terminate a pregnancy.

10. 10 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 3:40 pm

    Do you quite grasp why I think the issue of non-personhood of a fetus is important?

    Come to think of it, maybe I should explain the above comment in a different way.

    Two reasons I think it’s important to recognize the weakness—or perceived weakness—of Marc’s argument are that:

    (1) Rightly or wrongly, there’s a lot of people it doesn’t convince, on both sides of the abortion rights issue. Either it needs fixing, or another argument is needed; I think that argument has to hinge on whether a fetus is a person or is personlike.

    (2) Even people who believe in the right to abortion often believe that it is nonetheless bad. I have known several women who thought they had the right to an abortion but nonetheless felt it would be bad to actually do it—including one who bore a child she did not want. (Which I thought was crazy bad.)

    That is, some women may believe that nobody else has the right to stop them from getting an abortion, but that it’s morally preferable not to have one. They may get an abortion and feel bad about it—for asserting their right “selfishly”—or they may not get an abortion they do want. (And in my opinion, if you don’t want a child it’s generally morally wrong to choose childbearing over abortion. That’s why I’m comfortable saying I’m not just pro-choice, I’m pro-abortion.)

    Marc’s argument doesn’t help with these things. If it’s strictly a matter of rights rather than goods and interests, it doesn’t stop somebody from feeling guilty about an abortion, or making the “noble” sacrifice of bearing an unwanted child. I think either outcome is bad, because women should feel just fine about abortion—if you don’t want kids, it’s usually the right choice, not just an allowable one.

    My basic argument for this is a no-harm, no-foul argument. If you conceive and abort a zygote, for example, that’s no worse than not conceiving it at all. It is not a person cable of experienceing anything, so it doesn’t really matter whether you keep the egg and sperm apart and they die separately, or put them together and let the zygote die. Either way, there’s nobody home and the end result is the same—some dead cells.

11. 11 elfinity Apr 26th, 2006 at 3:50 pm

    Here from Pandagon

    Wow, just wow. That and the Mr. Bluey’s speech back there totally made my day. Thank you so much for this post!

    I completely agree in terms of bodily autonomy being the basis of all other rights, and you’ve phrased it quite well (and in a very organized and thought-out manner) and WHEEE I can use this in my arguments now!

    As far as Paul’s “well, cutting off a nail is not so bad as cutting one’s head”, consider a couple of samples:

    In USSR, in mid-1930’s, former peasants (then collective-farm workers) were denied the right to move from place to place. How the hell did that happen? It started with, “Oh, well, post Civil War times, we have to know where everyone is, so stay put, ok? And we’ll give you the identity documents (without which you cannot move about) a bit later, mmkay?”
    Also, how did the whole repression atrocity under Stalin happen? Pretty much same thing that US is using now to justify illegal tapwiring “Dude, like, it’s a war-type situation, there are enemies everywhere, we don’t have time to check all the facts now!”

    (Before anyone wants to pipe up, I was born and raised in USSR, and went through the brief period between demise of USSR and establishment of Russian Federation, during which time one could get as close to truth in history as it is possible)

    Also, how did the good German peeps allow Holocaust to happen? Because the rights of the oppressed (in this case, mostly Jews, but other peoples, like Gypsies, as well) were taken away little by little, so each step did not seem so very unreasonable. Before they knew it, though, we’ve got Auschwitz and Dachau.

    You can only keep your rights if you stick to your guns. Once you start saying, “Aw, that ain’t so bad, you can take this one,” things typically don’t go well.

    And just for some individuals’ information, going through pregnancy, even if it’s a healthy one (no complications) and even if you want it, is NOT AT ALL like cutting off a nail or giving a pint of blood.

12. 12 punkass marc Apr 26th, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    Marc’s argument doesn’t help with these things. If it’s strictly a matter of rights rather than goods and interests, it doesn’t stop somebody from feeling guilty about an abortion, or making the “noble” sacrifice of bearing an unwanted child. I think either outcome is bad, because women should feel just fine about abortion—if you don’t want kids, it’s usually the right choice, not just an allowable one.

    Ah, yes. I am not making an emotional argument here and I understand that not everyone will be swayed by the technicalities of what rights hinge on what values. But if it generally holds up, then it’s a start.

    For what it’s worth, though, I did get one very nice comment in the Bluey thread from Michael:

    Thank you for the fantastic post. It’s actually the first time I’ve been able to understand a pro-choice argument for abortion. This issue is usually so buried in abstract ideology that it’s a relief to read a simple, logical argument.

    So if it’s generally coherent and gets through to folks like Michael, then it’s working already.

    Ideally, someone on the fence will be swayed by these thoughts. But even if people who already _feel_ like abortions aren’t wrong but can’t explain it precisely can use some of this language to better express their feelings to others, then I will feel deeply honored.

13. 13 j0lt Apr 26th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

    Exactly! The person I was referring to in my comment to your earlier Bluey post is pro-choice, but was voicing caveats & limitations and then defended these assertions based on logic that I ‘knew’ was erroneous, but didn’t have arguments at the ready (don’t you hate it when that happens). I read Bluey’s post & then this one & voila - I now feel armed with better responses for the next round on this topic- for which I give big thanks to p.m. & Bluey.

14. 14 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 4:30 pm

    D writes:
    

    Paul W.: The auto accident analogy that you’ve adopted remains flawed. You are presenting the violation of the truck driver’s autonomy as punishment for having violated the autonomy of the victim. You reject the importance of bodily autonomy on the grounds of what seems like the eye for an eye philosophy.

    I don’t think it’s eye-for-an-eye vindictiveness at all. It’s not punishment at all; I’m not motivated by a desire to hurt the truck driver, and I’d disavow any such argument.

    It’s an argument about accepting responsibility for risks to others that one willingly takes. Expecting people to pay the costs of damage that they do by taking risks is not generally vindictive. E.g., if somebody totals your car by driving carelessly, I’d hope you want them to pay for it because you don’t want to pay the price of their carelessness—not because you want to hurt them in revenge. (I’ve been in such a situation and felt bad for the person who paid for my car—but not enough to pay for it myself, and eat the cost of his drunk driving!)

    My question is this: why are bodies different from, say, property? If I risk your property (your car) and damage or destroy it, I’m generally supposed to pay you for the damage, with my property. My right to my property ends when I damage your property—I have to fork some of my property over to you.

    It seems reasonable to me that my right to bodily autonomy similarly ends when I infringe on yours, in a situation where there’s no other medium of exchange. (Like money. If you could buy back my bodily autonomy with money, that’d be fine, and you can keep your bodily autonomy. If only pregnancy were so simple.) If I took the risk, and am the only one who can help, I’m obliged to sacrifice some of my bodily autonomy; that’s the implicit “deal” of risking yours.

    However, a pregnant woman is guilty of no violation to the fetus. Rather, the fetus is the one violating the mother’s autonomy (presuming she does not wish it feeding off her body).

    I think that’s pretty question-begging. The antiabortionists think that the parents are the ones who took the risk, the fetus is (a person and) a completely innocent party, and the parents right to take that risk (by having vaginal sex) does not entail the right to let an innocent person created by their choice to take a risk die.

    In their view, a fetus is not an uninvited guest. It’s an innocent party “invited” or “lured” into the situation by people’s risk-taking choices. You don’t have the right to kill it, because it’s their due to your voluntary choices. (Except in cases of rape.)

    I do think that there are some things grossly wrong with that analysis, but I don’t think Marc’s argument addresses the real flaws.

    One big flaw (and disanalogy) is that a zygote or fetus doesn’t even exist if you don’t take that risk—it is not a pre-existing person who would have had fine life if you hadn’t taken a risk that messed it up. It would not be like Craig, who got hit by a truck—iIt wouldn’t exist at all.

    That raises some deep and weird questions, which I think is one reason people typically avoid the issue; I think the bottom line does come out that abortion is just fine, but it raises a whole new set of issues that people typically avoid.

15. 15 McBoing Apr 26th, 2006 at 4:33 pm

    My question is this: why are bodies different from, say, property?

    For one, body is tied up in identity. While property may serve as an extension of someone’s identity, you can remove property and not body.

16. 16 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 4:51 pm

    For a while I thought Plan B was partly an abortion pill, as a number of scientists did,

    Not any scientists who know what a “pregnancy” is, actually. It was well understood from the beginning that Plan B prevented pregnancy. What was uncertain was whether or not it could make it marginally more likely for a fertilized egg not to implant. However, pregnancy doesn’t begin at conception, as male-centric thinkers would like to believe. It begins at implantation, so Plan B was and has always been understood as having no ability to terminate a pregnancy.

    I should have been more careful in my language; if I’d thought about it, I’d have said it differently.

    On the other hand, I don’t think there’s exactly one right and true sense of the word “pregnant.” I was using a very well-accepted vernacular sense (#1 in Websters), rather than the narrower biomedical technical term. (The vernacular sense is sometimes used in biology as well, as a technical term.) And unfortunately, I think that’s a relevant sense for most discussions of the morality of abortion. If people mistakenly think that personhood begins at fertilization, preventing implantation is morally an “abortion,” even if that doesn’t fit the narrower medical definition.

    What’s wrong with most of the anti-abortionists arguments is not that “pregnancy” doesn’t begin until implantation; it’s that a zygote is not a person whether it’s implanted or not, and aborting the “pregnancy”—or whatever you call the development process—isn’t wrong.

17. 17 D Apr 26th, 2006 at 5:41 pm

    I don’t think it’s eye-for-an-eye vindictiveness at all. It’s not punishment at all; I’m not motivated by a desire to hurt the truck driver, and I’d disavow any such argument.

    Forcing someone to do or suffer something they do not wish for an action of theirs is punishing them. If that wasn’t your angle, why go through the motions of setting up the scenario as such?

    It’s an argument about accepting responsibility for risks to others that one willingly takes. Expecting people to pay the costs of damage that they do by taking risks is not generally vindictive.

    Justified punishment is still punishment.

    My question is this: why are bodies different from, say, property?

    Self, as stated above.

    It seems reasonable to me that my right to bodily autonomy similarly ends when I infringe on yours, in a situation where there’s no other medium of exchange. (Like money. If you could buy back my bodily autonomy with money, that’d be fine, and you can keep your bodily autonomy. If only pregnancy were so simple.) If I took the risk, and am the only one who can help, I’m obliged to sacrifice some of my bodily autonomy; that’s the implicit “deal” of risking yours.

    That sounds like eye for an eye, if slightly modified to be more palatable. I simply don’t ascribe to that philosophy.

    I think that’s pretty question-begging. The antiabortionists think that the parents are the ones who took the risk, the fetus is (a person and) a completely innocent party, and the parents right to take that risk (by having vaginal sex) does not entail the right to let an innocent person created by their choice to take a risk die.
    In their view, a fetus is not an uninvited guest. It’s an innocent party “invited” or “lured” into the situation by people’s risk-taking choices. You don’t have the right to kill it, because it’s their due to your voluntary choices. (Except in cases of rape.)

    Still, no harm has been done to the fetus for which it would have an analogous claim to infringe upon the risk taker’s bodily autonomy as you’d argue in your example. I understand some anti-abortionists follow the faulty logic you present. It’s practically the same argument rape apologists use to justify rape. It’s revolting.

    I do think that there are some things grossly wrong with that analysis, but I don’t think Marc’s argument addresses the real flaws.

    I don’t think it’s meant necessarily universally address all the anti-abortionists arguments. I see it as one prong, one barb that can be used as part of an arsenal.

18. 18 Roving Thundercloud Apr 26th, 2006 at 7:09 pm

    Shoot, I posted on the Bluey thread before I got here. Very interesting conversation.

    Part of me says “Well, if the issue was simply harboring the fetus for nine months, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, I could handle that.” Of course that’s not true–being pregnant is a major physical trauma that permanently changes your body and the way you think & feel about it. But the reason my first pregnancy was such a horrible awful time of fear and dread had nothing to do with the physical side–it was the certain knowledge that this kid would derail everything we were working so hard for, *specifically including* establishing ourselves enough so that our future child(ren) could have a decent standard of living. The child’s impact on its own future well-being would be a negative one, if it arrived too soon in the process.

    It seems to me that we get all hung up on whether or not a woman should have to be pregnant against her will, when the real issue is not that it will screw up her body. It will screw up her life, the pending baby’s life, and the lives of her already existing children, if any. The first nine months, barring complications, are the easy part! It’s the entire rest of my life, and the child(ren)’s, that are being compromised.

    Finally, I wanted to post my question here as well. One argument I’ve heard is that “even if the fetus would otherwise have full rights, the woman has the PRIOR claim on her body, so tough noogies to the fetus.” I haven’t seen that articulated here though, and was wondering what y’all thought of that.

19. 19 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 8:38 pm

    OK, I’ve thought of a different example that I think should make my position clearer.

    My position is this: if a fetus is a person, the right of a woman to voluntarily get pregnant and her right to not give birth can’t both be absolute—or at least, she can’t have a very general, entirely absolute right to control of her own body that includes those things and other similar things.

    Here’s the thought experiment: suppose that a woman could get pregnant, and stay pregnant indefinitely, while the fetus inside her did develop into an actual person. Perhaps a physically dwarfed person, the size of a baby, but developing the basic kinds of cognition and emotions that children and adults have.

    In other words, suppose the fetus did in fact become incontestably a person, but the woman simply chose not to give birth to it, or allow anyone to cut it out by c-section or whatever.

    Suppose this physically dwarfed, stunted person lives in its mother’s belly for decades, fully aware of who it is and where it is—it is trapped in its mother’s belly. Suppose it wants to get out and live something like a normal life, but she won’t let it. She says “it’s my vagina, and I don’t have to let you through it.”

    Suppose, even, that the woman chooses to do all of this on purpose, because she likes the idea of having a helpless small person stuck inside her body for its entire life. She lives to a ripe old age of 90, at which time the person inside her has lived a full 70 years of fully aware helpless misery—and then she dies and her 70-year-old “child” dies with her—because right up to the end, it’s her body and that’s how she wants it.

    In that scenario, the child is the mother’s slave—its bodily autonomy is overridden by her rights, and it lives a miserable existence its entire life at her whim.

    Supposing a woman had the ability to do that, would she really have the right to?

    I really don’t think so. You do not have a right to voluntarily create a person and then refuse to grant that person human rights, to the point of creating a helpless slave and keeping it in that situation indefinitely.

    If a fetus really was a person, like an adult, it would have to matter in that general way—its rights could not simply be trumped by the mother’s right to absolute control her body.

20. 20 McBoing Apr 26th, 2006 at 8:57 pm

    And what if there were pink unicorns? And the pink unicorns were pregnant? And they, like, smoked pot? And…

21. 21 Paul W. Apr 26th, 2006 at 9:03 pm

    And what if there were pink unicorns? And the pink unicorns were pregnant? And they, like, smoked pot? And…

    And what if you got, like, a clue. Other people have been making some very absolute claims. A single counterexample disproves such a generalization, if it is “possible” in the relevant sense.

    It’s a thought experiment, like riding on a beam of light.

    Figure it out, Einstein.

22. 22 McBoing Apr 26th, 2006 at 9:27 pm

    But this conversation was about logic, Paco. Not emotion and crazy hypotheticals in which imaginary women downright refuse to give the earth the little people it deserves! Pitch it to Margaret Atwood. She’ll love it.

    Look, I don’t want to bag on the majority of this conversation, but I read about half of that last comment before

    

23. 23 punkass marc Apr 26th, 2006 at 9:37 pm

    I’m sorry, Paul, but your “thought experiment” is a little too far-fetched to warrant serious consideration. If I had to account for every conceivable utero-dwarf colony womb prison scenario, well, I’d be here all night.

24. 24 McBoing Apr 26th, 2006 at 9:39 pm

    I’m down with pinkunicornism myself.

25. 25 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 3:43 am

    I’m sorry, Paul, but your “thought experiment” is a little too far-fetched to warrant serious consideration. If I had to account for every conceivable utero-dwarf colony womb prison scenario, well, I’d be here all night.

    Unfortunately, I find your longer argument just as farfetched. I think you’re appealing to certain intuitions about moral theory that a lot of your readers (like many libertarians) share, but I (like most liberals) don’t.

    My counterargument is basically just a simple reductio ad absurdam—if the mother’s rights really just trumped the fetus’s absolutely, irrespective of the personhood or the degree of harm to the fetus, then the outlandish aspects of my scenario would be completely irrelevant.

    But they’re not irrelevant; your theory gives the wrong answer in a clear case, so it must be at least somewhat wrong somewhere.

    You have set yourself up for this by saying that it doesn’t matter at all how fetal personlike a fetus is, or how much it is harmed. That gives me license to hold you to your claims even in a scenario where the fetus is completely personlike and completely harmed.

    That is basic deductive logic—you are responsible for the conclusions that follow from your claims. If you can’t accept the logical consequences, you have to retract the claim. (And maybe offer an amended version.)

    If you won’t stick to your own rules even in such a farfetched scenario, you’re showing that you don’t really believe your own argument. It is not as general and reliable as you say.

    I don’t claim that this proves your argument basically wrong, or that it proves my own position right. It doesn’t prove that your theory gives the wrong answers in important real-world cases.

    What it proves is that your argument is not the tight logical deductive argument you have condescendingly told me it was—you have left out something important, or relied on a false premise, somewhere. It’s an interesting “intuition pump” but it doesn’t compel agreement.

26. 26 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 5:14 am

    But this conversation was about logic, Paco. Not emotion and crazy hypotheticals [...]

    I disagree. This is an argument about moral principles. Moral principles aren’t simply “logic,” nor are they simply emotional. There’s a very subtle relationship between emotions, moral intuitions, and the logical consequences of those moral intuitions. (Especially in light of conflicting intuitions, or intuitions that seem to conflict until you understand them in terms of more basic intuitions.)

    Part of the process of arguing morality is to tease out various moral intuitions and see whether they collapse under rational scrutiny. (E.g., because they were based on a more basic moral intuition plus some reasoning turns out to be mistaken, or because they conflict with some other intuition that is more basic and stable.)

    Saying that the conversation was about logic and not emotion is a false dichotomy; it’s about both, and has to be. Objecting to hypotheticals in moral argument makes no sense, either, and I think I’ve explained why my admittedly farfetched “crazy” scenario was entirely called for.

    From my point of view, other people’s arguments seem just as “emotional” as mine seem to them, at least at first or second glance. For example, I don’t share some people’s apparent visceral horror of any coercion whatsoever, or of specifically bodily coercion of any kind. I realize that for some people, those strong intuitions are justified in terms of one argument or another, but I don’t buy all of those arguments. And I do share some of those intuitions fairly strongly, but find that they collapse under rational scrutiny. (Or so it seems to me, anyway.)

27. 27 D Apr 27th, 2006 at 5:43 am

    Ok Paul W., I’ll bite. Remember before where I was saying one of the main difference between the car crash scenario and pregnancy was that in the case of the latter it was the fetus trespassing upon the bodily autonomy of the woman? Well, you’ve reversed that in your new rather bizarre scenario. The dwarf/fetus person thing is the one having its bodily autonomy rights stepped upon. The question, for me, remains: In order to free or rescue a person having his or her bodily autonomy violated, is it permissible to violate the attacker’s bodily autonomy? I would answer yes for the concept of self-defense or defense of another’s self that they can not defend, a concept that exists because of the importance of bodily autonomy or self. This applies to the dwarf/fetus thing in this scenario, just as it applies to the woman in abortion scenarios.

    This take of course diverges from Marc’s idea of no conflict between parties. It is one point that I disagree with. However, it does not nullify the rest of the logic. A person does not get to exercise a right at the expense of another.

28. 28 McBoing Apr 27th, 2006 at 6:09 am

    Paul, that was sarcasm.

29. 29 punkass marc Apr 27th, 2006 at 6:44 am

    Paul:

    You have set yourself up for this by saying that it doesn’t matter at all how fetal personlike a fetus is, or how much it is harmed. That gives me license to hold you to your claims even in a scenario where the fetus is completely personlike and completely harmed.

    That is basic deductive logic—you are responsible for the conclusions that follow from your claims. If you can’t accept the logical consequences, you have to retract the claim. (And maybe offer an amended version.

    Heh. Yeah, you go ahead and hold me responsible for whatever you want, but “this” is ridiculous. Frankly, if you have to go this far out of the bounds of reality to try and make my position crack, you’ve made my point for me. Unless we reach this fairy-tale land of utero-dwarves, this philosophy holds up. Thanks, man.

    Oh, and I don’t have to accept these as logical consequences. You once accused me of invalid reasoning via the “snoball effect.” Wanna guess how big your snoball is here, Paul? There are logical consequences, there are extreme scenarios that may never happen in the world, there are theoretical idea that probably will never happen, then there are about 100 other levels of increasing absurdity, then there are utero-dwarves.

    I don’t claim that this proves your argument basically wrong, or that it proves my own position right. It doesn’t prove that your theory gives the wrong answers in important real-world cases.

    What it proves is that your argument is not the tight logical deductive argument you have condescendingly told me it was—you have left out something important, or relied on a false premise, somewhere. It’s an interesting “intuition pump” but it doesn’t compel agreement.

    Man, you really don’t know how to distinguish between emotional uncomfortability and “logical deductive argument,” do you? You feel bad for your mythical utero-dwarves, fine. But that doesn’t invalidate my reasoning nor does it prove a faulty assumption.

    You have _changed_ some of our basic assumptions to try and damage the argument. People can’t live in a woman’s uterus their whole life, and that is one of my assumptions. If it ever changes, I will get back to you. I hope you see the difference between altering the assumptions and creating a scenario that relies on the same assumptions but challenges the conclusions. You might recognize this idea from such failed attempts as all your other tries.

    You jump back in to explain that somehow it’s okay to confuse something that makes you feel bad with reason:

    Saying that the conversation was about logic and not emotion is a false dichotomy; it’s about both, and has to be. Objecting to hypotheticals in moral argument makes no sense, either, and I think I’ve explained why my admittedly farfetched “crazy” scenario was entirely called for.

    Yeah. Not objecting to hypotheticals, just crackpot scenarios that change several fundamental assumptions (always a no-no when testing a theory, mr. proving-program man) that can no longer disprove an argument because they rest on different assumptions.

    The sad thing is that you probably don’t yet see how they rest on different assumptions. So let me be clear.

    Body = person because it’s the clearest way to define a single individual.

    Now, if one person were to always live completely within the confines of another person for their whole life, that distinction fails to become clear. One could argue that the utero-dwarf is the property of the mother, someone else could argue it’s distinct. Fetuses are temporarily in this state but are fully known to exit it after 9 months. They _will_ become distinct.

    So, as long as we remain in a state where body = person b/c all bodies will become distinct for one another, we’re good here.

    If the assumptions change, so too must the argument. But don’t go pulling out concrete piers from my house and replacing them with nerf so you can run up and tell me my crib is collapsing.

    And, dude, if we relied on emotion to make our moral arguments work, we’d never get anywhere in philosophy. First you must satisfy the rational mind, then you can apply some emotional tests. If the tests fail, you should go back and try to isolate what makes you feel bad to see if there’s a problem somewhere. But if you start immediately mixing the two, you will sink your own ship.

    Every moral philosophy can put you in an emotional bind. There will always be rocks and hard places, and I’m sure if you scour hard enough, you can find them for this one. Doesn’t make it wrong, especially b/c anything you replace it with will have similar dilemmas. But if the best you can do for an emotional appeal is plead the case of utero-dwarves, then I may have posited the friendliest philosophy in all the dadgum land.

    If I sound irritated, I am. You call me illogical, then explicitly marry emotion to logic. You claim faulty deduction and that “you know logic” then start radically changing assumptions to try to disprove a point. You are like the platonic form of the pot calling the kettle black.

    And this kettle is lime green, thank you very much.

30. 30 McBoing Apr 27th, 2006 at 8:21 am

    The more I think about Paul’s pink unicorn argument the more angry I get.

    Paul is content to ride on the psychadelic wave of thought experiments and inter-uterine dwarves for the purposes of intellectual entertainment, and in the meantime, women in the U.S. are very close to having their very real and not hypothetical rights to bodily autonomy curbed for the sake of currying Republican political favor for wingnut assholes.

    Not to pick on you, Paul, but this attitude generally falls into the trap that I see many lefty men fall into — ignoring real women in order to craft imaginary women on which to hone one’s rhetorical skills.

    And on days I don’t feel so jaunty, I call that sexist.

31. 31 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 8:24 am

    Heh. Yeah, you go ahead and hold me responsible for whatever you want, but “this” is ridiculous. Frankly, if you have to go this far out of the bounds of reality to try and make my position crack, you’ve made my point for me. Unless we reach this fairy-tale land of utero-dwarves, this philosophy holds up. Thanks, man.

    If you say this, you’re proved my point.

    Whether my example is farfetched has nothing to do with its logical validity, and whether it reveals a flaw in your “logical deductions.” If you don’t recognize the validity of a reductio ad absurdam, you’re not serious about doing logic.

    You can’t have it both ways. Don’t condescend to me about “logical deduction” if you’re going to evade an argument that really is a logical deduction with emotion-talk like “farfetched” and “this far outside the bounds of reality,” etc. That’s ridiculous.

    Instead, you should try to focus on fixing your theory. It’s broken somewhere.

    I’m not the enemy. I’m just somebody who disagrees about certain things, and who is skeptical that your argument is as good as you say it is—and who you’ve consistently condescended to for it. That gets really tedious.

32. 32 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 8:31 am

    Paul, that was sarcasm.

    It was? I recognized the sarcastic tone, but I thought the underlying point was supposed to be that my farfetched example was unworthy of serious consideration. (As Marc thinks.)

    If not, my bad. Very sorry.

    (And if “I’m down with pinkunicornism” was supposed to clarify that, and mean that thought experiments are cool, well, cool.)

33. 33 punkass marc Apr 27th, 2006 at 8:50 am

    If you say this, you’re proved my point.

    Whether my example is farfetched has nothing to do with its logical validity, and whether it reveals a flaw in your “logical deductions.” If you don’t recognize the validity of a reductio ad absurdam, you’re not serious about doing logic.

    Paul, you are a goofball. Your point relies on a different assumption than mine, indeed, than the world — your assumption is that bodies aren’t 100% distinguishable like they are now. That means they’re no longer the easiest way to describe a person.

    THAT IS NOT A FLAW IN MY DEDUCTION. YOU HAVE CHANGED THE ASSUMPTIONS THAT WE BEGAN WITH.

    If I could fire you for incompetency, I would.

34. 34 punkass marc Apr 27th, 2006 at 8:59 am

    Also, Paul, knowing some Latin phrases doesn’t mean you understand logic or even how to use the phrases you spout. You did not reduce my position to the absurd, you changed the underpinnings and expected it to hold up. Different things.

35. 35 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    Also, Paul, knowing some Latin phrases doesn’t mean you understand logic or even how to use the phrases you spout. You did not reduce my position to the absurd, you changed the underpinnings and expected it to hold up. Different things.

    Marc, I didn’t mean to imply that I proved your position or your argument absurd. That’s not what “reductio ad absurdam” means; that’s just the literal translation of the latin term. What it really means is deriving a contradiction, showing that there’s an error somewhere. That doesn’t imply actual absurdity—just some flaw or other, maybe a fixable one.

36. 36 punkass marc Apr 27th, 2006 at 9:35 am

    Paul, I’m going to say this one more time for clarity: you cannot - CAN NOT - meaning it is impossible to - derive contradiction from a point that relies on a different assumption.

    Do you get this?

    You say “what if bodies were in bodies?” I say “then that means they aren’t the easiest way to define a person and we are no longer operating under the same assumptions.”

    If you think you can still prove a contradiction or disprove an argument when we are not beginning from the same set of starting points, you are way off base.

37. 37 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 10:54 am

    D writes:
    

    Ok Paul W., I’ll bite. Remember before where I was saying one of the main difference between the car crash scenario and pregnancy was that in the case of the latter it was the fetus trespassing upon the bodily autonomy of the woman? Well, you’ve reversed that in your new rather bizarre scenario.
    The dwarf/fetus person thing is the one having its bodily autonomy rights stepped upon.

    I would say that the trapped dwarfed person is having its rights stepped on. But by the same token, somebody who believes a fetus is also person would say it gets its rights stepped on, too, in very much the same way, if the mother decides to abort—it is a “helpless victim” of its mother’s whims, too.

    The question, for me, remains: In order to free or rescue a person having his or her bodily autonomy violated, is it permissible to violate the attacker’s bodily autonomy? I would answer yes for the concept of self-defense or defense of another’s self that they can not defend, a concept that exists because of the importance of bodily autonomy or self. This applies to the dwarf/fetus thing in this scenario, just as it applies to the woman in abortion scenarios.

    I’d agree that it applies to the dwarf. The thing I still don’t get—pardon me if I’m being really dense—is why you think that it wouldn’t similarly apply to the fetus rather than the woman, in the other case. (I have my reasons, but I want to know yours.)

    It seems to me that the situations are parallel, not reversed. In both cases you have a helpless, developing organism created and brought into the situation by the parents’ choice, and subjected to a “dire” situation by the woman’s subsequent choices about what to do with her body.

    Where is the reversal? How is one “attacking” the mother, and the other being “attacked” by the mother? In both cases, the parents (having sex) and then the mother made the choices. Neither the fetus nor the dwarf has any say in what happens to it. Their situations are structurally identical, for moral purposes.

    I do think that there are extremely important differences in the two cases, but they’re not a reversal of the situation that the fetus or dwarf finds itself in. I don’t think that the difference is that in one case the mother is being attacked and in the other case she’s the attacker; either way, the mother is in control and the fetus/dwarf is not.

    I think the difference is that a fetus isn’t a person, and a dwarf is; the mother’s rights do (easily) trump a fetus’s, but don’t trump a dwarf’s. “Attacking” a fetus isn’t morally the same (or even similar) to attacking a dwarf, because it is not a person.

    (Of course that claim has to be justified—and that’s part of my point. Personhood matters a lot, so we’d better be clear on what makes something a person.)

38. 38 punkass marc Apr 27th, 2006 at 11:07 am

    Guh. Purposefully ignoring what you’ve done with your silly dwarf argument — change the assumptions of the logic and still pretend it applies — doesn’t mean you can keep making it.

39. 39 Paul W. Apr 27th, 2006 at 11:13 am

    You say “what if bodies were in bodies?” I say “then that means they aren’t the easiest way to define a person and we are no longer operating under the same assumptions.”

    If you think you can still prove a contradiction or disprove an argument when we are not beginning from the same set of starting points, you are way off base.

    OK, maybe I owe you an apology here. Maybe I screwed up by not realizing that you seriously meant to define bodies so simplistically, and mis-described a problem with your argument as an internal, strictly “logical” error in your “deductions.” Maybe that problem isn’t that.

    My bad. Mea culpa.

    But…if you seriously intend to stick to that definition, you have bigger problem with your argument—the definition is absurdly unrealistic in a way that has everything to do with the problems at hand, and whether your logic applies to the real world.

    So, for example, if you say a body is what goes up and down together when you jump up and down naked, a fetus doesn’t have a body. It can’t jump up and down. Ergo, it’s not a person, has no rights, and may be freely aborted.

    The previous paragraph could replace your whole argument.

    If I thought your seriously meant your rough description of a body as something that jumps up and down together to be a strict logical definition I certainly would have argued differently.

    I simply assumed you couldn’t mean such a rough, offhand commonsense description to be a logical definition meant to capture the essence of a real-world phenomenon. The problems with that “definition” are too obvious, and if you meant for your argument to hinge on the details of that extremely convenient definition, surely you’d have gone for the obvious easy argument.

    Either way, the reductio ad absurdam still works. It reveals a flaw somewhere. Maybe the problem isn’t in the internal logic of the argument, but in the initial (mis-)definition, but the flaw is still there, and is detected.

    If you say that a trapped dwarf wouldn’t count as a person because its body would’t count as a “body,” then clearly you don’t have a definition of “body” that’s useful in talking about fetuses. Fetuses do have bodies, and arguably are persons—though I think they’re not—so defining “body” that way is begging the whole question.

40. 40 D Apr 27th, 2006 at 12:43 pm

    I’d agree that it applies to the dwarf. The thing I still don’t get—pardon me if I’m being really dense—is why you think that it wouldn’t similarly apply to the fetus rather than the woman, in the other case.

    That’s really a fundamental idea (as I see it) behind choice. A person choosing to give up a part of their body is not being violated of their autonomy, but rather exercising that autonomy. Likewise a person choosing not to give up part of their body is exercising their autonomy. If a woman does not choose to give up her body for a fetus, then that fetus is violating her autonomy. If the dwarf/fetus does not choose to be inside the woman, she is violating his/her autonomy.

    In the case of abortion, the fetus may be having its autonomy violated, just as the woman may be having her autonomy violated to free the dwarf/fetus, but that is after the fact that the woman having an abortion had her autonomy violated.

    To illustrate, I’ll make a whole new pristine analogy. You own a house, analogous to a womb. You leave the door to this house open, analogous to having sex. Someone enters your house, analogous to becoming pregnant. Now, do you want this person there? This stranger was not invited, analogous to an unwanted pregnancy. You have a right to get rid of them. If in fact they are harming you, intentionally or not, you have a right to defend yourself. And because we want to be analogous to a pregnant woman, they are harming you. So, you have the means to remove this person and do so, analogous to having an abortion.

    To make it analogous to your dwarf/fetus scenario some things would be fundamentally different. First, the door was opened and the person invited inside or at least welcomed once inside. Then, quite the opposite from trying to get rid of the person, you force them to stay, kidnap them. Now it becomes the right of the kidnapped person to flee or be rescued as the case may be.

    Now I’m under no illusion that this argument will convince certain people that believe the fetus is a human person with self and agency. But I hold no illusion that they’d be more easily convinced the fetus is not a person either. I do think this revelation of logic can help some, just as arguments at to why an amorphous ball of cell isn’t a person will help some.

41. 41 punkass marc Apr 27th, 2006 at 1:15 pm

    Either way, the reductio ad absurdam still works.

    You know how stuff goes from funny to hilarious to eyeball-scratchingly awful to funny again? Thanks for the round-trip, Paul.

    If you haven’t see how this isn’t true by now, well, then, I am truly sorry. Best of luck to you.

42. 42 Grump Apr 29th, 2006 at 4:05 pm

    “You own a house, analogous to a womb.”

    Good so far, but let’s widen it to her house=her body.

    “You leave the door to this house open, analogous to having sex.”

    This is where your analogy fails. The act of having sex facillitates the existence of another organism. In state of fact, the man is dropping baby parts off at her house. The woman has reproductive material as part of the basic structure of her house.

    In this situation, both parties are responsible because they both put the new person (her offspring) they have created in a position of vulnerability inside the woman’s house. As such, the woman has a moral responsibility to keep her offspring within her house until such time as it can live outside. In the meantime, the man has a responsibility to help the woman maintain her house (I think child support should extend prebirth).

    Stepping outside of the analogy for a second: it is called parental responsibility.

    “Someone enters your house, analogous to becoming pregnant.”

    No, because

    1. that someone didn’t ‘enter’ the house. It came into existence in the house because of what the woman and a visitor (the father) did.

    “Now, do you want this person there?”

    Irrelevant. Consider first of all that most women don’t abort because it is an ‘intruder’ but because they don’t want to have to take care of it later. Second, it’s irrelevant for the reasons I expressed above.

    “This stranger was not invited, analogous to an unwanted pregnancy.”

    Oh, but the woman did invite that stranger’s creation within her house. That changes your analogy dramatically, since for about six to seven months, the stranger *cannot* leave without being killed.

    “You have a right to get rid of them.”

    Assuming that your analogy is correct (which it is most definitely not), you would be right. We have a right to get rid of unwanted people from our property. I celebrate that right. *Nonetheless*, we don’t have a right to kill unwanted people while they are on our property, even if it is in the process of booting them out.

    Recently in the news, a man had confessed to murdering a boy who frequently trespassed on his property. He claimed that it had gone on for years and it had reached his breaking point. Abortion is like that. It almost always involves killing the trespasser while he is on your property. Having a right to boot an unwanted trespasser is massively different from having a right to kill an unwanted trespasser. That man was wrong for killing the boy, and most women are wrong for killing a fetus.

    “If in fact they are harming you, intentionally or not, you have a right to defend yourself.”

    Unfortunately for you, most women survive pregnancies unscathed.

43. 43 punkass marc Apr 29th, 2006 at 4:14 pm

    “Unfortunately for you, most women survive pregnancies unscathed.”

    Huh. Could be. To test your theory, I recommend shoving a watermelon in or out of your butt and seeing how that goes.

44. 44 Amanda Marcotte Apr 29th, 2006 at 4:17 pm

    In Texas, you’re expected to shoot intruders. What are you, Grump? Anti-Texan?

45. 45 McBoing Apr 29th, 2006 at 5:09 pm

    Consider first of all that most women don’t abort because it is an ‘intruder’ but because they don’t want to have to take care of it later. Second, it’s irrelevant for the reasons I expressed above.

    Or consider that women abort because they both see it as an intruder and don’t want to take care of the intruder.

    Just because somebody invades my property doesn’t mean I have to invite them in for tea.

46. 46 D Apr 29th, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    Too often it seems people want to place intent onto a woman (and sometimes even a man!) that has sex, namely the intent to have a child. That is not true, which is why the contention with my analogy is incorrect. While some people do have sex to become pregnant, most instances of sex occur with the expressed intent not to become pregnant. So while some might invite a person inside, that is by far the more rare case. In fact, most cases involve definite acts to prevent pregnancy.

    Of course, that’s all mostly irrelevant. Even if there was an invitation initially, if I tell someone its time to leave, they have to leave.

47. 47 Shauna Apr 29th, 2006 at 6:56 pm

    I believe that earlier, someone asked about the actual symptoms of pregnancy. I debate on other abortion topics, and wanted to repost a helpful compilation of the frequent, common, and uncommon effects of pregnancy:

    Effects of pregnancy:
    These are the normal, frequent or expectable temporary side effects of pregnancy:

    – exhaustion (weariness common from first weeks)
    – altered appetite and senses of taste and smell
    – nausea and vomiting (50% of women, first trimester)
    – heartburn and indigestion
    – constipation
    – weight gain
    – dizziness and light-headedness
    – bloating, swelling, fluid retention
    – hemmorhoids
    – abdominal cramps
    – yeast infections
    – congested, bloody nose
    – acne and mild skin disorders
    – skin discoloration (chloasma, face and abdomen)
    – mild to severe backache and strain
    – increased headaches
    – difficulty sleeping, and discomfort while sleeping
    – increased urination and incontinence
    – bleeding gums
    – pica
    – breast pain and discharge
    – swelling of joints, leg cramps, joint pain
    – difficulty sitting, standing in later pregnancy
    – inability to take regular medications
    – shortness of breath
    – higher blood pressure
    – hair loss
    – tendency to anemia
    – curtailment of ability to participate in some sports and activities
    – infection including from serious and potentially fatal disease (pregnant women are immune suppressed compared with non-pregnant women, and are more susceptible to fungal and certain other diseases)
    – extreme pain on delivery
    – hormonal mood changes, including normal post-partum depression
    – continued post-partum exhaustion and recovery period (exacerbated if a c-section — major surgery — is required, sometimes taking up to a full year to fully recover)

    These are the normal, expectable, or frequent PERMANENT side effects of pregnancy:

    – stretch marks (worse in younger women)
    – loose skin
    – permanent weight gain or redistribution
    – abdominal and vaginal muscle weakness
    – pelvic floor disorder (occurring in as many as 35% of middle-aged former child-bearers and 50% of elderly former child-bearers, associated with urinary and rectal incontinence, discomfort and reduced quality of life)
    – changes to breasts