Its still a silly question.

You clearly intended it to cause an introspective moment of

"Well what if I had gotten abored?"

But that's no different than asking the question

"well what if one of my parents had gotten killed in a car wreck before I was conceived or born?"

OR

What if my parents had never met?

These are self-indulgent existential questions that really don't beare either on the morality, ethics or legality of allowing a woman to control her reproductive organs and the cosequences of that.

Its a bit like the Michael Dukakis Death Penalty question from a legal, moral and ethical perspective Dukakis answered perfectly reasonably. But it made him come accross as a cold fish and probably lost him the election.

Had instead he answered

"I would be outraged. I would want to strangle the offender with my bare hands. But that sort of retributive justice is precisely what leads to ever escalating violence and retribution and why a civilized justice system does NOT include revenge.

That is why I have opposed the death penalty during all my life. It is the government engagin in revenge and that should never be the role of the government. We should expect our government to represent our highest aspirations, not our basest instincts"

GHWB probably would not have been elected.

1. Everyone focuses on the moral tradeoff between mother and fetus -- do we have the right to make the mother somewhat better by making the fetus somewhat worse? I'm selfish -- as a doctor, abortions lead to better profits.

2. Just recently came across the proposition that societies extend moral rights they can afford (forget where). Think of the world today, and how infanticide, abortions, and (American) veganism cluster by class. Clearly the best strategy for a pro-lifer to take is to encourage economic and sci-tech development; since excess unwanted babies are detrimental to that effort, pro-choice (even pro-death?) seems a better short term strategy.

3. Re: conjoined twins - how paternalistic!

1. Long time no see. Too busy separating patients and their money, I presume.
2. You have out-Levitted Steve clearly. I see a field day for bumper sticker writers: "Abort today so that you don't have to abort tomorrow." "A fetus a day keeps genocide away." There should be a market among Presidential candidates for a Malthusian brand of evangelism. Mitt Romney perhaps?
3. Paternalism? Just sending more business your way, dude.

Suppose Gregor agreed to host Sarvis, but changed his mind. Is he still obligated to do so? Don't think so. It goes against the 13th Amendment.

My 2 kids cost thousands of dollars each.

I figure live births are where the real money is.

It's all about volume.

I was wondering if the same argument might mean that the mother and father to (prospective, new) baby have obligations to their parents, and particularly their mothers (ie "the grandmothers"), because the grandmothers carried the mothers to term. If that's the case, then one could see as a result of your line of reasoning...

1. way in which the Thrasymachus obligation is in fact vested in the mother

2. implication that decision to abort not wholly with mother

Not sure if that works, and not sure if there are any policy implications beyond perhaps supporting parental notification.

Also, what would be more handy for me at the moment would be an argument for killing other people's babies...

august:

Also, what would be more handy for me at the moment would be an argument for killing other people's babies...

not sure where you're going or coming from with that, but first would be to commoditize them, kinda where i was going here (baby trading discussion).

i.e. once there, then just trade for them, then .. [well, you know]

Well, I'm not sure where I was going myself. I guess just that if I compare the number of times I've wanted somebody to get an abortion (0) with the number of times I've wanted to shoot somebody's kid (zillions), it just seems like a good moral justification for the later might be more handy.

So if there's a lively baby-trading network, does it help me to drill a chopstick through little Marky's aorta? I guess your point is that I could purchase Marky, making him mine, and then my job of moral explanation is a little easier, because I only have to worry about offing my own kid... Sadly, I'm not sure Marky has annoyed me enough to justify the expense, and I'm also not certain what justification I have for killing my own kid. Jet skis, children, Tom Hanks -- some things you just want to shoot on sight without having to discuss matters with your accountant.

Your original top post is a great question. I'll check back regarding my answer in about 8 months.

--------

One thing I've been thinking about as a result of Gregor-Demo exchange above -- here's a plausible assumption about ethics: "Moral obligations must be possible." That is, if I say that a given person is ethically obliged to do or not do something, that person must be able to do the thing.

Given that the capabilities of so many seem so, er, limited, I wonder how many moral obligations would survive that test.

Congratlations, and welcome to the vicarious life of parenthood.

In context, I'll take a completely libertarian stance. There's no obligation to gestate and no obligation to return favors if the mother so chooses. That seems fair because it preserves symmetry. After all disfavors cannot be returned - the unborn has no way to take it out on the parents.

Nevertheless, the general point you raise is interesting in that it questions whether mere reciprocity can serve as an adequate basis for moral arrangements. There are many problems where A does B a favor which must be returned not to A but C (and so on), with the network of obligations either forming a closed loop of 3 or more or even an open chain (as in intergenerational obligations). The intergenerational issue is a thorny one: there are both evolutionary reasons and empirical evidence that altruism is asymmetric, child neglect being far rarer than abandonment of old parents. The only possible solution seems a contagious ethic (loathe the mom who threw grandma out), so I'll agree to your moral reasoning in a slightly different domain (providing care and resources the other direction, from current generations to previous ones).

Re the demo conversation, I actually prodded him because secretly, I find a lot of sympathy with that stance. The dialectics of morality is funny because it is both an attempt to defy human nature (nobody sees eating and fucking as much of a moral duty) as well as a speciesistic exercise constrained by human nature (if dogs and aliens are to try being moral, I suggest not mimicking us too closely). A related point would be that moral rules are written to be broken - the purpose is not to prohibit certain actions but to make them costly so as not to be lightly undertaken. Ender alone seems to have made that point in the torture debate and the ticking time bomb scenario.

Enjoyed dave's poll, but it's annoying that people miss the point (which is rhetorical) with overly literal responses.

Yeah, fair enough. I'm glad I'm wrong. I liked Zeus Boy's argument.

I have a friend (doctor) who makes a similar point as Demo. His argument is that soon we'll have the technology to turn pretty much any old human cell into a full fledged human. Would we then have an obligation to do so? And then the argument works pretty much the same way as others -- who decides there's something magical about sperm meeting egg? Other things need to happen, outside agency is necessary to bring to term, etc.

I'm reading Appiah's new book on moral experiment (about 50 pages in). He makes a similar kind of point, but in more positive terms. Moral decisions happen in time, and are clearly affected by seemingly arbitrary outside influences (apparently people are more likely to give change for a dollar if the person asking is standing outside a bakery). In most cases, there's no way of summing up all the pros and cons and coming to virtue. Instead, Appiah proposes, it makes sense to use heuristics -- approximations that if repeated over time will produce relatively just outcomes (but not always).

Another interesting point -- apparently the genesis of most university philosophy departments happened in the early twentieth century, and basically were the results of philosopher kicking out the psychologists. Which made me think of ghost, as did daveto's question.