Politics And Current Events

[Freddy Rumsen]

You do understand believing something to be immoral/not good is not the same thing as thinking that same thing should be illegal right?

[dodint]

Okay. So if your way of opposing euthanasia is to never bother anyone that matters about it then I suppose I can't have a personal objection to it. But in your position I assume it comes up from time to time. I don't care about your opinion on the legal status of euthanasia; your position of power and the subsequent effect it has on vulnerable people is something I loathe from a moral standpoint.

Not that you should care what I think.

[tifosi77]

I think the issue of euthanasia is less legality of providing assistance as it is an ethical hurdle for medical professionals and doctors. ("First do no harm") That's why lethal injection executions are generally carried out by randos who ordinarily would not be allowed to stick a needle into someone's arm.

[shmenguin]

that wasn't clear. probably because this skew is embedded inside of a policy debate. so you think assisted suicide should be legal then?

[tifosi77]

Ohio State Finds Team Doctor Sexually Abused 177 Students

Ohio State has concluded that a team doctor sexually abused at least 177 men, including many varsity athletes, while working for the university in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The university also found that college officials knew about the actions for years and did not act to stop them.

In a report issued Friday, Ohio State said the doctor, Richard Strauss, who committed suicide in 2005, had groped students, required them to strip, and asked intimate questions about sexual practices under the guise of providing medical treatment.

The university said that college personnel knew about Dr. Strauss’s activities as early as 1979 but that no reports advanced out of the athletic department or the student health department until 1996. After his actions were finally reported, he was suspended and then removed from his post, but he remained a tenured faculty member. Dr. Strauss then opened an off-campus clinic and continued to abuse students. He was still a professor emeritus at the time of his death, though Ohio State said Friday that it would begin the process of revoking that status.

Athletes reported coming in for treatment for a variety of ailments, including one who had a sore throat, only to find that Dr. Strauss would touch their genitals. The report said that in one case, when a student responded to abuse “with anger and some physicality,” Dr. Strauss accused the student of assaulting him.

Geeesh.......

[Dickie Dunn]

The Big 10 strikes again.

[Freddy Rumsen]

Okay. So if your way of opposing euthanasia is to never bother anyone that matters about it then I suppose I can't have a personal objection to it. But in your position I assume it comes up from time to time. I don't care about your opinion on the legal status of euthanasia; your position of power and the subsequent effect it has on vulnerable people is something I loathe from a moral standpoint.

Not that you should care what I think.

More than once I've advised people against getting further care, and thereby gracefully enter the afterlife, rather than burdening their families and the medical system, and living in unnecessary pain.

I of course say it a bit nicer than that.

[tifosi77]

'Advising against further care' is not euthanasia, and should not be equated.

[Freddy Rumsen]

Do you consider palliative care for terminal patients to be euthanasia?

I do not.

[dodint]

'Advising against further care' is not euthanasia, and should not be equated.

That was never the issue though. Opposition of euthanasia in all forms was the position. He offered the advising against future care stance to feel out exactly how far apart we are; it's not really relevant to the actual issue at hand.

[dodint]

Do you consider palliative care for terminal patients to be euthanasia?

I do not.

No, I do not either. Euthanasia has an intent element. Palliative care/hospice is a waiting game.

[Tomas]

Forget Amazon HQ2!!

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/walmart ... rmat=embed

[Freddy Rumsen]

Didn't AOC euthanize AHQ2?

[Shyster]

Deists and non-deists have a Grand Canyon dividing them as far as what the definition of “human life” is. That’s an insurmountable obstacle to discussion. On the internet or otherwise.

It's not merely a dispute for the religious. For example, the libertarian non-aggression principle says that aggression is inherently wrong, and aggression is usually defined as initiating or threatening any forceful interference with an individual or their property. Killing or injuring someone else would be a violation of the NAP, and I think libertarians would pretty much universally agree that people have a right not to be killed when they don't want to be. The question, then, it when does personhood attach such that a person has a right not to be aggressed against under the NAP. And that, unfortunately, leads back to the same debate.

[Willie Kool]

I think libertarians everyone would pretty much universally agree that people have a right not to be killed when they don't want to be.

[shmenguin]

Libertarians are so cooky with their whole “don’t kill me I don’t wanna die” thing.

[Shyster]

Yes, everyone is in agreement as to not wanting to be killed. I was thinking of the fact that libertarians very much disagree on the abortion question, so while they agree that people have a right not to be killed when they don't want to be, they disagree on when that right comes into being.

I will admit that my own views on the topic are conflicted. While looking into the issue I just ran across Walter Block's idea of "evictionism", and at first blush I think the idea has a lot of merit as a compromise that comports with the NAP. Under that view, women would have the right only to evict a fetus from their bodies, but they would not have the right to do so in a way that inherently kills or destroys the fetus. If the fetus is not yet able to survive on its own, then it would die naturally. But if it is capable of independent life (even if supported by medical technology), then it would live and would be placed for adoption.

[Willie Kool]

Is there currently an orphan shortage? If only a tenth of fetuses survived, that's almost 100,000 new orphans every year...

And 75,000 of them are black...

[Willie Kool]

Who pays for that?

[Freddy Rumsen]

Adoption (as it should be) is incredibly hard and expensive. There are a lot of families that would love to have a child, but cannot afford the cost, and most who can have to go oversees primarily because it's cheaper.

It's easier to adopt a young baby from Asia than it is in the U.S.

Also, is it not really weird to hear, "These babies are better off being not alive."?

I mean you get to live, but they don't because why? You want to mercifully spare them from a hard life?

[Willie Kool]

I'm not necessarily opposed to the philosophical argument. I'm just asking how to make it work in the real world...

[Guinness]

One of the biggest sticking points to me, and it goes to Guinness's post, is self ownership. If a woman is raped, her self ownership has been denied. If she has been impregnated through rape, it has again been denied. If abortion rights are taken away, it yet again takes away self ownership of the woman. I understand that if one's view is that self ownership starts at conception, by aborting, you're taking away another being's self ownership. But why is one life worth more than another? Because that is the decision that is made. If a woman can't choose to abort, her life then becomes a series of circumstances where her self ownership is repeatedly taken away.

Yes, this goes to the uniquely complex question of pregnancy specifically. In cases of rape/incest/child molestation, there has been a clear and undeniable violation of the woman/child's self-ownership, and such an attack is probably only second to murder in the violation of one's personhood, by my principles. Yet in some cases that violation results in the creation of a 3rd human being - and this is, in my view, the fulcrum upon which the discussion pivots.

I believe - again after careful consideration - that a human being exists at the point of conception, due to the fact that a genetically distinct individual is present at that moment. In my estimation, this human being did not commit a crime against any other human being. The male criminal most certainly did, to be sure. But in my view, it is immoral to exact punishment on some other human being for the crimes of some other. And I say that mournfully, because I conceive that the female victim is not only subsequently burdened with the physical trauma of carrying this new human being unwillingly, but also mentally and emotionally. This is the worst kind of tragedy in my view.

I freely admit that I do not know how to square that dilemma. On one hand you have a female who has been violated in the worst way aside from murder; on the other you have an innocent bystander unwittingly thrust upon that female. But I do not see how that innocent bystander should be made to pay for the violator's crime (and I cannot imagine the anguish of the female victim, to be sure). This of course begets the question of "worth"... isn't the fully-developed woman's life worth more than the "clump of cells"? But the prices are not the same. I can't understand but can faintfully imagine the mental/emotional/physical trauma of bringing a child begat by such violence to term. But an abortion is the purposeful destruction of a genetically distinct human individual at a point of its development - indeed there are cases of human beings whose mothers had considered abortion yet decided against it; there are human beings who are the product of rape, incest, etc., who are alive because their mothers chose to carry them. These people's lives would've ended at the point of a blade had their mothers not heroically chosen to carry them to term.

I refer to the principle of self-ownership to determine my position on every political/philosophical question, and though I am ardently "pro-life" I acknowledge that this question in certain circumstances is uniquely challenging.

[Guinness]

I will admit that my own views on the topic are conflicted. While looking into the issue I just ran across Walter Block's idea of "evictionism", and at first blush I think the idea has a lot of merit as a compromise that comports with the NAP. Under that view, women would have the right only to evict a fetus from their bodies, but they would not have the right to do so in a way that inherently kills or destroys the fetus. If the fetus is not yet able to survive on its own, then it would die naturally. But if it is capable of independent life (even if supported by medical technology), then it would live and would be placed for adoption.

In my view (if I recall Block's argument correctly) "evictionism" is a cop out: extract the "fetus" from the woman's body "alive" and then... whatever happens, happens?

According to libertarian ethics, it's murder by another name in my view.

[MWB]

The value of the two lives is certainly the crux, as you say. If one removes any emotion and view in terms of objective value (admittedly, a callous way to look at this), a "fully developed woman" would have more value. She is a known commodity. An established life. The unborn is "potential." Of course, the next step to that is determine how valuable the woman's established life is? What if she is a crack whore who gets knocked up repeatedly and has already had 5 abortions? In my opinion, her life would not have value over a potential life.

There is no easy way to look at this. Frankly, it surprises me when people come to absolute conclusions about abortion. Every situation is unique, every life is different. There is no fair or correct answer to this.

[eddy]

. There is no fair or correct answer to this.

How about let the pregnant woman decide and we respect their decision.