Sorry about the top post response to Sarvis. I accidentally found his post on a drive-by, but it’s, er, dead now. There’s a pretty simple answer, a variant of which Thrasymachus posted once in a thread now gone. I’ll repost the gist. The key is viability.

Sci-fi thought experiment: Gregor contracts a disease which gets him lodged inside Sarvis for one year, utterly dependent on him for nutrition, oxygen, physical care, etc. Sarvis must double his food intake, crap twice as much, wear an oxygen mask at all times and severely restrict his movements and lifestyle to allow Gregor to survive this ordeal. Should Sarvis be made legally liable to do so (a higher standard than non-coercive moral pleading)?

Morally, it can be argued both ways, but there is no compelling case to hold Sarvis liable at pain of criminal prosecution. Framed this way, it ought to be clear that the pro-life case hinges on more than a conventional “right to life” (the kind conferred on biologically independent humans). It hinges on a “right to life supporting sustenance”, which is a stronger claim. Many people would (sadly and reluctantly maybe) allow Sarvis the right to cut the lifeline through which Gregor is sucking his blood and since the resultant corpse would be a mortal risk inside Sarvis’s body, the right to flush it out as well. Abortion techniques don’t target the umbilical cord, but that’s just logistics, not a consequential point. The key right on the mother’s side is the right to withhold biological inputs from a claimant, any claimant.

A right to sustenance (over and above life) is not universally accepted in American society. If it were, there would be Good Samaritan laws and right to medical care guaranteed in the Bill of rights. It is inconsistent to selectively insist on it in the case of a fetus, but not an adult. The argument from viability (as opposed to sentience, which evolves continuously) also implies abortion rights should be extended till birth. It is a discontinuous change in relevant factors.

The kind of intimate biological dependence involved in the abortion debate is rare in other interpersonal problems like ordinary murder, but there are a few parallels. Think conjoined twins (two brains, shared heart). Is it ok to give normal life to one child rather than an incredibly burdensome life to two (sort of like a more onerous lifetime pregnancy)? What about friendly vampires who can only survive on live blood?

The one pertinent objection is the issue of causation. In my hypothetical, Sarvis’s predicament is not his doing, while pregnancy is caused by the mother’s choices (although that’s not as easy as it sounds, since if she kept her legs together, the fetus wouldn’t be there in the first place, so it’s fundamentally different from endangerment of a pre-existing viable human). Nevertheless, responsibility lies on a continuum (from rape to ruptured condom to miscalculation of the cycle to wanton horniness), and since the state is in no good position to assess the particulars of individual cases, the argument for banning abortion on the basis of causation is rather weak, even if it were granted in principle.

As to equal rights for fathers, yes, post partum. It makes no sense to talk about equality at a stage when nature’s arrangement is highly asymmetric. Come back with that question when humans develop the capability of sea horses.

You can check the list of Sarvis’s premises. This line of reasoning respects all of them.

P.S. Demo’s argument that nature has its own abortions (failure to implant, miscarriages, etc.) is silly. People die of accidents and diseases all the time, but that’s no reason to allow them to be killed deliberately by other humans.

So to reiterate a portion of this: Given the premise that what lies inside a mother is a viable human being at any stage, the mother can now legally choose to not sustain this life. However, it conflicts with society’s laws that we must sustain human life in many other arrangements.

So you find the current laws to be incongruent?

For me personally, I cannot get bogged down trying to reason this out (although I admire those pro-lifers who make the valiant, timely efforts). I follow Augustine’s simplification: “Rome has spoken, the case is closed.”

Thanks to Thr. and to you.

Yes, as I explained in my post, if the courts overturned Roe vs. Wade but didn’t legislate universal health care, it would be blatantly inconsistent (actually, consistency would require more than legislation. It would require a constitutional amendment to incorporate right to health care for those who cannot afford the cost).

Actually I’d be in favor of more sustenance rather than less, so sincerely speaking, I should be arguing for universal health care rather than abortion rights. I was posting under Sarvis’s constraints. My fuller defense of abortion rights would combine sentience/consciousness as well as gender issues.

I know you take your orders from Rome, but since when was Washington supposed to do the same?

Judith Jarvis Thompson proposed the same anaology in her essay on the topic. Even though analogies (per se) are inherently flawed, the logic held and she was able to argue her position against the intransigent one held by the church. Planned Parenthood subsequently debunked her claims by demonstrating that less that 1% of abortions are performed under the extreme cases of rape, incest and threat to the life of the mother.

I wrote a response to Sarvis but pulled it after it went unanswered. Here it is:

A Metaphysics of Ethical Entelechy
by Zeus-Boy
01/21/2008, 11:20 PM

Delete Favorites Reply

Aristotle's category of Entelechy designates that vital force within an organism that directs it towards the self-fulfillment of what it is destined to become.

In the abortion debate it is meaningless to hinge the moral question on the resolution of a purely semantic contest: Whether you call that potential a blastocyst, an embryo, a zygote, a fetus or a clump of cells is immaterial. This much is certain, none of these entities denote what is commonly meant by the word 'person', so to impose that linguistic constraint does not miraculously allow you to resolve the ethical question by fiat of a misappropriation. The corollary is also true, and is merely the same debate cast back-to-front. Yet, who can deny that the latent potential inhering in all of the above will [provided all the right conditions are in place] become a human being, in the same way that this potential has become so from time immemorial.

An ethical question based on entelechy is one where a moral decision is made in the present according to [or, on the basis of] some future [and can we suppose] certain outcome -- whether to abort today knowing what the fetus may become tomorrow. That's the ethical question as far as I'm concerned. Who gets to answer this question? A pregnant woman? Her man? Any man on her behalf? Any judge in any court on her behalf? Or society as a whole, by referendum, on her behalf?

It seems to me that women are the only ones empowered to answer the question on their own behalf, because they are the only ones for whom that entelechy collapses their own projected future into their stark immediate present. Men may use their interest in a particular case to influence a particular outcome, but they have no business seeking to legislate their morality, thus making it binding on what is effectively a pregnant woman's private decision. Besides, men are much better positioned to pontificate on future outcomes than the pregnant woman they seek to constrain, which is not an argument for moral relativism. Rather, it is a sober acknowledgement of the purely subjunctive mood of their edicts.

We will construct a Carnot model for this post..

Gregor = A value that has no known origin unless he admits to having been a fetus at some point before the experiment begins. If not then Gregor must become an absolute value with nor origin and know quantity.

The Physical Action ( Work done ) is the interment of Gregor to the mythical womb of Sarvis. Carnot is okay with myths as long as a definite value can be attached to them.

The other necessity for a Carnot analysis is that the action be reversible.

Now lets see:

Gregor >>>>> Sarvis = Gregor<>Sarvis

Sarvis>>>>>Abortion­ = - ( Gregor ) + ( Sarvis )

Sarvis>>>>> Birth = = +(Gregor) + (+Sarvis) or back to Line one.

Carnot would be please as long as

Gregor = Gregor

Where Gregor has no identifiable beginning and therefore has a definable value ...

The only problem is this:

In the very real case the fact is that

Gregor = Gregor

Where Gregor does have a beginning outside of the equation in which case Carnot would see this as a failed test in logic.

The issue of current vs. potential sentience that you raise is surprisingly downplayed in these debates (if it ever gets that far). Peter Singer gives it rather short shrift. However, going too far in any one direction will take us to ridiculous positions, like legalizing murder of the comatose on the one hand, and criminalizing birth control or even abstinence on the other. Isn’t every sperm precious? I’m afraid a line has to be drawn where none naturally exists, like choosing age of consent.

Detailed conception of the characteristics of the fetus that we now have is recent knowledge and something that hadn’t had time to imprint on human instinct. On the other hand, the notion of individual autonomy over body is older and more deeply rooted. I find it ironic that the religious position on abortion is more in need of intellectual foundations, while the pro-choice position can perhaps be described as intuitionist.

Every post spent on unfunny gibberish is one less confused rant against Martin Luther King.

Your time, your priorities, your choice.

providing in utero nutrition and that outside the womb for the parent? I'm no legal scholar but it seems to me that the two would be equivalent. Let's say that the mom-to-be decided to go on a hunger strike. Could and would the State intervene and and begin feeding her against her will?

There are plenty of other reasons to interfere with a hunger strike, based on mother's interest, not child's. Most people would favor intervening with suicide attempts based on the actor's mental instability.

More difficult would be scenarios that are also more realistic: e.g., regulate mother's behavior vis-a-vis smoking and alcohol? What about selective female abortion (common in China and India)? I wonder what pro-choice people think on those issues.

Yeah, Rome just spoke a few days ago when Pope Rottweiler, whose previous job was obfuscating, deflecting and covering up the rampant pedophilia of the church, went on record to say that Galileo's punishment was just and deserved. Yeah, he just said that. Rome has spoken AND Rome can kiss my ass.

"I accidentally found his post on a drive-by, but it’s, er, dead now."

Sarvis' post is alive and kicking, as are many other posts seemingly dead in the womb.

Just scroll down to "More Options" at the bottom of the page, select "Last Post Date" over the default "Initial Post Date", and voila!; you'll see Sarvis' post reborn, with last responder clearly identified and inviting further discussion.

I think most here have "Last Post Date" as selected default, or at least occasionally check it to see where the activity is.

two-tiered analysis?

• is abortion moral?
• is it moral to for one individual to deny sustenance to another?
• does a special relationship exist between the one individual and the other?
• should society legislate this moral question?
• is it moral to demand that an individual provide sustenance to another?
• is social prescription a "second-best"? if so, is a "second-best" prescription acceptable?

i like the framework.

there may be a case for parentalism when the person in question demands pickled bananas on peanut butter.

It should've at least been acknowledged by the top poster maybe, because I thought it was marvelous how you laid it all out on the table, but I think at that point in the thread (150+responses) people were through with scrolling back and forth from flat view to threaded to see who was responding to whom. I know I grew plain weary of it & abandoned the discussion altogether.